“(Blogging is) headed everywhere, because the underlying pattern of cheap amateur publishing is what’s important, not the current manifestations. The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.
A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.
The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world.”
From Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The
Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
Fascism is the ultimate embodiment of corporate control. Their idea of a good outcome is for us to “Imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever”. No, thanks; but Il Duce’s trains did tend to run on time.
The irony is that we can all hold hands and sing kum-bay-yah here in the blogosphere, but during business hours there are still bills to be paid and it’s so much easier to make those problems disappear when there is something bland and predictable bringing in the revenue.
I would love to sit and experiment all day. And, in fact I am more able to do so than 99% of the working world, for which I am grateful every day. I work for myself expressly to allow that to happen, but at the same time I am forced to put that goal in the back seat in order to ensure that I get the same thin opportunity to do something cool tomorrow.
Most people don’t get even that because it is far simpler to crush the spirit and creativity of interesting people in a vacuum-sealed cubicle, than to take a risk on something potentially world-changing.