SAI paraphrases Cramer as follows:
While Silicon Valley tech firms soak up capital and task engineers to develop "fancy ways to deliver music and games," Rust Belt survivors are buying back stock and trying to solve real global problems with advanced materials and alternative energy sources.
And then one commenter writes:
I completely agree with his sentiment regarding Silicon Valley. What is going to happen when most of a consumer's discretionary capital is tied up making purchases of energy, food, and paying down the mortgage.
Indeed.
But even then, I think what is most interesting is not the economics of this, though that is important, but the broader issue of “significance.” Not everything has to be important of course, but do we really need, as an industry, to spend so much time focused on MySpace, or Facebook, or Twitter? Why are so many of our brain cycles trained on yet another way to engage in less than substantial chatter with each other, while people starve and we suck the last bits of fossil fuel out of the ground?
Yes, yes, I am *not* discounting all the real and important work that is going on by lots of great, smart, dedicated people. But I am suggesting that there is not enough of that going on. More importantly, we, as an industry, don’t seem to be all that interested in it. Why is every tech blog (mine included) focused on so much irrelevant crap? The answer is because apparently *that* is what people are interested in.
But the truth is, aside from Google, the stuff that seems to get the most attention really isn’t making much of a difference to our planet. The real issues facing us are things like energy, food production, shelter, health, and education. But instead we inside bubble 2.0 are focused on yet another Twitter outage.
As I see it, what really matters at this point is how we take the human condition to the next level. This relates to our physical well being and also to our emotional and spiritual well being. The last point about the spiritual is not at all about religion, but the idea that how we feel about ourselves and whether we are really good and really “doing good” is important. This is part of the reason I feel so strongly about the acceleration of piracy, which I don’t think is spiritually healthy, or economically beneficial either for us as individuals or as a society.
But the main point is that I would love to see more of us focused on how we can increase our productivity and in so doing increase our planet’s sustainability. Yes, I will grant you that communications tools like Facebook do indeed have the ability to increase our productivity, particularly inside professional environments, and this *is* significant. I just think that our obsession with finding new ways to Super Poke each other is getting to be a bit much.
7 comments:
Here here. The triviality ratio is very high in startups of late, it seems. Either that or the real game-changers just aren't being talked about. I'd love to see more focus on art, education, activism and humanitarian activity.
I've been kicking around ideas with a friend for creating a peer-review based free education sharing system and although I probably won't get it going I think those kinds of ideas have merit. I'm actually working on a poetry-related project in the hopes of encouraging people to give a flying fuck about English and writing again.
The Internet was supposed to make us smarter *on average.* Go read comments on YouTube or any political blog. It's really not working.
I once got a lot of bumps on a news site for the comment: "if only widgets were edible." I'd like to see more people working on things that stand to really improve the quality of life rather than distract us from its decline.
If you do some homework, you find lots of 2.0 applications that help cope with today's problems of rising prices etc...applications that help you save money or manage money or even get something for free that you previously had to pay for.
Any mass communication tool promises to make you smarter. Sometimes it may be hard to spot, but there are more tools available than superpoke or watching Youtube videos of people falling off their bikes. It really depends on what the individual consumer is looking for - sometimes I want to see stupid videos...most of the time I'm looking for tools that will help.
All these qualities of Web 2.0 help consumers maintain or even increase their discretionary income for things that are based on 'rust-belt' industry. Neither is going away, both are important
Couldn't agree more, Hank. I've made similar arguments in semi-conversations with Scoble, aka King Bubble'n'hype.
Sure, there's value to be found, but it's a vast sea of noise and what will no doubt turn out to be burnt capital. And Twitter being out (for the xxxth time) doesn't mean a thing to most peoples' bottom lines ... unless they're bubble-bound.
from a 2013 Think Piece that a Buddy of Mine wrote & emailed to me June 3rd, 2008 echoes your sentiment:
"Economic woes also loom and pertain directly to media. After the sharp recession of 2008-2010 due to the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) industry bubble/burst cycle, a new bubble is growing, centered on the media economy. Boosters say online media is finally coming into its own, as there is no other media of significance. Others worry that an economy based on vlogs, movies, video games, retail, services, and a national media (as well as a government) that exists only to sell these things will soon suffer an unprecedented crash. The feared causes of this crash are: the foreign credit enabling it will dry up; the whole US economy or large swaths of it being transferred (with the stroke of a key) to India and Indonesia; the Chinese taking back Taiwan, virtually the world's sole producer of computers, servers, and consumer electronics.
Spurred by the base and hegemonic status of American media, a diverse array of foreign and domestic (especially Canadian and Latin American) techo rightists and leftists start building an "alternet" while the sizeable number of people disenfranchised by the mainstream first world order crank out subversive pamphlets and books with dead technologies. This development is both motivated and hampered by the official criminalization of paper production.
Hi Hank,
Why the doom and gloom. Don’t underestimate the magical powers of a capitalistic, post-industrial, well post-agrarian society. Because western society is so efficient at food production—only 4-6% of our economy is farming—that means the rest of us (94-96% of our economy) have the luxury of laboring on purely comfort focused endeavors. Just walk around any major city viewing the myriad of businesses and ask yourself which companies are really focused on energy, food production, shelter, health, and education. In the information age, comfort gets the lions share of attention; food, clothing, and shelter are essentially a given.
That’s not to say that focus on comfort doesn’t positively side-effect the necessities. Think about the web. Readily available information hasn’t made me smarter, but it does allow me to function with the appearance of being smarter. My mantra to my teenage daughters is that “there’s no excuse for not knowing anything—look it up!” Google is the oracle. As VP of marketing for a SiValley software firm, I’m continuously amazed at how the web makes my job 10x easier that it was 10 years ago. Practically anything I need to know is available instantaneously. Through 3G, email, WebX and skype our small 70 person startup with global operations and offices in Sydney, Tokyo, Munich, and San Jose, communicate more regularly and at 10x lower costs than we could have just a few years ago.
Now having said that, I can’t help but reflect on my grandmother’s frustration with my generation. Born around the turn of the century, during her lifetime she experienced truly life changing innovations—air travel, the telephone, TV, air conditioning, and the interstate highway system, to name a few. These were major societal changing technologies. Her constant criticism of my generation was that we haven’t done much in the way of physical innovation. Air travel, cars, and telephones, are largely unchanged over the last 50+ years. It seems physical innovation has taken a hiatus.
It’s hard not to agree with my grandmother’s position, but my bet is this to will change. With energy and the environment now the center of attention, the pendulum will swing back to the physical. SiValley VC’s are now betting on companies that will have a marked effect on our physical, and environmental condition. These investments will come to fruition over the next 5-10 yrs and we will then long for more focus on creature comforts.
As a corollary to the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks", there are no new tricks, just new dogs doing old tricks who think they're new."
-Jeff
>What is going to happen when most of a consumer's discretionary capital is tied up making purchases of energy, food, and paying down the mortgage.
Pedantic correction: If your income is "tied up" doing one of those things, then by definition it isn't discretionary!
Jeff: What you are saying used to be true in those times when abundant energy (that is, fossil fuels) and cheap transportation, and all that comes along with that, were a "given".
Unfortunately, this is going to change very drastically very soon, thus the focus in society WILL shift from Web 2.0 to "how will I get my house heated"?
So, Hank's point is valid and will become far more valid in the near future :)
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