So I was pissed off first thing this morning.



I ran into an article written a few days ago on Cnet which quoted IBM Developer Sam Ruby saying the following about cellphones:

“It’s killing the landline; it’s killing watches; it’s changing the camera business; it’s changing the TV industry, the music industry,” Ruby said Monday at the New Paradigms for Using Computers (NPUC) 2006 workshop at the IBM Almaden Research Center here. “It’s destroying the pay-phone industry. It’s hurting the hotel industry and putting the squeeze on universities,” he said during a talk titled “Teenagers on the Go.”

Wait a fucking minute, I thought. Didn’t I say that? Verbatim.

I put on my Che Guevara shirt and seethed.

Then realized I was acting like a fucking idiot.



We live in the knowledge age.

And this generation probably has more obsolete knowledge in it’s collective head than any other time in history.

99% of what matters lies outside our own head.

And smart people suck up the ideas of others and remix them in a way that makes sense to them and their audience.

...So yeah I sampled your voice, you was usin it wrong You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song... --Jay-Z (the Takeover)

Earlier today I linked to an article by a Yale professor about how copyright judges should look at copyright the same way economist look at the environment. The environment is a complex system and so are copyrights. But some of us (even me sometimes) want to look at things as if they are simple.

One of the hallmarks of this age is complexity.

Look at sports.

Think about how many people are employed by the typical baseball team. The game hasn’t really changed in 100 years but few would argue it’s not more complex.

Multiply that by everything.

And that will give you a sense of how much more complex the world is today.

In a complex system, like the internet, or life in general, if you didn’t soak up or was anyway effected by the stuff around you couldn’t be part of the system anyway.

In other words, if I didn’t want my thoughts remixed why did I post them on my blog in the first place?

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