[Techno Doomed ]

David Galbraith: "From F**ked company to F**ked Industry. 7 entire sectors that the Internet will nuke

Following on from the acquisition of Skype by Ebay, this weeks Economist leads with a prediction that everyone would have laughed at if it had been in Mondo 2000 ten years ago:

'the rise of Skype and other VOIP services means nothing less than the death of the traditional telephone business established over a century ago... the death of the trillion dollar voice telephony market... it is now no longer a question whether VOIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so'

What other sectors are toast:

2. Retail banking - retail banks are crap, expensive, lazy and complacent. Why do I have to mail pieces of paper that look like 19th century parchment 3000 miles to deposit virtual money via a building with travertine floors and 20 foot ceilings?

3. Photography - The number of art schools in Britain reflects the requirement for large numbers of illustrators to record the conquests of the early Victorians rather than a British aesthetic taste. These illustrators were replaced by photographers. The photographers will, in turn, largely be replaced by amateurs given that digital photography achieves quality through unlimited quantity. The good photographers will survive, but the army of mediocrity that still shoot weddings on film to overcharge for the prints will be overtaken by editing the best shots from the army of guests with digital cameras."

4. The Music Industry - enough said. Except 5 years after Napster why are millions of people using iPods to spend the same amount of money to rent songs rather than own them? Perhaps those white cables lead to electrodes that slowly fry your brain leaving you as a blackened silhouette - like the billboards show.

5. Suburbia - the railways created them and cars extended them, but the donut effect will kill them. Inner suburbs will become ghettos as the young middle class populate the former inner city industrial areas and those who are older, with families hook up to broadband internet, liaise with China and India and commute a couple of days a week to the office from real countryside.

6. Realtors - An architect spends 7 years training and gets up to 16% for designing a house and then is liable for 12 years. A realtor with 3 months training, who doesn't know a cornice from a corniche, gets up to 1.5% for opening the door and opening his/her mouth without any liability. The good news is that it wont be for long, eventually cartel-like operations such as Manhattan realtors will be disintermediated by more efficient online marketplaces. Hahahaha.

----------------
The impossible logic of copyright in the digital age

One of the problems that I have with the current Supreme Court ruling over file sharing is the assumption that this stuff can be legislated absolutely.

As media is reduced to an atomic state of bits, it starts to show quantum-like uncertainty, is it a thing like an LP or a transmission like a song on the radio, a particle or a wave?

Hidden within the Supreme Court ruling is the other side of the coin:

Just as people have created software that allows people to share things they don't own, with copy protected digital media nobody owns anything. Everything you buy is actually rented.

Why is it legal to develop software which necessarily prevents ownership of something you buy?

At the moment I buy albums in flea markets for 10c a song, read books that I bought in the UK in the US and can read all the books I want by checking them out of the library.

I cannot buy second hand MP3s, watch DVDs I bought in the UK (without hardware that will surely be banned at some point) or check out unlimited electronic books from the library.

The bottom line to all this: stuff should just be a whole lot cheaper and the problem would surely go away.

The role of the media industry has always been to promote and distribute media - when the network replaces these what is that role?

Notes on RIAA and MPAA Press Conference: Corante
Posted by david galbraith on June 27, 2005

---------------------
http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_01_19.html#008914

Gained in translation

: Gotta love it: Now the FCC is mucking up international relations. The Greeks are pissed that the FCC would investigate the decency of the Olympics.

Greece does not wish to be drawn into an American culture war. Yet that is exactly what is happening. The Federal Communications Commission has launched an investigation into the broadcast of the opening ceremonies of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympic Games.

The first step was taken in December, when the commission demanded that NBC provide it with tapes of the broadcast. This was in response to nine complaints about indecency from U.S. citizens (globally, viewers exceeded 3.9 billion).



7. Walmart - Walmart has Woolworths written all over it. As a portal into the People's Republic of China staffed by Mexicans, its a pretty weird place to be frequented by people from Kansas. Its demise wont have much to do with the Internet, except in that it epitomises the last hurrah of the way things were in retail. They should buy Amazon.
link »

tags: [predictions]

posted via Wists: permamark
========================
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
Scooter Libby's novel shooting up the charts on Amazon
Scooter Libby wrote a novel in 1996, called The Apprentice, and ever since he was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements, his book has been selling well on Amazon.

The sex scenes in the book feature tasteful fare such as bestiality with children.

"The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the 'mound' of a little girl," Collins reports. "The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter." Meanwhile, "certain passages can better be described as reminiscent of Penthouse Forum," Collins writes. "Other sex scenes are less conventional."

Collins quotes from the indicted aide's novel: "At age 10 the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest."

Will our porn-hatin' Attorney General be the next to go after Libby? Link

posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 03:53:38 PM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post
======================