*Or, those who live by disruption die by disruption.
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2013/04/02/berkman-anil-dash-on-the-web-we-lost/
[berkman] Anil Dash on “The Web We Lost”
Posted on:: April 2nd, 2013
"Anil Dash is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk, titled “The Web We Lost.” He begins by pointing out that the title of his talk implies a commonality that at least once was.
"NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
"Anil puts up an icon that is a symbol of privately-owned public spaces in New York City. Businesses create them in order to be allowed to build buildings taller than the zoning requirements allow. These are sorta kinda like parks but are not. E.g., Occupy isn’t in Zuccotti Park any more because the space is a POC, not a park. “We need to understand the distinction” between the space we think are public and the ones that are privately owned.
"We find out about these when we transgress rules. We expect to be able to transgress in public spaces, but in POCs we cannot. E.g., Improv Everywhere needs to operate anonymously to perform in these spaces. Anil imagines “a secretive, private ivy league club.” Harvard is an intimidating place, he says. He is the son of immigrants and didn’t go to college. “A space even as welcoming as this one can seem intimidating.” E.g., Facebook was built as a private club. It welcomes everyone now, but it still doesn’t feel like ours. It’s very hard for a business to get much past its origins.
"One result of online POCs is “the wholesale destruction of your wedding photos.” Sometimes people lose them in a fire, and they are what they cannot replace. Yet everyday we hear about a startup that “succeeds” by selling out, and then destroying the content that they’d gathered. We’ve all gotten the emails that say: “Good news! 1. We’re getting rich. 2. You’re not. 3. We’re deleting your wedding photos.” They can do this because of the terms of service that none of us read but that give them carte blanche. We tend to look at this as simply the cost of doing business with the site.
"But don’t see it that way, Anil recommends. “This is actually a battle” against the values of the early Web. In the mid to late 1990s, the social Web arose. There was a time when it was meaningful thing to say that you’re a blogger. It was distinguishing. That’s evaporated. “No one’s a Facebooker.” Now being introduced as a blogger “is a little bit like being introduced as an emailer.” (((
