Q&A With MIT's Nicholas Negroponte 185
Lisa Langsdorf writes "Thought you might be interested in this interview between Nicholas Negroponte and BusinessWeek Online's Steven Baker.
In it, Nicholas says that peer-to-peer is his prediction as to which new products or services are likely to make the biggest splash, he says:
Peer-to-peer is key. I mean that in every form conceivable: cell phones without towers, sharing leftover food, bartering, etc. Furthermore, you will see micro-wireless networks, where everyday devices become routers of messages that have nothing to do with themselves.
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
"
New quote from the future: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New quote from the future: (Score:4, Funny)
Like this? [bash.org]
Re:New quote from the future: (Score:2)
At first I was scared to click this link (I know I'm not the only one), but I had to come back for it.
I am relieved to say that it is both work-safe (as long as no one is in your immediate vicinity) and somewhat amusing.
Re:New quote from the future: (Score:3, Informative)
Jesus... (Score:3, Funny)
Come one, did we really need some computer geek to tell us that?
There's nothing more to see here, next story please.
Nicholas... (Score:4, Insightful)
has not yet achieved its potential. You must
admit that after the boom in filesharing,
new applications of peer-oriented network
protocols dropped off dramatically. But the
economies and liberties enabled by p2p have
not yet begun to emerge in many areas where
they can be applied to good effect.
Decentralization is the key (Score:2)
Re:Decentralization is the key (Score:3, Interesting)
Blockquoth the parent:
The Catholic Church gave us hierarchical command structures? Umm, then what happened during those 4,000 years of human civilization before the birth of Christ?
Re:Decentralization is the key (Score:2)
Disorganized survival of the fittest, it seems. Look at Rome before the Church took over- he who assasinated everybody above him became emperor. There's a reason why the Church is called "Civilization's Builder and Protector". Of course, I'm talking WESTERN civilization; there's more to humanity than just the west.
Re:Decentralization is the key (Score:2)
A varmit with a political agenda will fare better to the extent he can make it seem religious rather than political.
Re:Decentralization is the key (Score:2)
...duh... (Score:2)
Re:Jesus... (Score:2)
Yeah, but not by much. This guy Negroponte practically defines the phrase "pompous ass." He's the Ivory-Tower-Intellectual's Ivory-Tower-Intellectual, made all the more painfully wretched by the notion that he's supposed to be "one of us geeks."
And besides, what's he doing showing up here, now? I thought his fifteen minutes of fame ended circa the time Wired stopped using neon pi
Re:Jesus... (Score:2)
I just read the article (yes, really!) to see what he had to say. Same flannel, just different names used. Of course, some of the more obvious stuff will (eventually) come to pass, thus keeping his 'visionary' status intact....
-MT.
Re:Jesus... (Score:2)
LOL we just did our semiannual "clean and dust off the bookshelves" event, and I too have that book and thought it may be fun to re-read it NOW and see whats what.
Great (Score:1)
"Your home liquid calcium levels are low. Please pause at the grocers and aquire more."
P2P (Score:5, Funny)
Almost like...The Internet!?!?!
Re:P2P (Score:4, Informative)
What Negroponte means is that your phone will pass data for other clients like a router does, but it will also be your mobile phone (a helpful, interactive, personal device). So instead of having a fairly strict division between client, server, and message-passing machines, each device will contain the transport functions and also do something individualistic.
This architecture, it seems to me, will imply encryption throughout -- somehow, people are more concerned by the idea of their data passing through other individuals' devices (what if they look at it?!) than they are sending the data through the hands of a few mega-corporations. I would say this is a good thing...
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
viruses (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:viruses (Score:3, Informative)
yeah, well, did you read anything about the 'virus'? it was more like "hey, it's possible to TRANSFER PROGRAMS WITH BLUETOOTH" than being of any major concern to anyone.. unless you think it's a major concern to somebody that you can transfer a program to your friend if you want to do so and your friend can choose to run that program if he wants.. if the user _wants_ to install something i
Re:viruses (Score:2)
Re:viruses (Score:2)
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/symbca b ir a.html
the possibility of writing such a worm that needs *user interaction and permittance* to spread was known from the day the first s60 platform phone was
Re:viruses (Score:2)
Not to be logically fallacious... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not to be logically fallacious... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not to be logically fallacious... (Score:2)
Re:Not to be logically fallacious... (Score:2)
So, a single company decides to invent a new timescale, with very little practicality, that nobody's heard of, but has the "I" word (Internet) in it?
