Sundry Ruminations: May 1997 Archives

Mass-Producted Individuality

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You know, the meme pool manipulates individuals. Are we it’s servants just as the phenotype is the survival machine of the gene? What I want to get at is the myth of individual originality… I’m increasingly becoming a believer in collective intelligence. Keeping an oar in the idea river is essentially to maintaining a healthy intellect.

Is this notion sour grapes on the part of the mediocre? Perhaps so… The idea of getting recognition for ideas like these drips with irony, which make them an amusing furrow to plow…

The Phantom Tollbooths

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When will the tollbooths on the infobahn appear? My brother-in-law thinks it’s television, and that that’s how it will develop. I still think we need some pay-per-view channels, or some of us will have no means of “trading bits for pieces”… Fifty quatleus on the Earthling. What do you give away? Something cheap, one would think…

However, everything in the realm of bits is essentially expensive to develop, and very cheap to “produce” and disseminate. The marginal cost of additional copies is low, like seats on an airplane, or in a movie theatre, or viewers of a television broadcast…

Will netcasting channels be artificially made to be a precious resource? Certainly there are people who’d benefit from this.

There is some merit in the broadcasting analogy here… The movie studios and television networks have been in the business of charging for information for a long time…

We really will need verifiable identities on the net soon. People do know this… Dertzusos recognized on C-SPAN that anonymity is optional, if that’s the way we want it…

About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Sundry Ruminations category from May 1997.

Sundry Ruminations: August 1996 is the previous archive.

Sundry Ruminations: June 1997 is the next archive.

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