Repetitive Mistake Syndrome

This is what makes it worth while sitting up late and reading the Web — a lovely, spiky, acute essay by Doc Searls and David Weinberger on the essence of the Net. Here’s a sample:

“When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six.

Thanks to the enormous influence of those industries in Washington, Repetitive Mistake Syndrome also afflicts lawmakers, regulators and even the courts. Last year Internet radio, a promising new industry that threatened to give listeners choices far exceeding anything on the increasingly variety-less (and technologically stone-age) AM and FM bands, was shot in its cradle. Guns, ammo and the occasional “Yee-Haw!” were provided by the recording industry and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which embodies all the fears felt by Hollywood’s alpha dinosaurs when they lobbied the Act through Congress in 1998.

“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” John Gilmore famously said. And it’s true. In the long run, Internet radio will succeed. Instant messaging systems will interoperate. Dumb companies will get smart or die. Stupid laws will be killed or replaced. But then, as John Maynard Keynes also famously said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

We’d like to avoid the wait.

All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It’s not hard. The Net isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars? worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You’re at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.”

Metaphors again

Interesting Weblog reverie by Jonathan Peterson on how to explain the special characteristics of the Net. Think of it as being like the electrical network. “A comparison that David and Doc touched on, but didn?t go into (and which I haven?t seen used much) is the Internet as electricity.  Telling people the metaphors they are using are wrong is fine, but people NEED analogies, so putting forth a better analogy and hammering it home seems like a good idea to me.

The electrical network is also a completely dumb network that was terribly underutilized initially (since DC current was generated at neighborhood electrical stations they were largely dormant during the day, as home lighting was the first widespread commercial application of elecricity).

The entire value of electrical networks is delivered by the devices on the end, and those devices are drastically different than those it was designed for (electricity really took off with the invention of home refrigeration, leading to constant demand, from that follow the rise of Tesla?s AC network, which allowed an interconnected grid to replace spot generation.  The simularity to the rise of email/web driving people away from the old world of BBSs is left as an exercise is probably not coincidental.”