A Long, Strange Road Trip
« Post 3 | This is the 4th post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series
“When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip.’ She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.’ For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.” — John Seigenthaler Sr.
So the future pulled up in her shiny big metaphor and we got in. In the beginning, our road trip made sense, all well-ordered highways and wholesome roadside attractions. Somewhere along the way, we hit bat country and the trip got weird.
We drove past fecund swamps that spawned zoomorphic software – spiders and crawlers and worms and virii. We drove on once lonely roads that jammed up with millions of other futures, all ways walled in by billboards layered on billboards layered on billboards. We drove through dry, empty plains that swelled into unending fleshy hills of porn. Dancing hamsters and browser wars, dot bombs and towering clouds of greed, we drove through it and all the while the Net sprawled into ever deeper weirdness.
Sometime when we stopped to refuel and wash the splattered bits of hype off of our windshield, the weirdness finally started making sense.
It wasn’t that the Net was any stranger, better or darker than the rest of the world – it was just a lot more convenient.
All of the evil and good in the world – at least, all the evil and good that can be reasonably well-represented as a stream of bits – was being put back on the tree for any of us to click as we like. We can each choose rumor or fact, guilt or freedom, hatred or justice.
« Post 3 | This is the 4th post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series
The A Long, Strange Road Trip by , unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 23:32
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January 28th, 2009 at 23:35
[...] « Post 2 | This is the 3rd post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series | Post 4 » [...]
January 29th, 2009 at 18:19
Quite – you’re producing some very eloquent writing, my friend!
January 29th, 2009 at 18:21
Thanks Arjen! I’ve was beginning to wonder if I’d wandered too far off the beaten metaphor on this post.
February 5th, 2009 at 01:42
[...] research for us. I need to go donate to Wikipedia to show my thanks. I wrote few blog posts, restarting my now stale thread on what motivates me to participate in Mozilla and writing another post on my Twitter use within Mozilla. I caught up with Nicholas Reville and [...]
February 5th, 2009 at 04:01
[...] « Post 2 | This is the 3rd post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series | Post 4 » [...]