The End of Linearity

Gary Thompson, is not only the curator of The End of Linearity, but the co-founder of CLOUD, Inc. CLOUD will be the manifestation of much of the thinking embodied by the End of Linearity. Those posts that relate more to Gary’s thinking than just CLOUD’s thinking are shared here.

The following discussion has been posted in a number of the LinkedIn groups (Gary was at Apple from 1987-97, and 2003-2006):

As Apple builds out iCloud, we at CLOUD are building out something equally exciting: the next Internet. A few months back, I posted a discussion here asking how Knowledge Navigator connected the Amazon and the Sahara data sets.

I loved Knowledge Navigator’s vision and remember showing this video during customer events frequently when I was in the sales office in Chicago for Apple in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Siri, the iPad, FaceTime… so much of Knowledge Navigator has come true. With all these advances, there is still an underlying need for something like HTML but for privacy, security, identity and data to create the digital fabric underlying Knowledge Navigator.

If you visit CLOUDCircles, my TEDxAustin talk, “Reweaving the Fabric of the Internet to Transform Humanity,” is available in the videos. I know my ability to Think Different is driven by my over a decade at Apple.

If you wish to support this vision and the work of a fellow Apple alum to make it happen, CLOUDCircles is also our crowdfunding mechanism. The Apple CLOUDCircle can be found by clicking on People, because at the end of the day, people are what made and still make Apple Apple.

Nowhere is the end of linearity more important than our individual rights, and Set the Default to Open takes a new look at this issue from both a legal and technology perspective.

From the introduction to the article in the forthcoming Texas Review of Law and Politics, Volume 14, Issue 1:

Rugged individualism and religious and economic freedom are among the most important factors that have contributed to the growth of U.S. global power and prestige and the welfare of its citizens since the founding of the original colonies. The trajectory of freedom has not always been smooth; however, the United States has remained a powerful example of the benefits and resilience of constitutional democracy. It has weathered a civil war and two world wars, grown from the shores of the Atlantic to the northern reaches of the Pacific, become a global economic and technological powerhouse, and even treated the great wound of slavery.

In the midst of this success the underlying tension in constitutional democracy—the force behind U.S. power and prestige—has the capacity to muddle the national vision. Tension between individual rights and the state is not new. It stretches from antiquity to the Renaissance to the modern world. The U.S. Constitution represents an attempt to codify the social contract between the government and its citizens in an enduring document that supports a functioning government and society. Continue reading →

I am at the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC, and as the many great panels and conversations unfold, I realized that I needed to post some of my recent conversations around social networking into the public sphere.

As more and more of us tap into destination sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn and MySpace, it is critical to understand that like email, these types of all-in-one sites are very unInternet.

The most critical aspect of the Internet is that there is no there there. Continue reading →

This past Friday, I had the pleasure of being a guest lecturer for a Digital Media class in the Department of Advertising at the University of Texas at Austin. The class is deep into the semester and about to begin their semester project, fusing Web 2.0 and social networks. This is a topic that is close to my heart and one I enjoyed sharing some thoughts on.

Professor Gene Kincaid has assigned excerpts from The ClueTrain Manifesto, a book that has driven much of my thinking regarding the Internet over the past several years. In the context of Digital Media and advertising, it could not be a better text. Its focus on ‘conversations’ captures the essence of marketing and the power of evolving social networks and Web 2.0. Continue reading →