Cheering for Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward (aka the stenographer to power) says he doesn’t do Twitter. Dave Winer gives him a cheer. Here’s why:

I cheered for Woodward the way an addict cheers for someone who was smart enough never to smoke the first cigarette, or take the first hit of coke or smack. I am stuck in Twitter, like the frog in the boiling water. I notice it’s getting uncomfortable as they pull back features that were central to my adopting it in the first place. The ability to hack my own stuff in there. The level playing field where I could be as influential as the greatest media celebrity. The level playing field relative to Yahoo and Google and all the other Giants of the Valley. These are all lost, they were things I came to depend on, and now that they’re gone, like my friend Jay — I’m not happy. And as with Jay, it’s my fault for believing, for no good reason, that things would more or less stay as they were.

The only way to get what we want is to make the stuff work the way we want it to work. We can’t wait for Silicon Valley to do that for us, because they will never do it. It's not in their nature.

So mazel tov to Woodward…

Dave’s right. What enthusiasts for free services seem to forget is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In the end, the providers of these services are doing it to serve their own purposes. And those sure as hell aren’t your purposes or mine. Why is why Eben Moglen’s “Freedom in the Cloud” lecture was so interesting.