Brian Eno breakthrough thinking: ""Be the first person to try not doing something that no one else has ever not done before."

https://twit.tv/posts/transcripts/week-tech-963-transcript

How e-mail got open and became the standard: Explained on This Week In Tech by Cory Doctorow: https://twit.tv/posts/transcripts/week-tech-963-transcript

02:01:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, I mean okay, we have a simple email list on our street. It's just one guy who is the street coordinator. That's a good idea. Maybe we should do emails, you know it's just like emails the original protocol is coming down to empty the bins. Today, clear your car off this side.

02:01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember it wasn't. It wasn't. Some of us have been around long enough to remember when email was siloed. You know you were on MCI mail or comp you serving. You couldn't talk to one another.

02:01:59 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
"Have you installed the X 500 certificate yet?", but so so I don't know how email got open and RFC 422,. I think that's amazing.

02:02:10
The story is. The story is that the person working on it said we'll do the authentication later. We'll ship it now and do the authentication next year, and authentication turned out to be the last 10% that was, you know 99% of the work which they just didn't do. It's like the epitome of that, Brian Eno aphorism "be the first person to try not doing something that no one else has ever not done before." To try an email system without authentication.

02:02:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm still trying to solve that one, the first person to not do something that no one else has ever done before.

02:02:44 - Cory Doctorow (Guest)
That's what eBay did. Right, it was like the, you know, auctions without an auctioneer who held things in escrow. And it's what Kickstarter did the first street performer protocol that didn't have an escrow service, so you got the money before you delivered the thing. So the problem is that you generally can't deliver the thing unless you got the money. So Kickstarter, you know, all the previous versions of that were like we're going to hold on to the money until you deliver. And everyone who did it was like well, I didn't deliver because you didn't give me any money to deliver with.

02:03:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for the very first thing I ordered on Kickstarter,