The Web
is a democracy
of opportunity, but not necessarily of outcome. At the beginning it was
like a beautiful,
fertile ground where
all sorts of
organizations could theoretically survive. But the
selection process has been incredibly fast.
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In the industrial society, the balance of information inevitably sided with
corporations. They had centralized knowledge while the customer had only their own solo experience
divorced from that of all but a few friends.
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In the
new mental geography created by the railroad, humanity mastered
distance. In the mental geography of e-commerce, distance has been eliminated. There is only one economy and only one market.
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The Internet was made for big companies. The dot-coms understand buying and selling. But the real
efficiencies come in that middle part of the
equation: making things.
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The modern world focuses primarily on material things. Development is measured by material indicators, not
by intangible things such as God-consciousness, brotherhood and sisterhood, or neighbourliness. Taliban-style movements
also focus on the material, the tangible aspects of faith—rules and
outward behaviour. Unlike beliefs, intentions and feelings, these can
be controlled and imposed upon people. Taliban violence against those
who break the rules is an application of the modern view that state interference in the lives of individuals
is the answer to most social problems.
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| They
could see that a closed society like theirs was
unable to compete with an open society,
where innovations in computer software — quickly leading to military
spin-offs — were coming out of the garages of Californian
20-somethings. America won the Cold War because it entered a new type of economy — based on knowledge and
computers — and left its strategic competitor marooned inside the
crumbling remains of the industrial era.
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For the last 200 years, the basic construction paradigm has been the
factory, created for masses of people to work
together to make complicated products. That paradigm has been applied
not only to the workplace, but also to homes, schools and most other
types of buildings. Industrial society has created high-rise apartment
buildings as human warehouses
so that people can live near their workplace. Even the interior design
of our homes has been influenced: subdivided, like factories, into a
series of special purpose rooms - kitchen, dining room, living room,
television room, sewing room, bedroom. Now that paradigm is changing.
With the rise of the virtual workplace, physical proximity is becoming
ever less essential.
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