During the decade the Internet has become accessible to all in the years since, giving birth to sites such as Wikipedia in 2001, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006.The combination of ever cheaper electronics and the networking of the planet has been a notable feature of the decade. It will be interesting to see if the changes are as great over the next 10 years.
"Becoming a pure bandwidth provider is every cellco's nightmare: it levels the playing field and puts them in direct competition with their peers, a competition that can only be won by throwing huge amounts of capital infrastructure at their backbone network. So for the past five years or more, they've been doing their best not to get dragged into a game of beggar-my-neighbor, by expedients such as exclusive handset deals... [Google intends] to turn 3G data service (and subsequently, LTE) into a commodity, like Wi-Fi hotspot service only more widespread and cheaper to get at. They want to get consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets and pick cheap data SIMs. They'd love to move everyone to cheap data SIMs rather than the hideously convoluted legacy voice stacks maintained by the telcos; then they could piggyback Google Voice on it, and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages as well as your email and web access. (This is, needless to say, going to bring them into conflict with Apple. ... Apple are an implicit threat to Google because Google can't slap their ads all over [the App and iTunes stores]. So it's going to end in handbags at dawn... eventually.)"The future is Amish?
Some people are saying they're the worst decade ever, but that's more true for the global relations of the United States than for the level of human well-being in the world as a whole. Even in the U.S., a lot of social indicators improved. Elsewhere Chinese growth continued, Indian growth moved into the big time (in the gross reckoning we're already at well over two billion people), a lot of Eastern Europe was successfully absorbed into the EU, Indonesia made slow but steady progress. Brazil may have turned a corner, and Africa had a better-than-lately decade in terms of economic growth... For a lot of you it feels bad, but it's not obvious that the naughties have been such a terrible decade overall.I wonder what the next decade will be...
Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone. The only question to ask is, what's the resistance of the network?so like in an era of upheaval, esp of the means (and ownership) of production, i wonder whether the political system is capable of "addressing large-scale objective problems."
So where should we go in the next decade? For all its difficulties, the US is not the UK of 1910. Its economy remains the world's most productive and innovative and its military capacity remains unmatched. The western world, as a whole, remains potent, with about 40 per cent of global output, at purchasing power parity. But other countries and forces are now on the rise, while the challenges ahead are also more complex and global than ever before.and echoed here:
"We must all hang together or assuredly we shall hang separately." All countries – above all, incumbent and rising great powers – must recognise this truth, enunciated by Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the US declaration of independence. History has hardly been dominated by the benign spirits of co-operation, foresight and self-restraint. I would at least give Barack Obama credit for trying to provide the right sort of leadership. But will the world produce sufficient followers, at home or abroad? Alas, I rather doubt it.
We tend to view China as posing an alternative and threatening model for the future, one that's by turns seductive and repulsive, the source of envy and contempt. But after a while I wondered if we aren't in some way converging with our supposed rival. China has managed the transition from a repressive, authoritarian, impoverished country to an industrial, corporatist oligarchy by allowing a loud and raucous debate while also holding tightly onto power. Perhaps we are moving toward the same end from a democratic direction, the roiling public debate and political polarization obscuring the fact that power and money continue to collect and pool among an elite that increasingly views itself as besieged on all sides by a restive and ungrateful populace... I may be going out on a limb, but I don't think either country is going to be able to make this system work.the way i see it, things seem to be evolving towards state capitalism and/or corporatism; it's the path of least resistance, and yet we're 'Still lost in the old Bretton Woods':
Great changes in the way that the economy was regulated and managed were often provoked by cataclysmic upheaval. It was to finance military expeditions in Europe that the English invented central banking in 1694; it was to fund the Napoleonic wars that Britain invented the modern income tax.so the question remains (as always) can we ever adapt with enough foresight to avoid 'cataclysmic upheaval' or is that what it takes?
And it was the Great Depression, followed by the second world war, that produced the framework we broadly have today... During the past 10 years, the shortcomings of that set-up in dealing with the problems of the modern economy became all too apparent... as global economic imbalances continued to build up... little reform has happened... The decade shows that political problems cannot be solved with technocratic solutions. No amount of shuffling the pack to include the emerging markets will make any difference unless they, and the rich countries, are aware what tough decisions have to be made, and are willing to face their domestic constituencies. The crisis has not produced a new world order. Only political will can do that.
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posted by limeonaire at 5:57 PM on December 28, 2009 [1 favorite]