To Make A Difference
Is there any urge more basic than for your life to be of consequence?
No matter how we define consequence, most of our instincts and actions
seem aimed towards it.
Now consider that we are helping in the birth of a ubiquitous global network,
for it's not the "frozen" Internet Infrastructure that matters,
it's the connecting of most humans who wish to be, using words and gestures
that seem
natural
to them (not yet, but real soon).
We
all know
this is what we're about, but it's good to pause and wonder at our good luck
to be at this place at this time.
I was reminded of this on the phone this afternoon with Doc. We
got off on Infrastructure and what the "A" in NEA
really means.
NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody
can use it, Anybody can
improve it. (Doc Searls)
A friend of Doc's had resisted the A part of the
slogan until he realized Doc wasn't talking about the alphabet
soup of established technical standards but the possibilities we're now building
on them that allow us to, literally, fashion any communications environment
we
want
to,
among
any
people
we welcome
to
our party. Like web logs, f'rinstance.
Forging a Confederation
I used to live in Philadelphia and I'd walk around Old Town and I got it that
the Founding Brothers were technologists in many ways. They too were dealing
with an interesting bandwidth accident exhibiting unintended outcomes. England's
purpose for the Colonies, of course, was to get more stuff as cheaply as possible
and to tax the colonists as much as possible. But bandwidth got in the way.
This was such a wild land that, for the better part of a century, the colonies
were more isolated from each other than from Mother England. Gradually though,
wagon trails were built and it became more convenient for the Carolinas to
deal with Pennsylvania than with England. The other virtue was that the colonists,
though profoundly different north-to-south, related to each other far better
than to the Court of St. James and the East India Company. By the 1770's, the
differences could no longer be ignored. Like any network, the colonies paid
closest attention to the highest fidelity signal.
What's interesting is how few people set the direction for the American Experiment.
Only the 56
white guys in Carpenter's Hall understood
what a leap they were taking with the Declaration of Independence. It's
not
like
they
were being closely controlled by their state legislatures which were several
days' ride away. It was never a certainty that Tom Jefferson's stirring
Enlightenment-era declarations of individual freedom would set the stage for
their conclusions. He did it because he could and he wanted to be of consequence.
Eleven years later, the 39
signers of the Constitution
acted just as independently in setting down the rules of
engagement
for
the people
and
their
rulers. No one paid much attention to their secret work until they were surprised
by the many changes the Constitution proposed. The fight over
the document
was
fierce
and the
debate
thoughtful,
but they
didn't revise
what the standards body had hammered out. So the twig was bent and that was
the
direction
our
nation
inclined. In October 1788, the old Congress disbanded quietly to make way for
an entirely new form of governance.
That was serious standard-setting. Today, under Doc's Anybody can Change
it doctrine,
we're sitting around lobbing ideas and code around, seldom realizing that we're the
delegates setting the standards for the world that will follow us. Relatively
speaking, we're even fewer than the four score or so men who did the real work
of putting symbols on parchment. Some of the symbols we're using are pretty
arcane, but they set standards anyway, which will mold society as surely as
did the Federalist papers.
As Dave Winer has told us so often, big companies don't set the important
standards. Instead, a physicist fires up his NeXT box and wham! the
web is born. He does it by standing on the shoulders of giants whose names
are unknown to any but the most devout. Sure, the standards are set by
guys
working
for someone else, but they're really
holding
their
own
congress,
asynchronously
but
still intimate.
TCP/IP, FTP, SMTP, POP, HTTP and all the rest were never the provenance of
the employers of the originators, because if something's important enough
to make
a
difference,
it will not be understood by management until it's too late to derail it.
Now that the alphabet soup's simmered long enough, its broth supports undreamt
of flavors. RSS gets baked in (metaphor fart) and revised as necessary
to be useful and use decides its fate. Sure, BigCos
rattle their sabers at W3C.org, but what matters is only what web designers
use and web users respond to. Even Jakob Neilson can't herd these cats.
Writing the Human Code
Lawrence Lessig is at once the most impressive and human of us, but the
laws-as-code he's a bulwark against may not be the threat they seem up close.
We'll route around constraints and fashion our own definition of fair use.
If our
behavior
is
technically
illegal, we'll add these new transgressions to the laundry list
of prohibitions
we
already
ignore because we can, since we outnumber the tools in Congress. Eventually
the rules we choose to ignore will wither away like last year's copied tunes.
"Humanity [is on] a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate
the spirit, and light up the brain. On that quest, politics is simply a
roadblock of stentorian baboons" —Tom
Robbins
"[Sony COO Kunitake Ando] startled everyone by speculating that in
the long term, given the nature of Internet copying, record labels may
not
have a future." —Steven Levy
So a few will debate nuances no one else comprehends. Even fewer will lay
down the words that free our progeny. What works will grow and the rest will
wither, as it always has. Someday we'll see that the Toms Jefferson and Robbins
were right in seeing that as long as there are willing followers there will
be exploitive leaders.
So instead we'll follow our collective gut, add what we can, use what works
and leave something better behind. Maybe this isn't an apocalypse but a parenthesis
and
the age of hierarchy is an interruption in organic evolution as it's always
gone on.
Doing sensible things is what makes us consequential.
12:01:57 AM 
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