I don't know, exactly. In my last post I simply summed up Google to an advertisement company and Apple to a leisure-time company. And indeed, I still think it is what they are, and what they focus first to become, consciously.
But underneath all that (business models, making money, stakeholders, business executives...) - and not everyone knows this, not even Apple, not even Google - there is a revolution that will disrupt our lives, sky-rocketing us to a near future where everything will change, from social-order and political-power-owners to day-to-day-operations.
Basically, while some follow tech and gadgets and others follow data and algorithms, I follow what gives the biggest bang for your buck (read "energy") to what regards empowerment and *people*-empowerment. I can't help it, I'm a physicist with a mathematical/hacker mindset... I strive for new ways of creating power and applying it in efficient innovative ways on abstract systems, may them be Nature, the Universe or Society... It's my instinct. (Btw, I failed miserably at all that, so far. I still keep trying though...)
Back in Euler days, rocket-science was in shipyards and nautical-sciences, back in the Wright brothers days, rocket-science was in flying machines, but also in cinematography, carbon-fossil fueled engines, electricity... Finally came the transistor invention, the Turing machine, the atom-bomb and rockets, thus, there, was rocket-science... It all pinnacled with a moon-landing somewhere during the sixties. Mankind greatest achievement of all time, well in the middle of the last century, which btw, is already in the past millennium. And what is the biggest symbol that sticks in our heads ever since?
Indeed the biggest symbol that stick in our heads, ever since that famous lunar-shot is... nothing but ourselves, in our globe, Earth in all its might and beauty. Neil Armstrong was looking right back, at what the next great leap for mankind was about to be; and that is us.
I insist: the next big change is going to be in ourselves and in society. That's where the next rocket-science is going to lie: body-hacks and real-time-connectivity for all of mankind. Connecting ourselves, that is, to this giant bee-hive that mankind potentially can become, means the ultimate challenge of true progress. Take a step back in the past and look at how fast communications were. In caveman history? They were local, they were vocal, they reached the far-end of the cave and the far-end of the cave only, period. Much later, the mail/post was invented for the sake of managing great kingdoms and great empires. Much later came the telephone, the television, satellites, the cell-phone, the email... and then came the tweeting.
One tweet can reach instantaneously millions of people, in real-time, as it happens, as the plane crashes, as the riots happen, before anybody can take control of the situation. Furthermore, thanks to the retweeting concept, tens of thousand of followers can actively engage in that original tweet and spread the word, making it their own, thus making it not one person's voice, but thousands to millions of peoples voices. A many, many times retweeted tweet, given it has some form of political content (think "RT Free Assange" in opposition to "RT Look at me eating my breakfast"), is something with an aura of humongous power. It can shake politically established powers, it may allow political-party opportunistic maneuvers. Think of all the possibilities... What if the Martin Luther King period was happening now? What if Gandhi could tweet to his hundred of millions of fellow-followers? Imagine the possibilities... to me, it is the premise of a revolution!
How? People don't realize this yet, but we'll do this revolution one tweet at a time... (disclosure: by a tweet I mean a generic "status update" of any real-time social networking service such as twitter, facebook, google talk, foursquare, instagr.am, you know...).
What was it, that I was missing in 2004, and that I wrote in this four-year-old blog very first post? What was it, but asking for the power to do more with less, using nothing but present technology?
At the time, I wanted to work seamlessly between my laptop, my desktop and cybercafes while I was on the move. I realized, then, that technology was mature to do it, only somebody had to build it and put it all together, not failing this disruptive vision of a webtop. This year (2010) Google grant me my wish with the Chrome OS. Thank you Google. I'm also grateful to Apple that make me see that sensors are way more advanced than I thought. Indeed, ubiquitous and reliable ccd cameras, gps, compasses and accelerometers in hand-held devices are available for everyone. I mean, this IS satellite technology for the masses, this IS rocket-science in your pocket, literally!
Practically no-one realizes this yet, but, in the computer era, this slow motion from a file-system based society to a tweet-system based society - I'm convinced: the webtop I advocate is based on tweets rather than on files. Focus on that notion, that the atom of information is in a tweet and not in a file, and everything in the webtop will fall into place - will empower individuals AND digital mobs to such extent that political powerhouses will fall and new ones will rise, put there by the sheer will of beehive behavior.
Here's a short video by Anthropologist Professor Wesch that Tim O'Reilly chose at some keynote opening (circa 2006).
Here's another one that greatly illustrates the power that the web gives to individuals.
Who are my main influencers? Tim O'Reilly, by a wide-shot. He's the one that resonates the most with my own mind. He coined the "web2.0" word but, more than that, he gave it a deeper meaning, deeper than most of people would lend to it. He too advocates what empowers individuals. How? By advocating open-source. Open-source empowers individual developers (examples, see Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds). How? By advocating DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movements, Make magazine, and Open-Hardware ideals like Arduino (think patent-free, public, digital circuits blueprints). Maker fairs symbolize the next-big-thing-coming-from-a-garage. An example? Woz and Steve. Other big influencers: Jimmy Wales, the creator of wikipedia. He empowered individuals up to the point of allowing them to realize that, together, they *know*. Finally, another influencer, and possibly the most rowdy of them all, Julian Assange. He empowers individuals to the point that they can be a menace to super-powered governments by leaking thousands of classified top-secret documents. Privacy is dead. Long live transparency. We should all start dealing with it. After all, all the celebrities saw their secrets out there and survived. Today, every individual has to gain PR skills and learn how to cultivate their digital image. So be a star my friend, be the star of your world! Don't like it? Doesn't matter, you'll have to cope with it! It's called *progress*. Leaking secret documents. Is this bad or evil? Let me put this into perspective. If you were a new born on this Earth and God came and asked you to choose: "Do you want others above to rule you and your kinsmen, or do you want you and your kinsmen to rule by yourselves?" There is a manly answer and there is a wimp answer to that question... and I don't like wimps ;) In my opinion, Julian Assange made us realize that no longer do we have to be ruled by others above. We *now*, *presently*, have a choice and, if we're man enough, we, and our kinsmen, can rule ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves. And who are our kinsmen? Well, let me put it this way, mankind itself is not big enough to represent the whole of our kinsmen; but it'll do for now.
