I just finished Linked: How everything is connected to everything else. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ABookSources&isbn=0452284392

The book is about scale free networks. It was extremely interesting especially since I had previously re-read Jeff Hawkin’s “On Intelligence.” I haltingly remember one little factoid for Linked ; that website with opposing views are rarely linked to together and that website with similar views tend to link together. This is seemingly a new introduction into our world’s forms of media and communication, the condensation of ideas into rarely interactive opposing networks. Since my job as CTO is to predict the future, I often wonder what this portends for us. The Tower of Babel story comes to mind… broken into opposing cultures and languages, the world’s inhabitants were lead into confusion and later this confusion lead to warring nations. Far from bringing the world together, the internet may indeed force us apart, into increasingly polarized volatile communities – that is a recipe for conflict. This conflict will happen on the virtual boundaries of the internet and not any current geo-political boundaries. If one looks for it you can see today at every level on the internet from large political discussions to minor sports team fans pages; an increase in polarization. I am beginning to fear the exploitation of that polarization even more the nuclear war with the USSR that I feared as child. Fortunately as a child, I had several people which shared my fear which help me understand there was a barrier to it happening – I don’t see the same barriers to prevent polarization and it happily goes on. The second law of thermodynamics is intact and the future is not a pretty as we think…

Joe McDevitt
CTO