A few months ago, on July 8th 2008, I shot this video at Odense harbour. I didn’t manage to edit it until the 25th. Then my dog died from one week to the other, and I didn’t do any real work on the Kaplak Blog for a complete month. I didn’t at all feel like presenting myself on video on the web, like nothing ever happened. I was ripped to pieces.
I am coming back, though, and what I say in this video is of core importance to what we do in Kaplak. It’s what makes sense of what we do, even when the outside world can’t make sense of it and even when we sometimes ourselves lose focus, when we discuss or dive into technicalities of niche products, long tail distribution, web filtering methods, free software, bittorrent seedboxes and twitter tools.
Here’s the full quote :
The question is, if the tools we have right now are sufficient for us to find relevant information, which we need for our lives, for our businesses, for our children’s educations – and everything in our lives. If these tools are sufficient to survive this onslaught of material which is added to the internet every month. There are millions of new websites created every month, and seach engines can only show a limited amount of results on a results page. So there’s a lot of things which are lost in the filters we use right now to filter the internet. Luckily, there are a lot of new filters and new tools, which are being developed all over the world. So some of these new tools will help us find the information that we need. But the question is, who is it going to be, and what are those tools going to be like, and who is going to control those tools? Those are the really big questions, as we see it.
What’s at stake, in other words is how we filter the web and find information. That’s one thing, and we’re working on it – and so are a lot of very talented people, all over the world.
The other thing is who is going to control these architectures of information. This part is a lot more tricky. This is where free software, the copyfight, DRM activism and ‘cloud computing ideology‘ comes into the picture. This is also why we don’t really like social networks, but love RSS feeds.
To get at the second thing, however, we need to create a sustainable business on the first. But these things are connected, and each day we walk the delicate path between falling into the trap of entrusting our information to proprietary designs, on the one hand – and on the other hand, our vision of a future, where each peer in a global peer-to-peer network of everyone of us is capable of reaching out to whoever he or she wants to connect to. Where even marginal products can be sold, and unpopular messages get out to the people who wants them, without being filtered by the centralized algoritms of corporate monopolies or crude filters of nasty regimes, or without, what is at least equally as bad, being buried in mountains of spam or mainstream crap.
