18/ Some "box" functions migrate to interior. Bibliographic references of books turn into hot links inside the text. Indices become search.
Conversation
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
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20/ One sign is shifting patterns in institutional funding. Unboxing is often accompanied by big cost reductions. Not all is wastecutting
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22/ Indirect cost support (the ~50% overhead univs get for government research funding) was important historically because it was box money
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23/ Indirect cost support *created* the research university after WW II. It didn't happen by magic. Something deinstitutionalizers don't get
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24/ There is a tendency to believe that Internet can magically substitute for box-level functions in organic/emergent ways. True and false.
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25/ True part: Self-organizing systems can evolve the right structures to capture any kind of value a top-down designed "box" can
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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...
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27/ But your "emergent box" (for example, fora like arXiv) do need the equivalent of indirect cost support flowing towards them somehow
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28/ A broad way to understand this is that the Internet, as an institutional stack base-layer, lacks indirection/persistence dynamics
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29/ So while I'm all for de-institutionalizing the Industrial Age and its dinosaur institutions, I'm skeptical that it will be lossless
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30/ The Internet is not institutional magic-sauce. It can't create something out of nothing, or costlessly store/embody stuff.
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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
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32/ "Reboxing" is the wrong term actually. Unboxing is the right term for the destruction process, but the creation process deals in flows
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33/ We need flow metaphors for reboxing. Something like adding insulating layers to pipes or something. Not entirely sure where to take that
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