Results tagged “Disruptive Technologies” from Astranaut

If you haven't already experienced it, you should try twitter out for a few days.  Follow everyone you think is interesting, and get connected.  Or if you're in a hurry, check out Twitterfall, and you can watch the ENTIRE conversation in real time. It is important you understand what twitter is before reading any further.

For the moment the twitter population is small, but soon it's going to take off big, and watching it live will mean seeing hundreds of thousands of tweets per second!  For the moment, it's not entirely accurate to call it a conversation, as most tweets are one-way, and there is not yet a clients capable of threading or filtering your tweets.  Also you only see the tweets of people you follow, and your tweets are only seen by those who follow you.

Now fast-forward 5 years.  Add in sophisticated clients capable of semantic web 3.0 filtering and threading.  This convergence adds an entirely new layer of communication, functionality and possibility.  So much so, that when it first occurred to me, after watching Twitterfall, my head exploded.  I think Nova's did too, when I pointed it out to him.  He should know as he is leading the development of a web 3.0 service called Twine. Nova Spivack does an outstanding job of describing this convergence in his Twitter + Twine post.

So in a few years everyone's twitter client will have the ability to sort/search through the entire twitter flood in real time bringing you threads of conversations happening right NOW on what most interests you.  You in turn can respond to those tweets and everyone who wants to can in turn respond to you.  If the client is smart enough, it will filter and display all of this real-time streaming conversation with very colorful and soothing visualizations to maximize your relevant connections at any given time.  This is really difficult to imagine, precisely because nothing like it has ever been possible before.  It would like be like mingling at a very large cocktail party, but in this case you just happen to be listening and in tuning into in to any conversation that interests you at just the right time, with the option of jumping in.  In turn you could start a new conversation, and in less than a minute you have dozens of responses all coming in at light speed. Except this time the cocktail party is the whole planet! Or at least everyone tweeting at that moment.  That's what makes twitter + semantic intelligence different, is it becomes a real-time global conversation - a global mind running at light speed.  Thousands, and soon millions of conversations all happening simultaneously - all of them co-mingling with each other via real-time semantic filtering, threading, cross-connecting. Each person being a node, or neuron in the global brain. The future is coming awfully fast, and twitter is making that possible.  Given sufficient visualization and semantic intelligence you could surf and trace the history of all of these conversations going back to the very beginning of twitter's existence.

As Spivack pointed out, Twitter + Twine = Smarter Collective Intelligence:

   1. In the 1980's the fax machine made snailmail almost obsolete. Faxing was faster.
   2. In the 1990's email made faxing almost obsolete. Email was faster.
   3. In the 2000's social media rose to challenge email's dominance. The blogosphere became the center of focus.Blogging about something was often a faster way to get attention (to oneself, or to the topic) than emailing people. And you could more easily reach a larger audience.
   4. In the 2010's it looks like Twitter (and other real-time messaging systems) may become more important than email and even blogging. Twitter is simply faster. And you can reach more people in less time, more interactively, in Twitter than via email.Twitter may overcome the asynchronous nature of the Web. Even search may go "real-time."

This is revolutionary enough that it may just undermine Google's current dominance (See Mining the Thought Stream). As more people will want to do real-time searches, rather than sifting though Google's archive of already documented past information.  They are really two different things.  The web won't become irrelevant, but the real action will be the conversations happening right NOW. You can do twitter searches right now, including an advanced search based on things like attitude.

But when you add semantic intelligence running automatically in the background, your conversation flows and is updated in real-time to connect with those most interested in hearing and responding to it, and on it goes forever. In other words the conversations begin taking on lives of their own.  With very well designed clients and intuitive graphical interfaces you could get an entirely new way to communicate than humans have ever had before.  It's not just way faster, it's also more paradigm busting and disruptive than any previous communication technology that came before it.

Welcome to the future, it is now.

Freenet does what people thought the internet was supposed to do - free information from censorship. But as we know, information flows through proprietary pipes and exists openly on identifiable servers. This means that not only is our surfing activity and email exposed to prying eyes, but that if certain information is offensive to individuals, corporations or governments it can be removed. More importantly, it has become increasingly difficult to post information on the internet anonymously. The ability to speak freely, openly, and anonymously assures that the person can speak their mind without fear of reprisal or even imprisonment or death. Freenet changes all that. Freenet has been a work in progress for over 2 years, and until now it has been cumbersome to use for the average user. Now, with the release of Freenet 0.5 (download here) it has an intuitive and easy to use interface. Freenet works by storing information in an encrptyed, decentralized and distributed manner. Information resides on individual computers on the network. But not even the computer owner knows exactly what information is stored on their machine. What this means is that even if a government were to demand that information be removed from Freenet at gunpoint, no one would be able to comply. Once information is published on freenet, its is essentially impossible to remove.

In Capital, Power and Ecology I suggested that "ecological" constraints are inherent in a global economy, and how capital rewards liberty over tyranny. So far capital has won hands down, lets hope it can survive the current onslaught of corruption and criminality long enough to see us out of global war and irreversible ecological disaster.

In the meantime there are many other developments on the technological front that hold promise for liberating capital, free enterprise, and fostering greater degrees of participatory democracy than ever seen before. Tools like reputation systems and p2p adhoc wireless mesh-networks are so disruptive in their potential its hard to predict what their effect will be, but they are sure to change society as radically as the internet itself - I would say much more so. For starters, adhoc wireless smart mobs will greater power over where capital flows. Companies like World Com and Enron who refuse to open their books and become more transparent will be much less likely to attract capital and investment than those companies that do. Therefore the drive of companies is to become increasing transparent and accountable to their "stakeholders" who in turn have the ability to move their capital around with the simple push of a button. This represents and eminent power shift away from centrally controlled hierarchies to bottom-up grass-roots capital structures. The future of the corporation is built from the bottom-up not the top-down. Meanwhile we are likely to see radical advancements in medicine, longevity, cheap space access, nanotechnology, and environmentally sustainable energy systems.

Then we have the current tyranny of the content industry as embodied by the RIAA and MPAA and other outdated business models built on scarcity. At the moment, the media giants seem to be winning with draconian legislation like the DMCA as part of their arsenal. But don't loose hope yet. These too ultimately restrict the flow of capital as well. What we are seeing are old modes of capital and collusion being increasingly threatened by more liquid and liberated economies of scale and zero duplication cost of the internet. Regardless of the legislative and technological restrictions implemented in the US, their are other countries who are not as keen to follow in the same footsteps.

China, not normally a bastion of freedom and democracy, is adopting open-source software at a blinding pace despite Microsoft's best efforts to shove their bloated, expensive and restrictive licensing schemes down their throats. And while AMD and Intel build in digital restrictions into their processors, China has started its own processor initiative called 'Dragon'. Kind of ironic, that a nation know for its gross human rights abuses could potentially be a bastion of digital liberty. China is not pursuing this path because of their freedom loving nature, but to increase their economic independence and capital liquidity. It just happens that increasing capital requires a corresponding increase in liberty if its to become sustainable. If China develops their own microprocessors and uses free open-source software, they are beholden to no one for their capitalization, especially the "imperialistic" US. So while the US chokes on expensive and restrictive digital lock-downs, China will be enjoying a more open platform. So in the global economy where do you think the capital will go? If the US hopes to compete in the global marketplace, its either going to have to loosen its digital restrictions or loose its place as the economic super-power. So the question is can the US continue as an economic superpower without bankrupting itself through global imperialism and domestic tyranny?

We will soon find out.