Notes from The Second Coming - A Manifesto
July 23, 2005
David Gelernter has been through a lot, from inventing computer languages and forecasting the WWW to suffering a misguided Unabomber blast. This manifesto, written in 2000, is already beginning to come true…
Google’s on the right track, basing their model on the world’s best “collection of information”.
9 The computing future is based on “cyberbodies” — self-contained, neatly-ordered, beautifully-laid-out collections of information, like immaculate giant gardens.
Browser == “tuner”?
11 Your whole electronic life will be stored in a cyberbody. You can summon it to any tuner at any time.
This reminds me of Google’s “Turn OFF personalized results”:
13 Any well-designed next-generation electronic gadget will come with a “Disable Omniscience” button.
Yet he likes the desktop model for computing; what about “tuners”?
19 The power of desktop machines is a magnet that will reverse today’s “everything onto the Web!” trend. Desktop power will inevitably drag information out of remote servers onto desktops.
The idea behind BitTorrent?
20 If a million people use a Web site simultaneously, doesn’t that mean that we must have a heavy-duty remote server to keep them all happy? No; we could move the site onto a million desktops and use the internet for coordination.
Ha ha, David Kelley!
23 The computer mouse was a brilliant invention, but we can see today that it is a bad design. Like any device that must be moved and placed precisely, it ought to provide tactile feedback; it doesn’t.
Why “files” and “folders” (even in email) are a bad idea:
Computers are fundamentally unlike file cabinets because they can take action.
Proposing autonaming? Sort by attribute? Or (gasp!) search?
30 If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.
Well, I could have told you this:
34 In the beginning, computers dealt mainly in numbers and words. Today they deal mainly with pictures. In a new period now emerging, they will deal mainly with tangible time — time made visible and concrete. Chronologies and timelines tend to be awkward in the off-computer world of paper, but they are natural online.
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