DeeLoaf

Truly I am starting to believe that is what each of us is becoming -- nodes in a great network. Cells of a great body. Each of us doing our own thing, but at the same time working with those we are connected with. This is the beginning of a great p2p culture, the beginning of a new era of cooperation on this planet. One of abdunance and freedom. But we have a long way to go and many great challenges, primary among them is the looming energy crisis. It is my hope that the crisis will be solved not by money interests and capitalist greed, but by free agent actors on the fringes, doing something new for the excitement of it, for the inherent value to each of us. This is where the net came from. Peers working loosely with one another over great distances, and it was good. This is the future, and the new addition to the network will transcend the purely informational and now begin to move into the physical. Fabbers. Nano-manufacturing in your home with inexpensive and widely available materials. Machines that can replicate themselves. Machines that can produce cheap solar collectors. To be used to power the manufacture of more machines that can do the same. Cheap energy for all who want it, without the stranglehold of "intellectual property" constraints, free to replicate across the globe, and like wildfire it will. How fast did everyone jump on the napster bandwagon? It was very fast. BitTorrent? Very fast. A new idea that WORKS gets put into practice, people start using it, other people witness its effectiveness and start using it too, and soon anyone NOT using it is comedic in their toil. New ideas can spread very fast, especially with the net keeping us all in the loop on everything imaginable.

I am a cripple now without the net. Surely just as capable as any man would have been in the past, constrained to the limits of physical reality for all aspects of information, culture and human co-operation.

I should note that this post was inspired by something that happened last week, I was poking around and found a halton information site (hipinfo.info) and reading on the about us page I saw something quite ironic, they had 6 points under their explanation about themselves, point 1 and 3 were the identical text about reducing redundancy in information management. I thought it so funny and ironic that I called them up and let them know about the redundency in their information. I was just doing what I thought needed to be done, acting as a simple node in the network, taking on a responsibility that I felt I could initiate some action on. The duplicate text was removed within a few minutes. The other nodes in the network for this action did each of their jobs to perfection. The action would not have happend had I not initiated it, had I not sent that first signal to some hopefully responsible other node. This made me think about the human condition here in general, and gave me hope for the future.