[HOME]

A rchive Date
[ 20-02-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge70.html

The Third Culture

Edge 70 —June 15, 2000

(10, 084 words)

[Excerpts from this edition of

Edge

are being simultaneously published in German by

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

—

Frank Schirrmacher

, Publisher.]

THE THIRD CULTURE

THE SECOND COMING —A MANIFESTO
By David Gelernter

Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us.

THE REALITY CLUB

Responses to "The Second Coming - A Manifesto" by David Gelernter (As of June 15:)

Stewart Brand

: The sequence is clear. From "the user is a luser" (early programmer joke) to "the user wins" to "the user rules" (eg. Napster) and "the user creates" (the Web) to, with Gelertner, "the user is the system."

David Ditzel

: Gelernter is ahead of us all in peering through the fog that we call the future of technology.

John C. Dvorak

: Bill Gates will love reading this stuff. Hating it will be the Ellisons and McNealys of the world whose goal is to de-ball the personal computer and replace it with a thin client running eunuchs.

Feeman Dyson

: I suspect that he has a one-sided view of computing. I suspect that cyberspace will also be dominated by tools, as far into the future as we can imagine. The topography of our future cyberspace will be determined more by new tools than by Gelernter's vision.

George Dyson

: Let us hope that Gelernter's prophecies continue to be fulfilled. The sooner spines replace icons the better —would you rather work in a library where the books are shelved at eye-level or left lying face-up all over the floor??

Douglas Rushkoff

: ...the trick to seeing through today's interfaces —a way of envisioning information architecture that David does effortlessly —involves distinguishing between our modeling systems and the models they build.

Rod Brooks

: David Gelernter is no doubt right on about the coming revolution, but as with all revolutions it is hard to predict the details of how it will play out. I suspect he is wrong on the details of cyberbodies and his lifestreams.

Lee Smolin

: I have the sense that David's manifesto is a bit like the predictions I read as a child that by the 21st century cars would have evolved wings and we would all be flying to work. The technology of cars has improved a bit since then, but the basic experience of driving is almost exactly the same.

Jaron Lanier

: This reminds of Marx's vision of what should happen after the revolution. He imagined we'd be reading the classics and practicing archery! Idealists always believe there's some more meaningful, less dreary plane of existence that can be found in this life.

David Farber

: We are at the edge of a real dramatic change in technology. For the past decade we have evolved from a view that the network is just a way of connecting computers together to the current view that the network is the action to the view often stated (by me and others) that no one cares about the network but only what they can access and interact with —information and people.

Danny Hillis

: David Gelernter is basically right: current generation computer interfaces are not very good. (Since we are all among friends here, we can say it: they suck).

Vinod Khosla:

... like most technologies, the path to getting there often changes the end we get to.

John McCarthy

: Paper will be needed until screens are better. I use paper just as Gelernter suggests. Print the document for reading and then throw it away. I'll do that even at the cost of losing the pretty red ink I've put on my printout of the Manifesto.

World Fact Book

(CIA

)

]

Cross-Indexed:

Microsoft, Linux And Desktop Computing

Some pages may require Adobe Acrobat Reader^™