Nicholas Negroponte, former director of the MIT Media Lab, announced the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project at the beginning of 2005. The project aims to give one hundred million hardy, portable computers to children in the developing world. The laptops, called XOs, are priced around $100, and they are to be purchased by governments […]
Even if the generative Internet is preserved, those who stand to lose from the behaviors taking place over it will maintain pressure for change. Threats to the technical stability of the newly expanded network are not the only factors at work shaping the digital future. At the time of the founding of the Internet and […]
There is a phrase from the days when television was central: “Not ready for prime time.” Prime time refers to the precious time between dinner and bedtime when families would gather around the TV set looking to be informed or entertained. Viewership would be at its apex, both in numbers and in quality of viewers, […]
This book has explained how the Internet’s generative characteristics primed it for extraordinary success—and now position it for failure. The response to the failure will most likely be sterile tethered appliances and Web services that are contingently generative, if generative at all. The trajectory is part of a larger pattern. If we can understand the […]
The Dutch city of Drachten has undertaken an unusual experiment in traffic management. The roads serving forty-five thousand people are “verkeersbordvrij”: free of nearly all road signs. Drachten is one of several European test sites for a traffic planning approach called “unsafe is safe.”1 The city has removed its traffic signs, parking meters, and even […]
As Part I of this book explained, the generative nature of the PC and Internet—a certain incompleteness in design, and corresponding openness to outside innovation—is both the cause of their success and the instrument of their forthcoming failure. The most likely reactions to PC and Internet failures brought on by the proliferation of bad code, […]
Anyone can design new applications to operate over the Internet. Good applications can then be adopted widely while bad ones are ignored. The phenomenon is part of the Internet’s “hourglass architecture” (Figure 4.1). The hourglass portrays two important design insights. First is the notion that the network can be carved into conceptual layers. The exact […]
In Part I of this book I showed how generativity—both at the PC and network layers—was critical to the explosion of the Net, and how it will soon be critical to the explosion of the Net in a very different sense. In Part II I drill down a bit more into this concept of generativity. […]
In 1988 there were about sixty thousand computers connected to the Internet. Few of them were PCs.1 Instead, the Net was the province of mainframes, minicomputers, and professional workstations found at government offices, universities, and computer science research centers.2 These computers were designed to allow different people to run software on them at the same […]