WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !
Liquefaction. A word to savour. Sensuously sliding off the surface of your tongue. Liquefaction, the process of liquefying; the process of turning something that was not a liquid into a liquid.
For the last day and a half, I was ensconced with my team at work, seeing where we’re trying to go, reviewing how we’re getting there, working out what we can do better. All made more enjoyable because we had the privilege of Doc working with us.
Jeremy and his team spent some time showing us the things we’d been able to do with Tiddlywiki, and the discussion moved on into one of my favourite subjects, the flow of information. I was stressing the importance of not building walled gardens with our applications, making sure that our applications allow customers to import or export their information simply, and in standardised ways.
Something about that conversation stuck with me, and I pondered on it later. And this is where I went:
At one time all assets were physical. When we wanted to exchange assets all we could do was barter them, albeit at some rate of exchange we could discover or determine. When the idea of money came along, everything changed, and the barter economy went away. Since money could operate as a medium of exchange, it became possible for us to convert our physical assets into something “liquid”.
I was struck by the liquid concept. When we convert physical assets into this thing we call money, then something strange happens, very similar to what happens when, for example, soil liquefaction takes place. Something hard and physical undergoes a structural change. One of the words used to describe this changed substance is cohesionless.
Now money went through a number of iterations along the road from physical to digital, growing up from being a store of value to being a medium of exchange and a unit of account. People wailed and moaned and gnashed their teeth as something physical and real became something representational and digital. One of the words used to describe what happened to money along the way is that it became commoditised. And people did not like it. It didn’t feel like it was theirs. So some held on to the gold, some kept the banknotes under their mattresses, some insisted on cheques forever and a day. But in the end everyone went digital.
Something similar is happening to information. All we can “own” is the conventional representation, the token for whatever we convert into digital form. We don’t own the digital form. It’s just an ocean of bits. You can keep track of what you put in before it became digital water, you can keep track of what you took out as digital water, but while it’s there, it’s just water.
Just water. Not my water and your water. Not text water and video water and audio water. Not black water and white water. Just water. Pure water.
Water which we can use to do many things, which we can mix in different ways, which we can mash up and recombine and repackage. Water which we can do all these things with because we have avoided polluting it.
When money became water, we kept the tokens, the conventional representations and ownership symbols, we kept them out of the water.
We have to do the same with information. With everything digital.
The tokens have to be kept out of the water.