Saturday, August 06, 2011

Truly Disruptive


Of all the blog posts I have done at this blog, this has got to be my favorite: My Web Diagram.

I keep thinking in terms of the red circle.

What after the infrastructure has been built? Then what? That has implications. When people in tech talk about disruptive, it is about shifts in the way the technology operates. Digital disrupts the music scene, for example. Disruptions can be to business processes.

But the web is not one technology, just like white is not one people, Indian is not one people. There are many peoples. Africa is not one country.

The internet is the greatest technological advance humanity ever made. It has thousand year implications. Goals like a total spread of democracy and eradication of poverty and fundamental progress on gender feel possible in ways we could not have imagined before the web.

And that has implications for mature political institutions in mature democracies. That has implications for race and gender in places like Manhattan. When the earth is flat and everyone is connected to everyone else and little personal updates fly around faster social progress is possible.

Little Flickers Of Racism
Race, Gender, Tech (2)
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