“The early, text-only internet reminded me of Judaism, with its restriction on “graven images” and even of the early Israelites, who were essentially Bedouin, always on the move. I wrote a piece for The Australian in around 1993, naming us “digital nomads” and suggesting we might be “the new Jews.” Something about maintaining a text-only tradition, engaging on a network in provisional ways, and enjoying a culture based on the sharing of data and the exchange of ideas seemed to retrieve the best things about the Jewish tradition. What might a society built on these principles bring us that the later, more sedentary civilization of agriculture, land ownership, and domination could not?
This is why I was so disappointed by the World Wide Web. Its flat, image-based interface, along with the pointing and clicking, felt fundamentally different to me. Literacy was no longer a prerequisite for participation. Participation wasn’t even a prerequisite for participation if you know what I mean. Interactivity came to mean pointing and clicking on stuff in a website rather than sharing one’s though”
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Retrieving the great, big, migratory meta-community of digital nomads
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