Bruce Sterling Assay about the future of the web.
A fantastic powerfull transcript of a speech by futurist and SciFi writer Bruce Sterling at the Webstock09 conference. He talks about the transition of the web 1.0 to 2.0 and how that is now transforming to something completely new - his bet "ubiquity" - being networked anywhere anytime. He says thats its a rollercoaster drive we are all boarded now and that the future will look different but will be what we make it. And he couldn´t hit it home any better:
We've got a web built on top of a collapsed economy. THAT's the black hole at the center of the solar system now. There's gonna be a Transition Web. Your economic system collapses: Eastern Europe, Russia, the Transition Economy, that bracing experience is for everybody now. Except it's not Communism transitioning toward capitalism. It's the whole world into transition toward something we don't even have proper words for.
The Web has always had an awkward relationship with business. Web 2.0 was a business model. The Transition Web is a culture model. If it's gonna work, it's got to replace things that we used to pay for with things that we just plain use.
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In the Transition Web, if you're monetizable, it means that you get attacked. You gotta squeeze a penny out of every pixel because the owners are broke. But if you do that to your users, they will vaporize, because they're broke too, just like you; of course they're gonna migrate to stuff that's free.
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But you know, I'm not scared by any of this. I regret the suffering, I know it’s big trouble -- but it promises massive change and a massive change was inevitable. The way we ran the world was wrong. I've never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience.
via boingboing