Tim O’Reilly’s says in his “Inventing the future” article [found via Mattw, Dan] is that:
“So often, signs of the future are all around us, but it isn’t until much later that most of the world realizes their significance. Meanwhile, the innovators who are busy inventing that future live in a world of their own. They see and act on premises not yet apparent to others. In the computer industry, these are the folks I affectionately call “the alpha geeks,” the hackers who have such mastery of their tools that they “roll their own” when existing products don’t give them what they need.
The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. They see the potential in existing technology, and push the envelope to get a little (or a lot) more out of it than its original creators intended. They are comfortable with new tools, and good at combining them to get unexpected results.”
The same sort of phenomenon is reported back from the front by those who study teens and young people’s use of media and technology.
Apple’s “Rip, Burn, Mix” refrain resonates with this attitude to media. We’ve talked about it’s technological equivalent, “Wombling” here before too.
We’re about to see the first generation of kids who entered secondary education when the Web broke (’95) leave college and enter the workplace. Won’t be too long before Homo Technophobis is in decline, and rapidly being replaced with Homo Infovorous (sorry for lousy latin).
Many jokes at the Baltimore ASIS conference about our generation and below “harnessing A.D.D.”… Been thinking about that since I read some William Gibson over the new year..
Will we as a profession/community of practice have to switch gears from “don’t make me think!” to “get the hell out of the way!”.
How do we do that? What will the design challenges be? Is it even likely to be a problem? What the hell am I talking about? Nurse Rached? Is that you?
» Tim O’Reilly “Inventing The Future”
» Interview with Tim O’Reilly by Steve Gilmour expanding on this article which includes this nice snippet:
“The hackers are already treating the Internet as this global data resource and they’re building Web services however they have to,” O’Reilly said. If a Web services interface is not available, they’ll use good old-fashioned screen-scraping. “They’ll download the page, figure out what data they want, and throw away the rest … sort of unauthorized, brute-force Web services.”
It’s what Tim likes to call the architecture of unintended consequences. “The original Internet made it possible for people to build independent services without knowing each other, without having to enter into a contract,” O’Reilly recalled.”
Petafloptimism 
I suppose we’re actually dealing with two competing models, at least in the domain of web services. The one where it’s user-centric organisation, the whole just-in-time ordering of the world, and the other where the ordering appears indifferent to user focus, which is the whole autonomous system stuff you talk about w/ Cory.
And the general point is that it doesn’t matter if the system doesn’t explicitly centre itself around the user, as long as it creates room for the user to feel accommodated by it.
Which is what I’d call the “Gosford Park criterion”, based on the line that Helen Mirren delivers towards the end of the film about “the gift of anticipation”:
“I know when they’ll be hungry, and the food is ready. I know when they’ll be tired, and the bed is turned down. I know it before they know it themselves.”