Upon my arrival in Bocas, I wasn´t too sure what to make of it here. I was a little surprised (unpleasantly) to discover that this town has no beach. There´s actually no way to access the water at all really, even though we´re surrounded by it. So the only thing to do here, really, is eat, drink, and shop, which is NOT why I go on vacation.
But after a couple days of observation, I´ve gotten the hang of it here, and I LOVE IT. Any time you need to do something, it´s going to require a water taxi. Free for the taxi to the cheap restaraunt with $4 fish dinners, $1 to the aquabar with 50 cent beers and $1 tequilas. $3 to the little beach on a nearby island. $5 to Hospital point for awesome snorkeling. $10 to Zapetillas, the kick-ass island with super-georgeous beach all the way around, and national park status, so no one can build anything there.
So you get nickel and dimed every day, but it’s cheap and fully worth it. Also, you never, ever say ¨no¨ to anyone about anything. If someone says “you wanna go snorkeling today with us?”, you just say yes, and you’ll have a great time. Every day has been an adventure, I have dozens of new friends already, and every night has been an epic party of legendary status. Also, my male friends would probably be interested in the fact that about 70% of this island are female backpackers. Seriously. It’s bizarre.
Bocas itself has plenty of cheap food and drinks to keep anyone happy, though, if you just want something quick. A six pack of beer is $3, a bottle of rum is $5, and the hostel has a kitchen if you want to chip in with some friends and make a big dinner or something. What’s not to like?
Our luck with the weather (today was perfect) is going to change tomorrow, though, apparently, so a couple mellow rain days might be coming. We’ll have to wait and see. I still don’t know how to surf, but hopefully that day is coming soon…
Photos and captions here. I’m trying to upload another video, but it’s not working very well. More soon!
It’s hot here. And that’s a good thing. I was really, really tired of the cold in MN, and I can’t remember being so happy to be covered in sweat all the time and taking showers with no hot water. It’s paradise for me right now, truly.
When I got off the plane in Panama City, I overheard the people next to me discussing a cab to town, so I introduced myself. It turns out they were staying at the same place as me (Luna’s Castle, which is not really a castle at all), and the 4 of us split the $40 cab fare, which was great. These guys, Eric, Paul, and Max, are from Florida on Spring Break, and they’re pretty cool. They’re heading to Boquete to climb the volcano, which I have no interest in, so I’ll be splitting up with them today, but I may run into them again in Bocas in a few days…
Panama City is huge, unwieldy, under construction, unsafe in places, and smelly. In other words, it’s just like every other big city in the world, and as long as you keep to places that are recommended to you, you’ll be just fine. The area I’m staying in is the ‘old city’, and it’s got some really neat architecture, some awesome shops and cafe’s, and some really run down areas. It’s interesting, but it’s no beach, and I’ll be leaving it today.
I’ve already had some REALLY good strokes of luck on this trip. I fell asleep in the airport in Minneapolis, and a random angel of an old lady woke me minutes before my plane left to see if I needed to catch the flight (THANK YOU MYSTERY LADY!!!). I met some cool fellows on the plane to share my cab ride, eat and drink with. And last night at the incredibly packed bar in Luna’s Castle (people come from all over the city to drink here, apparently), I met a nice Canadian couple here on a medical mission, who informed me that I don’t need to take another $40 cab ride to the airport to get to Bocas Del Toro. I’m evidently supposed to go to a small local airport instead, which is about a $4 cab ride away. Thus they saved me not only the $40 ride to the big airport, but ANOTHER $40 ride back to the little airport. I bought them A LOT of drinks. I did not, however, get their photo, which I attribute solely to the amount of beer, tequila, and Flor De Cana rum consumed last night…
And with it, we’ve started to experience the result of group-thinking that prior to this was unimaginable. In the beginning of the internet (which was really a very, very short time ago), we started to communicate one-on-one (with email), because that’s all we knew. We just duplicated the phone and typed letters, because that’s what we were so used to. But then came things like ‘comments sections’ and ‘chat rooms’ and ’social media’. We began to communicate in group-fashion. And look to the group for answers, opinions, and positive reinforcement. Now we continue to push the boundaries of group-think with tools like Facebook and Twitter. Once bandwidth and processing power become more available and inexpensive, we can expect to see real-time group interaction with audio and video to become more available and ubiquitous.
Even a quick look at the most popular sites on the internet confirms that what we really want to do is share information with each other. We share photos, music, video, ideas, and our stuff. We appear to be built to communicate this way, but just lacked a piece of the puzzle that now, apparently, is being filled by technology.
I’ve already spoken about how the internet has come to change, modify, and potentially disable a fantastic number of formerlyviablebusinessmodels. But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. I also think that the internet has also begun to fundamentally change what it means to be a human being.
