Web icebergs
I’m not turning this blog into BoingBoing, honest.
But something’s come up on which I’m interested in your guys’ take.
A couple of months ago, Vanity Fair ran a lengthy piece on the development history of the World Wide Web. It was some interesting stuff, particularly for those of us who remember browser wars and Usenet and the days when you had to pay per e-mail kilobyte and a 9.6k modem connection was just tearing it up.
In the current issue of Vanity Fair, “Robocop” screenwriter Michael Miner sent in a letter criticizing the piece as incomplete. Miner wrote:
… Henry Ford never anticipated global warming when he and his enablers perfected the assembly line. And the builders of the Titanic thumbed their noses at ice floating in the path of their “unsinkable” passenger steamship. So it’s not surprising that these techno-gurus don’t see, or refuse to point out, the icebergs.
I understand the concerns about privacy and the potential for cyber-terrorism throwing our world out of whack. (When GMail crashed for about two hours last week, I was thrown into a temporary tizzy that mainly consisted of trying to remember e-mail addresses I didn’t have anywhere else. That’s since been corrected.)
But what do you any of you guys think Miner is talking about? What kind of icebergs are out there that the rest of us might not be seeing?