tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post6078807591578260445..comments2023-10-12T04:54:05.108-07:00Comments on Deep Freeze 9: Gardening the WebJP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-75399747884474894002007-11-16T18:37:00.000-08:002007-11-16T18:37:00.000-08:00In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon wrot...In <I>The Advancement of Learning</I>, Francis Bacon wrote:<BR/><BR/>“[T]here is a wisdom of counsel, and again there is a wisdom of pressing a man’s own fortune; and they do sometimes meet, and often sever. For many are wise in their own ways that are weak for government or counsel; like ants, which is a wise creature for itself, but very hurtful for the garden.”<BR/><BR/>This strikes me as remarkably relevant to your fine analogy. There are a large number of players/individuals on the Web who are “wise for themselves” but “hurtful for the garden” (spammers, keyword agglomerators, app builders, hackers, etc). And to some extent they are operating outside the hierarchy of the Web—they are both within and without the ecosystem. Or perhaps it’s merely that the ecosystem in this case is both fragmented and fractal, and that there is little productive communication between each of the fractal layers. So the ants in their self-contained, self-centered micro-ecosystem have no interest in their effect on the broader macro-ecosystem; and that macro-ecosystem has no effective signaling mechanism to modify the ants’ behavior.<BR/><BR/>Where does all this lead? Well, perhaps to the idea that top-down regulation in a system as inherently chaotic and fragmented as the Web will always have to be supplemented by the moral imperative (certainly not the Kantian categorical imperative, because that sure as hell hasn’t worked on the Web). Which means that education needs to be a large part of how we garden the Web: we need to teach every creature in the garden (<I>warning: analogy stretching in progress</I> :)) the consequences of their unenlightened self-interest. Which in turn means that the Web, if it is to usefully survive, must become a much closer analog to society—or at least those parts of society that function most effectively as an ecosystem.<BR/><BR/>What might that look like? My guess is: a lot like the successful big-city neighborhoods described by Jane Jacobs in <I>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</I>, a book I can't recommend highly enough. Read it with the Web in mind, and you realize just how poorly the virtual world of the Web maps to the real world we inhabit. Which is why when we try to regulate it like the real world, we often come up short…Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com