To be long the tail must be linear

It's significant that the ideas that best exemplify the culture of Wired these days are not those of co-founder and inspiring organicist Kevin Kelly, but long-tailed Chris Anderson, whose thinking has a strong analytical bias. And the likely long-term impact of the phenomenon he's pinned his name to is exactly that, a bias, because culture does not consist exclusively of objects on display on a virtual shelf. An atomistic view of culture can only ever deliver approximate predictions, because it ignores the non-linear ways that meanings are constructed.

A decade ago a golden age of vertnetztes denken (network thinking) seemed imminent but regretably, mechanical, linear, information processing models are if anything, stronger than ever.