Dustbunny

I pulled a dustbunny off my jacket today and as it fell it did something surprising. It stopped mid-air, and took a right turn and shot across the room straight towards the jacket I had just removed it from. I dropped it again and the same thing happened, but as the static electric field was fading off my jacket - the arc was flat and it just barely caught the hem of my jacket at the end.

I've been thinking alot lately about the central problem of the net. It's not the tons of data. After all, everything generates tons of data. Its the fact that nobody seems to know what is worth knowing anymore. Alot of it isn't on the net at all. Courage. Honesty. Physical Strength. Intelligence. The net is too simple a place to hang out - to acquire these skills. We learn physics, for example - by doing math. It's easier to do it on the page than to type the equations or try to draw the integral signs with a mouse.

In network engineering, we sometimes refer to the internet as the dust bunny.

Twitter and Facebook just shut down the accounts of people who were organizing their protest against the attack on wikileaks. I realized that open source software is the answer to such problems. Do you remember "portals"? How every dot com wanted to be a "portal" to the internet? No. The net should be wide, scaleable, and distributed. We should never worry about how big it is or how much is out there - we should concentrate on our part of it. Our website, for example. Or, our work. We should never attribute to one site, the concept that we can find everything we need to find - from its mechanisms. The net is a giant cloud. If we are all operating our own facebooks, our own websites - the concept that a one size fits all government, website, search engine - news service -all will fall where it belongs. To the wayside. Artists will publish their own music as easily as sending a text message from their phone after recording sessions are complete. Scholars and Scientists will blog their way to resolution of academic conflict and new vistas of research.

In the dust bunny, alot has changed in the past five years. Does anyone remember the "pajama clad blogger" that took down the fake documents a CBS news series put up on display? How about the most watched political ad of 2008 (a homemade number). The Blogosphere threatened then and now - the Fascistbook, Twit - any and all other sites that pretend the basic human right of freedom of speech and pretends it's some kind of service level agreement contract term that we can sign away. "Just so we can use their site".

They are still trying to convince an entire generation to submit every single line of text they share with their friends, to remote automated monitoring.