Oh wait - it came out in 1999... Guess it makes sense now. (Gosh, weren't there alot of RETARDED people back then? Did the general IQ just dip ~20 points, or what?)
synchronetically?! (Score:2)
I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, who would trust their credit card number to travel through a peer-to-peer network to get to the company he/she's ordering from? And this is just money... how about food as mentioned in the article?
Re:I wonder... (Score:1, Funny)
I think you have some priority issues, mate.
Mail (Score:5, Insightful)
This happens every day when I drop mail into the postbox. Or when I buy a banana in the local market.
Re:Mail (Score:5, Insightful)
I think your analogy actually cuts the other way. When you drop your mail into the mailbox, it enters a highly regulated, automated, centralized system that collects fees (i.e., stamps) of which the government gets a cut. Yes, it's true that you do not know the people, but you sure know who they work for.
By contrast, Negroponte seems to be suggesting that you would (in effect) hand your letter to a stranger on the street, who would hand it off to another, who hands it off to another, etc., until it gets to where it's going, with no intervention by a centralized agency.
It's an interesting theory, but we'll never see it happen, for one obvious reason: it does not lend itself well to being taxed.
Re:Mail (Score:3, Insightful)
It's an interesting theory, but we'll never see it happen, for one obvious reason: it does not lend itself well to being taxed.
That's the most ridiculous dismissal I've seen in a while. If someone at the USPS messes up my shipment, I can
Re:Mail (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I meant it in a different way than you have interpreted. Let me try to say it better.
Centralized governments do not encourage econcomic processes that are not subject to audit and taxation. That is why smuggling is illegal. That is why barter transactions must be reported on your income tax (if you are a US taxpayer). The point I meant to make was that Negroponte's theory does not take this into account. Therefore, I believe it is unlikely that his vision of a decentralized, unregulated, economically-significant distribution system could now come into existence.
Full Faith & Credit (Score:3, Interesting)
Any mutually inter-dependent system can become self-organising and regulated according to custom and expectations. The key issue is the "centralisation". That's the central point.
I argue that the centralisation in this case stems from the State monopoly on money. In their recent history States have generally monopolized the right to issue fiat money for settlement of all debts, pub
Re:Mail (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you are being somewhat shortsighted here. Any P2P system is more centralized than it seems on the surface once you look a bit deeper. The protocol level of these networks are highly centralized in that they are developed at a company or standards body. Any device wanting to be part of the network needs to conform to that protcol. Being that greater power is gained from a bigger network, it is to the device's benefit to conform to the popular protocol.
Emphasizing humans as carriers for this data is quite rediculous. Most of what you do already is out in the open right now for anyone to see it. Wireless and P2P will make this more prevalent, but hardly mean you have to put more trust in strangers. You are trusting the protocol running over the network. Again, trusting the standards bodies/companies to come up with a reliable protocol.
Taxing happens at the sale of the device level. Software is of very little use without a device to run on it. Taxing only works when something holds value, which software doesn't necessarily do on its own. That's a bit of a misleading statement but generally correct. Protocols can also have a license "tax" similar to the MPEG standard.
In short, you shouldn't fear this because it seems more open. Most rapid periods of progress occur when things become more open and free (democracy, railroads, telephone, Internet, etc.) Each invention that opens up information has a certain balance of centralization and openness that gives it credibility. P2P is certainly no different.
Re:Mail (Score:2)
Yes, I agree with this completely if you are referring only to electronic transactions. But in the portion of the Negroponte interview that inspired this particular thread, that is exactly what Negroponte suggested. He opines that in the future, the P2P model would apply not only to electronic transactions, but also to basic physical transactions. He specifically mentions bartering and food distribution. Such transactions are not subject t
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do you trust servers/routers that your number passes through now over the internet?
Answer: You don't. You use some form of end to end encryption (https).
As far as the food thing goes, I think he was making a point. I'm not eating anybody's leftovers except my own anytime soon.
Re:I wonder... (Score:2)
I'm not sure about food but here's how it works for data:
Unsatisfied (Score:3, Insightful)
A: Peer-to-peer is key. I mean that in every form conceivable: cell phones without towers, sharing leftover food, bartering, etc
Is it just me or is his answer devoid of reasons why "peer-to-peer is key"?Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
Ok... so, why is "peer-to-peer key"?
