Gary Wolf
Gary Wolf
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The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.
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The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz.
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Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books.
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The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful.
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Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free.
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Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it, and every day it grows.
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To the small group of editors and designers who would launch Wired in January 1993, technology represented the future's best hope; but to the media, the tech boom was yesterday's story.
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Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times.
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Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their physical form inspires passion.
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Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly browsable books from the long tail necessarily compete with the biggest best-sellers, just as cable siphons audience from the major networks, and just as the Web pulls viewers from TV.
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As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular - or supremely practical - replies.
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Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers.
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If national safety - the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes - depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless.
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The history of using mice to stand in for humans in medical experiments is replete with failures.