The book has been submitted to the publisher on schedule!…

The Internet is a centrifugal force, user driven and open. These three characteristics have asserted themselves throughout  its history. Understanding them is the key to adapting to the new global commons, a political and media system in flux, and the future of competitive creativity.

Here’s a post about the Big Idea at the heart of the book …

Samples of the subjects:

• The bubble… (eBay, Amazon, Netscape, Webvan, Pets.com…)
• Innovation in the shadow of the Nuke
• The Music Industry: hope in the Long Tail and a long history of technological turmoil
• The MP3, its origins and impact
• New Audiences and the digital fourth wall
• The tulip, NASDAQ and the dot-com crash
• The decline of the newspaper
• Lord Byron’s daughter becomes world’s first programmer
• Communities beyond geography: the Phone Phreakers
• Short note on the virulent growth of WWW + Internet, 1988-1997
• Al Gore and the Internet
• The Big Idea: the death of the center and the new centrifugal trend
  
• ICANN becomes Independent!

The contents page looks like this:

—PHASE I: DISTRIBUTED NETWORK, CENTRIFUGAL IDEAS—
Chapter 1. A CONCEPT BORN IN THE SHADOW OF THE NUKE
Chapter 2. THE MILITARY EXPERIMENT
Chapter 3. THE ESSENCE OF THE INTERNET
Chapter 4. COMPUTERS BECOME CHEAP, FAST, AND COMMON
—PHASE II: EXPANSION—
Chapter 5. THE HOI POLLOI CONNECT
Chapter 6. COMMUNITIES  BASED ON INTEREST, NOT PROXIMITY
Chapter 7. FROM MILITARY NETWORKS TO THE GLOBAL INTERNET
Chapter 8. THE WEB!
Chapter 9. A PLATFORM FOR TRADE AND THE PITFALLS OF THE DOT COM
—PHASE III: THE EMERGING ENVIRONMENT p. 105Chapter 10. WEB 2.0 AND THE RETURN TO THE ORAL TRADITION—
Chapter 11. NEW AUDIENCES, THE FOURTH WALL, AND EXTRUDED MEDIA
Chapter 12. TWO WAY POLITICS
Chapter 13. PROMISE AND PERIL

This book will take the reader on a path through some of the most interesting events and documents of the last century. A few samples: wargame-style briefings outlining nuclear exchange scenarios presented to President Kennedy, memoranda from the Obama transition team in 2008, scientific proposals for resilient communications networks developed at RAND in the early 1960s, records of the US Air Force’s increasing reliance on statistics and research & development during WWII, Warran Buffet’s I-told-you-so letter to shareholders in the aftermath of the dot com bust, startling statistics of growth in value of eBay sales per year, schematics of Steve Wozniak’s Apple I computer… This book will be not only a history, but like all good histories, may say where we are bound in the future.

I’ve spoken to some interesting people recently, including Vint Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock, Steve Crocker, Robert Cailliau, Bob Metcalfe, Dave Crocker, Heidi Heiden, Shih-Pau Yen (inventor of Gopher), Bill Thompson, Gregor Bailar, Ralph Lee Smith (author of “Wired Nation” in 1970), Brian Pinkerton (search engine innovator), Gordon Bell, and Phil Madsen (man behind Jesse Ventura’s Internet driven 1998 campaign), Thomas Bruce (creator of Cello, the first PC web browser), Alan Emtage (inventor of Archie), Perry Pei Wei (creator of the first Unix WWW browser), Andrew Weinreich (founder of the first social network, sixdegrees.com), and Josh Tauberer, founder of GovTrack.us, Justin Williams (activist against the App Store NDA policy), Netfrack (the first MP3 pirate), Steven M. Bellovin (one of the founders of Usenet), Carlye Adler,  Marc Benioff. A range of people including Peter Kirstein, Howard Rheingold, Micah Sifry, Nick Yee, have helped with sources. The RAND Corporation have kindly permitted the reproduction of Paul Baran’s diagram on distributed networking.

The ideas in this book are have benefited from the insights of thought, business, and policy leaders who participated at the IIEA Digital Future Group since October 2007, including Timothy Wu, Viviane Reding (European Commissioner for Media & Information Society), Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia), Peter Fleischer (Chief Privacy Counsel of Google Inc.), H.E. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Jonathan Zittrain, and US Congressman Rick Boucher.

[image: a selection of books on my shelf at the moment]

The publisher is Reaktion Press, an interesting publishing house that produces books like A Cultural History of Boxing – see The Economist’s review of that book here. They distribute in the US through the University of Chicago Press. According to Wikipedia, Reaktion was runner-up for the Sunday Times Small Publisher of the Year Award in 1996, 1997, and 1999, and was shortlisted in 2003

What I need are suggestions on the title. Last time I made the mistake of using a 17 word title. What is the 1 word that encapsulates the subject, possibly extending to 3 words? I think OPENNESSS is the element about which the Net’s history has often pivoted, and upon which future political, business, and social development in the digital environment may depend. Equally, the decentralising character of the Internet and its flattening of hierarchies and empowerment of individuals evokes the image of the CENTRIFUGE. Any ideas, comment below. I’m considering one of the following four:

• OPENNESS: a history of the Internet and its lessons for the future of business, politics, and society
• CENTRIFUGE: a history of the Internet and its lessons for the future of business, politics, and society
• INTERNET: the centrifugal force of the Internet and its lessons for the future of business, politics, and society
• A history of the Internet and its lessons for the future of business, politics, and society

See a note here about the word ‘Openness’, which has a little controversy surrounding it in some circles…

[image: my desk in Cambridge]