complich8′s journal

So, I ran into the slashdot-linked businessweek editorial on the broken state of intellectual property, and of course the obligatory followups (supporting and rejecting the conclusions of the article).

And it sort of makes me think … you know?

3 years ago, the state of the patent system was nobody’s concern but the fringe media. Basically technocrats and geeks the world over cared, because it impacted them. However, the mainstream media didn’t register it as a remote radar blip.

Now, this is entering more than just fringe media. Businessweek is somewhat mainstream. All we need is a big story on it for CNN and FOX and MSNBC to jump on it, and then we’ll have ALL the mainstream media in the IP-commentary game.

Which brings me to the thrust…

In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed more and more that obscure techie matter has been absorbed by the mainstream. Now you occasionally see news reports about virus outbreaks, tomorrow it’ll be new exploits in commonly used software products.

At the same time, we see a mainstreaming of the pseudo-geek image. The Napoleon Dynamite phenomenon, the age of the ipod, semi-ubiquitous computing (aka “my 80 year old grandma has broadband”), social networking (facebook, flickr, technorati, del.icio.us) … all working together to bring technology into focus for the masses.

Are these universally appealing technologies democratizing the very nerddom which even as recently as 3 years ago was unfashionable? Is it to the point that you not only have to do cool things, but you have to do them stylishly while wearing trendy clothes and emo glasses? When did tech get hijacked by fashion?

I think it’s apple’s fault. Stupid goddamned ipod. Damned business-suited body-pierced cyberpunks. Damned hipsters, the beatniks of our time. (a sidebar on “second orality” could digress from here, but I’ll save it for another day)

It’s interesting though. This NYTimes editorial ponders on a key point: in the world of physics, Einstein was a brilliant physicist among a small field of peers, and suggests that there are people on par with Einstein today, but that they’re somewhat marginalized because there’s so many of them.

At the same time, let’s ponder the IT world. With that analogy, back in the days of barbarian computing (ie: before windows, before linux, before the dawn of the interactive terminal even), there were a few great people. Thompson and Ritchie, Dijkstra, Von Neumann, Knuth. There’s even a few modern/more recent ones that have attained almost legendary status (The MS crew, Larry Wall, Linus, RMS, Bram Cohen). But with all of the giants around, it may be that it’s harder to attain legendary nerddom status than it was in the 80′s or the 30′s.

I think there’s a link there though. Physics became a more globally interesting field, with advances in industry and education, and with the intellectual overshadowing of the A-bomb. Since then, the field has grown crowded, with the best and brightest people that could be attracted to it going to it.

IT became big with the whole dot-com era, attracting a lot of people to the field. Now it, too, is becoming mainstream (and arguably as poorly understood as physics). Is the same thing also going to happen? Is there a place for a rogue software designer to boldly go, where no tenured professor at a major university has gone before? Are there important questions left in the field of technology, that will make great scientists do their thing as great scientists? Or is the field tapped out, focusing on what, to the field as a whole, are obscure minutiae that are only vaguely tangential to the important questions?

Is computer science largely a solved problem? Is all that’s left mere software engineering? In other words, is there room for individual innovation, or is the environment so saturated on the meat that all that’s left is the presentation?

I don’t think it is, but I have to agree with the article’s implication that the subject is “getting small”. That is … the problems aren’t “how do I write an efficient sort” — they’re “how do I make it easier to write gui elements” and “how do I make my UI look nicer” and “how do I make this interrupt mechanism 3% faster”.

I dunno where I was going with this, but I still think it’s an interesting parallel between the physics world 100 years ago and the tech world 20 years ago. Maybe it’s just me :-p

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 8:37 pm and is filed under On the net/In the news, observational. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.