Cory Doctorow:

The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.

It’s a scary thought, especially if you’re personally attached to an old medium like movies, books, records, or newspapers.

The article briefly covers the concerns of newspapers, films from major studios, music labels and artists, and books.

From the section on films:

So, we may be at the end of the period in cinematic history where we can convince investors to pony up $300 million to make a sequel to a sequel to a remake of a movie adapted from a 50-year-old comic book. Which isn’t to say that no one will make these things henceforth — give it a decade or two and there may well be rich weirdos who fund these productions the same way there are lovely old codgers who can be coaxed into putting up the dough to mount 15-hour, all-singing, all-dancing Wagner operas. Not a mass medium, nowhere near as culturally relevant as BBMs are today, but still a going concern as a vanity/prestige form.

That sounds familiar, as does this comment about distraction, from the Books segment:

On the other hand, for many kinds of books — long-form narratives, for instance — reading off a screen is a poor substitute for a cheap and easy-to-buy codex. Not because screen quality is insufficient (if it were, we wouldn’t all spend every hour that God sends sitting in front of our computers), but because computers are damned distracting.

Vannevar Bush’s famous essay predicting the course of technology in the twentieth century.

His section on the memex contains a paragraph that serves as an effective mission statement for many of the sites that inspire me, and one I hope to prove worthy of:

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Another Gelernter piece. I’m about done now.

The manifest seems to be effectively one for cloud computing. The whole thing is certainly worth reading, but I’ve pulled out some highlights for commentary.

Theme of the Second Age [of computing] now approaching: computing transcends computers. Information travels through a sea of anonymous, interchangeable computers like a breeze through tall grass. A desktop computer is a scooped-out hole in the beach where information from the Cybersphere wells up like seawater.

…

Today’s operating systems and browsers are obsolete because people no longer want to be connected to computers — near ones OR remote ones. (They probably never did). They want to be connected to information. In the future, people are connected to cyberbodies; cyberbodies drift in the computational cosmos  — also known as the Swarm, the Cybersphere.

From the Prim Pristine Net to the Omnipresent Swarm

The computing future is based on “cyberbodies” — self-contained, neatly-ordered, beautifully-laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens.

You will walk up to any “tuner” (a computer at home, work or the supermarket, or a TV, a telephone, any kind of electronic device) and slip in a “calling card,” which identifes a cyberbody. The tuner tunes it in. The cyberbody arrives and settles in like a bluebird perching on a branch.

Your whole electronic life will be stored in a cyberbody. You can summon it to any tuner at any time.

By slipping it your calling card, you customize any electronic device you touch; for as long as it holds your card, the machine knows your habits and preferences better than you know them yourself.

I think this ‘cyberbody’ idea is beginning to appear in the form of cloud computing, although both names are somewhat regrettable. I don’t really mean cloud computing in the sense of ‘everything is stored on the network’ — that’s a limited view, and only captures the present. Instead, I’m thinking of what comes next. As a result of improved capabilities in mobile hardware, increasing connectivity, and a general willingness to utilize the cloud, computers are moving in the direction of dumb terminals.

Desktops (both towers and laptops) are still important due to their computation power and the network’s general lack of such. But netbooks and smartphones are definitely on the rise, and many people have overpowered computers anyways. As we gradually accept the idea of doing everything online, there is increasingly less reason to keep big powerful machines around in the house. I’ve been using a lower-end laptop as my sole Computer for about a year now, with no real concerns.

Getting back to the ‘cyberbody’ concept: it’s odd that keycards are assumed to be the method that will be used for access and verification. Perhaps it was the spirit of the dot-com boom that influenced the choice, in the same way I assume the ‘cyberbody’ term is a result of sci-fi and early web culture. Regardless, it seems that the more immediate method is email or user logins of some manner (e.g. MobileMe, which presumably binds everything to one’s Apple email/password combo). Perhaps things will shift in the direction of keycards, or biometrics, or something similar, but I wouldn’t look for it as an early sign.

