14 January 2018

If The Only Tool You Have Is A Hammer

... everything tends to look like a nail. Let's start with the latest edition of The Transitory Quote:
We have built the digital world too rapidly. It was constructed layer upon layer, and many of the early layers were never meant to guard so many valuable things: our personal correspondence, our finances, the very infrastructure of our lives.
-- Zeynep Tufekci/2018

You'll see it for the next few days in the preamble.

It should come as no surprise that I was involved with computers at the birth of the innterTubes, though not a moving force in that birth. Even in the early days of the World Wide Web (I wonder, does anyone remember that term?), I knew the history of its origins: ARPANET. The multi-level network model was worked out the make all this happen. HTTP, also, actually had a meaning: HyperText Transfer Protocol. The design, and purpose, of the net was to facilitate the movement of technical papers among researcher. IOW, text files of moderate size. Unix, likewise, was designed for the purpose of driving in-house, character terminal based, word processing systems. IOW, text files of moderate size.

Should it be surprising that such tech can only be finagled into streaming porn to your phone or desk or 80" plasma with difficulty?

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