Even already (and I submit that this will become much more noticable in years to come), we’ve begun to see that when people (especially young people, even in other countries) are disconnected from the internet (or ‘cloud’), they become increasingly irritable. I think that we’ve created a new step in the evolutionary chain, and have actually developed a way to participate in a hive-mind. And furthermore, I think that once activated, our brains prefer this, and react negatively when this option is removed. Most of the realities of the hive-mind are much more apparent in young people simply because they are the first generation of people to have a hive-mind available to them since birth or youth. It is a much more difficult and frightening world when you don’t have the hive to answer your questions or participate in your conversations and your world. I cannot express my dismay when I need an answer, and Google is unavailable. I cannot imagine the reaction of fear and isolation from someone who has never had to live without it.
The hive-mind rarely, if ever, agrees with itself. Which I think says more about the complicated nature of the world in which we live than it demonstrates any inherent flaws in the human condition. There are simply many different ways to look at frog. The hive-mind has much internal strife, disagreement, and cognitive dissonance, because we’ve not yet learned to assimilate the information overload that comes from looking at a frog from every conceivable angle all at one time.
But it knows that in order to be more accurate and make better decisions, it must consult the hive. Most of us just call this ‘Googling’, but it’s the same thing. We now are experiencing an age where information and content is increasingly no longer for sale, but is freely distributed (whether your broken company likes it or not), and new content and ideas are being developed by the cloud, not just by the individual.
Give it two generations, and the entire experience of being a human being will be a different experience than it is today. The road to this new place will not be an easy one. There are large and powerful corporate interests that have much to lose if we start collaborating in this manner without their newly irrelevant services. I fear that perhaps our new ability to collaborate as a species may require revolution in addition to evolution, and I wonder how hard the fight will be to change the status quo. This is the most frightening thing that many people can imagine, but I maintain a more positive view. I think that this is the thing that will set us free.
It’s time that someone sat you down, and explained a few things to you. The world changed. And if you’re in any type of media, advertising, or media distribution business, your business model is now permanently broken and useless. If you continue to think you can somehow ‘fix it’, or ‘make it work’, you’re going to lose all your money and go bankrupt. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I know that the way we sold advertising, newspapers, magazines, books, music, movies, and television had worked for decades (if not centuries), but then the internet came. And now everything is different, and you can’t undo it. I’m sorry.
If you have a newspaper publishing business, your business model is broken.
If you have a music business, your business model is broken.
If you have a movie making business, your business model is broken.
If you have a magazine publishing business, your business model is broken.
If you have a distribution business for any of these, your business model is broken.
Lots and lots of other business models are broken now, too, but I’m not going to list them all because it would take too long.
It CANNOT be fixed. Stop trying. You’re going to go broke. Seriously. Duplication and distribution of media are free now, because some people invented this internet thing, and it’s never going to go away. You’ve been trying to create artificial scarcity through copyright legislation and DRM, but as you can tell, it’s not going to work. Not now, not ever. You really need to come to terms with this. You cannot legislate this into going away. The internet changed lots and lots of things, and one of the things that it changed was the way that we share and distribute written, audio, and video content. That cat is out of the bag, and trust me when I say that it’s never going back in.
Anyway, it has appeared for the last decade that there are many of you who just don’t understand the fundamental change that’s happened in the world, and I thought I would help explain it to you. If you insist on staying in a business that is no longer viable (and remember, IT CANNOT BE FIXED through legislation. You’ve already tried.), then I guess I don’t feel too bad about your impending bankruptcy. I warned ya.
I’ve been thinking a lot more lately about social media and the implications of this type of communication, and I’ve noticed that usage of Facebook, Twitter, and other types of network communication tools are pretty much sharply divided between two groups. And for the sake of having simple names for these groups (and because I like to rile people up), I’m going to call these two groups ‘Young People’ and ‘Old People’.
And here’s the difference. Old People see network communication as noise. They see a crowd of people, all of whom are shouting into their own personal megaphones. It was easier to understand a topic when only one person (or media outlet) had the megaphone, and everyone else had to sit quietly and listen. It’s calmer that way. And more orderly. And in their opinion, that’s a good thing. Social media and networking are a bother, and require effort and attention that old-style media did not. Almost every leader of business, industry, media, and politics is an Old Person.
The Young People, however, don’t view social networking as a crowd of people with megaphones. They (or I should say ‘We’, because I count myself as one of them) see these tools as a platform for conversation. Instead of passively being told what the news is, we get to create it, and form our own dialogs and methods of interaction with words, and photos, and video, and even music and art. Young People see the social media experience as a tool for sharing thoughts, ideas, and facts, and are dissatisfied with sitting passively and having all this media broadcast at them, like TV, radio, and most other media has been doing for many decades in the past. We see social media as an opportunity, not as an effort.
And so where does the line get drawn? Who gets to be ‘Old People’ and who gets to be ‘Young People’? Well, that’s the beautiful part, and it has nothing to do with Facebook, Twitter, social networks, computers, or any other thing. It’s a very simple matter of where your dreams take you. Old People want to live in the past. Young People want to live in the future. And you get to decide, for the rest of your life, which group you’re going to be in.
This totally sucks. There used to be years and years of content below this, but I neglected to pay my hosting bill on time, and now GoDaddy.com wants $150 to give me my data back. Fuck ‘em. I’m starting over. Welcome to GoChet.com version 2!
