The next 6,500 days

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 09 November 2008 02:18PM CST

Section: Internet

Semantic webIt’s been about 6,500 days since Tim Berners-Lee published the first page on the web. 6,500 days. Everything that’s happened on the web has happened in the last 6,500 days.

Earlier this week, Kevin Kelly spoke briefly—but deeply—at the Web 2.0 Summit on what’s likely to happen with regard to the web during the next 6,500 days.

I’ve followed most of what Kevin Kelly has done for the last 20 years because he’s a completist—he does something until it’s done and then moves on. He thinks deeply and completely. And he’s at it again.

Kelly begins by pointing out that what’s happened on the web in its first 6,500 days is impossible. “There’s not enough money in the world, 6,000 days ago, to accomplish all the things that have happened already,” said Kelly. We have to start thinking differently about what’s impossible, he says.

First, we linked data and shared packets. Then we linked pages on the web and shared those links. Throughout both of these phases we were concerned about the sharing piece of the equation. We’ve mostly gotten over these concerns.

Except we really haven’t. The big battles that continue to rage is over the sharing of information and knowledge. Kelly says where were heading is sharing linked data—elemental units. So far so good, and I’m totally on board with this, the semantic web. This requires first de-structuring information into machine-readable components and then re-structuring it in different ways for different purposes, sharing all the while. The result is that “everything becomes part of the web,” says Kelly, “the database of things.” That’d be everything in the world. Including us, individually.

This is where Kelly loses me—with the cloud. The database of everything will reside in the one machine—the cloud. “The web will own every bit that’s produced,” Kelly states. Anything that’s not shared on the web won’t matter.

What Kelly doesn’t say is that presumably wars will be fought over control of the cloud. The way to avoid that is to refuse to consolidate everything into the cloud. You retain control of your bits and I retain control of mine. We can share linked data, if we so agree, but it can’t be mandated.

Either I’ve reached my capacity for change (a scary thought, but admittedly possible) or Kelly is wrong. In this case, I’m hoping he’s wrong. Perhaps foolishly, I insist on retaining control of my bits. I have no problem sharing them, necessarily, but I want the control to reside with me—and I want the control of your bits to reside with you—not the cloud or the corporate interests behind the cloud. I want, for example, to disconnect from time to time and leave the grid as I did last summer. Go somewhere where the cloud doesn’t exist, where I can be unreachable and, if I so choose, unidentifiable. If everything is in the cloud—including personal identity—then there’s no privacy, and by extension, no autonomy.

While there’s value in the collective, as Kelly points out, there’s also sure to be value in the individual.

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