This week's NTK sums up the magic of the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference:
The Emerging Technology Conference, it turns out, was akin
to putting a bunch of Wilhelm Reich fans inside an Orgone
machine : what transpired may not change many minds, but
*boy* it sounded like they were having fun in there. The
tribes building the new Net got to see each other through
the impending nanotech mist, briefly: the wiring techmonkeys
of WiFi (winners of Best T-Shirt Motto By A Mile: "CRIMINAL.
ANARCHIST. PARASITES."), the keyboard rattling hoardes of
Blogistan, the Men-In-Suits-With-Earrings of the Web
Services crowd, and the grubby-but-unbowed street P2Punks of
last year's file-sharing implosion. You know when the geek
mood is up when attendees stop talking about making rent
this month, and resume predicting the date of the
Singularity. Looks like we're back to looking up at a
J-curve – and after all those months of sitting on a U-bend, too.
