The Way We Net-Work

Doc is, as usual, hitting on some big topics when he mulls over the subject of Why We Blog. Go there quick and read it if you haven't, especially his simple "I work alone and I need to talk about something other than work — and work too — with somebody. Or anybody. And I'm probably not alone in this regard."

Read this again "other than work and work too" — or how about work intimately integrated with family, intimately integrated with food, intimately integrated with friends, intimately integrated with thought, intimately integrated with books, etc., etc.

There's nothing casual about what Doc is doing. He's SHOWING US HOW. How to live and work in a radically different way, supported by a radical infrastructure — the Net, but I mean the net(work of people, thought, etc.) too. It's our hometown. (It's what David Weinberger's new book is all about.) That's why we get so damned pissed off when Disney marches in and pretends they own the Web, and plants a Mickey Mouse flag of glossy Mylar and shouts out "We're King of the Hill."

We need to see this on a continuum. There's an evolution here that is bigger, deeper, wider than all the great stuff Daniel Pink wrote about in Free Agent Nation, all the important stuff Alan Webber's been pointing us to in FastCompany, all of Seth Godin's fascinating monthly pieces and books, all the open source sorcery Eric Raymond brilliantly reflects on in Cathedral and The Bazaar, everything Tom Peters has been writing about for 25 years, and of course, all the groundbreaking shit Cluetrain has delivered. But it's beginning to speed up and we're not even noticing. This train's gone from loco-motive to shinkansen.