Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau

Author:Joel Garreau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780385515764
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

AFTER RETURNING FROM ASPEN, I reread Brown and Duguid’s piece. I thought of Bill Joy on his mountaintop, as alone as he could get. In the profiles I’d read of him from as long ago as the 1980s, there had been many references to his “characteristic boyish grin.” Granted, the topics we discussed had been grim. But over the course of a couple of days I would have thought I might have seen one or two characteristic boyish grins. I did not. Overall, his affect was markedly flat. Later that year, he got divorced, quit Sun, and put the book on hold.

Whenever Joy and I discussed the bullets humanity had dodged over the years, such as nuclear annihilation, he ascribed it to “luck.” Computer viruses haven’t destroyed the Information Age? Given Microsoft’s “bug-ridden” software permeating the globe, “that’s just serendipity.” SARS? “We were just lucky.” Whenever a social system works, for Joy that is just “luck.” “The common defense is not in anybody’s individual self-interest,” he claims.

He may be right. The Hell Scenario may be inevitable. But the great irony is that Joy—the pioneer of networks, the pioneer of open source—believes we are doomed precisely because he no longer gives much credence to the power of either.

Brown would hardly argue with Joy’s contention that “life involves risk. If it didn’t involve risk, it would be inanimate. What you can do is responsibly reduce the risk.” Nor would he argue with the proposition that Joy has done the world a great service with his warnings.

Brown’s gentle and almost avuncular reminder to Joy, however, is that for hundreds of thousands of years, we humans have succeeded in making our own luck.

And no man is an island.

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