Intellectual Fast Food

Here's some from Clay Shirky. Clay and many of the Web 2.0 crowd are clearly smart, but what they do is far removed from the current focal point of global change. As a result, indulging in clever Web 2.0 thinking is akin to eating intellectual fast food, it satisfies but its clearly not good for you.

This is why I bailed on thinking about techy topics after helping to get blogs (which turned into Web 2.0 later) going back in 2001/2002. The most important global changes are going on is much deeper in the stack now.

Comments

[James Bowery]

Satisfying if you've got a palate for thoughts that (being charitable) have aged on the shelf for 25 years:

http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/vnatap.html

The thing is, as I pointed out 25 years ago, the old media guys _had_ the technology for Web 2.0 and they _had_ the market data telling them they should deploy it for profit. Shirky's conversations with old media folks today are conversations with the idiocracy of the old media -- not its movers and shakers.

Here's why this stuff is still relevant to the "deep in the stack" global changes:

These issues are not being fought nor resolved at the rational level.

They are religious.

Just as the prior media revolution of the Gutenberg Press unleashed a decentralizing religious revolution (that had almost as a side-effect the scientific revolution and enlightenment), so the recentralizing innovations of the steam-driven “double-press”, motion pictures, radio and finally television unleashed a religious counter-revolution which is now, at last, giving way to a new decentralizing religious revolution based on the Internet.

Jews played an important part in the decentralizing religious revolution triggered by the Gutenberg Press, but it was a “deal with the devil” so to speak — out of the frying pan of Catholic theocracy into the fire of the new state religion: Holocaustianity.

Saddam Hussein predicted that an invasion of Iraq would result in the "ideological collapse" of the West. Well, maybe he realized that the Internet had destabilized the Zeitgeist to the point that Jews playing the role of Nazis in the middle east would undermine the West's social control mechanisms.

What I'm waiting to see is what role Muslims play that is analogous to the role Jews played with the Gutenberg Press when they assisted in the widely-distributed translations of the Bible.

[James Bowery]

Erratum: It was bin Laden who predicted the "ideological collapse" of the West if it invaded Iraq -- not Saddam Hussein.