Russell Kirsch says he’s sorry.More than 50 years ago, Kirsch took a picture of his infant son and scanned it into a computer. It was the first digital image: a grainy, black-and-white baby picture that literally changed the way we view the world. With it, the smoothness of images captured on film was shattered to bits.
The square pixel became the norm, thanks in part to Kirsch, and the world got a little bit rougher around the edges.
Yet science is still grappling with the limits set by the square pixel.
“Squares was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch says. “Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.”
I read this as “____ was the logical thing to do. Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used _____."
I'll elaborate on how the idea of "the logical thing to do" relates to control/decentralization/self vs human interest by beginning with an excerpt from TechCrunch's take on the potential implications of/reactions to Google Me:
This obviously has the potential to be huge, and Facebook needs a strong competitor. But even if Google has an amazing site in the pipeline, creating the next Facebook is going to be easier said than done — nearly 500 million people already have their content stored on Facebook, and despite what Facebook has claimed about being open, I doubt they’ll make it easy for anyone to jump into the arms of a competitor.
The logical business move for an organization like Facebook, facing the threat of a competitor drawing from their user base, is to implement measures that make it less worthwhile for users to switch. Or, more directly, make it difficult for other competitors to draw followers in.
(This happens all the time in the tech/digital/social world, of course; while grabbing the above link from TechCrunch, I saw the following in their "Featured Articles" section: Twitpic Blocks Posterous’ Import Tool; Out Come The Lawyers)
What Kirsch above is apologizing for is that in the human-wide interest of future development, a standard was set without the foresight of understanding how that standard would actually impact future development.
I'm of the mind that given our limited capacity for calculating that impact, there's really nothing to apologize for in this case. Contrast this to the tech control battles, which are a matter of self-interest. Tim O'Reilly comments on this below, in a discussion of the Internet of Things:
"You see increasingly the giants of the internet are trading for their own account, they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that, we have to work for openess in that web."
It's an expression of our natural human short-sightededness, to measure 'success' as a reflection of 'control'; that is to say it's natural for us to think that if your platform controls more users, your platform is 'successful'. This notion of "success through control" has of course been reflected time and again ever since humans began fighting each other over the control of resources.
The key question to ask has always been that of the degree of efficiency allowed by centralized control versus the degree of efficiency allowed by distributed openness.
Returning to the "___ is the logical thing to do": centralizing resources is not the only possibility, but it is the one that makes logical sense in the immediate-term. In fact, for a good amount of human history, going to war in an attempt to centralize resources could be argued as the better of the two options in the key question just highlighted. But in a new world where advanced communication networks allow for an exponentially greater degree of efficiency allowed by decentralization (especially in the long-term), I'm not so sure control is the right answer anymore.
