Thursday, May 18, 2006

Quote du jour

Rob Cottingham: There is a mentality that cannot see a commons without imagining a profitable tragedy, and it finds full expression in their boardrooms.

He adds,

Half a year after Doc Searls posted this warning, it’s already starting to come true.

Except I'm not so sure the we're in quite the win/lose situation I posed in that piece last Fall. There are too many ways of working around the carriers, which desperately need competition (and we can help give it to them). And, in the long run, there will be more money for carriers in a Net that's a wide open market for goods and services, than as a tragically divided commons. That may not dawn on the board rooms immediately, but the market opportunities should become obvious eventually.

In other words, I think the Net is bigger than the carriers. And that there are clever ways we can fight for what we want without taking the carriers head-on in Congress, where they are too well-entrenched. And that is what we've been doing with Net Neutrality.

By the way, Neutrality should include symmetricality, I think. So does Doug Ross.

So go dig it

Sean Coon: Tree is Not Árbol Unless You Add Silly String. A sample:

Each day we rely on our own trees of knowledge — branches of immeasurable directions and depth, overlapping and crossing one another to form meshed nests of position. The common faith we tend to hold regarding knowledge, is in the strength to overlap our individual trees with one another; the more the overlap, the more the homogenous culture, driving civil movement within this complex ecosystem and jungle we’ve created for ourselves.

It gets deeper, too.

I was overheard to have said...

I'll have the visuals from yesterday's talk at Syndicate up soon. Tomorrow, probably. Meanwhile, David Utter, Jeff Jarvis and Earthling have all put up notes.