What do you mean with Assange and with ruling ourselves? I don't see how these two notions relate. Simple: Assange simply decided to pick up the samuraï sword that is leaning on this new ground ever since the internet and email came around. One individual can take the power and attack super-powers if he has the bravery to do it. Provided he has the right heart, the right courage and the right intent, mankind could follow him ... The party-model in this old-age democracy is going to crumble. Directly elect your statesman from twitter and facebook is what is going to be. The tech is there, we only need a new king Arthur to pick up the sword entangled in this shiny new stone.
Check out this prototypical entrepreneur, aka Jason Calacanis, talking about picking up the samuraï sword instead of picking rice. It's a must see for every entrepreneur and for every power-aspirant politician!:
Basically speed up the timeline and reduce the latency between every tweets, make them search-able through the whole of tweeting/facebook history. In a few decades from today, I can imagine our sons and daughters ruling themselves, by themselves for themselves all from twitter and facebook. New political parties and new political figures would be designated by the sheer will of their followers/friends. The law system would have to be revolutionized and agilized so that new laws and codes of conducts, morals and values be approved, respected and enforced by tweets only. Prominent thinkers would be hard-linked to their hordes of followers/believers. Prominent spiritual and religious-leaders would be hard-linked too. Heck, prominent leaders would be hard-linked to their followers, of course!
Someday, we will reach to the point that one individual has so many followers on twitter, that on his tweet for everyone to jump, the world will shake and turn faster. Beehives with their Queen-bees will fit better and more efficiently as a ruling system to our society. Patriarch-ism, feudalism, democracy and, finally, webcracy (as a side-note, a "connaissance" of mine maintains a tech-blog by that name. This tells me a long way about his vision...). I won't go into further detail of trying to describe what would be a webcracy, I just can't think of words to describe it, yet. For now, let's just put it as the "next name" in the latter sequence of types of governments and be on the lookout, for a clearer meaning of the concept, in the future. We can rest assure that, probably, whatever the webcracy will be, it'll probably come in a revolutionary way.
And all that, thanks to an important physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the HTML language over TCP/IP connection protocol for the benefit of the world. And all that thanks to an important algorithm that helped organize this massive new heap of information (PageRank). And all that thanks to these new empowering sensors embodied in miniaturized hand-held-devices (iPhone).
And with all this new potential to change the world, two of the four single biggest companies that could lead this revolution are merely, unconsciously, dominating advertisement (which can be seen as a tool for propaganda) and are dominating leisure-time (which could be seen as a tool for education), the single two most massive weapons to keep mankind asleep and to keep the next king Arthur at bay, in the nut-house. Mind you, I'm refering respectively to Google and Apple. The two other single biggest companies that are leading this revolution from the inside out and from the bottom up, Twitter and Facebook, are right on track. They are different in that they didn't clearly establish their business model, yet. Luckily for me, Zuckerberg wants to become the next king Arthur and take a shot at world domination, even if he doesn't realize this yet. Luckily for me, Twitter exploded out of control of their makers right from the beginning (remember the "fail-whale"?) and they're just too busy focused at making it scale smoothly to even care about their business model in the first place.
The dangers and actual threats of this future? The tablets and mobile devices (anything digital that works without a keyboard and a chair, in fact) mean doomsday for the next generation of developers. If our sons won't bother to learn low-level programming languages, mankind progress will stall. From my perspective, apps on tablets mean massive stupidification. Only objective-C and cocoa-based developers will be able to pull-out clever, meaningful hacks. I do hope that Html, css and javascript become the de-facto tech-standards of development. Objective-C in a cocoa framework means elitism, and this means the killing of the beehive effect of open-source. I want more people striving to build empowering tools from those sensors and not stupidifying drugs. Angry birds? OMG! Don't blog about *that*! I want people to explore the new sensors in their high-tech devices, DIY fashion, a bit like the "Android in space" saga:
"The future is out there now; it's just not evenly distributed." (William Gibson). To keep up with the future, I recommend following Tim O'Reilly for the vision, and Robert Scoble and Louis Gray for the gadgets and tech in general. Happy new year!
UPDATE: a friend of mine recommended me JP Allen, a scholar of open-source and web2.0. Even if his writings demand 2 years to get published, he still deserves the credit for giving credit to the web2.0 concept :) I'll follow his blog on my reader in the meantime. Keep up to date with what feeds me over at Google Reader, and follow my shares. The usual Facebooker just isn't quite ripe for this kind of information, so I cut the data flow to fb, although I do get surprises...
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