Ashutosh Nilkanth’s Blog

Snails in the Internet Wormhole

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In his recent (and apparently his last before blogging retirement) article, “A Brief History of Dangerous Ideas“, Reg Braithwaite wrote about the dangers associated with technology (ideas). Reg’ article also draws a reflection on how the Internet has become a dangerous idea for corpocracy.

Web applications are dangerous. Never mind the fact that they make desktop applications obsolete. … But … web applications just might make venture capital obsolete! When you don’t need hundreds of programmers and distribution channels and all the other friction-managing elements of a company that ships old-school software, you need a lot less money to start a business.

And on to media. You know that the web is busy putting newspapers out of business. … But the web lets us choose what we want to watch (or read), when we want to watch (or read) it. The network can’t put their up-and-coming show on right after their hit to give it a boost. The new show has to compete on its own merits. That puts users in control, and that’s dangerous.

… similar thing about pricing all music at 99 cents a track: it means the labels can’t kill an artist by sticking their CD in the $3.99 crapola bin. Users choose what they want to listen to. That’s dangerous, again because users are in control.

While I agree with all such hypothesis about the Internet killing a lot of “traditional” models, including media. But I also feel that the Internet’ rippling transformations have subdued our culture. All this advancement may actually be making us stupid.