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On how the web would evolve, Jobs was profoundly wrong The new Steve Jobs scoffs at the naïve idealism of Web partisans who believe the new medium will turn ev

by ajju 16y ago

On how the web would evolve, Jobs was profoundly wrong The new Steve Jobs scoffs at the naïve idealism of Web partisans who believe the new medium will turn every person into a publisher. The heart of the Web, he said, will be commerce, and the heart of commerce will be corporate America serving custom products to individual consumer. On how soon the web (and software development) would go from custom development to "lego blocks", Jobs was premature. The number of applications that need to be written is growing exponentially. Unless we can find a way to write them in a tenth of the time, we're toast. The end result of objects - this repackaging of software - is that we can develop applications with only about 10 to 20 percent of the software development required any other way. Even today, while frameworks like Django are finally providing the basic building blocks, a lot of web development is still 'custom'. But in the end, this is one of the most profound interviews I have seen of jobs. But you seem very optimistic about the potential for change. <snip> I believe that people with an engineering point of view as a basic foundation are in a pretty good position to jump in and solve some of these problems. But in society, it's not working. Those people are not attracted to the political process. And why would somebody be? </snip> Could technology help by improving education? I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. <snip> It's a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I'm one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system. <snip> These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn't it. <snip> It's not as simple as you think when you're in your 20s - that technology's going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won't.

alsomike 16y ago
On the contrary, his only mistake was that he didn't see that the naive idealistic pseudo-democratization which co-opts the people's creativity to become conduits for advertising is one and the same as corporate capitalism.
- ajju 16y ago
  Interesting viewpoint. I think Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the use of Blogs, Twitter and even the epitome-of-corporate-antiprivacy that is Facebook by political movements: all present very strong counterevidence to your claim that the web has not been democratized. The heart of any information medium has to be commerce, in that there has to be way to economically support the infrastructure costs of the medium but what makes the web more democratic is: 1) The infrastructure costs are very low and falling (The cost of a web server that you can run two hundred blogs off is not more than $200 / year) 2) Quite contrary to what Jobs claimed, everyone on the web is already a publisher.
  - alsomike 16y ago
    Wikipedia is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, because it's controlled by a very small number of elites with no accountability. This is true of Britannica, but the difference is that Wikipedia editors have perversely managed to co-opt populist democratic rhetoric in order to justify what is effectively an oligarchy. The presence of the edit button on each page functions as an ideological mystification to conceal the where the real power lies. What's happening is that we are provided with the illusion of power, on condition that we never actually use it. As soon as you actually try to become a wikipedia editor, you are immediately confronted with a co-ordinated power bloc that is virtually impossible to penetrate. So far, these elites have been benevolent, but the case of one poweful Wikipedia editor who was a member of a cult and deleted any criticism of the cult leader on his page illustrates that abuse of power is possible. Another example of this is restaurant reviews. The basic argument is familiar: a single restaurant reviewer in a newspaper is an elite, and this creates the potential for abuse of power. He could demand kickbacks from restaurants to ensure positive reviews or promote his friends' restaurants at the expense of competitors, and so on. Decentralization is proposed as the solution: instead of a single restaurant review, individual patrons review restaurants on a web site and it averages the reviews, and even if a few of them are corrupt, it's much harder to subvert the system. So problem solved, it's a much more trustworthy system. Except for one minor problem: Yelp implements this idea, and restaurant owners have complained that Yelp has abused their power by trying to extort advertising dollars from them by threatening to delete positive reviews and post negative reviews. The pattern should be clear: moving from a centralized system to a decentralized network doesn't eliminate power, it just moves it to a different place where it can be potentially abused by a different group of elites. That position of power comes from controlling the protocol which aggregates each individual node on the network. The nodes can be decentralized and distributed, but the cost for this is that they must all speak the same language to connect to each other, which is a centralization at a different level. That's why further decentralization doesn't solve the Yelp problem. We could imagine a federated system of restaurant reviews where individual reviews are stored on servers controlled by individuals, so they can't be deleted. But this just moves the power to a different level - the system for aggregating the peers on the node becomes the position of power, which could potentially be exploited for power and money to an elite. A similar relationship exists between Facebook and Diaspora. This is why Google promotes decentralization, because it is the centralized place you have to pass through in order to get to all that decentralized content, and there's lots of money to be had in owning that position. The handful of multinational corporations that control the internet backbones are also in a similar position of power, control and profit. This is ideal position to hold power, because the average person is completely clueless that these are positions of power. Think of how few people are aware of the importance of network neutrality, for example. Evgeny Morozov makes similar points in his TED talk entitled "How the Net aids dictatorships." Really, the people promoting decentralization as a moral imperative are the ones who are profiting from it, from VC backed startups who stand to make millions or even billions of dollars to global multinationals who already are. Here again, the idealistic hacker ethos and ruthless corporate capitalism turn out to be one and the same, a nice example of the Hegelian coincidence of opposites.

