Vous avez vu tous les Fast and Furious, vous connaissez par cœur les répliques de Bruce Willis dans Armageddon, vous maîtrisez chaque stratagème de L’Art d’avoir toujours raison de Schopenhauer et vous récitez la *Rhétorique *d’Aristote à vous enfants pour les endormir. Bref: en adrénaline comme en dialectique éristique vous êtes sérieusement badass (ou “mauvaiscul”, comme diraient nos amis étouffeurs de la langue française). Mais connaissez-vous le lightning talk?

As you well know, dear reader, I am a freelancer, and as freelancers well know "All Contracts Must Die. Thanks to the kind support of Adobe, Google, and Microsoft, I have had an interesting two-year run being part of the W3C Team and shepherding the HTML5 specification towards Recommendation. As August goes, these two years too will end.

With all these Web@25, W3C@20, WHAT@10, and of course Robin@37 worldwide celebrations it seems like as good a time as any to take a few minutes for musings about where we’ll be ten years from now. The content here is not meant to be particularly serious (or anywhere near complete), but I operate under conservative assumptions, for instance that the world doesn’t get overrun by an evil AI in the meantime. I’m also not interested in every other small detail. These are some of my opinions, and while I very, very much welcome opinionated disagreement I certainly don’t mind that part of them may feel outrageous to some — nor how wrong they turn out to be.

Evil geniuses, be it in history or fiction, tend to distinguish themselves through some unique trait that hallmarks their own personal expertise beyond the generic, run-of-the-mill apparatus of evil. Dracula has dread, Torquemada has torture, Carly Rae Jepsen has "Call Me Maybe". If ever an evil genius were to rise from the ranks of the standards community, there is no shade of a doubt for me that her evil specificity will be tedium.

In 1937, Walter Lippmann wrote "The Good Society" which captured with stunning lucidity the politics of his time. And as many potent political texts, it echoes well beyond its era. One of my favourite quotes from it is:

Allow me, Dear Reader, to kick off with a remarkable statement that will no doubt keep you astonished for days to come: I really, really don't like DRM. I want a third party to be allowed to control my ownership of my books, movies, and music just as much as I wish Ikea were allowed to come reclaim tables and cupboards from my home, Uniqlo to snatch clothes off my hunky pecs, or Tanziti Abdelfattah (the baker around the corner) to grab his baguette right out of my toaster.\