Doc Searls and David Weinberger have created an article, World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to stop Mistaking It for Something Else.
Doc Searls explains here, and David Weinberger explains here.
Casting around the usual blogs sees a mostly positive response, though Burningbird pushes back some. I'm not sure yet; I read the thing through a haze of red wine and Friday-night tiredness. I also take a little while to process these things in background and work out what I think. So I'll write a proper response later, perhaps in a day or two.
Having said that, a couple of things occur to me:
Any "article" that gathers enough mind share to demand its own web site was likely a strong statement of position to start with, a manifesto if you will. Think of Cluetrain and The Cathedral and the Bazaar. And World of Ends was launched on its own site. Are Doc and Dave expecting big things from this one? Are they deliberately trying to engineer a movement? I do hope so ;-)
In the context of our western, middle-class, privileged existence, Statement 8: The Internet's three virtues, and in particular 8b: Everyone can use it, is true. And so are statements like "Everyone has enough to eat". Yet, we don't have to look too far from our comfortable situation to see that for a very large part of the world, these things aren't true. OK, I'm hardly being original pointing this out, but for now it's still a real, and uncomfortable, obstacle to aligning with the movement.
Except, except, I don't think Doc and Dave meant it this way. For a couple of related reasons:
Think 42 years from now, to an age of ubiquitous, pervasive, wireless connectivity -- a true global net -- and 3-a-penny computing devices of all kinds, especially ones that let people talk or "pict" instead of read and type: the barrier to participation might be so low as to be effectively non-existent. Think of transistor radios today. OK, not a great example because they receive only, but I'm trying for the image of dirt cheap and globally available.
"Using it" doesn't have to imply a PC, broadband connection, etc.: just as with a simple radio receiver where an entire village might cluster around to hear the BBC World Service, a single device might serve an entire family, or village, or community.
I think while the Net right now is not able to be used by everyone, that's almost all about its current state of evolution, not its true and ultimate nature.
Finally, for now, I'm wondering about something else related to all of the above: Cluetrain told us about what the Net was doing to markets and marketing; The Cathedral and the Bazaar told us about what open-source was doing to software development; and now World of Ends talks further about the Net itself. All good stuff. What I'm curious about is this: what does all this have to say about the business of business itself? To clarify, if everything naturally moves to decentralisation, to a distributed model, are large organisations as we know them ultimately doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs? And then, from a personal perspective -- personal, because I want to create a business and make some money -- how exactly does one make money in this brave, new world? You see, I have this uncomfortable feeling that capitalism, at least large-scale capitalism, just doesn't fit in. I'd love to get rich, but I think it's mutually exclusive with the truths that these movements have revealed to me. Yet again, I've come to the party after the booze ran out.
Seriously, the way I think it can work is that while behemoths are indeed doomed, there's still money to be made. Not billions of dollars, but certainly enough to be comfy. This money can come from helping a few tens, or hundreds or thousands, of people get connected in some way, allowing them to find a way to express themselves. And we'll be doubly comfy because of the knowledge that the money has come from making a real difference to the lives of people. (Hmmm, haven't phrased any of that very well but the battery is running out and I want to get out for a walk. I'll try again a bit later.) All of which is kinda funny, because the Net was going to let the few businesses that got there first and had enough money behind them to build markets of billions of people. And now it looks as if what it's really going to do is let billions of people develop their own markets of just a few people. It's not really commie, more like in fact the small-scale capitalism that China has been slowly allowing to happen.
2:50:33 PM 
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