New computer and communications technologies were supposed to democratize information—route around corrupt media and data-centrer oligarchies, and allow a flourishing of the public sphere. Yes... and no...: Joi Ito: The Next Great (Digital) Extinction | WIRED: "SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 2 and 3 billion years ago, what scientists call the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE, took place, causing the mass extinction of ... the dominant life form at the time.... Cyanobacteria... had the photosynthetic ability to produce glucose and oxygen out of carbon dioxide and water using the power of the sun. Oxygen was toxic to many anaerobic cousins...
...In addition to being a massive extinction event, the oxygenation of the planet kicked off the evolution of multicellular organisms (620 to 550 million years ago), the Cambrian explosion of new species (540 million years ago).... I’ve been thinking about the GOE, the Cambrian Explosion, and the emergence of the mammals a lot lately, because I’m pretty sure we’re in the midst of a similarly disruptive and pivotal moment in history that I’m calling the Great Digitization Event, or GDE. And right now we’re in that period where the oxygen, or in this case the internet as used today, is rapidly and indifferently killing off many systems while allowing new types of organizations to emerge. As WIRED celebrates its 25th anniversary, the Whole Earth Catalog its 50th anniversary, and the Bauhaus its 100th anniversary, we’re in a modern Cambrian era, sorting through an explosion of technologies enabled by the internet that are the equivalent of the stunning evolutionary diversity that emerged some 500 million years ago. ...
As Fred Turner describes in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, we can trace all of this back to the hippies in the 1960s and 1970s in San Francisco. They were the evolutionary precursor to the advanced life forms observable in the aftermath at Stoneman Douglas High School. Let me give you a first-hand account of how the hippies set off the Great Digitization Event. FROM THE OUTSET, members of that movement embraced nascent technological change.... Whole Earth Catalog... the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or WELL... High Frontiers... Mondo 2000... cyberpunk... Timothy Leary... bridges between the Japanese techno scene and the San Francisco rave scene....
In August 1992, Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rossetto rented a loft in the South Park area because they wanted to start a magazine to chronicle what had evolved from a counterculture into a powerful new culture built around hippie values, technology, and the new Libertarian movement... WIRED. Nicholas Negroponte, who had cofounded the MIT Media Lab in 1985, was backing Jane and Louis financially.... Kevin Kelly, who was formerly one of the editors of the Whole Earth Catalog.... WIRED came along just as the internet and the technology around it really began to morph into something much bigger than a science fiction fantasy, in other words, on the cusp of the GDE. The magazine tapped into the design talent around South Park.... Before long, vice president Al Gore started talking about the internet as the Next Big Thing....
The world also began to go through something like the Cambrian Explosion, as the internet lowered the cost of collaboration and invention to nearly zero, creating an explosion of new ideas and products.... This flourishing of technoculture had and continues to have a broad impact on business and society.... Legacy businesses have been disintermediated by the rise of companies built around the internet which have, within a very short period, exerted dominion over the world. This is the GDE, and it reminds me of nothing so much as the GOE in its impact and implications. As our modern dinosaurs crash down around us, I sometimes wonder what kind of humans will eventually walk out of this epic transformation....
The same tools of post-internet collective action that fueled Trump and #gamergate also gave the kids from Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the tools they needed to inspire students at some 3,800 schools across the country to walk out in protest over lax gun regulations, and to push stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods to stop selling guns. That sustains my hope.... The hippie culture that drove the rise of the GDE failed to completely fulfill the promise of new technology, but those anaerobic hippies did leave Gen Z a whole new set of tools.... My generation and the hippies are the anaerobic bacteria heading toward the mud....
#shouldread #riseoftherobots