by ajju 16y ago

alsomike 16y ago

On the contrary, his only mistake was that he didn't see that the naive idealistic pseudo-democratization which co-opts the people's creativity to become conduits for advertising is one and the same as corporate capitalism.

ajju 16y ago
Interesting viewpoint. I think Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the use of Blogs, Twitter and even the epitome-of-corporate-antiprivacy that is Facebook by political movements: all present very strong counterevidence to your claim that the web has not been democratized. The heart of any information medium has to be commerce, in that there has to be way to economically support the infrastructure costs of the medium but what makes the web more democratic is: 1) The infrastructure costs are very low and falling (The cost of a web server that you can run two hundred blogs off is not more than $200 / year) 2) Quite contrary to what Jobs claimed, everyone on the web is already a publisher.
- alsomike 16y ago
  Wikipedia is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, because it's controlled by a very small number of elites with no accountability. This is true of Britannica, but the difference is that Wikipedia editors have perversely managed to co-opt populist democratic rhetoric in order to justify what is effectively an oligarchy. The presence of the edit button on each page functions as an ideological mystification to conceal the where the real power lies. What's happening is that we are provided with the illusion of power, on condition that we never actually use it. As soon as you actually try to become a wikipedia editor, you are immediately confronted with a co-ordinated power bloc that is virtually impossible to penetrate. So far, these elites have been benevolent, but the case of one poweful Wikipedia editor who was a member of a cult and deleted any criticism of the cult leader on his page illustrates that abuse of power is possible. Another example of this is restaurant reviews. The basic argument is familiar: a single restaurant reviewer in a newspaper is an elite, and this creates the potential for abuse of power. He could demand kickbacks from restaurants to ensure positive reviews or promote his friends' restaurants at the expense of competitors, and so on. Decentralization is proposed as the solution: instead of a single restaurant review, individual patrons review restaurants on a web site and it averages the reviews, and even if a few of them are corrupt, it's much harder to subvert the system. So problem solved, it's a much more trustworthy system. Except for one minor problem: Yelp implements this idea, and restaurant owners have complained that Yelp has abused their power by trying to extort advertising dollars from them by threatening to delete positive reviews and post negative reviews. The pattern should be clear: moving from a centralized system to a decentralized network doesn't eliminate power, it just moves it to a different place where it can be potentially abused by a different group of elites. That position of power comes from controlling the protocol which aggregates each individual node on the network. The nodes can be decentralized and distributed, but the cost for this is that they must all speak the same language to connect to each other, which is a centralization at a different level. That's why further decentralization doesn't solve the Yelp problem. We could imagine a federated system of restaurant reviews where individual reviews are stored on servers controlled by individuals, so they can't be deleted. But this just moves the power to a different level - the system for aggregating the peers on the node becomes the position of power, which could potentially be exploited for power and money to an elite. A similar relationship exists between Facebook and Diaspora. This is why Google promotes decentralization, because it is the centralized place you have to pass through in order to get to all that decentralized content, and there's lots of money to be had in owning that position. The handful of multinational corporations that control the internet backbones are also in a similar position of power, control and profit. This is ideal position to hold power, because the average person is completely clueless that these are positions of power. Think of how few people are aware of the importance of network neutrality, for example. Evgeny Morozov makes similar points in his TED talk entitled "How the Net aids dictatorships." Really, the people promoting decentralization as a moral imperative are the ones who are profiting from it, from VC backed startups who stand to make millions or even billions of dollars to global multinationals who already are. Here again, the idealistic hacker ethos and ruthless corporate capitalism turn out to be one and the same, a nice example of the Hegelian coincidence of opposites.