On a mailing list that obsesses about All Things Networking, another member cited what he called “the Doc Searls approach” to something. Since it was a little off (though kind and well-intended), I responded with this (lightly edited):
The Doc Searls approach is to put as much agency as possible in the hands of individuals first, and self-organized groups of individuals second. In other words, equip demand to engage and drive supply on customers’ own terms and in their own ways.
This is supported by the wide-open design of TCP/IP in the first place, which at least models (even if providers don’t fully give us) an Archimedean place to stand, and a wide-open market for levers that help us move the world—one in which the practical distance between everyone and everything rounds to zero.
To me this is a greenfield that has been mostly fallow for the duration. There are exceptions (and encouraging those is my personal mission), but mostly what we live with are industrial age models that assume from the start that the most leveraged agency is central, and that all the most useful intelligence (lately with AI and ML being the most hyper-focused on and fantasized about) should naturally be isolated inside corporate giants with immense data holdings and compute factories.
Government oversight of these giants and what they do is nigh unthinkable, much less do-able. While regulators aplenty know and investigate the workings of oil refineries and nuclear power plants, there are no equivalents for Google’s, Facebook’s or Amazon’s vast refineries of data and plants doing AI, ML and much more. All the expertise is working for those companies or selling their skills in the marketplace. (The public minded work in universities, I suppose.) I don’t lament this, by the way. I just note that it pretty much can’t happen.
More importantly, we have seen, over and over, that compute powers of many kinds will be far more leveraged for all when individuals can apply them. We saw that when computing got personal, when the Internet gave everybody a place to operate on a common network that spanned the world, and when both could fit in a hand-held rectangle.
The ability for each of us to not only drive prices individually, but to retrieve the virtues of the bazaar to the networked marketplace, will eventually win out. In the meantime it appears the best we can do is imagine that the full graces of computing and networks are what only big companies can do for (and to) us.
Bonus link: a talk I gave last week in Munich.
So I thought it might be good to surface that here. At least it partly explains why I’ve been working more and blogging less lately.
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