Kevin Kelly, of Wired fame, has written and spoken many times about what he calls the ‘One Machine’. I find Kevin to be spot on about what the web is transforming into, and I don’t think that you, I , or anyone else are prepared for the changes that this transformation will entail.
(If you haven’t already read these articles by Kevin Kelly [One, Two], you might want to do so now. They will greatly enhance your understanding of my thinking in this piece.)
Until now, the importance of the computer, cell phone, PDA, or net appliance was what it could do for me locally. How can this device help me as it exists in my personal space? But as our devices begin to function more like information pipelines to the One Machine, and less like individual computing devices, our needs and expectations of those devices should be, and slowly are, changing. Again, as with all technologies, this appears to be happening faster with young people than with the majority of the population.
The term ‘Cloud Computing‘ has gotten a lot of press lately, and rightfully so, but I don’t think that everyone fully understands the massive implications of what is beginning to happen. Cloud computing, right now, is something that is most easily and widely taken advantage of by corporations looking to save money on massive server arrays that most of us have no interest in discussing or understanding. Yet it is important to us, because we are starting to realize the benefits of the cloud. Essentially, many companies have decided to stop buying massive rooms of computers and servers. It is easier, more reliable, and cheaper to outsource that function to someone else, and let them do all the massive number-crunching and data storage. As more and more companies head in this direction (which is inevitable, because it’s cheaper, faster, and more reliable), our computing begins to be a function of the grid, instead of a function of our personal computer, or even a function of a company’s network of computers.
My expectation of a computing device has always been what the device is capable of. But as cloud computing becomes more the norm, it is no longer necessary that my personal device bear the load of the task that I demand. The cloud can, and does, perform all the necessary computations, and my device is merely utilized for reporting the results to me. I send my request to the Machine, it figures out the answer, and it reports back to me. The end result is that I have nearly limitless computational power at my fingertips, with nearly unlimited knowledge and database resources, and I need only have a basic computer (or phone or netbook) in my possession to retrieve the information. This, without question, is a game-changer on an absolutely historic level.
If you’d like a very simple example of cloud computing, think about this: If I want to know what 50 times 34.2 is, I could access the calculator on my computer, and find out effortlessly. But I could also go to www.google.com, and type “50 times 34.2″, and let the cloud, or Machine, do the work instead. The difference is subtle, but important. This example is simple, but what if the example was much more complex? Perhaps I only had a cell phone at my disposal? And perhaps the problem wasn’t a simple mathematics equation, but a very complex analysis of home values vs. educational standards in rural Midwestern counties under a certain population? My cell phone would likely have the ability to do the math, but there’s no way that I have that kind of data stored in there. And right now, getting that information through the cloud is difficult and time-consuming, but it is certainly possible.
Part of what has made Web 2.0 such a success (besides the realization that businesses need to make money) has been the utilization of the network as a provider of services. Gmail and Hotmail are examples of cloud computing, and their success eventually helped lead to what Amazon now offers with EC2 and EBS. More than a million other services ranging in complexity from Remember the Milk to SalesForce.com allow us to use other people’s processing power in order to perform our own tasks. And the ability to build our own website/applications, add them to the web, utilize Amazon’s (or someone else’s) processing power, and make them available to the entire world…… Well, it’s causing the One Machine to grow massively smarter and more useful every second of every day.
And what’s about to come is even more interesting yet. As more phones begin to ship with GPS functionality, and as we begin to become more personally invested in social networks such as FaceBook or LinkedIn, we can look forward to a myriad of services that reflect not only WHO our friends and business associates are, but WHERE they are, and what they’re doing, in real time. Your fears and concerns about security and privacy are valid, but your children will grasp onto this type of connection and communication in ways that will amaze (and possibly frighten) you.
And as we begin to see the web as One Machine, our perceptions and expectations will change as well. Where we used to think in terms of the device (”I want my phone to play music”), now we begin to think in terms of the Machine (”I want the Machine to deliver music to me that fits my listening patterns and tendencies based on my personal historical patterns and ratings”). And the Machine can deliver this to you today, via Pandora.
Once we finally begin to truly look beyond the device, and think of this all as One Machine, we will be able to flip that switch in our minds that allows us to imagine and build the types of applications and services that this machine is truly capable of. This machine is growing and changing far faster than our relationship with it appears to be comfortable with, but that will not prevent the change from happening. This Machine is capable of managing every square inch of farmland in the world in the most optimal way to feed a global civilization. This Machine is capable of designing and managing the most cost-effective shipping routes and schedules to move people and product that the world has ever known. This Machine is capable of predicting, planning for, and optimizing the health care of an entire population. This Machine can, using information that is already contained within the Machine, create a tax system that works. For everyone.
This Machine can ALMOST do these things.
I, for one, look forward to seeing what the next 10 years of the One Machine will bring.
Upon my arrival in Bocas, I wasn´t too sure what to make of it here. I was a little surprised (unpleasantly) to discover that this town has no beach. There´s actually no way to access the water at all really, even though we´re surrounded by it. So the only thing to do here, really, is eat, drink, and shop, which is NOT why I go on vacation.
I did not, however, get their photo, which I attribute solely to the amount of beer, tequila, and 
