1. If, by initial design, ‘packet switching’ can survive nuclear war, how can it be controlled?

The late, and reflexive, capitalism struggles with the anarchy, makes a short-term ‘quid’ and moves on—to the next quarterly earnings report.

2. If ‘hobbyism’ is one of those increasingly affordable ‘affordances’ for the dis-employed, can they not ‘organize?

The ‘Talking Tree’ in pre-revolutionary Paris comes to mind.

3. Is this not the ultimate ‘subversion’?

(Himanen has made some arguments to the Finnish Parliament that innovation and a welfare state are intertwined. Perhaps this is the real ‘terrorism’ threat to the ‘maddies’ runnning, in some ways, their own ‘pension programs’, or anti-social ‘security’, elsewhere.

4. Does anyone have the least idea?

I don’t think so, and am with Henry on “weird”.

The weird are going ‘shopping’—and they are…we don’t know.

Blogging is non-economic like a hobby, but it’s still a source of economically relevant innovations. RSS is a big example of something that’s spread from blogs to the Internet in general and RSS is significant not only in itself but as the first big application of XML.

And what’s true for blogging now has been true for the Internet as a whole. It’s the hobbyists/consumers/household sector who’ve driven the advances and the corporate and government sectors that have followed them.

The dotcom boom was supposed to show that hobbyist development (with government backing) was an immature phase and that the corporate sector was now ready to take over. But what it showed instead was that corporate business had no idea how to turn leading-edge innovation into profits, or even into a business plan sustainable long enough to deliver substantial real innovation.

One question: Isn’t Abramson’s proposal for limited copyright for software essentially describing patent protection? Disclose one’s innovation publicly, and get a few years’ monopoly? Perhaps that’s the central problem with software law: At the outset, software code should have been recognized as a patentable device, rather than a copyrightable literary work.

One small quibble: I’m not sure that your point about blogging goes too far, because I don’t think blogging represents any sort of innovative economic activity. Rather, it’s a hobby, like skateboarding, beading, or plain-paper diary writing. Some few individuals make money at those things, but as with any hobby, most people do it because they like it, not because they expect to get paid.