William Gibson’s Neuromancer was a highly imaginative and insightful exploration of the possibilities implicit in the technology. One of the few elements that did not correspond to reality was the idea of the “walled city” - an enclosed area, a playground for freethinkers shut off from the rest of the net. As it’s turned out, the progressive elements of the web are nourished by, and depend on, openness, not exclusivity.
The real “walled cities” on the web today are, in fact, run by deeply reactionary plutocrats, inhabited by naive users who entrust their data to the owners of these networks for whatever use they make from it.
Facebook is a perfect case in point. Look at this thread on the PV3D mailing list; developers tend to be more wary of handing over their data than other web users, in much the same way as someone who’s worked in the kitchen of a restaurant may be more concious of the corners people cut with food hygiene. But there it is: people use it, so what we do? Make fake accounts with dummy data, I guess, for the purposes of testing.
Ultimately though, until people understand the inherent undesirability, the anti-web-ness, of a website whose entire contents are unavailable unless you sign up and hand over your data, the problem won’t go away. OK, maybe people will be won over by some future killer app based on OpenSocial. But then they can get wooed back to the darkness by another Scrabulous type app. They have to be doing the right thing for the right reason, for sites like Facebook to wither (or become more open).
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