The entire economic model of telecommunications – based on charging per minute, per mile, or per bit – is about to fall apart. As human-to-human communications become increasingly asynchronous, time will be meaningless (five hours of music will be delivered to you in less than five seconds). Distance is irrelevant: New York to London is only five miles further than New York to Newark via satellite.
I think that for most Wired readers, the golden years are over. [Laughs.] I mean, the little club that they had called the Internet. The little club, all the cute little faces they made [Emoticons]. It’s over. It’s done. Your club is about to be invaded. It’s about to be totally changed. And your snooty little view of the world and “aren’t-I-cool” sentiments are about to go crashing down on your ears. That’ll piss a lot of people off, but that’s good! And I say, Good riddance to the old Internet.
Let’s be bold for a moment and suppose that a smaller, cheaper, simpler way is found to read data out of a molecular array, and the array can be made from a substance stable at room temperature. At this point, the consequences become truly mind-boggling … you could store the complete texts of a billion books. Online access to reference sources would become irrelevant; each of us could own the Library of Congress, every piece of music ever recorded, plus immaculate digital reproductions of art from every museum in the world. Meanwhile, every domestic device, from a sound system to a hair brush, could possess artificial intelligence at a human level or beyond.
Don’t forget: just like there are only so many Monets and so many Picassos, there are only so many filmmakers who can make a “Citizen Kane” or a “Gone With the Wind” and capture the imaginations of tens of millions of people. Not everybody can do that. Really great artistic talent is not a commodity. It’s always a scarce resource. So yeah, Hollywood’s going to have to reinvent itself. But Hollywood as a leading cultural force … that’s never going to change.
Even with the explosion from the grassroots, there’s still going to be a need for mass culture, for truly great entertainment that transcends all the little niches and links people together. So even when some guy in Akron, Ohio, comes up with a funny show, it’ll just be one in a universe of little grass-roots shows out there. How do people find it? How do they know about it? Hollywood is still going to popularize the best that comes up from below, and try to make killer copyrights out of them.
You may have 500 channels instead of 50, but you won’t get 10 times as many people willing to pay a penny more for what they get over the air for free … If you look at the growth from 1970 to today in household income, it was a second income that fueled it. And we’ve tapped that one out. So it’s not as if this pie is just going to keep expanding. There may be somewhat more movies produced, but again, the basic pie is not going to grow that much.
By making sure that we’re able to leverage our assets to create brands, we’re able to make people’s time more valuable. However high-tech the world gets, we can’t lose sight of the fact that we’ve got to enhance the consumer’s disposable time and make it more enjoyable. That’s the new paradigm for success.
If one buys into the generalization that men attempt to be self-contained power centers and women attempt to be networked and connected, the change in the document paradigm probably won’t change anything at all. Instead of pushing men toward connectivity, it may just turn them into competitive knowledge jockeys. Some things never change.
Philosophical phenomenology of the sort championed by Martin Heidegger will make progress on this continent, as it believes that humans are not containers of perceptions but instead are always already out of themselves, into the world and toward the future; this is a philosophy that already characterizes itself explicitly as kstasis.
As every reader becomes an author – assembling information and making it available – the role of authors will be not only to assemble interesting links or even to express a point of view. Readers will seek authors for their voice, the way they express and condition the information pointers they assemble.