page217
all comPlex ecosystems have Parasites
195
gether whole books from the page-previews one can get via the
look-inside-the-book programs. They’re even cooking up pro-
grams to spoof deliberately corrupted ebooks into the P2P net-
works, presumably to assure the few readers the field has left that
reading science fiction is a mug’s game.
The amazing thing about the failure of parasite-elimination
programs is that their proponents have concluded that the prob-
lem is that they haven’t tried hard enough — with just a few more
species eliminated, a few more policies imposed, paradise will
spring into being. Their answer to an unsuccessful strategy for
fixing the Internet is to try the same strategy, only more so — only
fill those niches in the ecology that you can sanction. Hunt and
kill more parasites, no matter what the cost.
We are proud parasites, we Emerging Techers. We’re engaged
in Perl whirling, Pythoneering, lightweight Javarey — we hack
our cars and we hack our PCs. We’re the rich humus carpeting the
jungle floor and the tiny frogs living in the bromeliads.
The long tail — Chris Anderson’s name for the 95 percent of
media that aren’t top sellers, but which, in aggregate, account for
more than half the money on the table for media vendors — is
the tail of bottom-feeders and improbable denizens of the ocean’s
thermal vents. We’re unexpected guests at the dinner table and
we have the nerve to demand a full helping.
Your ideas are cool and you should go and make them real,
even if they demand the kind of ecological diversity that seems to
be disappearing around us.
You may succeed — provided that your plans don’t call for a
simple ecosystem where only you get to provide value and no one
else gets to play.
Content 2nd gal final.indd 195
7/4/08 9:57:39 AM