Key to what?
Re:Unsatisfied (Score:3, Insightful)
When you have centralized entities, it does not take much to bring them down -- think Napster. However, when you have genuine P2P -- where there is no real central point of failure, it would become almost impossible to bring out the destruction of such a system.
And we are always used to central and organized systems (hell, we even have a hierarchy of people ruling, err governing us) -- he just says that this is deviant from the norm beca
Re:Unsatisfied (Score:2)
Therefore, it is unique and will be harder to bring down than traditional systems. Does that help?
That could make sense if the question was about longevity (and if you can maintain that the likes of IBM, Exxon, Microsoft and the White House have faded into irrelevancy). But look at the original question:
Q: Which new products or services are likely to make the biggest splash?
Re:Unsatisfied (Score:3, Insightful)
Traditional innovations are stifled by centralization, so if the queen bee falls, everything else around it falls. However, P2P does not have that issue and therefore, any new technology that employs this is more likely to be popular, and will last longer.
I'm guessing he jumps to this conclusion from the outburst of P2P applications after Napster, and how all the media co
Re:Unsatisfied (Score:3, Interesting)
I still fail to see how P2P is key. Yes, the network might be harder to take down, but reliability isn't the most important aspect to most systems, usefulness is. In my experience, having a disorganized network becomes more susceptable to abuse. I mean compare Gnutella vs. BitTorrent, I'd argue that BitTorrent generally works better. And that is because there is a little bit of structure built into the system via the tracker.
I also don't like his nature argument. Nature creates hierarchies too. Your
Re:Unsatisfied (Score:2)
However, I just brought up the possible reasons as to why he might have made those statements.
Yes, right now (and maybe for a long time to come) P2P can only be useful from the perspective of distribution and purchase, and not creation in itself. However, we can become more peer to peer than we are at the moment, and maybe that will see changes in the social, economic and technical paradigms than we do currently.
I guess
Re:Unsatisfied (Score:3, Insightful)
Great article, but..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
The last person to want real change is not the customer, these days it seems to be the companies making that decision for the customer.
Think of any area, there are millions of customers who want a change for the better -- however the companies are just not letting the change happen and say that it's for the good of the customer, or that what the customer wants is illegal (and if it isn't illegal, they'll just pass a couple of laws and make it illegal).
And to be honest, small companies that bring about great innovations are being stifled, especially because they are shit scared of law suits. I'm surprised that Nicholas did not mention this in his interview.
True, they hold the key. But it does not take much to crush them down, either.
Re:Great article, but..... (Score:2)
However, there are many larger organizations that innovate for their customers. Even my formerly big crappy bank is adding nice online banking features at every turn.
Re:Great article, but..... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is in the definition of "better." Read "The Innovator's Dilemma [amazon.com]" by Clayton M. Christensen.
The basic idea is that your present customers value a certain set of features or parameters of your product, which leads you to continue to make the same product, only "better", defining "better" to be "the same as your present product, only with [the parameter(s) they care about] improved." Significant numbers of new customers, however, can only be attracted by a new technology that, while perhaps scoring lower with your present customers, has some other feature that is not in your present product. Christensen uses the example of disk drives, which have been placed in smaller and smaller form factors, even though that hurts the existing customers of disk drive manufacturers, by reducing their storage capacity (which is the parameter the present customers care about). Smaller disk drives, however, enable the drives to be used in minicomputers instead of big iron, then in desktops instead of minicomputers, then in laptops and PDAs, etc., increasing their sales volume each time--the new customers at each transition value physical size over absolute storage capacity. The larger sales volume in turn led to R&D that enabled the new generation to eventually surpass the old in the original performance metric, storage capacity.
Existing customers resisted the change each time because, for example, the first 3.5-inch drives had less capacity than 5.25-inch drives, and who wants less capacity in a hard drive? But the manufacturer that listened to his present customers, keeping to the 5.25-inch format and not making 3.5-inch drives, found his market, and his business, disappearing quickly. Christensen used the term "incremental change" to describe the capacity improvements made in a given drive form factor (which made existing customers happier), and "distruptive change" to describe the move from one form factor to another (which brought in new customers).
And that's what Negroponte meant.
