Re: internet infrastructure investment data

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Pen-L,
KGC writes,
Oops, but, but, Clay Shirky is a bit of a moron.

Doyle,
Couple of things, while for you the term moron is simply a label that
indicates you think Shirky is not interesting, for me as a disability rights
advocate I find the term anti-disabled.  If you read Stephen Jay Gould's
book on "The Mismeasure of Man" you get a decent insight on this made-up
word.  The basic concept from the early nineteen hundreds in the IQ
'science' underlying the word moron was a person too stupid to learn how to
read.  The science behind the concept was dismantled by Gould.  So the term
moron while associated in the public mind with developmentally disabled
persons is simply empty of meaning because it has not scientific validity.

As to your personal insight into Shirky, I always thought Bush was not
intellectually able, but I don't dwell on labeling him stupid because that
is an empty way of trying to understand what is going on.  Just a brief
reaction to your wording about Shirky.

Shirky represents an influential part of the IT industry accessible and
available for you to read.  How some of that school analyze their industry
bears upon your request. Since you know him well that offering from me is
irrelevant to your question.  In fact too bad he was not a pleasure to work
with and brilliant.  Life is so short to waste upon someone whom one does
not respect.

I would say though you can't argue that investment in the telecom industry
is what made things scale up to 5B + documents, if people didn't use the
internet as well, it was after all for a couple of decades just a back water
in the sciences community.  If you are meaning 5B+ (billion plus) documents
I am struck by this statistic that there are roughly one document on the web
to every five hundred documents in private intranet resources.  So I think
about these things in terms of public and private intellectual property.

As far as that goes, it is interesting that investment had three roughly
parallel tracks in the telecom world.  The U.S., Europe, and Asia.  If
scaling up is a key issue, how does each region differ?

you write,
One of the prevailing explanations is that HTTP got smarter
(basically, it became more cachable by intermediaries and proxies) and that
those technical changes (the changes aren't *theoretical* or "theory", and I
didn't imply that) were the critical change which has let the Web scale to
5B+ documents.

me,
well I read this comment in your previous email which says;

you wrote,
because of various purely technological ideas (most of which get
attributed, inaccurately, to Tim Berners-Lee)

me,
Which sounds to me like you are going to write about technology ideas (and
implementation) and you just don't agree that was important for the web in
relation to the infrastructure built during the great bubble economy.  But
you seem not so much intent on validating theory or ideas as important for
5B + documents that was made possible by the investment in infrastructure of
support for the web.  So you are downgrading the intellectual labor process
that goes into the web by dwelling on the machinery behind it.  Maybe that
isn't your intent, but strikes me that way.

you write in the previous email,
My suggestion will be that of at least *equal importance* to these
technical fixes (having mostly to do with the differences between version
1.0 and 1.1 of the HTTP protocol, for anyone who cares) is the massive
influx of investment dollars to beef up the infrastructure of the
Internet, most of which the Web benefited from.

me,
This reads to me like you have a thing about the W3C (world wide web
consortium) being over blown in value.  And the machinery and spending on
the infrastructure as much more important.  Roughly like saying the auto
industry spends a gazillion dollars a year on plants and infrastructure and
the labor of the auto workers is sort of secondary.  May not be what you
mean, but I get a little bit of that sort of message here also as well as
above.

you write,
Huh? You really lost me here.

me,
One analogy that Doug Henwood uses to good effect about the relative lack of
change between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century is that he
points out during the nineteenth century with the telegraph wires
communication leapt from an era of foot travel to instant communications
around the world was unprecedented in world history, while one could look at
computing communications as a much less spectacular addition to the human
culture.  To me if you are going to talk about so-called 3rd generation
telecom industry and what it's meaning was as a lefty, you must pay
attention to the historical precedents as Doug Henwood did to get your
'ideas' across.  Even if I think you are off the beam I get a lot out of a
capable person writing in depth including having a historical sense of time
and place.

I hope I gave you some value for your request for advice.  I was trying to
be helpful.
thanks,
Doyle