Finding myself increasingly enamored of this meme that “Architecture is politics.” The idea comes up in Lawrence Lessig’s “The Future of Ideas” and is being repeated by Tim O’Reilly at OSX Con (which I am regrettably not attending). I’ve been drumming on the idea a bit in the blogging class, and it has come up on a mailing list I’m on, in a thread on whether using HTML in email is a political choice or not (I believe it most definitely is).
Applied to software, the meme suggests that there are no neutral choices – every technology decision you make impacts (pardon me for using that word as a verb) the real world in some way… tangibly or intangibly. It affects the question of whether technology flows upwards from the people to the big picture or from corporations on down, for example. It’s all about power – the difference between “power over” and “power to.”
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Looks like Jean-Louis Gassee is moving on yet again.
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Great piece by Dan Gillmor on Apple’s contrarian (pro-people, not pro-corporation) stance on DRM: Apple stands firm against entertainment cartel
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Since the other 72 pieces of spam I get every day aren’t having an effect on my wallet, they’ve decided to double the volume on the subject line. Today I received one promising me two carrots at once: Get a Big Penis and a Free Vacation!
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Ack packet via Rebecca Blood: William Gibson is credited with saying ‘The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.’