Freedom to Choose (Score:2)
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense" [slashdot.org]. Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
How can distributed P2P maintain its speed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How can distributed P2P maintain its speed? (Score:3, Insightful)
One might have asked, "Why would I want to route this post through hundreds of devices on some crazy internetwork when I could just dial straight into the conventional BBS?"
Just at thought.
Half joking here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, i'm half talkin out of my ass there, but ya know, sometimes good ideas show up that way
Oh yeah, the other prob with that, wouldn't it need lots of network traffic and ram just to maintain a network of path/nodes/phones/whatever?
Re:How can distributed P2P maintain its speed? (Score:2)
you know your position and the position of your near neighbours, you know the small obstacles near you (the forest) and the small shortcut near you,
bigger obstacles and bigger shortcuts a little farther away, and you know the big obstacles far away (the oceans...) and the big shortcuts (cables, sat links...), and you deduce the approximate direction you need to route to.
As for mobility, you have a geographically fixed syste
Sorry... (Score:2, Informative)
Ah, the 90s (Score:2)
prediction? (Score:2)
Yes, and here we have the most depressing economic forecast ever. Don't forget "fighting over petrol" and "driving really fast cars".
"fighting over petrol", "driving really fast cars (Score:2)
Who run barter-town?
Geesh, if that's where P2P leads us, maybe the RIAA is right. Hmmmm.
Late, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Kids, back in the olden days of the 1990's, there was a whole magazine that consisted of repeating "Atoms are heavy; bits are weightless." over and over again, interspersed with pictures of stuff they said you had to buy. Strange times.
Its changed slightly... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Late, but ... (Score:2)
There were more ads than content when I cancelled my subscription. I picked up a couple of issues in the years since, but just couldn't find anything to justify making it a regular purchase any more.
Skynet? (Score:1)
Negroponte's Law (Score:4, Interesting)
His law I guess from the early 90's said that everything that was airborne would become fixed conduits and the reverse.
Example: Television is mostly fixed and stationary so cable will take over. Telephones is for people that is moving so they will switch to Wireless.
Re:Negroponte's Law (Score:2)
Organisation & order can only come from centra (Score:2, Informative)
And now John Negroponte is Bush's choice for next Ambassador to Iraq, where it seems the current US administration obviously
wow (Score:2)
I'm genuinely impressed. That's the cleverest disguise for an offtopic post I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Of course, I am new here.
Re:Organisation & order can only come from cen (Score:2)
Peer to Peer Good? (Score:2)
Unbottlenecked (Score:2)
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense" [slashdot.org]. Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Being Obvious (Score:2)
Agreed, Nick was showing the rear view mirror (Score:3, Insightful)
Whats interesting is how wrong he got some parts. He totally missed the web...he seemed to be stuck on some vision of uber-TV.
Re:Agreed, Nick was showing the rear view mirror (Score:2)
he's stating the patently obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
the killer apps that proved the model: im ala icq, music sharing ala napster, are already dust in the wind, taken over by aim, kazaa, etc.
and we know what the concerns are with those apps: patent infringement, viruses, spam, etc.
what we need is a wireless killer app without these concerns thwarting it
we also need a user base: enough infratstructure and people with bluetooth or whatever wireless protocol enabled gadgets to make a critical mass for the rest of the world to notice
and then we can start talking about p2p again the way negroponte is
i don't know what this killer app is, i'm no futurist, but some of you out there closer to the ground with some wacky ideas may be, and i say, to you goes the spoils of the future of computing/ the internet/ media itself
roll up your sleeves and get programming
the internet is still a very young place, we are still on the upside of the bell curve of innovation yet to come, so even though what negroponte says is dubious and/ or obvious and therefore useless, the basic observation of the youth of the internet and its promising future remains unchallenged
that's why futurists like negroponte sound interesting, because they get that (no matter if their predictions are crapola)
one of you out there reading this is going to become very rich/ influential/ famous
that is for sure
but how you are going to do that probably has very little to do with what negorponte is talking about
Re:he's stating the patently obvious (Score:2)
How about VOIP? Wouldn't it be interesting if you could just by a handset and start calling people for free? Perhaps at some point you'd want to make a long distance call and couldn't find a path across the free P2P network (or you wanted a QOS guarantee) which would use your paid subscription, but for a call across town, why not?
Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
P2P has already proven its effectiveness, whether you look at programs like KaZaA, Mercora, etc. But it works on wired systems because there is established infrastructure that makes the rest of the system work. For his system to work, it would be like taking out the router/server farms from the ISPs and turning every desktop computer into both a router and a server. It adds complexity, and while it ensures redundancy and would keep outages like the earlier one at Akamai from happening, it would require lots of overhead.
There is a reason that we assume that centralised systems work better; they are easier to establish, coordinate and control. This outlook only works if you are going for a fully anarchist system, which you will never get everyone to buy into, barring a massive sociological paradigm shift; something has to happen that convinces everyone that a truly open society is more beneficial than the current model.
Or until you stop coercing people! (Score:2)
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense" [slashdot.org]. Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Re:Erm... (Score:2)
If central command was easier, the USSR would be growing. Oh wait they don't exist anymore.
Now all you
Re:Erm... (Score:2)
Actually the beginning of that was the decentralizaion of physical force/power through the development of weaponry that joe average could wield. When enough of the masses (usally 10%) determined they had the wherewithal, it happe
Re:Erm... (Score:2)
The assumption that what we cannot see doen't exist.
Centralised systems work better for a very few things that we can measure and control effectively.
Essentially, the centralised system doesn't scale.
P2P as key may be wishful thinking... (Score:3, Insightful)
Those with money and power will continue to control and influence the masses while giving the masses the illusion of lack of centralized control.
RIAA, MPAA, governments, banking and financing industries, are all out to centralize control of flow of things. They are not going to give up that power easily. This is partly why we have social classes, and that in the world, the wealthy get wealthier and the poor get poorer, why government's agricultural subsidy create farmers who are not wealthy, but become addicts to subsidy, and why certain companies make so much money from them.
Centralised Control (Score:2)
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense" [slashdot.org]. Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Re:P2P as key may be wishful thinking... (Score:2)
Most cell phones are off 99% of the time, and only turn on a few tens of milliseconds every second or so to see if a call is coming in. If your handset is on to help someone else establish a connection, your battery drains as well as theirs. Any kind of ad-hoc network would seem to be completely inefficient in terms of p
Hype that matters? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nicholas Negroponte is f a r being from a geek. He is a suit that pretends to be one. I have not read a single piece written by this person having anything resembling substance. He embodies the prototypical techological-determinist, quite ill read or prepared for anything besides business-talk. For this, amongst many other reasons, I'd rather read a publication like "Scientific American" than "Wired" any day. This guy is seriously brain-damaged.
Now what would an interview with this guy be doing in Slashdot?
Ideology (Score:2)
He wears his ideology close to his chest. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense" [slashdot.org]. Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Re:Hype that matters? (Score:2)
Negroponte's job is to produce mentions of MIT Media Lab in the popular press. That's it. He's halfway competent at doing it too. But it would be a grave mistake to think of him as a technologist in any way, shape or form. He's a PR flack, nothing more.
Deconstructing Ne-gro-pon-te (Score:2, Insightful)
Page me your chalupa...
Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical,
I always thought that society was a direct result of nature, as exemplified by the complex relationships of wolf pack, a lion pride or a troop of macaques, but seemingly the geniuses at media lab have discovered that social systems are not from nature.
Skype is remarkable (I know them well) and will change the landscape radically.
Yet anoth
Another Self-Appointed Expert (Score:5, Insightful)
From 1998:
Nicholas Negroponte predicts "You're going to see within the next year an
extraordinary movement on the Web of systems for micropayment
to predict micropayment revenues in the Billions of dollars.
Re:Another Self-Appointed Expert (Score:2)
I've complained about this as such to Scott McCloud of webcomic fame. He has since been involved in BitPass. He hardly needed to hear my complaint; my opinion was formed in part by his own bo
Re:Another Self-Appointed Expert (Score:2)
There's a classic internal bank scam involving round-off errors of less than a cent on interest computations. Micropayments should be much easier to scam.
MIT & Peer-to-Peer (Score:4, Informative)
Most peer-to-peer research in universities regards creating better, faster Distributed Hash Tables, or DHTs for short. Typically, for N nodes on an overlay network connected by a DHT, insertion and queries come at log(N) cost. MIT has one of the best, called Chord [mit.edu]. Some DHTs are very fragile and their routing topology can "break" when under extreme churn (when a flash of nodes suddenly join or leave the network), or malicious nodes attempt to manipulate other nodes' routing tables by creating fake identities (see the Sybil attack [rice.edu]) -- Chord has been shown to be very resistant to both. Other notables are Kademlia [nyu.edu] from NYU (which is under the hood of eMule), and Pastry [slashdot.org] from Rice (Microsoft collaborated).
