The Transitional Web

Bruce Sterling talking about ideas surrounding the fact that the web as we know it, is built upon finance that is falling apart.

From Webstock in New Zealand, which I didn’t go to because it cost like a $1000.

Brought to you by Vimeo, who may or may not be in profit – but Youtube is on track to lose $470 million this year, according to Credit Suisse who are leaving them in the shade by losing $5.2 billion in a single quarter.

I think we’re going to see some fairly major players go under – one of the things that bothers me about youtube and flickr et al – all these major silos of the collective-memories of the humanity. They’re inherently unstable. The Pirate Bay fronting onto Bittorrent is an inherently more trustworthy platform than any of the “business” backed entities.

Something that happened the last time round… The Reformation, Protestantism (and I’ve only just noticed that this word is built on “protest”)… distaste (to put it mildly) with the corrupt, centrally-controlled-flow-of-information-infrastructure of The Papal Church… bubbled and simmered and fermented – until it was taken up as a cause by an existing (but troubled) power-structure to extremely dramatic effect. Henry VIII. Doable because there is power in people.

This time round? I’m still kindof waiting for it to happen. The Pirate Bay was found guilty by the Corporate Courts (lets not pretend they’re anything else) but won a seat in the EU elections. The Pirate Bay weren’t technically doing anything that Google weren’t also doing… but I don’t think Google are the power structure that are going to take up the flag of the “new” side of this schism and go to war under it. Maybe no one will. Maybe it will be China, or India. Or the whole of South America.

Here’s the rationale : Intellectual Property is a choke on cultural vitality. Culture is Vicarious Lamarkianism. Nobody has any moral right to build upon all the culture that has gone before, then stop people building any further. It’s evil.

Yea well, whatever, never mind. We (notice that word) need infrastructure that isn’t controlled by AT&T. We need a youtube that doesn’t lose 470 million dollars a year. Fuck it, we need banks that aren’t costing us trillions to keep afloat. We need (I suspect) peer to peer everything.