In the spirit of "Yes, and...": I've been chewing on an alternate narrative. Firstly, I don't think any of us anticipated preferential attachment. Even despit

In the spirit of "Yes, and...": I've been chewing on an alternate narrative. Firstly, I don't think any of us anticipated preferential attachment. Even despite the popularity of "six degrees of separation" and other graph related notions. Clay Shirky's essay about Power Laws was my first exposure to the idea. Here's Kotte's meta entry: http://www.kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws http://www.kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws Everyone complains about how "the web" we got is broken. It wasn't until very recently that I understood that Ted Nelson's Xanadu vision, an often imagined alternative timeline perfect web, requires centralization. Um, is this really what we want? Because that's what we're getting. Incrementally, fitfully, inevitably. Your warnings about DRM times infinity. Also the libertarians, anarchists, technophiles behind "the web" thought we'd have micropayments. Instead, we got advertisements and freemium. I don't know if micropayments, or prepaid wallets, or subscriptions, would be less toxic. But it couldn't be any worse.