Of course, my perspective is just as rooted in the near-future as Gelernter’s was. :)

Any well-designed next-generation electronic gadget will come with a “Disable Omniscience” button.

Such as the iPhone’s ‘flight mode’, perhaps? I don’t know how this fits with plugging in for data — seems to me that the device would be largely useless without the ‘cyberbody’. Perhaps it’s mean to function as a basic smartphone that can be greatly enhanced by a user’s personalized information?

If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn’t that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could move the site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination. […] (We used essentially this technique to build the first tuple space implementations. They seemed to depend on a shared server, but the server was an illusion; there was no server, just a swarm of clients.) Could Amazon.com be an itinerant horde instead of a fixed Central Command Post? Yes.

And, in fact, Amazon did jumpstart cloud computing (though perhaps prompted by the success of Gmail).

The windows-menus-mouse “desktop” interface, invented by Xerox and Apple and now universal, was a brilliant invention and is now obsolete. It wastes screen-space on meaningless images, fails to provide adequate clues to what is inside the files represented by those blurry little images…

Again pushing icon previews.

If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother.

Worth use as a maxim.

File cabinets and human minds are information-storage systems. We could model computerized information-storage on the mind instead of the file cabinet if we wanted to.

Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. (Hear a voice, think of a face: you’ve retrieved a memory that contains the voice as one component.) You can see everything in your memory from the standpoint of past, present and future. Using a file cabinet, you classify information when you put it in; minds classify information when it is taken out. (Yesterday afternoon at four you stood with Natasha on Fifth Avenue in the rain — as you might recall when you are thinking about “Fifth Avenue,” “rain,” “Natasha” or many other things. But you attached no such labels to the memory when you acquired it. The classification happened retrospectively.)

Stuff like Spotlight and Google Desktop Search are helping us move in this direction. Of course, the idea (and even software) isn’t really new. From an article by Chuq von Rospach:

I came to Apple to work on its Unix products — at the time, a version of Unix called A/UX. I spent the first half of my time there working with a wide array of things, mostly enterprise products — A/UX, Data Access Language, AppleShare, AppleSearch, 3270 and Token Ring. Other than Unix, most of the products were at best marginal successes and generally soon cancelled. AppleSearch was by far my favorite — a technology to help you find content on your server. You may have heard of its grandson, called Spotlight, standard since April [0]2005 on Mac OS X. Ten years? That’s a pretty long gestation for a feature.

Back to the manifesto.

The lifestream (or some other system with the same properties) will become the most important information-organizing structure in computing —  because even a rough imitation of the human mind is vastly more powerful than the most sophisticated file cabinet ever conceived.

Although my first thought was ‘it depends on just how rough that is’, a moment’s consideration is enough to convince me this is true. Certainly our present attempts are fairly weak and just summarize what’s going on, but they’re already more humanizing because they 1) turn the data back into a human story, and 2) make it simpler to watch what’s going on.

Lifestreams don’t yield the “paperless office.” (The “paperless office” is a bad idea because paper is one of the most useful and valuable media ever invented.) But lifestreams can turn office paper into a temporary medium —  for use, not storage. “On paper” is a good place for information you want to use; a bad place for information you want to store. In the stream-based office, for each newly-created or -received paper document: scan it into the stream and throw it away. When you need a paper document: find it in the stream; print it out; use it; if you wrote on the paper while using it, scan it back in; throw it out.

Questionable, but I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. Paper is a wasteful technology. Most information can easily be digital for its entire life.

But What Does It All Matter?

If you have plenty of money, the best consequence (so they say) is that you no longer need to think about money. In the future we will have plenty of technology — and the best consequence will be that we will no longer have to think about technology.

We will return with gratitude and relief to the topics that actually count.

Fitting to close with a restatement of the idea that good design is invisible.