In the wake of the Google aquisition of YouTube, Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge writes “What is truth? or, the old patterns repeat” concluding with

We can’t afford for one company (or any algorithm) to organise information for the world.

I have a response which is waiting in the moderation queue, which for some reason prompts me to publish it here right away. ( Impatience appears to be one of the possible negative by-products of a connected lifestyle).

….

The trend for markets to become dominated by irreversible giant monopolies has been documented for a century or two now, so this process is hardly new. Perhaps there’s nothing intrinsically different about internet technology which is going to somehow protect it from the greater influences of ownership and control in society. But that isn’t a forgone conclusion for me. I suspect that the network infrastructure itself is a progressive thing, but that the superstructure which is built on top of the network, by such as google, is subject to the normal laws of prevalent economic and social relations.

So having said “We can’t afford for one company (or any algorithm) to organise information for the world.” what do you propose we do about it?

More anti-trust laws?

Intervention to try and reverse market forces in order to preserve the illusion of a healthy market?

Siezure of the means of production and distribution of information as a commodity, to be reorganised under international democratic workers’ control and management?
(Well you did mention Trotsky…)

Back to the primacy of the network, I suspect that if services such as Google begin to become not useful to the network, then the network will innovate once more and pretty rapidly come up with alternatives to reliance on Google.

I’ve been exploring YouTube a bit recently, mainly because my initial experience was a positive one, uncovering more and more rare bonzo dog band footage. This one was found on google video though, and I missed the ability to save it to favourites within the application, so the best option seemed to be to blog it.

This archive BBC video has everything.

Multimedia, Hypermedia, Micons, Douglas Adams, Tom Baker, Kurt Vonnegut, Bach, Picasso, Gernika. Shape, Language, DNA, Non linear fiction, virtual reality.

The future looked good in those days, perhaps. (date?)

But as commented, the dream has not become reality yet. Who was supposed to make all the media clips, link it all together and provide it for free. Instead all we have is Wikipedia and blogs. And YouTube, of course.

17 years old according to Epeus’ epigone