Sounds like a very old-fashioned sales pitch.

P.T. Barnum may have been right at one point in time, many years ago, when he said that there was a sucker born every minute… but that does not mean that everyone born must be a sucker — and to pop a bubble,… well, all it takes is one single prick.

These days, it seems like there are more than enough pricks out there… — indeed: there are probably so many pricks, that they are totally willing and able to take care of each and every one of the suckers. Disintermediation is going to happen: expect it!

When we consider the value of content, we need to consider what relationship there is between the content and the container. For example: if the container is “business”, “jobs”, “real estate”, “movies”, “diapers”, etc., the consumers’ expectation of content will be different in each case.

For the producer, choosing the appropriate container is paramount to receiving an audience of eager consumers. Producers who choose generic containers will only get a very mediocre audience. However, producers who select a very specific container may very well be able to reach a very selective audience.

Day by day, the container — the communication channel, the medium which transports the message — is becoming ever more crucial. Indeed: If the container is simply a marketplace for buyers and sellers to meet, then the message is simply “user-generated content“. In this context, market participants are freely available, ready and willing to express their ideas,… if they have paid their entrance fee at the door to gain access to the container.

If your container is meaningless, then you will have an increasingly difficult time turning it into a marketplace. This is precisely what happened to the newspaper industry, and it is also what will happen to other publishing industries focused on nothing more than traditional brand names… — including generic television channels, generic cable services, generic search engines and any nondescript information sources whatsoever. All such media will address only the most base and meanest of markets,… the tired, poor, huddled masses, who yearn to be free… — and thereby the din of such generic content is nothing more than a babbling murmur of worthless, noisy and noxious spam.

If Moffett wasn’t here, I don’t think NASA would have been here and if NASA wasn’t here, I don’t think Lockheed would have been here.

So when Paul Krugman mentioned in a blog post that David Brooks had responded to Krugman’s editorial from last friday (to which I had also replied), I was a little bit curious about what Mr. Brooks’ response might be. Plus, I had been asked about my position, and so I thought it might make sense to clarify it some more.

Forget David Brooks — that is just so confusing that none of it is worth mentioning at all.

When I mentioned bogus values, I think it was not clear to some that I meant jobs. Jobs are simply a leftover side-effect of 19th century capitalism. We no longer need jobs. What is needed most of all today are people who are literate enough to work in an information society — and presently I think no more than 1% of most national populations on Earth would pass muster.

The only literacy most people have mastered is how to buy things with paper money, and how to consume mainstream media such as television programs and tabloid press. From a productive point of view — e.g. one that would make a democracy (or a republic) function the way the so-called founding fathers found might be fruitful — the vast majority of the human population is by and large incompetent… and disinterested.

In contrast, anyone who is interested doesn’t really need a high school education — the Internet has more than enough information in it. The problem is: most people don’t know how to use it, simply because no one is teaching them how to use it. Even most lawmakers are incompetent, hence progress is moving ahead at about the rate that Professor Krugman is moving forward on his treadmill.

The [aforementioned] rule of thumb works for cars, for houses, and for every other substantial area of technological regulation. Not realizing that it fails for the Internet does not make you evil, and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless.

One reason why it might be so slow is that the technology is antiquated.

People who use computers to interact on facebook and twitter are essentially using racehorses to move milling stones and grind grain. That’s not impossible to do, it just doesn’t make much sense.

If you are unable to ascertain the authorship / authority of an “information resource”, then that is your problem, not a problem that has to do with the source of the information. For example, if your online identity relies on the brand name of a company, then you yourself don’t really exist online. :O

That’s a choice I have to make. Here’s a quote from an excerpt of the book:

Models this complex — whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic — often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave.

If the system is a supposed to make electricity, then obviously we can try to “figure out” if it indeed makes electricity…. — but what if the system ought instead to be optimized to prevent cancer?

If the same system can be configured to either produce electricity or to prevent cancer, which one should we measure? And what if our measurement apparatus causes depression in butterflies, causing them to no longer flap their wings, thereby changing weather patterns leading to flash floods across much of Asia?

Hurray for systems — they give computers something to do!