ONE SHOT
“The company falls victim to an old, familiar failing of visionaries and engineers: the One Big Fix.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
May 2012
37 posts
“In the long term, it’s possible (though not knowable) that Google’s effects on the various industries it has touched will be positive – and that seems to be an article of faith with those inside the door. But in the short term what economists call disruption or ‘creative destruction’, and Google sees as the cutting away of inefficiency, translates in the real world into lost jobs, reduced revenues for huge companies and the slow, painful demise of the newspaper industry as it struggles to deal with content aggregators, the loss of ad sales and the balkanization of its audience.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“In many ways it is the model for what a twenty-first-century corporation ought to be: rewarding, protective, collegial, environmentally sound, innovative – and determined to make a moral calculus part of or even central to its decision-making.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“Apple, of course, profits from every single sale. The economics of the Internet, as presently constructed, do not favour the old dream of small content makers. Instead, they seem to produce an inevitable trend towards consolidation and gatekeeping. Rather than trading the fusty cultural chains of the conventional media for a bright new world of digital cottage industries, we are in danger of exchanging one bottleneck for another.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“The developer calculated the investment cost at £60k, and the money coming in at £26k – a shortfall of £34k. And that was a popular application; only a very, very few apps will do better.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“The downward pressure on price is so strong that many have given up charging directly altogether, and propose to make content available without monetary charge either on a simple advertising-funded model, on a merchandizing model where content induces fans to buy related material or hardware, or on a cross-subsidization model which sells the data generated by users as demographic information to advertisers.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“That may have seemed possible in the 1990s; now the situation is more complex and difficult. The massive number of people attempting the same thing makes discovery – making your creative product not just available but known about – rather than distribution, the barrier to success. More, as the share-and-share-alike attitude to content has proliferated, content has either become cheap or free, or it has been shared without permission of the creator.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“the Electronic Frontier Foundation is at root the digital resistance, seeking to preserve the ideals of a digital environment which was still small and built on notions of community and cooperation.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“Briefly, the Secret Service raided SJG and confiscated their computers in pursuit of a document which was alleged to have been illegally obtained from the telecoms company BellSouth. SJG was at the time in the process of making a role-playing game with a cyberpunk tone, which perhaps explains somewhat why the Secret Service agents, having confiscated the company’s online bulletin board and files (called ‘Illuminati’), apparently decided that they had uncovered ‘a handbook for computer crime’.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“The EFF, in particular, came in part out of a massively misguided United States Secret Service raid on a company called Steve Jackson Games (SJG)”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.
” —Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
” —Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“there is a feeling among some Net users that the online world is a special case, a free speech zone, and that in cyberspace it is entirely appropriate to divulge what a print journalist, subject to national laws, dare not. On the other hand, government and legislation have also designated digital communications as a special case, asserting that they do not merit the same kind of protection given to older media.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“the UK courts faced simple disobedience from users of Twitter regarding injunctions against the publication of certain information early in 2011. The company itself went to court in America to secure the right to notify users that their information was being requested by the US government in connection with WikiLeaks – and won, prompting Wired magazine to suggest that Twitter’s corporate response should be the industry standard to demands from law enforcement and government for secret access to user data.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“The promise and rhetoric of the Internet as given in the 1990s – when it ceased to be part of the on-campus life of specialists and met the wider world – was of open systems, free speech, individual privacy and governmental transparency.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“When governments and corporations at last woke up to what was happening and tried to enforce ‘real world’ laws, it was as if lawyers had walked into private houses during Sunday lunch and started demanding that everyone pay for using the cutlery. The arrival of sheriffs and Pinkertons on the digital frontier was the start of a conflict of law and ideology that continues to this day.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“there is no such thing as ‘the digital world’. The metaphor of space behind the screen is just that. The Internet is not separate from the physical world we inhabit day to day”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“the Internet is in its most basic structure an entity that is intended to bypass local blockages. From its inception, the Internet was intended to pass the word, not ringfence it.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“I am, for want of a better word, a digital yeti.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“We live in a time when boundaries of the possible are elastic, while our unconscious notions of what can and cannot be done remain lodged in a sort of spiritual 1972.”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
“the term post-modern has a number of meanings in different disciplines, some specific and others irksomely vague, and in any case suggests that we’re in some kind of afterparty of world history, which I think is untrue, so I use late modern, which means more or less what it sounds like and doesn’t instantly cause me to break out in sociological hives”
—Highlighted by erin kissane in The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World by Nick Harkaway