MIT has done some pioneering research in DHTs, and they have a lot of great minds on it. I'm making my own peer-to-peer program (hopefully it will be ready in a few months) and it will incorporate quite a few of the ideas they've developed. One of their ideas that I find particularly interesting (and I think should be incorporated into BitTorrent, because it seems like the perfect application) is called Vivaldi [mit.edu]. You can read for yourself on how it works, but when applying it to BitTorrent, basicially the tracker would give you peers it thinks you have a low ping time to, as opposed to a random list which may be sub-optimal.
They're also involved in Project IRIS [project-iris.net], which aims to develop a decentralized Internet infrastructure using all the latest DHT technology. It's funded indirectly through -- gasp -- the government via the NSF.
So yeah, don't just think that MIT is jumping on the bandwagon. They've been on the bleeding edge for some time.
- shadowmatter
Re:MIT & Peer-to-Peer (Score:2)
MIT, yes. Negroponte, no. The Media Lab was/is mostly fluff. Serious research goes on in other corridors.
False assumption about social networks (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a fallacy you don't even need to be a PhD to figure out (which is lucky for me). To each person, their social network might appear to be a hierarchical system with them at the top, but that is only because of their rather limited scope, and some helping of selfishness that all of us carry at least a bit of. However all these little social networks are just pieces of the real "Social Network" sitting out there.
If you know no one, it's really hard to get anything done in this world. The old saw of, "It's not what you know, it's who you know," is truer than many people would like to believe. I route my friends to people and places I know that have what they want or need, exactly like a node on a p2p network does. Me and the people I know are just a small chunk of the Social Network that humanity has built and made itself a part of for the last...gods how long has humanity been around? It's so big it's hard to get a grasp on it. Most people just see themselves and those they know and ignore everything and everyone else, most of the time out of necessity. It's hard enough to cope with the immediate for the vast majority of people out there. Taking the time to look at all the connections and build the big picture is just not something that's worthwhile to most people, but that doesn't mean it's not there if they're not aware of it.
Central control is not the way humanity, left to it's own devices, organizes itself. Centralized systems try to limit the natural peering we do to focus people for some particular end (closed countries and economies, corporate officers determining the company direction, jobs period limit us and what we do and who we talk to) and it's neither good or bad. Unrestricted peering is an unfocused haze of not much getting done. People spend a lot of time dealing with things that don't further any specific agenda. Focus requires limits on what we do, and not much good has happened in this world without a lot of people focused on it.
However, even then the most it can do is limit it. Sometimes to a very strong degree (like North Korea) but even then the peering happens and communication and commerce happens outside that central control. People get smuggled out of North Korea to freedom in South Korea despite the efforts of the most draconian regime on the planet. People get smuggled into Western nations as slaves (for sex, sweatshop work, or whatnot) despite the abolishment of slavery, tough laws, and seemingly almost universal abhorrence of the practice. If centralized control was the way people actually worked, this kind of stuff would be pretty much impossible.
Social Event Horizon (Score:2)
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense" [slashdot.org]. Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
tired (Score:3, Insightful)
Authority for its own sake (Score:2)
By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
That's a simplification.
Like nature, social systems can come in a variety of kinds, whether strictly hierarchal or peer-to-peer.
Sufficient organization and order to get the job done is demonstrated in swarms and flocks.
Likewise, in my own human body there are a variety of cells that interact in different degrees of hierarchy depending on the funct
Re:Authority for its own sake (Score:2)
Exactly. I think both the Negroponte brothers dress up their centralized, Statist ideologies as "common sense" [slashdot.org]. Which is a very common strategy of centrists everywhere.
Re:Authority for its own sake (Score:2)
biggest gaff: missed predicting the web (Score:2)
Re:Mr. Poo (Score:2, Funny)
Actually, that'd be kind of interesting, being able to defecate via wireless ethernet. Bosses would love it a bit too much though since they wouldn't have to pay for our bathroom breaks. Of course, if we somehow get around to the point that we could do such things, at least maybe P2P would stop being such a sticking point with the government, since they'd have bigger things to worry ab