andrew.pilsch.com

I just finished reading Bernard Wolfe’s science fiction
novel, Limbo,
which, as the review I linked to says, is “one of those novels that
only five people or so read a year but all five of them declare it
brilliant.” I wonder who the other four are? Seriously, though, the
fact that this book is way out of print is criminal (also, as the copy
I read was a moldy first edition from Rutgers, I now have to clean up
the pieces of the book’s binding that have been deposited all over my
house). It has to rank as one of the strangest novels I’ve ever read. Large chunks of the book are rants about
Freud or
Weiner or
Korzybski. It has some truly
strange sex scenes and some rather embarrassing misogyny. The book is
largely a consideration of cybernetics and their implications for
re-making man. N. Katherine Hayles has a pretty good essay, from How We Become Posthuman
on Limbo. There are a lot of things that I could say about this
book (and will, I’m sure), especially in light of the fact that Wolfe
considers the possibility of physically remaking the human to be a
losing proposition and that true transcendence can only result from a
wetware upgrade.

As I was reading Wolfe’s novel, I saw some stuff on some blogs that
relates: in this post on Digital Inspiration,
there’s a discussion of whether or not the failure of
Spresent and
Slideaware represents the beginning of the
end of Web2.0. I don’t think we can make that claim so quickly, and,
probably, such claims are a result of the cave-in that resulted in the
end of Web1.0 (why does no one ever talk about that?). What
interested me about this post is the question of what would actually
constitute the end of Web2.0.

What we see in the case of Spresent and Slideaware is the natural
weeding-out process that occurs with any new economic sector. That
said, this post on Thomas Hawk’s blog
got me thinking about the things that could actually end the Web2.0
boom. As we know, Web2.0 is characterized by openness, the ability to
serialize data in XML and move it around the web. Clever Web2.0
business models leverage this openness in novel ways to try and make a
buck. As Hawks writes about FriendFeed,
however:

Now when companies like Twitter and Flickr start seeing a new site coming out that is essentially using the benevolence of the Web 2.0ish “open API” to essentially pull views from their own properties you might think that they’d be concerned. And maybe they are or maybe they aren’t. At least publicly they can’t say that they don’t like this because being Web 2.0ish is all about being “open” and grumbling about someone pulling views from your site with your open API would sound somehow unsportsmanlike.

This “grumbling”, I think, could be the end of Web2.0. To get back to
Limbo, one of the major theses of the novel is the psychological
inability of pacifism to work. Wolfe argues that man is not a natural
font of goodness and, as such, movements that attempt to deny the
violent cannot hope to succeed and, often, in the name of peace breed
even more war. This summary is a simplification of a rather nuanced
argument, but it will have to suffice. At one point in the novel, he
presents the Assassination Clause that makes up part of the new US
charter (the book takes place after WWIII):

Every person who offers himself as a candidate for public office automatically takes oath never to encourage or countenance or condone the manufacture of arms or their distribution; never to make hostile utterances about other nations or peoples; _never to carry out the functions of his office with any degree of secrecy, or enter into diplomatic negotiations or agreements which are not fully open_; never to obtain information of any sort through the use of confidential agents; never to employ bodyguards or take any steps toward the securing of his personal safety; never to suggest, under any circumstances whatsoever, that the foregoing commitments must be suspended because of a state “crisis” or “emergency”; never to adopt or even advocate a strategy of defensism, political or personal, no matter what “external” threat appears to exist. If during his tenure of office he engages in any of the illegal acts enumerated above, or even suggest that such acts are called for by a “new” situation, this shall be construed by the citizenry as an invitation to assassinate said public official in the public interest… (emphasis added)

In this long list of demands, one of the key terms of the
Assassination Clause is a call for openness in governance. I’m
thinking about this openness, though, in the context I discussed
above: Web2.0. While the Internet doesn’t have anything has harsh as
the Assassination Clause (which fails miserably, in Wolfe’s novel,
anyway), there is still, at the moment, a successfully managed open
society. I think, following Hawk’s observation of how sites like
FriendFeed pull views away from sites like Twitter by allowing users
to manage their data even more effectively (although, I would depute
this, I think FriendFeed is kind of useless), that the end of Web2.0
will probably be when many of these companies realize that the very
openness that defined them as New and Different is ultimately messing
with their bottom line. Of course, when this happens, the whole thing
will probably come crashing down, given how many sites in the “Web2.0
Rainbow” operate on content created elsewhere. For instance, if
Twitter suddenly closes its API, how many other sites get screwed?

Of course, we’ve seen this sort of thing happen before in computing.
I’m thinking that the post Web2.0 Internet, if it comes about, will
probably look a lot like the Mac/PC split in the 90s, in which you
have two (although probably more in this version of the Internet)
platforms that integrate well and work well together but don’t operate
between one another in any way, shape, or form.

I recognized that this is one of the reasons that I’ve moved all my
email to Gmail. I had been using Thunderbird to read my mail, but I
became increasingly aware that in the messaging, calendaring world, I
had to either get on the Apple bandwagon or the Google bandwagon,
because of iPhone compatibility. Mozilla was getting squeezed out of
my work flow (although, I still use Firefox because, well, because
Apple hasn’t figure out a way to force me not to, yet). This is
probably a bad example, but I hope it gets my point across: the vision
of life put forward by Apple (in its lifestyle management approach to
branding) could, increasingly, become the norm of Web2.0, if companies
ever give up on their noble pacifist ideals of openness and start,
once again, marching off to war.

Anyway, this is just one of the many ideas that reading Limbo has
generated. I highly recommend the novel. Also, in case nothing else
i’ve said convinced you, Wolfe was Trotsky’s bodyguard in Mexico City
(apparently, the icepicking happened on his night off).

Image Credit: “Limbo Snowman” by Jim Carson