As we near the end of what Microsoft founder and chairman dubbed the Digital Decade, there are powerful myths at work about the way our digital lives will inevitably unfold. These myths contain kernels of truth, but like all myths, they also exaggerate the importance of certain anecdotes and dismiss or ignore other evidence. In this series of blog posts, intended to be collected in book form, I hope to illuminate these myths.
Then, I will delve deep into the essential madness of the Digital Decade -- a decade full of amazing innovation, but also senseless duplication of effort and breakdowns in communication. Part of the madness stems from the way capitalism plays out in information technology -- how business models create stovepipes of incompatible systems, software and data. But another part stems from how communities of developers inevitably add to the incompatibilities, through politics and sheer human nature -- and leave our digital infrastructure far poorer than its potential, and leave ordinary digital citizens wandering between a Hobson's choice of digital dilemmas where sharing data between them requires choosing sides in technology battles they played no part in fighting.
Finally, I look at the sheer momentum of the Digital Decade, which ends things on an optimistic note. The network effects of people sharing everything they have -- their relationships, their software, their data, and their vulnerabilities, particularly a common desire for security and privacy -- have yielded unprecedented efforts to stem the tide of incompatibility, to open up on all fronts, despite the inevitable overhead that this sharing creates.
When I started this project years ago, I simply wanted to tell some stories. At its heart, journalism is best when it does that. The story was originally from a few very limited perspectives -- my own, or those of a few that I trusted. But in the process of investigating my assumptions, and those of others, I found that the Web was its own storyteller. The way we tell stories has been forever changed by the Web. In the old days, book research was inevitably a process of linking together scholarly research with original journalism, or some combination of the two sources. Today, everything and everyone is a source, fully capable of commenting, correcting, or clarifying stories in real time.
For this reason, I have chosen to tell my story in the modern form of a blog. I've been blogging since the form was very young, in 2000 or so. (Currently, my blog posts online date back to 2003.) This blog will be the stories themselves, and as I receive comment, correction, or clarification, I will, at my discretion, update each post to a state of accuracy that new readers will find appropriate, with a limited history of such updating at the end of each post. This approach may rankle those who expect a blog post to be never-changing, and so be it. The wiki, another storytelling form invented in part to preserve the history of a writing, might be a more appropriate way to document such amendments to my work, but I rejected it as my storytelling medium. Time will tell whether my approach is successful or not. That, and my ability to discriminate between constructive criticism and attempts to do otherwise. Ultimately, I have to rely on my own wits. If you must consult a wiki to read stories, Wikipedia, itself invented while I labored away, is your best bet. I have deliberately chosen to consult it as little as possible, as it's still an infant medium, has its own idiosyncracies and biases, and my storytelling task wouldn't have been helped very much by cutting and pasting from that source anyway.
I'll also use another of my blogs to further comment on this work, but it won't be required reading, just a way to tell other aspects of the story in a way that doesn't detract from this tale.
Finally, no project of this sort is possible without acknowledging the many people who have supported it and made it possible. But rather than list them now, I'm simply going to humbly thank my wife River and daughter Tembani. Without their love and inspiration, this project would have been impossible.
