Chris Messina has published a passionate and beautifully-illustrated post about the tension between what Jonathan Zittrain describes as generative and tethered net applications, represented by Neo’s Cartesian dilemma.

How insidious is the slide towards ease of use inside walled gardens such as Facebook and the iPhone? And how many users truly take the red pill by running everything from the command line rather than relying on stable releases of operating systems with convenient graphical user interfaces?

Chris is correct to say that ‘the internet has won as the transport medium for all data’, even though it will take years for this to roll out in practice, but I am not convinced that there must be a one-size fits all ‘universal interface for interacting with the web’.

Some will want hobbled devices that restrict their destinations to a few corporate data silos, but it is still hard to imagine open web search being excluded from that list.

Meanwhile many will continue to relish the relative freedom they currently enjoy to create and contribute on the web by making use of whatever technology they understand and are comfortable with.

I would prefer everyone to own their identity online by publishing and communicating autonomously, making use of open software and systems, instead of depending on proprietary web applications designed to harvest personal data for private profit.

However, there are compromises to be made here as there are in all human endeavour.

I would still rather take part in the Twitter experiment, however profound or trivial it turns out to be, than insist on its open distribution before signing up.

In other words, surely pragmatism is the best solution to such ideological problems?