Root Cause

I don't follow a lot of the trends and thoughts of the larger information technology culture cum economy. (A deliberate construction that harkens back to Doc's pernicious aphorism that, "Markets are conversations." Culture being a social construct that often frames "conversations," while economies and markets are systems of transactions. We can discuss culture as an element of a "social system," but they remain fundamentally, orthogonally different.) Having digressed, I'll spare you "the weave," and try to get back on point. Back in the day, when I was a young and foolish, I used to think that technology was great. That changes in technology represented progress. That the future was going to be better. And I used to follow all the discussions, the debates, the competing ideas. It seemed as though there were solutions to the eventual conundrums that arose when technology empowered people to do things that were in tension with economic interests. (Napster? "Rip. Mix. Burn."?) The whole…