Should Be an Interesting Read

I saw this author interviewed on Colbert. The interview was good comedy, but as an interview, it sucked - par for the course. So I was wanting to see what somebody thought of it outside Comedy Central.

I've just finished reading Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a provocative, well-reasoned, well-informed and sometimes frustrating book about the power of the Internet to allow people to be more effective at taking action -- whether that action is good or bad.

Zittrain talks about the principle of "generativity" in technology: the capacity of some technology to allow its users to make new things out of it, things the designer never anticipated, and does a very good job in enumerating the characteristics that make a technology more or less generative. Zittrain is more-or-less in favor of generativity: he talks about all the amazing things that the human race has accomplished by using that most generative of technologies: the public Internet and the general-purpose PC.

But Zittrain points out that generativity contains the seeds of its own destruction, because it allows bad people to leverage their malicious intentions -- with malware, spyware, DDoS attacks and so on -- to the point that an average person using the Internet is at constant risk from creeps and thugs. And what's more, all average people use the Internet because it's been so thoroughly woven into our lives.

Zittrain fears that the power of the Internet to let creeps do bad things will lead to a regulatory backlash and a series of Draconian laws that take away all the social benefits of the Internet, and that this will be enabled by a consumer backlash against general-purpose PCs in favor of "tethered appliances" -- TiVos, iPhones, etc -- that grant a measure of security by taking away the user-modifiability that is at the heart of the principle of generativity.

Full post.
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