World Panopticon Media Class Now For Real

In Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, the novel that won the 2007 Hugo Award, the Internet has essentially morphed into everyware, in which distributed, integrated computing makes everyone into a de facto journalist, Hollywood producer, and information analyst. In little fits and starts we come closer every day to that ideal (or dystopia): weblog companies with micropayment systems for their anonymous commenters, new non-monetary currencies, YouTube stardom. Today, we get one step closer in the future's ad hoc, micro-freelancing world that Vinge calls affiliancing: Getty Images, the powerhouse image sales bank, has decided to devote editors' resources to cruising the massive amateur photo-hosting site Flickr, and making whatever amateur images they like available for purchase by their clients. So now all net-based photographers are news professionals, linked together in a larger commercial super-structure, without any meddlesome negotiations or additional overhead. It's nearly the future!