Snails in the Internet Wormhole

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.

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