Composers
From “Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy”:
“[Composers] who lose their youthful rebelliousness are in grave danger of losing their talent as well. Such was the destiny of Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens. After a youth brimming in confidence and daring, Mendelssohn essentially worked himself to death in academic life, all the while becoming more and more conservative in his outlook and more and more detail-oriented in his composing — a perfectionism he described late in life as his 'dread disease.' Saint-Saens suffered a worse fate, becoming so reactionary late in life that he schemed to quash the careers of youthful free spirits like Debussy. He once wrote in regret, 'I ran after the chimera of purity of style and perfection of form.' The innovative Berlioz, who knew Saint-Saens as a glittering prodigy, was less charitable: 'He knows everything but lacks inexperience.'”
Dream Machine
In our musings about the accountable net meme/essay/road show, I and my co-authors have thought that a positive view of accountability (friends pointing friends to great content) might be a breakthrough. Rather than just shielding ourselves from spam/spyware/security problems by only accepting bits from sources we can verify (something that technology is now making possible), we could also be pointed by our friends to great, worthwhile stuff. Like blogs, but bigger.
The problem is, as Cory Doctorow reminded us three years ago, that people are lazy, people lie, it's hard to describe things, and no schemes are neutral. So it might be difficult to rely only on the individual choices of content of people/ISPs you trust to get you to things you want to see.
Of course, Doctorow's comment was about metadata. And it might be that you could create an aggregated set of links that was really the collection of useful stuff that people you trust had decided to link to — rather than stuff that had been described in some consistent way.
But people are still lazy, and they still do lie, and it's hard to get them to join block associations. Some people join, sure, but not everyone. Is it too optimistic to hope that virtual block associations will arise to point us to worthwhile material, while protecting us from destructive bits? Maybe. And our machines are increasingly dark to us — incomprehensible boxes that swallow useful text without warning. (For a different view of computers, read Dream Machine by Waldrop. I just tried to link to it and lost this post, twice, so you're on your own in finding it.)
Anyway, the question is whether the accountable net can also be the pathway to everything useful and worthwhile online, and if this new net, built by us, can avoid the problems that make governments want to regulate. Stay tuned — road show begins this week.