The Critical Path #100: Fin de siècle
by Horace Dediu
The closing of one and the onset of another era. In this hundredth episode of The Critical Path we look back to some of the big questions we asked and ask them again with hindsight and foresight. They are:
- What happens to entertainment in the era of pervasive connectivity and computing?
- What happens to privacy when citizenship requires divulging all your secrets to commercial entities?
- What happens to the structure of computing when diffusions of innovations are instantly global?
3 comments
berult ·
The means to implement either noble or nefarious intents are growing in leaps and bounds, both diversity-wise and impact-per-attempt-wise. For governments...and for private and corporate citizens alike. The margin of error in managing the moral mediation withers in synchrony with the pauperization in the diffusion of data.
The key principle underlying sound management of the growing data, and big-data conundrums:
All that is knowable from a social agent should either be rendered knowable to it and strictly to it...in real time, or be rendered accessible to absolutely all social agents, with no lapse in the rate of diffusion. One or the other, one and the other, both those multilaterally antithetical propositions must ultimately be nurtured into ethical equivalencies.
Apple's crossroad platform...Siri-esque in its most tentative embodiment...defines, as an arbitrage microcosm, what the moral template henceforth should be.
As for wearables... None the better for one's vested interest in a coy garment and a hushed-down underwear... These guys ought to talk to each other, and certainly to me! With stylish à-propos! We're all idiosyncratic family here, right...!?
Rogers ·
Thought you might find this interesting, relevant to this podcast ... in the 1920's the FTC stepped into the movie business, ending the movie producer's practice of forcing theater owners to buy all of a studios output in order to get any of their movies. Sounds eerily similar to the "bundled" cable options today.
stefnagel ·
Feels like this was a important episode. Interesting: The Cubed podcast by Bejarin and Evans had a similarly deep take this week.