Chapter 13. In a Screen Darkly

In this final chapter, we take out and dust off the crystal ball to discern where the current trends and ideas might lead. The view is necessarily dark, misty and unclear, both because of the difficulty in predicting which way critical events might go and because of the state of flux in which the entire field—for that matter, the entire world—finds itself.

Some of these imponderables have been touched on in earlier chapters. We however can’t predict very well which technologies will “take off” and which will fall by the wayside. Nobody predicted, for example, the intense popularity of messaging or file sharing, although in hindsight, the development seems inevitable. Future changes in Internet infrastructure and general computing, in themselves hard to predict, can have enormous and unpredictable effects on the way people use and want to use the technology. All these factors affect any future application of p2p.

Other imponderables are the more general trends that affect the Internet or society as a whole. The ongoing commercialization of Web content—subscription or pay by view—and consequent tendency to move towards closed and proprietary systems for the sake of better content control is one such factor. The increased concerns over Internet security and content censorship in the wake of escalated terrorism, both in cyberspace and in the physical world, is another.

No matter. The following discussion looks at what is known, what can be guessed or conjectured, and opinions on the subject gathered from a collection of experts in the field who were willing to share their views.