Singularity? Or Gravitational Collapse?

Sarah Dopp points us to a Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us, a piece of fatuous Web 2.0 cheerleading that tells us that ZOMG! the Web changes everything!!!111!!:

What particularly gets up my nose is the claim that syndications like RSS, Atom, FeedBurner et al. RELEASE CONTENT FOREVER FROM THE STRICTURES OF FORM ZOMG!!!!11!

Horsepuckey.

You can't separate content from form. Content cannot exist without form. The interpretation of form is how we determine content.

The reason syndications enable display of content in a variety of forms is that the content so displayed is highly constrained.

I've heard these "There will be Pie in the Sky when you join MySpace" claims before. Remember the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchy? Strong cryptography was supposed to bring on the Infocalypse and end government. Well, we've got strong cryptography, and the Feds are still tapping our phones.

Meanwhile, Mark Gritter points us to Karl Auerbach, who asks the question, Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

You would have thought that in this internet age that we might have learned that clarity of internet protocol design is a great virtue and that management, diagnostics, and security are not afterthoughts but primary design goals.

There is a lot of noise out there about internet stability. And a lot of people and businesses are risking their actual and economic well being on the net, and the applications layered on it, really being stable and reliable.

But I have great concern that our approach to the internet resembles a high pillar of round stones piled on top of other round stones - we should not be surprised when it begins to wobble and then falls to the ground.

I am beginning to foresee a future internet in which people involved in management, troubleshooting, and repair are engaged in a Sisyphean effort to provide service in the face of increasingly non-unified design of internet protocols. And in that future, users will have to learn to expect outages and become accustomed to dealing with service provider customer service "associates" whose main job is to buy time to keep customers from rioting while the technical repair team tries to figure out what happened, where it happened, and what to do about it.

What's the bloody use of a vast externalized memory and reasoning capabilty that takes ten minutes to load a page and is filled with dead links because the routers are down?