1. The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain. The main claim is that everything will be sterile, tethered appliances. The opening up of the iPhone would seem to bely this message plus competition usually works in giving consumers what they want. A smart book (that is rare for internet books, oddly) but I suspect it will prove to be wrong.
2. Paul Auster, Man in the Dark. Reviews for this work have a bimodal distribution. I like most of Auster’s books but I vote no.
3. The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson. So far this is excellent junk reading.
4. Epilogue, by Anne Roiphe. Ideally this book deserves its own post but it is difficult to excerpt. It’s about why the author, now a widow, finds it hard to fall in love again. Definitely recommended.
5. The Boy with Two Belly Buttons, by Stephen Dubner. It’s a children’s book. I haven’t read so many of these since Mr. Pines Paints a Purple House — my favorite as a tot — but to me it seemed very good. Ages 4-8.
How open is the iPhone? (I’d think the success or failure of Google’s Android will be a real test.)
Re: Gargoyle, but the author’s obnoxious bio is off-putting.
Epilogue sounds like a definite get. How does it compare to The Year of Magical Thinking?
plus competition usually works in giving consumers what they want
Usually, but the internet is already saddled with anti-competitive regulation.
(Relatedly, what everyone else said about the iPhone not being open.)
“The opening up of the iPhone would seem to bely this message plus competition usually works in giving consumers what they want.”
The iPhone is not particularly open. Apple has 100% veto power over everything and takes a cut of the revenues from applications.
Competition is great, but Adam Smith was quite clear in his belief that businessmen rarely talk to each other without turning to ways to collude against the consume. The Internet is not immune.
The open internet and WWW did not just happen, but were the result of a great deal of hard work by people like David Clark and Tim Berners-Lee who actively and mostly successfully fought back efforts by commercial entities to create walled gardens of incompatible technologies and/or monopoly-controlled standards. Certainly that has happened in the past with other platforms and it’s not a stretch that it could happen in the future. Nor is such an outcome likely to be beneficial to welfare or consumers, even if some individuals and businesses would benefit enormously.
The risks are especially great if we grow complacent and assume the invisible hand will automatically prevent Zittrain’s future. Pay heed to Adam Smith, history and people like Zittrain and Berners-Lee who are on the front lines of the ongoing battles to preserve openness..
Careful, one of your loyal readers is in the acknowledgments for #1!
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