It’s not the new year without another State of the World Q’n'A with Chairman Bruce on The Well.

He kicks things off by dispensing some advice to his pal Cory Doctorow:

Okay, you’ve treated your future as an “unpredictable lurching thing…” and now you’re all morose about that… You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of “disruptive innovation,” “disintermediation,” “offshoring,” “small pieces loosely joined,” “de-monetization,” “plug and play,” “the network as a platform”? Of course you’ve heard of all that crap, because you’ve been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don’t have any stability now! Much less guys like you, who move their fingers up and down on keyboards for a living.

And, from the discussion of the dismantling of yet another institution, via the rise of participatory medicine:

If medicine gets the big wikipedia treatment, you don’t get a computer-literate doctor, you get a doctor-literate web activist.

Doctors are keenly jealous of their pre-eminence. They spent hard
years in med school, unlike Joe Keyboard. Doctors also earn much, much more money than they would if arteriosclerosis was re-defined as some kind of hardware problem to be scanned by an iPhone app.

It’s scary/exciting times, that’s for sure.

The discussion is still on-going, so jump on over and contribute.

Note: pic taken from a recent German interview with Bruce, auto-translated into something resembling English here.