Copernicus famously put the sun at the center of the universe and so drove man to the periphery. Countless revolutions were to follow, pushing man ever further away in the name of objective science. But the IT industry has taken a step too far with the objectification of information. And society followed: we now take information to be physical and yet have intrinsic meaning. At the same time, we all know that words taken out of their context may take on significance and meaning never intended by their speaker.
I realised this morning that this is exactly what we try to restore with Perspectives! We have constructed a method of creating computer programs that tie information to its context. Information is a physical object (e.g. a letter) that is the result of technology (c.q. paper, ink, the art of writing) that lets people communicate over a distance in space or time. But physical objects persist and can be moved out of that context of communication, hence re-used and misinterpreted, hence the problem. Big Tech in Silicon Valley bases its empires on that fact and thereby has a vested interest in the status quo of IT. Moving information out of its context is a business model. Alternatives have not been given serious thought: billions hang in the balance.
Enter Perspectives, that lets people keep the physical objects (data as represented on a medium like a hard disk) in their physical context of use, because the system is inherently distributed, meaning that each user brings his own device. It is back to the future in the sense that before 1990 we all kept our own (paper) files in a drawer in our study: all of our insurance policies, employment contracts, etc were in our own house. We restore that. It is as simple as that, the difference being that with Perspectives we do not need a postman to communicate: we can have the full benefits of the information age yet keep our own stuff safe.
So we need an anti-Copernican revolution, in IT. Man, for once, should be in the centre of the scheme: not his data.