One of the great draws to me of working in the new industrialized IT, aka the Cloud, is the real possibility it gives for a disruptive change in the way we live and organize ourselves. A thing that has been awfully difficult for me is the extent to which some fraction of my skills are always sitting on the bench depending upon the IT infrastructure of my next client. It might be 6 or it might be 18 months between projects when I get to use my Perl skills, which of course atrophy in the meantime. Between product cycles of one application or another, there will be a host of shortcuts I will have to discover on my own.
But I am taking the approach of a farmer here. As I look forward to this new industry, I want to settle in my own version of the English village and cultivate rows of code agriculture. It is an appropriate analogy for the management of structured data. I too will have my various almanacs and real-time cohorts by my virtual side, especially in collaborative projects somewhere along the data supply chain as I provide one piece of specialization using products from my supplier and passing it on to my customer. In the case of my OLAP engine experience, I work with an ETL guy and pass on to a report writing guy, and sometimes I do a little of both.
Information economies will be the enablers of the future. Ties to communities that are dispersed geographically, tied every once in a while to meetups, and in sporadic ad hoc communications over subjects of interest are going to become the organizing paradigms for the next generation here in the US and the first world. I grow more confident as the years go by that people who engineer networks of knowledge are going to have more say in society than ever. It was my reading of Cryptonomicon many years ago that got me thinking that this could be more than dormroom talk for CS wonks, and my recent studies of geopolitics and intelligence confirms it in different ways.
Most interestingly and somewhat tangential to the nuts and bolts of the 'outsourced IT worker' is the extent to which knowledge frameworks themselves will become more important, by that I mean philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. Why? Because I am convinced that in a relatively short space of years we will have analytic networks that will make short work of the sort of dissonant information gaps between those who could know and those who do know. In other words, we'll have the facts so fast and so transparently that the only really interesting thing left to do with them is interpret them according to our philosophical frameworks. And those are going to be the things we will start to organize next.
What will be the most difficult part of that, naturally, will be what I often hear in various corporate cultures called 'socialization'. That is to say the political work required to get things through thick or disinterested skulls. Today, various bureaucratic inefficiencies allow us the luxury of being stupid, indifferent and otherwise out of the loop. The future will not allow that because so much more will be identified and disseminated. We will have knowledge shock. Imagine a world in which everybody's salary becomes public knowledge. That kind of shock of facts will force us to acknowledge things about others and about ourselves that we previously could not make judgments about, and what's going to be even more frustrating is that we will know the extent to which we care about what we can know will or will not matter. This is another reason why our meta-organizations, our philosophical frameworks, our religions, our politics, our circles of trust, our social networks will be so much more important than they are today. They will be our virtual English villages.
I think that I would very much like to live in a literal physical English village, so long as it had delivery of Thai food or maybe a WalMart within 30 minutes. I very much like the idea of being virtually close but physically remote. When people can be so intimate with my facts and information because of the online world, whose industrical cultivation is fast approaching, I think I'd like a lot of physical space between me and the millions. I think of the English village as that remote from where I sit at this moment in Southern California, but how remote is it actually from infrastructural logistics ? That's the measurement of the ideal distance.
On the other hand from data and knowledge farmers are hunters and gatherers. Think of Bear Grylls or the guys who drive the Google camera cars. Think of a new generation of digital paparazzi with their uber digital vacuum cleaners stringing home terabits of raw data from around the planet. Just look at your teenaged kids. What kind of digital dirt will they be tracking into your house? This is how I'm thinking about the future of the supply chain of the digital economy.
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