An excellent interview here with technology visionary, Jaron Lanier.
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_la...dle_class/
He has a new book out which I am going to check out. The inerview (and the book) cover his thoughts on how the internet is starting to hollow out the middle classes. So that the content on the internet is soon to be made by the many (who are not paid) and owned by the few (who keep all the money that is generated).
This 'winner takes all' model is different to traditional economies where those who generate the wealth get to keep a sizable portion for themselves (ie the middle classes). And this helps stimulate the economy to provide further jobs and customers in the future.
It is an interesting interview and the talk of 'winner takes all' is reminscent of how Nassim Taleb analyses alot of industries in his books. For instance he gave an interesting statistic along the lines that 90% of the previous year's revenues from publishing went to JK Rowling. I'm sure I have misremembered the figure but it was along those lines.
The figure makes sense when you factor in movie rights and so on. It seems such Pareto distributions are spreading online as well.
Anyway - it seems likely that the internet will soon lead to a crisis in capitalism. And this is an area of interest for me since I have spent some time recently studying Marx. And he seems to have an interesting insight in to how technologies and distributions of wealth can cascade with unforeseen consequences.
Still - the internet may be destroying jobs. But it is not destroying value. I would say that the internet is worth thousands of pounds to me in terms of value.
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_la...dle_class/
He has a new book out which I am going to check out. The inerview (and the book) cover his thoughts on how the internet is starting to hollow out the middle classes. So that the content on the internet is soon to be made by the many (who are not paid) and owned by the few (who keep all the money that is generated).
This 'winner takes all' model is different to traditional economies where those who generate the wealth get to keep a sizable portion for themselves (ie the middle classes). And this helps stimulate the economy to provide further jobs and customers in the future.
It is an interesting interview and the talk of 'winner takes all' is reminscent of how Nassim Taleb analyses alot of industries in his books. For instance he gave an interesting statistic along the lines that 90% of the previous year's revenues from publishing went to JK Rowling. I'm sure I have misremembered the figure but it was along those lines.
The figure makes sense when you factor in movie rights and so on. It seems such Pareto distributions are spreading online as well.
Anyway - it seems likely that the internet will soon lead to a crisis in capitalism. And this is an area of interest for me since I have spent some time recently studying Marx. And he seems to have an interesting insight in to how technologies and distributions of wealth can cascade with unforeseen consequences.
Still - the internet may be destroying jobs. But it is not destroying value. I would say that the internet is worth thousands of pounds to me in terms of value.