one of the most important messages for me from Simak’s “City” is that number of speakers matters, size of the community matters. Not that I did not know or acknowledge that, but the book made me sober again about it.
Humanity cannot develop if there’s only one city of us.
Social network cannot develop if there’s not enough people. Diaspora pretty much stuck, because many say ‘it’s lonely here’, life happens at other places, like twitter.
Culture, and national culture cannot develop if there’s not enough people.
(I believe very good example of it are animes and Hayao Miyazaki, or Satoshi Kon. If there would be no possibility to be an animator in Japan, and Hayao would work as an animator in let’s say USA, nobody would allow him to make the films he would like to and as he would like to. There’s a different culture of making films. And there was a necessity in big enough Japanese, local market, to cover anime production costs, in order to make possible sustainable creation of them. And after they have been made, they can be exported to the other countries as is. And people in other countries would appreciate the difference of making.)
Operating system, and even flavour of it (like Sailfish) needs a number of users and developers. (Which it did not get, just like diaspora.)
And of course programming language needs a number of speakers to create an ecosystem around it.
#communities #city #simak #culture #programming
