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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
The geek-driven world of new "decentralized" technologies like Wi-Fi, blogging and Web services is more about cutting out the middleman than finding a business model.
Dec 13, 2002 | The technology industry has long been shaped by the creative tension between technologists and businesspeople, otherwise known as geeks and suits. Geeks make new stuff primarily because it's fun, because it's useful, and because they can. Suits make new stuff primarily because they hope to earn a profit. Yes, that is an oversimplification, and there's overlap between the two types -- there are plenty of profit-seeking geeks and geeky business folks. Still, the distinction is real.
You'd think that, today, with the tech industry in its worst downturn in memory, jobs scarce and funding scarcer, bottom-line thinking would dominate. Instead, the recent cratering of so many companies seems to have chastened the suits -- and the very absence of get-rich-quick opportunities has cleared a space for geek enthusiasms to flourish.
That was certainly the feeling I got from this week's Supernova conference on decentralization -- a gathering in Palo Alto, Calif., for which the über-geeks of Silicon Valley and beyond (to use the label suggested by one of the software-industry legends in attendance) turned out in full force.
There was Bob Frankston, who'd coded VisiCalc, the personal computer's first "killer app," and a row behind him sat Mitch Kapor, whose Lotus 1-2-3 replaced VisiCalc as the spreadsheet of choice in the early '80s. There were Marc Canter (creator of Director and other multimedia tools) and Dave Winer (creator of Radio and other blogging and outlining tools), double-teaming a Microsoft exec on the issue of patents.
Prominent bloggers swarmed the place, keeping up a keyboard-click chorus as they logged speakers' comments in real time. (Mitch Ratcliffe offers a good list here.) The blogging was so thorough that, though my Salon duties kept me in the office on the conference's second day, I could keep up with the event pretty well. Thank you, decentralization!
Conference organizer Kevin Werbach admitted that his "decentralization" label was "ugly," but suggested that its very awkwardness was a sign that we were dealing with an underlying trend rather than a "marketing-concocted theme." And he was right: The phenomena this event focused on, a grab bag of new technologies that have bubbled up from the humbled high-tech world in the post-crash era, are mostly geek driven and grassroots spread: Wi-Fi (802.11b), the wireless high-speed Net access method; blogs; and "Web services," a fuzzy term to describe new methods of directly and quickly connecting software applications and data across the Net.
These disparate boomlets share an "end to end" design: They rely on the power of individual users' computers -- there's no big, centrally operated piece of software or hardware mediating. The users connect across an open, "stupid" network -- the Internet itself, today -- that simply moves information without worrying about what it is. The resulting software is ad hoc, impromptu, flexible, "lightweight." Empowered individuals at the ends of the network try out new ideas and build myriad new services. It's geek heaven.
