Postcards from the Edge
Multiple reports were expelled into the surrounding ether from the Supernova
conference on decentralization in Palo Alto (blogged by Jeremy
Allaire, Cory
Doctorow, Glenn Fleishman,
JD Lasica, Mitch
Ratcliffe, Doc Searls
and David Weinberger, according
to Dave
Winer and Dan
Gillmor. Dan was even pressed into service to replace a scheduled keynote
by Clay Shirky, stranded here in NYC by
his airline). Dave Winer participated as a panelist on blogging but was tepid
at first about even the bit of centralized meatspace the conference required:
"Is it in poor taste to say that I wouldn't go if it weren't 15
minutes away and a freebie for me because I'm speaking? Yeah, it is in poor
taste, but I have to say it anyway. Maybe the conference will exceed my expectations.
Right now they're pretty low."*
Understandable. Conferences, like computer magazines, seemed to have been eclipsed
by the immediacy of the web. But the unexpected seemed to happen as the conference
was blogged from the floor by many who brought their unique insights, their
own publics and shared the ability to look over each other's shoulders. Even
Dave seemed to warm to it, perhaps helped by companionship over spicy
noodles:
"Hey the nicest moment of the evening, even though it was horribly
embarrassing, was the enthusiastic round of applause I got when I walked into
the restaurant and saw the scene. The cool thing about weblogs is that today
in 2002, it attracts the nicest, smartest, and most ambitious people. We kicked
butt at the conference during the day, leading Kevin Werbach to say that bloggers
rule the world, or something like that, to which I say It's about time y'all
figured that out and stop sending PR people to explain technology to us, and
be prepared to answer the tough questions, and also be prepared to build on
our work. Nothing is more frustrating than a BigCo who sends a glad-hander
to tell you how they're going to fail at reinventing everything you had working
three years ago. "
Life's like that. We'd rather stay in our own cocoons but are forced to congregate
and we end up getting more than we expected. "April is the cruelest
month," T. S. Eliot lamented
over spring's annual invitation to party.
Well Named
Like the Supernova conference, supernovas are the source of the heavy elements
that have been organized into humans and other simple creatures. The Big Bang
was certainly the archetype of centralization - everything's been rushing to
the edges ever since. The elements spewing from the big bang were lightweight:
hydrogen, helium, some deuterium and lithium. Evolution's just a process of
combining in novel ways. In the primordial minute or so, sub-nuclear particles
coalesced into subatomic particles and then into atoms, molecules, etc. My favorite
data point is that a neutron has 10.3 minutes to join up with a proton or it
disappears. I guess a 16-year-old could relate.
After spreading around the universe, the light elements coalesced enough to
form stars and to fire up the fusion of hydrogen into helium and thence into
bigger molecules right up to carbon, iron, etc. Cosmologists point out that
life depends on supernovae to expel those elements out into space to populate
the universe with enough heavier elements to support organic chemistry. Every
interesting atom in our bodies was cooked in the fires of an unnamed sun and
exploded into our sun's orbit by a supernova.
The Stupidnet
Cory Doctorow was inspired
by David Isenberg's talk on the promise
of the Stupid Network:
"In two or three years, you can have an entire telephone company's
worth of bandwidth in your house for $2,000.
"The phone companies value artificial scarcity. The most malleable of
all laws (Moore's Law, Gilder's Law) is accounting law -- depreciation...
" So keep it simple, stupid. All the smarts in the network should be
at the ends, in PCs or devices, not in routers or other network pieces.
"Internetworking shifts control and value-creation from the network owner
to the end-user. A conventional telephone call touches every node in every
network, and every node's owner can add features -- call waiting, etc. The
Internet's job is to ignore network-specific differences, like call waiting.
Call-waiting is defined at the end-points between both parties on the conversation."
David Isenberg seems to assume what everyone else seems to dismiss out of hand
- that we can run fiber to the home and be done with it. If the cablecos could
profit on coax 30 years ago, why is it assumed someone else can't make sense
of fiber today - it's not like you can't buy stuff using it.
Cory references George Gilder who is worth quoting here. Gilder's Law of the
Telecosm
holds that bandwidth capacity grows ten times faster than Moore's Law of microprocessors
doubling every 18 months or so. He pointed out as early as 1992 in The
Coming of the Fibersphere that, "In a world of dumb terminals and
telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks
have to be dumb".
Gilder characterized an optical fibersphere, analogous to the atmosphere from
which we use clever radios to pluck just the message we want while ignoring
the rest. The rise of ubiquitous clever connected machines threatens every intermediary
and its employees and shareholders. Whether they're telcos, "content"
companies, wireless providers or the politicians who work for them, there's
a zillion people and organizations which, however clueless
they may be, can sense that there's something radically wrong with their income
model and a lot of franchises are about to be cancelled. His Fibersphere article
hoped that the owners of fiber would just hook it all up together and let us
light it from the edges, so that every packet is propagated everywhere to be
grabbed by just the intended recipient. Under this model, a signal will travel
down the fiber to Beijing faster than it will move from your microchip to the
back of your computer.
The solution of the centralists is cleverness. We're promised services that
the smart machines don't quite do yet (but will), like Voice Over IP, Pay Per
View, Messaging, etc. Cleverness is a euphemism for complexity we
don't need promised by business plans we can't trust.
And that's the take-away from any discussion about decentralization vs. concentration.
When you buy a service, you don't buy it from a company or its owners or its
asset base or even a stable set of employees. You buy it from a business plan
and nothing more. "The most malleable of all laws (Moore's Law, Gilder's
Law) is accounting law."
If the business plan doesn't work out, your trust will be violated in a New
York minute. Airlines routinely cancel flights to maximize their scarce returns,
and probably don't have a lot of choice. Clay Shirky, trying to get to the Supernova
conference to deliver his keynote, could only hope that his reservation reflected
a reservoir of resources, competence and intent adding up to a timely flight
to the west coast. Unfortunately you don't buy a plane ticket from a pilot,
a worthy craft and loyal crew, but from a set of contingent, often promiscuous
business intentions.
Separation of Church and Statement
I'm convinced we need to separate representations about quality from those
from whom we seek quality. Until quality is quantified and rolled up into useful
data across vendors, customers and individual products, we'll continue to stumble
around in the agora bumping into the stalls. It's information that will never
be organized by vendors since it chronicles the failure of business plans that
were never going to work anyway, and in some vague sense, they knew it all along.
8:57:27 PM 
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