Jimmy Wales on Disruptive Technology
Next up the panel of Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Niklas Zennström (Skype, KaZaA, Joost), and Mitchell Baker (Mozilla) ponder the subject of "disruption" in relation to breaking old business models. When asked how he felt about busting the old encyclopedia model, Jimmy Wales responded, “I’m a bad man†… Technorati, 27 Jan 2010.
Cited by Jon Awbrey 18:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Jimbo's statement illustrates the fact that anything we do "disturbs the universe" (
Freeman Dyson) to some degree, and it's equally trite but true to say that "life is an experiment" for all of us. Jimbo thinks he's a "bad man" in the nicest possible way, I'm guessing, and Wikipedians think that it's just tough luck for anyone who doesn't like their experiments with disruptive social-technical forms.
So firing those kinds of words back and forth does very little to settle the question of when a perturbance has crossed a line too far or when a rupture has ruptured something we'd like to preserve. Life, the experiment, is just not that simple.
Which brings us back to all the years and centuries and millennia that civilizations around and before us have devoted to saying what it means to be civil.
Jon Awbrey 20:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Meta-Templates For Meta-Con-Templation, If I've Said This Once, I'll Say It 10³ Times
