Brockman’s cadre are a pretty select group — scientists, hippie visionaries and culture gurus — but that’s an interesting set of testaments. None of them say that the Internet made them more prosperous, that it helped them to settle down, that they feel better about their future thanks to the Internet. Nobody says that the Internet gave them a sense of safe, fatherly, middle-class things to do with a three year old. It’s great for thinking about tons of weird crap, and it’s rather bad for business and governance, the Internet. And for consumerism? Nobody pays on the Internet. They hate paying. They might mess with e-commerce for convenience sake, but give them their head and they undercut, they conspire, they disintermediate, they eBay and they Craigslist, they copy, they pirate, they cut and paste. Those are not consumer values. Real consumers have brand loyalty. They’re proud to pay because it shows how far they’ve come from poverty, from precarity. They want the car with fins. They specifically want the fins. Internet people want to swap the behind-the-scenes story about the fins, which is by no means the same impulse. Bruce Sterling ☀
Wednesday 13 January 2010
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