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by
Kevin Kelly
Read between
October 27 - November 13, 2019
People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth. Fixed copies don’t matter as much as flowing access.
People of the Book favor solutions by laws, while People of the Screen favor technology as a solution to all problems. Truth is, we are in transition, and the clash between the cultures of books and screens occurs within us as individuals as well. If you are an educated modern person, you are conflicted by these two modes. This tension is the new norm.
A book is more “booking” than paper or text. It is a becoming. It is a continuous flow of thinking, writing, researching, editing, rewriting, sharing, socializing, cognifying, unbundling, marketing, more sharing, and screening—a flow that generates a book along the way. Books, especially ebooks, are by-products of the booking process. Displayed on a screen, a book becomes a web of relationships generated by booking words and ideas. It connects readers, authors, characters, ideas, facts, notions, and stories. These relationships are amplified, enhanced, widened, accelerated, leveraged, and
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The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. You are anonymously marking up the web, making it smarter, when you link or tag something. These bits of interest are gathered and analyzed by search engines and AIs in order to strengthen the relationship between the end points of every link and the connections suggested by each tag.
Over the next three decades, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together
the books of the world into a single networked literature.
We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present.
Books were good at developing a contemplative
mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact uncovered while screening will provoke our reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it.
Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning and few of its disadvantages.
Dematerialization
The ratio of mass needed to generate a unit of GDP has
been falling for 150 years, declining even faster in the last two decades. In 1870 it took 4 kilograms of stuff to generate one unit of the U.S.’s GDP. In 1930 it took only one kilogram. Recently the value of GDP per kilogram of inputs rose from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000—a doubling of dematerialization in 23 years.
Real-Time On Demand
Decentralization
The consequence of moving away from centralized organization to the flatter worlds of networks is that everything—both tangible and intangible—must flow faster to keep the whole going together. Flows are hard to own; possession seems to just slip through your fingers. Access is a more appropriate stance for the fluid relations that govern a decentralized apparatus.
The more our society decentralizes, the more important accessing becomes.
Platform Synergy
A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. It is neither market nor firm, but something new. A platform, like a department store, offers stuff it did not create. One of the first widely successful platforms was Microsoft’s operating system (OS).
The wealthiest and most disruptive organizations today are almost all multisided platforms—Apple,
Ecosystems are governed by coevolution, which is a type of biological codependence, a mixture of competition and cooperation. In true ecological fashion, supporting vendors who cooperate in one dimension may also compete in others.
Clouds
A cloud is more powerful than a traditional supercomputer because its core is dynamically distributed. That means that its memory and work is spread across many chips in a massively redundant way.
The web is hyperlinked documents; the cloud is hyperlinked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Woven together, the bits are made much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone.
These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of digital “social-ism” uniquely tuned for a networked world.
None of these methods disappear in the rising superabundance. But to deal with the escalation of options in the coming decades, we’ll invent many more types of filtering.
The problem is that we start with so many candidates that, even after filtering out all but one in a million, you still have too many.
A major accelerant in this explosion of superabundance—the superabundance that demands constant increases in filtering—is the compounding cheapness of stuff. In general, on average, over time technology tends toward the free. That tends to make things abundant.
real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable. Growth comes from remixing.
After all, this is how authors work. We dip into a finite database of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels, and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed, it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by remixing formerly used, commonly shared ones.
Rewindability and findability are just two Gutenberg-like transformations
Remixing—the rearrangement and reuse of existing pieces—plays
The entire global economy is tipping away from the material
bits. It is moving away from ownership and toward access. It is tilting away from the value of copies and toward the value of networks. It is headed for the inevitability of constant, relentless, and increasing remixing. The laws will be slow to follow, but they will follow.
Transformation is a powerful test because “transformation” is another term for becoming. “Transformation” acknowledges that the creations we make today will become, and should become,
something else tomorrow.
Totally believable virtual reality is just about here.
“Presence” is what sells VR.
when you look into a state-of-the-art virtual reality display, your eye will be fooled into thinking you are looking through a real window into a real world.
The second generation of VR technology relies on a new, innovative “light field” projection.
In this design the VR is projected onto a semi-transparent visor much like a holograph. This permits the projected “reality” to overlay the reality you see normally
without goggles.
