Network Economics

I bought my first computer to crunch a database of names for a mail order company I owned. But within several months of getting my first Apple II running, I hooked the machine up to a telephone and had a religious experience. On the other side of the phone jack, an embryonic web stirred -- the young Net. In that dawn I saw that the future of computers was not numbers but connections. Far more voltage crackled out of a million interconnected Apple IIs than within the most coddled million-dollar supercomputer standing alone. Roaming the Net I got a hit of network juice, and my head buzzed. Computers, used as calculating machines, would, just as we all expected, whip up the next efficient edition of the world. But no one expected that once used as communication machines, networked computers would overturn the improved world onto an entirely different logic -- the logic of the Net. In the Me-Decades, the liberation of personal computers was just right. Personal computers were personal slaves. Loyal, bonded silicon brains, hired for cheap and at your command, even if you were only 13. It was plain as daylight that personal computers and their eventual high-powered offspring would reconfigure the world to our specifications: personal newspapers, video on demand, customized widgets. The focus was on you the individual. But in one of those quirks reality is famous for, the real power of the silicon chip lay not in its amazing ability to flip digits to think for us, but in its uncanny ability to use flipped switches to connect us. We shouldn't call them computers; we really should call them connectors. By 1992 the fastest-growing segment of the computer industry was network technology. This reflects the light-speed rate at which every sector of business is electronically netting itself into a new shape. By 1993, both Time and Newsweek featured cover stories on the fast-approaching data superhighway that would connect television, telephones, and the Sixpack family. In a few years -- no dream -- you would pick up a gadget and get a "video dialtone" which would enable you to send or receive a movie, a color photograph, an entire database, an album of music, some detailed blueprints, or a set of books -- instantly -- to or from anyone, anywhere, anytime. Networking at that scale would truly revolutionize almost every business. It would alter: What we make How we make it How we decide what to make The nature of the economy we make it in. Kevin Kelly http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch11-b.html