a) remove it from your mailbox before you read it, or
b) remove it from the archives ever ??
Nope. Neither.
And yet Ron says this is a good thing, freezing in space and time in
archives (do we call this pickle juice?) things that have already been
frozen there, once again revealing that I am an idiot...
Maybe the solution is to do what Rohit does. Go long periods without
posting until someone complains about your absence. The hit them with a
firehose to make them shut up. I trust Rohit to do this every time.
And yes, I forgot something about that "Shall We Dance?" movie. That
the central theme of the movie --- trust --- really struck home.
But I digress. I want a munchkin network, darn it! On a munchkin
network, I could send out a "blade runner bag-o-bits" that pursued and
captured bits of mine that I accidentally sent over the wire, destroying
them before they waste your time (and my kudos). Sure, I'd still have
spent a few millikudos to appropriate the bandwidth to send the bits,
but at least I'd have avoided the surcharge of all of you having read
those bits (again) and charging me the megakudos for wasting your time.
You would never have even known that I sent the offending bits...
And yes, Ron, Kevin Kelly's _Out of Control_ is *the* book you want to
read. It's about using biomass --- aka "swarms" of processes in a
system --- to develop a "hive mind." A trillion dumb chips connected
into a hive mind serves as the hardware, and the "new economy" is the
software.
This "new economy" was described both in the book _The Digital Economy_
by Don Tapscott and in the Kevin Kelly article in the September 1997
Wired. To summarize, the twelve themes of the new economy:
1. Knowledge.
2. Digitization.
3. Virtualization.
4. Molecularization.
5. Integration.
6. Disintermediation.
7. Convergence.
8. Innovation.
9. Prosumption.
10. Immediacy.
11. Globalization.
12. Dissonance.
These are described in detail both in the book and in the article. Take
your pick. So, as a worker in this new economy, what should your
strategy be for dealing with this paradigm shift? "Don't solve
problems, seek opportunities." That's the commandment for survival in
the new economy. Or something.
All I know is that this revolution will not be televised.
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
Humans do not always err. But they do when the things they use are
badly conceived and designed.
-- Donald Norman, _The Design of Everyday Things_