It might help if everyone knew how everything worked in a modern car or light duty truck. But good luck to that. This isn’t the 50s or 60s where you did your repairs and tune ups in the back yard then dumped the used oil into the sewer.

Modern vehicles are chock a block with sensors and computers and a master computer “that rules them all” and the manufacturers guard the diagnostic software like it’s the Holy Grail. (None of which means it hasn’t been hacked/cracked and otherwise broken into so people can load them onto laptops as do the work in their own independent garage.)

Given your attitude here I’m shocked you’d help those “morons” to get their wipers to work or explain the mysteries of cruise control to them and all the good deeds you seem to do. Glad to hear it.

A significant number of the kids written about in the manifesto know how the internet works, how DNS, works and how to get things like Apache off the ground so you can actually have yourself a web site. But none of that is contrary to what is being said there.

They use the Internet the same way people have used libraries, coffee shops, and many things my bunch are used to to learn, debate, establish and end relationships including close, intimate ones, to trade photos (before the copyright purists got their knickers in a knot it was called scrapbooking and no one cared), swap tales, recommend e-books, print books, movies and to shake their heads at the total ignorance and stupidity of their elders at just what they do there which, as the manifesto says, they live there.

Much as we boomers lived in sports fields, bars, basements blasting out the latest LP and doing just about everything these people are doing. And they do a lot of it instead of the hour long phone calls our parents railed at us about. Instead it’s the Web. That and I’ll bet the Web Kids do, actually, find time to meet face to face too as that’s a critical part of human society that the Internet can’t replace — yet.

The Web kids aren’t computer illiterate, far from it. Thier literacy is expressed in ways far different from those of us who had to rip the innards out of our Apple II, Trash-80s and IBM PCs to make them work sometimes.

For them, their computers be they smart phones, laptops, desktops, iPads or whatever are an extention of themselves much in the way the land line telephone was and is for the pre-Web kids. That thing they pick up to communicate with their peers when their friends aren’t around for everything from meeting up to planning protests around things like ACTA.

I find it amusing when the “what are those kids coming to these days” question is fired off by people who don’t even know them or who have only experienced them on the surface or news reports.

It reminds me so much of what was said in the 1950s, 60s and 70s about Boomers.

And we Boomers are left being in the uncomfortable position of being the power elite we used to protest against. This time it’s us.

And, to judge from silliness like ACTA, SOPA, PIPA and many other attempts to regulate the Web for the advantage of a wealthy, privileged few at the expense of the many we deserve it. We’re just upset cause we see ourselves as the ones angry with those same entrenched groups and get our knickers in a knot when a mirror is held up to us proving that we became what we loudly said we opposed.

We’ve become a part of the machine. And we can’t even see it.

“What is missing in any of these discussions is a clear image of what the world looks like AFTER the proposed revolution. Where will content come from? Don’t tell me “from everyone”… that is a pure cop out. Where will your TV shows come from, where will your news come from, where will your music come from? “

It’s in the nature of social revolutions brought about by technological progress or not that you don’t KNOW what the world will look like AFTER the revolution is completed.

No one had the slightest idea what would happen when the Industrial Revolution was over. It isn’t yet but we gave a fairly good idea both good and bad now. What we do know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is that successful companies that didn’t adapt, old ways of doing business (see East India Company, Hudson’s Bay Company and mercantilism) failed and to a very large degree so did the dominant methods of agriculture fail in that they couldn’t feed the exploding cities and so that changed too.

The printing press destroyed the ways that documents were created and distributed that had been in place since the dawn of western civilization. And did that very quickly. It also quickened the pace of the Industrial Revolution by making the distribution of information on new methods of manufacturing, maintenance and business information far cheaper and faster than it had ever been before.

So now we have another way to communicate (note I left out telegraph, telephone, radio and television and did so on purpose) called the Internet and the part most of us interact with called The World Wide Web. Most importantly a new way to make and distribute “content” as well as to store it.

Who will create the content? Cop out or not, creative people will. We forget that in the age before television and radio (and to a lesser extent motion pictures) we weren’t drowning in what some call “content”. As if content comes only from Hollywood or Bollywood or large publishers. It never has and never will. Those business have made the creation of cheap content an art from all themselves. Cheap content is otherwise known as popular content. Nothing wrong with that BUT, as we’re finding out, popular content cannibalizes itself. Just look at the large number of “reality” shows out there. The number of copycats “Mythbusters” has created. And how strikingly similar to each other movies tend to be before fall and the time the “good” ones come out to vie for Academy Awards. There are late winter, spring movies depressingly similar to each other, summer movies aimed at two audiences teen aged boys and teen aged girls. Slasher and horror films with lots of skin are boys movies, Romances and relationship movies with less skin aimed at girls. After Labour Day come the “serious” flicks.

That and other “content” will continue to be made we just don’t know who will do it or exactly how. Ditto for music. I suspect the biggest fear of the so-called “content” industry is that we humans will return to the days of creating our own content in the Web version of the living rooms and concert houses that are already appearing. Will the “quality” be the same as what the “content industry” cranks out now? Not at first. But then again, one can hardly apply the word quality to “Cash Cab”, right?

The answer to the question of who will create the content, the same question asked with a lot more fear after the movable type press appeared, is a combination of “the same people”, new entrants more familiar and comfortable with what the Web offers that those they’ll succeed are, “everyone” which covers the deep cultural effect and affect of the Web and, quite frankly, “we don’t know”. Nor should we care.

If the technical and web revolution take out the MPAA and RIAA I’m not going to shed any tears for them. They’ve had a good and obscenely profitable run over the past century. Someone or something will, make no mistake about that.

Our species are story-tellers, music makers so that will continue. In order to learn we are also copiers and that will continue as well. If the latter means changes to copyright and patents that makes what will come out the other end unrecognizable from out perspective. We’re just starting down that path. But we have no business resisting it for the benefit of a few who have fed on the same way of doing things for more than a century now. If they go, they go. Creative destruction and all of that, you know. Nor do we have any business putting road blocks in the way the early experiments in “content creation” happening now or trying to force it down the same path as the “content industry” would like. I doubt that it will anyway but we have no business standing in the way of the evolution/revolution and making the replacement for current models and mega-companies harder than it already will be.

But one more time — content will be created. Right now we just don’t know by whom (likely not the same players or most of them) nor is it any of our business. But content will be created. A digital appropriate kind of copyright will eventually appear just because it has to. It might look like Creative Commons, the LGPL or the Document GPL or none of them. We’ll know that when we get there too.

I find that to be exciting and filled with promise. Some seem to find it horrifing and meet it with fear and arguments that try to fit the digital revolution into an Industrial Revoltion model. But it won’t and can’t be fit into that model.

For what it’s worth the best advice is to stand back and watch it happen, the same thing that happened with the Industrial Revoution. In the meantime fear alone isn’t helpful and got us ACTA, almost spawned PIPA and SOPA which won’t change a thing. For a while yet uncertainty and doubt are the order of the say as this revolution progresses.

What will it look like when it “matures”, as opposed to ending which it likely never will; I don’t know and I don’t care. Content will be created and be spread across the web. By whom and how, I don’t know and I don’t care. “Content” will still be there.