We can place ourselves in the middle of two long-term trends.

The first trend is the mixing of cyberspace and the real world, which has tides in two directions.

Coming from cyberspace we expect to be able to manipulate objects and automate that manipulation. That requires giving things handles and names. Coming into the physical world, we find it's not like that: it's a continuous world, we can't get handles on it. So we end up creating handles for things: MP3s for Music, GeoURL for locations, email addresses for people. Look at how much effort the social software community is spending talking about Identity, which is just moot, not important, when we socialise face to face. Not only do we create handles in the real world, but we get upset when we can't make full use of them. Why we get upset about that I'll come back to at the end because I think it's important.

This isn't unique to cyberspace. We do the same thing with scientific models, or any way of talking about the world. We externalise our mental models. This process is named constructivist, this way we have to partition and name the world around us in order to interact with it. Now, I'm not saying this is new: it's the industrial mindset (the conduit metaphor) -- the ability to be able to break down a process into discrete steps is

(a) what gave us the ability to make production lines, to commoditise goods, and to complete the second half of the industrial revolution. That was Fordism, early twentieth century

(b) and this is the same as being able to program. That is, to decide that you can represent a process using only numbers and simple manipulations. You break it up into performable steps.

The problem being that to name and identify things is contentious. In cyberspace we've limited the number of people who can name things (have ontic powers), who can bring things into existence by contributing to the naming. So we can't all create webpages, create new email protocols, or whatever. I'll come back to this, because I want to talk about the other direction of this tide.