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February 12, 2005
"an insane flowering"
searls & weinberger in world of ends:
When Craig Burton describes the Net's stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he’s painting a picture that gets at what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.
some part of me knows that "value" here in too many ways only means money, but i'm stubbornly holding into believing that that isn't all (& if it were, anyway, the "wai-wai-wait" flag everybody threw at EPIC wouldn't always land at the "& everybody contributing gets paid according to the (popularity?) consumer-value of his or her contribution" point). because when people write metaphorically i fall in love with the pictures clusters of words make, and i'm seeing this great sparkling empty sphere surrounded by a tight-weave of contagiously rippling buds bursting into bloom.
no wonder people (i'm thinking of a few of my marketing majors in particular) get sucked into the rhetoric of "market" & "potential" "optimize" & "opportunity," when it's set up this way.
the flower metaphor continues: "the internet's value grows on its edges" like weeds on the garden-wall; but we all, like gardeners, have the power to "grow value on its edges"--to plant & nurture roses instead? like weeds (& roses) the flower-net is "outside," "open," "unowned," "not in the...hands of," "connective," "resiliant," "natural," "transporting" "bits" like water wicking up a stem, encouraging users to "flit" like butterflies.
& the metaphor's enemies are rigidly inorganic: "artificial," "barriers," "ownership," "propriety," "control," "force," "censorship," "permission," "private," "exclusive," "authorized," & "hate[fully]" resistant.
do i think the elaborately thematic rhetoric here might be a little over-the-top in an effort to jam an idea brightly down a reader's throat? i do. but i don't mind, & not just because i want the organic model & the laughing piracy of "hah--take that, recording industry!"--to win over those steely-grey words in my second collection above every time. it's a way of looking at the internet that we'd do well to listen to, & spread around perhaps like fern spores, even while also listening for some of the warnings i'm sure less effusive models offer.
(xp to 711)
Posted by ttobryan at February 12, 2005 03:34 PM
Comments
Everything about this post reminds me of every reason I wanted to be a comp instructor instead of a poli-sci major. The beauty and magic of words....
Thanks.
Posted by: Chris Geyer at February 12, 2005 08:51 PM