Listening to this now, I realize how much discipline these punks had. They’re tight; they’re schooled; they done their homework and they know what to do. (Did you know Gang of Four had covered “Sweet Jane,” the Velvet Underground howl? It makes the Cowboy Junkies look like they didn’t give a darn.) This is what my teachers meant when they said, you don’t go experimental until you know your basics. You don’t go out and do abstract work until you can do representational.

This is how I feel around these technologies that I’m writing about and watching, and to some degree, the strategies as well. I see companies launching, and I recognize the extraordinary power of their innovative ways of thinking — but until i see that they understand the history of technology, that they understand what came before them, I watch with an extremely skeptical eye. Take a company like Google. In Web search, in particular, the Google founders knew EXACTLY what had worked and what had failed. The storied clean interface that they adopted was founded in what had worked at Yahoo and at Alta Vista (although, to some degree, that initial crispness had been abandoned later). It’s that kind of deep recognition that history matters — right now I’m listening to “Anthrax,” the Gang of Four musical polemic. The lyrics could use a buffing even if one assumes an absurdist mentality (”love will get you like a case of anthrax, and that’s something I don’t want to catch”), but the guitar riff is rich, mean, bitter and feedbacky, a Hendrix solo extruded through time and slightly warped as a result.

A sense of history is no liability, in other words, no matter what the technological strategy.