Think About the Future

Today I purchased three movies for 35 bucks. They are episodes 1,2,3 from Star Wars in the Blu-Ray format. I'm going to play them on my HDTV via my XBox One. And yes I do have studio monitors and a fat Yamaha 12 inch 300W subwoofer. As I stood in line at Target checking out, the woman in front of me used $200 in Target issued currency that were given to her in the form of smart cards. While she dawdled, I decided to listen to some Star Wars music that I streamed over my smartphone, and read an article about social psychology. 

I had to hurry back home because one of my daughters had all four of her wisdom teeth removed under sedation and the other one got numbed up from a deep scrub. December is big dentistry month around here. So we're all at home this afternoon watching the marathon in advance of the next episode that we've reserved seats for online. 

Somebody asked what if the Internet wasn't able to make a profit. So I answered:

It would be like the old internet, when nobody knew how to profit from it.

It would be horribly expensive, like it was. Because people had to buy the pieces like 50 separate modems ,without the expectation of ever getting money from it. I was a member of Public Access Networks Corporation.   It was the first ISP.  You never heard such drama as they had to take from Nynex and AT&T as to why they should lease a circuit to a bunch of computer nerds just so they could talk to each other by computer. Why not use a phone? What kind of business are you anyway?

There would be no innovation. Because if you were the clever negotiator at Panix, so what? Just because you can get a deal with them doesn't mean you can get one with Pac Bell.

The list goes on and on. Anything where there's no profit in it gets ignored by people with money. No good ideas will come, no innovations, no standards all because no people are spending money on the basic premise.

I was on the internet before there was an internet (1984). It was small, expensive, claustrophobic, slow, obscure, and difficult to use. And even then we knew all the things it *could* be used for. We just had to wait until people could figure out how to make money on it. We're all better off because they did.

 

So I remembered way back 20 odd years ago when you couldn't buy a PC with a credit card from a retail store. Or maybe I'm just remembering that I never had $2400 worth of credit for my PowerMac 7100. But I do remember that the very existence of CompUSA was a miracle, and soon came Incredible Universe and other places that just didn't get it, like the Gateway store. But soon enough Samsung introduced themselves and the new flatscreen & DVD wars opened up with the Matrix blowing every mind. The winner, Best Buy, that now houses McIntosh and most of the surviving high end audio. 

 

Of course what really is making me think the fact that we're in the future owes a great deal to one man, who is our contemporary Edison. That is Elon Musk who just returned his first stage rocket to land back at Cape Canaveral the other night. Yay SpaceX. Yay Tesla. Yay PayPal. I've been using PayPal for 15 years now, and it has been 10 years since Ford reintroduced the Ford GT. Now I can buy a stock 500HP Mustang factory fresh off the lot. Of course I also have to give props to Jeff Bezos who is one of those great innovators without which the Internet would be a hodgepodge of MUDs and MOOs. As much as many people love Google and Facebook... well, there's arhitecture and there's suburban sprawl. I give a greater hat tip to Wolfram and Wikipedia. 

 

But this digital future feels very good to me. Mostly because I understand it and I can afford it and I don't absolutely depend upon it. It's good to be alive now.