Fess Up

Kevin Kelly discusses the next 5000 days of the web on TED.

His take home is three points. The Web will be...

Smarter.
More Personalised.
More Ubiquitous.

He talk about the web in a similar way to the `Matrix', except that we are conscious of its existence. The Internet first connected computers. The web connected pages. The next stage is connecting data. Slowly but surely everything and everyone will be connected.

The one challenge that for me strongly comes out of this is honesty, transparency and truth.

Soon you won't be able to tell lies. You won't be able to hide things. Cheap transport made it difficult to cheat even if you were in another postal code. Sms made it more difficult to cheat. Facebook and digital photos made it even more difficult. It is more difficult to lose contact with people even if you want to. You can't `cut people off' and forget about them anymore. If you hurt people, it is harder to just reinvent yourself. It is also harder to not confront and work through issues with people who hurt you. You can't have friends who don't know about your other friends and other aspects of your life. It becomes difficult to separate work and play.

Is this scary? Well, if you have something to hide... yes. Do we all have something to hide, perhaps?

Candor is very powerful. I keep speaking about the age of ideas. Perhaps that also means it is the age of candor.

Why do we hide things? Because we are worried about people finding out? So what if they do, surely if we live a more open environment where the truth will out we will be forced to aggressively pursue a better closer truth.

Or will we all just be paralysed by fear? Not do anything or say anything for fear of judgement?

Exciting times.