Subject: Re: [mmox] mmox Digest, Vol 2, Issue 62

From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:44:10 GMT

Re: "The Internet is a big place, gathering together a substantial proportion of humanity in shared information exchange, and in many cases in direct interactive engagement. The latter will be especially true in our case.

Morgaine,

This sort of idea is likely an artifact of your Extropian/singularity beliefs.

The Internet is big, but it is not unified or unifying or singular. The substantial proportion of humanity gathered on this "one thing called the Internet" are not connected to each other or under the dominion of any one power, including "this thing called the Internet" which is merely a substrate, like air. All humans breathe air, but you don't say they are united, and it would be difficult to imagine, at least on our planet, one power that could "remove all the air" and "control all the breathers". 

The Internet is heavily decentralized and autonomous in many places and that's its lifesaving grace, and thank God for it. And no, there are not "many cases" where "all these humans" are directly interacting. There might be 100 million on Twitter or 175 million on Facebook but they don't all talk at once to each other. Even Scoble doesn't talk all at once to his 65,000 followers. Nor can we say about virtual worlds this is "especially true" in a world where the 80,000 people logged on at any minute have 32,000 simulators to roam on, as you yourself complain in other settings. No, much of the Internet and much of virtual worlds are asynchronous -- and that's ok.

I also can't believe you all are talking about a universal browser. One browser to see them all?! Gosh, who gets the ad rights on that bonanza! Again, the saving grace of the Internet is that we have different browsers to choose from, we need not be frog-marched into having to use Mozilla, we can pick it freely from alternatives. Choice is freedom.

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