Britt rocks the history of societies
Britt Blaser has a thought-provoking piece up on the "obvious society," one in which personal interactions (note that is not to say personal information, but the exchanges that go on in society) will be completely transparent. We've been riffing on an old plan I put together in 1996, called NetCredentials, and an even older plan Britt and Flemming have been putting into code, called Xpertweb; Britt was actually able to take my old plan and use search and replace with his ideas to produce a coherent description of a business -- so, suffice to say, we agree about a lot of things.
A key passage, one that relates deeply to the emergent democracy discussion Joi has initiated, the Socialtext plans from Ross, Adina, Peter and Ed, and much else going on right now:
When obviousness is finally embedded into the socioeconomic interface, we can each become masters of nuance rather than slaves of mystery. Isn't the aim of User Interface Design to allow us to master options more broad and subtle than previously manageable?
The enabling technologies of the Obvious Society, while intriguing, are irrelevant. What's critical is that it promises to free us from the smoke we blow up each others' asses and, with a little bit of luck, make "isms" obsolete.
What we're talking about is Quality Assurance for tansactions, trust systems if you will, which is what Xpertweb provides. Britt is on to something very important.
The nature of collaboration, whether for political, social or economic goals, is one of constant dynamism--our relationships evolve over time, so our tools cannot lock us into a mode of interaction and leave us there. What I like about Xpertweb, what I thought was a winning quality in NetCredentials (though, at the time, Mitch Kapor read the plan and said I was suggesting too large a change in business practices by asking people to record their judgements of the value of work and relationships), is the fact that the tool does nothing but allow people to measure the quality of their experience when interacting with another person/entity. Whether we want to or not, the economy is becoming more like John Perry Barlow described back in the early 1990s, a small town where everyone knows everything that is going on or, at least, could find out anything by having a chat over the backyard fence. Isn't it obvious yet? That's what the conversations described in The Cluetrain Manifesto are about: exposure, living in the open and taking the wounds that come with that life gracefully.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at February 24, 2003 12:14 PM | TrackBack