Thought Hacks

It's the last morning at eTech: the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego. Actually, that's when you're reading this, if you eat it fresh. I'm writing this yesterday, at an afternoon session where Clay Shirky is talking about categories, terms, taxonomies and other stuff that's delicious to linguistics freaks like yours truly, and pretty damn interesting to everybody else in the packed room too.

Before the conference started, I heard complaints that O'Reilly was bringing in the Usual Suspects: Clay, George Dyson, Larry Lessig, Jeff Bezos, JC Herz, Danny Hillis... plus the customary slew of folks you kind-of-know or ought to know -- which you discover once you hear them. But there's a huge delta between what I'm hearing from all these repeat-informers and what I heard last year or the year before. Things are emerging, and re-emerging, and mixing together to create new alloys of invention, *that* fast.

Or so it seems. "Remix" is the theme here.

Clay just said "This is context-dependent and temporary. Well, so was East Germany!" Huge applause. Context is everything, right? You had to be there. Which is my point. I haven't been to a conference in years where I've said to myself, "Damn! I wish ________ had come to this thing" more than I have here. It's *that* good.

The event has been heavily blogged already. Look up tag:etech on Technorati, and you'll have plenty to read about the show. Look up tag:longtail and save yourself N-degrees of surfing labor. I'm sure longtail the most-searched (and blogged) tag here right now, in anticipation of Chris Anderson's speech this afternoon: one that will surely enlarge on "The Long Tail", his much-sourced lead story from the November 2004 issue of Wired (where he's the Editor-in-Chief).

The show is run by Rael Dornfest, who gave the opening talk, where I was surprised to find myself quoted repeatedly. Listening to how he used the raw material I provided, I came to see his talk as an unintended obituary for the concept of "information" as a commodity. What he quoted were notions, ideas, thoughts... that were made to be used, re-used, improved, changed. That's how open source code gets built, and used. It's also how What We Know grows far beyond What I Think, or What I Say.

What Rael used were not "my" ideas. Or David Weinberger's, or Peggy Rogers' or Charles Leadbeater's -- to name a few of the other people whose quotes graced Rael's slides. They were something more: ingredients in a recipe that Rael, and O'Reilly, were cooking and serving with the help of other chefs, many using each other's ideas -- and products -- as ingredients. Constructive recursion, in four dimensions.

Right as the show started, I "finished" my chapter of O'Reilly's second Open Sources book. (The first helped launch the movement, and started the same month I became a full-time editor with Linux Journal: January 1999.) Already there's so much I want to re-write, or add to the chapter, based on what I've learned here -- some of which was cooked up with ingredients I've supplied over the years, as a kind of open source thought code.

So here's my latest ingredients for any of you to use any way you please...

All of us are open sources. Our job, as creative, thinking human beings, is not to produce the finished binary blocks of code we call "information" or "content". It's to share, use, and re-use -- to hack -- the creative products of human mentation. To think, and re-think. And share. And watch, with equal parts joy and humility, as the best of our thinking gets improved by others.