Stephen Downes

This response to David Weinberger and Doc Searls's article 'World of Ends' challenges some now popular opinions, and especially the idea that value in a network is created at the end, not the middle. But is a smart network a bad thing? Look at Google - that's smart, isn't it? And what about the telephone system, which worked well for 100 years and was smart because it had to be. I'm not sure I buy the hard-core capitalism that underlies this item (after all, much of the internet was not created using investment dollars). As for the rest, well, food for thought.