Conversation

Replying to
11/ About 150 years ago, if you wanted to drive societal change through institutions, you'd fund things like universities: "mission boxes"
1
5
12/ The boxes got smaller and smaller. Institutional ambitions went from nation-state level to university level, to lab level
1
1
13/ At some point, rather than get smaller, institutional ambitions began manifesting in unboxed forms and calling themselves "networks"
1
5
14/ Institutional forms didn't suddenly "discover" networks as an organizing structure. They merely unboxed them and allowed them to connect
1
1
15/ Example: founders of w00w00, the hacker collective, cited Xerox PARC as an inspiration. PARC was a network in a leaky box, w00w00=no box
2
1
17/ Unlike unbundling/rebundling of content/functionality, which is relatively lossless, unboxing/reboxing tends to be extremely lossy
1
18/ Some "box" functions migrate to interior. Bibliographic references of books turn into hot links inside the text. Indices become search.
1
2
19/ But many are lost. Since a lot of the logic contained in box layer serves longer-term meta-functions, you don't notice till too late
1
2
20/ One sign is shifting patterns in institutional funding. Unboxing is often accompanied by big cost reductions. Not all is wastecutting
2
2
22/ Indirect cost support (the ~50% overhead univs get for government research funding) was important historically because it was box money
1
2
Replying to
24/ There is a tendency to believe that Internet can magically substitute for box-level functions in organic/emergent ways. True and false.
1
2
25/ True part: Self-organizing systems can evolve the right structures to capture any kind of value a top-down designed "box" can
1
1
26/ False part: they can do so at zero cost. When you unbox and rebox the research university, you don't have to create a new kind of box...
1
3
27/ But your "emergent box" (for example, fora like arXiv) do need the equivalent of indirect cost support flowing towards them somehow
1
3
28/ A broad way to understand this is that the Internet, as an institutional stack base-layer, lacks indirection/persistence dynamics
1
1
29/ So while I'm all for de-institutionalizing the Industrial Age and its dinosaur institutions, I'm skeptical that it will be lossless
1
3
30/ The Internet is not institutional magic-sauce. It can't create something out of nothing, or costlessly store/embody stuff.
1
2
31/ The net needs financial plumbing to fuel network-mode reboxing that can persist value of no immediate value but that we'll regret losing
1
2
32/ "Reboxing" is the wrong term actually. Unboxing is the right term for the destruction process, but the creation process deals in flows
1
1
33/ We need flow metaphors for reboxing. Something like adding insulating layers to pipes or something. Not entirely sure where to take that
1
2