Talker's Technologies

The harder a technology is to work with, the more room it leaves for fantasy, speculation, for everything from tweets to sci-fi novels.

The harder a technology is to work with, the more room it leaves for fantasy, speculation, for everything from tweets to sci-fi novels.

No sci-fi novel predicted blogs, forums, chatrooms ... To predict these things would have been to invent them.

We can think of blogs, forums and chatrooms as text technologies. We had text for 5000 years and have been figuring out how to use computers to share text for 50 years. Are we done yet? Is the way we share text now perfect?

Text is easy to work with, I expect more innovation in text for that reason, but it's precisely for the same reason that there's little speculation about the future of text.

If you have an idea for a text technology, you have to explain why no one implement this already. Maybe because no one had that idea before? But that explanation only works for a short time. If it's good, someone should implement the idea soon.

Compare this to the endless speculation about VR, from sci-fi novel to philosophical treatises.

Compare also web2 to web3. Any web3 idea I've ever heard is something that you could easily implement in web2 ("in a weekend" as web2 programmers like to say) if anyone actually wanted it. If you shared such an idea as a startup idea, or a web2 idea, people would ask the obvious question: Why has no one done that yet? Web3 offers this hand-wavy answer - well it requires some complex cryptography that we still have to figure out.