Freedom to Network

Looks like it's a steady diet of Bob Frankston posts here lately, but this one's on his usual topic of breaking out of the "telecom" model. A model that I agree is preventing the Internet from realizing the potential to be the equivalent "economic force multiplier" that the railroad and Interstate Highway System and shipping containers of yesteryear bequeathed on us. Which is why I favor "stimulus" spending on network capacity with "strings attached".

I really like some of his turns of phrase:

"They have created a Byzantine system of complex billing systems that have sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy in billable events"

and

"They have given us a funding model which is purposefully designed to create scarcity and have made us pay for very expensive redundant facilities just to have a physical embodiments of the accounting abstractions."

Of course "purposefully designed scarcity" comes close to being a best practice in the "free market" economy, not just telecom. Still it's good to think about all of this in structural terms instead of "good" versus "evil".

Holographic mysticism

I found this on my Bob Frankston feed. It's a fascinating and provocative intersection between physics and mysticism. And I find it especially pleasing that an engineering rationalist like Frankston includes topics like this on his almost exclusively network-heavy (I almost said "internet" or "net neutrality", but Bob would probably disparage these simple and apparently misleading labels) anti-telco/cableco oligarchy subject matter.

For myself, I'm - as always it seems - somewhere between Frankston's hyper-rationalist perspective and what he calls the "false awe" of mystical interpretation of recent scientific discoveries (starting I suppose with quantum mechanics).

And of course it's fun to read serious discourse - regardless of one's own position on the rationalist-mysticism spectrum - that reminds one of "I Think We're All Bozos On this Bus"...