Silicon Prairie News posted footage from Clay Shirky's "Institutions vs. Collabloration" TED talk. I thought it was a little weird that a 2005 talk would be considered 2011 news, but I watched it. Mainly because Cognitive Surplus was easily the best book I read in 2010--no contest.
A highly worthwhile 20 minutes, no question. But the takeaway for me was this line: "If it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos." Which is precisely what makes revolutions inherently terrifying to all but the preternaturally nimble-footed and natural-born adrenaline junkies. That's why historians love them--the revolutions themselves as well as their navigators (and cheekiest stowaways). All from a safe distance, naturally.
The problem, though, is we're used to analyzing revolutions in Cliff Notes format. Connections are oversimplified; correlation too closely resembles causation. Even in the best history. In the worst, historicism itself is replaced by the cult of personality. As the internet revolution creeps to toward the end of its second decade, you see the "biography" of the revolution unfolding through its cast of characters:
* Mark Andreeson taking credit for Netscape
* Bill Gates issuing the "Pearl Harbor Day" memo that amounted to assisted suicide for Netscape
* Jeff Bezos and Tony Hsieh re-inventing retailing
* Brin & Page founding an unlikely search empire on the premise "Don't be Evil"
* Steve Jobs' (now-predictable) "...one more thing..."
* Ashton Kucher racing CNN to a million Twitter followers
* The Social Network: 'nuff said.
And, naturally, the graveyard is full of sock-puppets, buzzwords, dancing hamsters, Dow 50,000 predictions, much sticky residue from the IPO effervescence, Rick-rolled videos, Friendster, Dean-screams and so much more. That's the story we'll tell our kids, assuming we can unplug them from whatever gadgets connect them to their tribes and alternate lives. The revolution will have a tidy narrative.
In political revolutions, backing the winning side (multiple times if necessary) is the key to survival. Just ask Messieur Tallyrand. In revolutions powered by economics (e.g. the industrial revolution) or technology (e.g. the printing press, to use Shirky's example), backing the wrong platform doesn't seem to be quite the mistake that mistaking its context is. One solution never fits an entire family of problems. The strictest law of any change is the Law of Unintended Consequences. That sort of thing.
I'm not knocking knowing, even mastering a given technology or platform--far from it. The more (and longer) you have to learn, the easier it should become to unlearn and move on. Understanding context even as it shifts is (as we say in programming) "platform independent," but not bothering to understand the platform(s) du jour is too much like letting the mob sweep you into its madness. Mobs typically have a single goal, typically miopic, and rather often sidetracked in the end. Those who incite them don't always come to fairytale endings, largely a result of the same short-sightedness.
But historical metaphors aside, the main thing to fear in any technological revolution is the tendency toward incrementalization, optimization, of doing more of the same with fewer resources. There's a time and place for that, but not when you can see people struggling to file the rough, freaky angles off new-ish forms and pound them into old pidgeonhole concepts. Witness Google's spats with China and the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Drudge and/or Julian Assange vs. mainstream media, Comcast vs. Netflix, Tivo vs. advertisers, etc.
Freaky edges, after all, are the instructive parts, the DNA mutations that or may not live long enough to make a new species, the street-corner prophets. And we are trained from kindergarten--perhaps even before--to shut our ears and eyes to them. But unless you have a failsafe plan to smuggle yourself and the family jewels to a safe country, that's no way to survive any revolution.
