Weekly views on Linux in Business
by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal

Thursday, May 2, 2002

Finishing the Third Wave

Three stories this week, and a thread that connects them --

***Mayday plus one

It's May Day as I write this -- the day chosen by the Internet radio community to send out a mayday (pun intended) signal, warning that Internet radio is about to become the first Net-based business category to be obliterated by regulation. The mayday call is a Day of Silence, to get listeners in practice for life starting May 22, when the new CARP-based rules are scheduled to go into effect.

I just wrote "Silent Radio" -- a long piece on the subject -- for the Linux Journal Web site:
<http://www.reason.com/0205/fe.mg.hollywood.shtml>

And if you're regular readers of SuitWatch, you know I've harped on the issue at length already:
<http://www.ssc.com/pipermail/suitwatch/2002q1/000016.html>

Here are the pages for the Day of Silence, SaveInternetRadio.org and Rice University's Save Our Streams:
<http://www.kurthanson.com/archive/news/042502/index.asp>
<http://www.saveinternetradio.org>
<http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~willr/cb/sos/>

Most of what you need to know is there.

***Chill, and ye shall not find

If you searched for "Scientology" on Google in March of this year, the top "I'm feeling lucky" result would probably have brought up the Church of Scientology's own site: Scientology.org. But if you search today, the lucky button will take you to "Operation Clambake: The Fight Against the Church of Scientology on the Net." <http://www.xenu.net>

***Deep what?

Lawyers for The Dallas Morning News <http://www.dallasnews.com/> have sent a cease & desist letter to Barkingdogs.org <http://www.barkingdogs.org>, a neighborhood Web site in Dallas, demanding that the site stop linking deeply to pages in the newspaper's Web site. Here's what the letter says:

"As you may know, the Belo content (various news articles) is protected by copyright laws of the United States...Accordingly, we must request that you cease and desist from any unauthorized use of the Belo content, including without limitation, allowing users of BarkingDogs.org to deep link directly to the Belo content or from posting, without prior written permission, any other Belo content on BarkingDogs.org.

"Any proper links to the Belo content should be directly hyperlinked to The Dallas Morning News homepage located at www.dallasnews.com."

The letter goes on to say that direct linking "can result in a viewer not understanding that the content is on our client's site (and) allows the viewer to avoid the advertising, etc., on the homepage (which places our client in a bad position with respect to its advertisers, etc.)."

Newspapers used to have "stories" which were generally called "editorial". Now they have "content".

They also used to have "readers". Now they have "viewers".

***Strange headfellows

What we have here are three very different organizations -- the U.S. Copyright Office, the Church of Scientology and the Dallas Morning News -- that share the same near-absolute misunderstanding of what the Net is all about. They think it's a distribution system for "content" controlled by the supply side. Which is understandable, since that's what business has mostly been about ever since Industry won the Industrial Revolution.

Given that much of the Industrialized business world is about moving massive quantities of goods down long "value chains" from production to consumption, it should be no surprise that much of our business vocabulary is borrowed from the language of shipping. We load "content" into a "channel" and "address" it for "delivery" to "consumers". We even talk about "delivering" services.

But while the Net may serve as a medium, it is something far more important: a "commons" that supports real markets where everybody with an interest in a category can get involved.

The most significant category ever to arrive in business is the original PC, introduced by IBM in 1981. Thanks to its open, clone-able design, it has become an all-purpose machine that supports an endless range of operating systems and applications. It's multitude of capabilities make it radically different than any consumer electronics appliance.

Alvin Toffler's landmark book The Third Wave came out in 1980, while the PC was still in its planning stages. In that book, Toffler famously heralded the arrival of the Information Age (the Third Wave), and the end of the Industrial Age (the Second Wave). <http://www.accd.edu/pac/philosop/phil1301/Wave3lec.htm>

The Industrial Age, Toffler said, split human life into two halves: production and consumption: "The Second Wave ... created.. a situation in which the overwhelming bulk of all food, goods, and services was destined for sale, barter, or exchange. It virtually wiped out of existence goods produced for one's own consumption... and created a civilization in which almost no one, not even a farmer, was self-sufficient any longer. Everyone became almost totally dependent upon food, goods, or services produced by somebody else". He also said, "..the obsessive concern with money, goods, and things is a reflection not of capitalism or socialism, but of industrialism. It is a reflection of the central role of the marketplace in ALL societies in which production is divorced from consumption, in which everyone is dependent upon the marketplace rather than on his or her own productive skills for the necessities of life".

Then the kicker: "The cleavage between these two roles -- producer and consumer -- created at the same time a dual personality. The very same person who (as a producer) was taught by family, school, and boss to defer gratification, to be disciplined, controlled, restrained, obedient, to be a team player, was simultaneously taught (as a consumer) to seek instant gratification, to be hedonistic rather than calculating, to abandon discipline, to pursue individualistic pleasure -- in short, to be a totally different kind of person".

The generic PC, the generic OS and the generic Internet have all served to restore both self-reliance and natural markets to business. They create new conditions that bring production and consumption back together again, healing that split between roles. Linux programmers, for example, famously "eat their own dog food".

Many of Toffler's predictions are coming true: intelligent environments, de-massification of the media, a new "social memory", the "electronic cottage", home-centered society, new codes of behavior, the rise of the "prosumer", radically changed schools, the break-up of the nation-state...

Meanwhile the second-wave mentality persists, and it's filled with fear of autonomous third-wave employees and customers. It wants to turn the PC back into an appliance, the OS into an instrument of control, and the Net into a plumbing system for pumping "content" to captive "consumers."

The power of this mentality is fading, simply because there is progressively less it can do.

But in many ways it is still in control. And the sooner we can end that control, the better off we'll all be.

It's time to finish what Toffler saw starting almost a quarter century ago.