So I was thinking the other day about how much change computers and the internet have wrought in my life (which is not to say I am overwrought, but then again…) You “digital natives” can skip this, as it will sound like I had to walk 6 miles thru the snow to get to the internet . . .
I remember how, when we wrote term papers and such, for research we had to go to the library building and look up source material in these directories that had catalogued the content of all the articles in major magazines. Amazing that we used to have to do that. Now, those directories are gone, along with the job of collating the data and getting them printed and distributed.
In 1991 I had to pay something like $200-300 an hour … that’s right, an hour . . For access to digital video editing, and a decent video camera (with a guy who owned and could operate it) cost $1800 a day. Now I have a video camera in my phone, and a complete digital “nonlinear” (as we used to call it– the video version of “horseless carriage”) video editing on a $500 laptop.
That’s hardly the end of it. I now have my own personal television distribution network (youtube), my own radio show (take your pick of podcast sites), my own newspaper (blog), a publishing house (lulu) and a new and used book distribution network (amazon). It used to take someone a lifetime of work to get to a position of such power in just one of these indutries, but now everyone has it all . . . for free. I used to have a 100/month “long distance” phone bill, now can also call anyone in the world on the phone for free (skype). And all this, you own as well.
100 years ago, the Luddites tried to stop the changes of the industrial revolution by destroying the mechanical looms that were taking their jobs. We don't have that option, we love our computers too much to do that.
I think it’s time to realize that the way we approach life, school, and work, which for 100 or so years was based on a cog-in-the-factory / assembly line role in life, is quickly fading away. Instead, since I now control a massive media empire, I cannot think in terms of “working for someone else,” but instead as a miniaturized version of a media mogul. And perhaps you should too. If someone is teaching you a skill but is not also teaching you how to be an individual global marketer, you are not getting the most important element of the task in the new era.
No matter what work you do, the intense efficiency of microchip industrialization has made you 100 times more efficient. You can’t really sell a piece of the process any more. Even if you are a nurse or a secretary, you have access, via google, to 99% of the information that used to be kept locked in exclusive vaults that kept you in a lower level of management capability. You can try to remain in a compartmentalized state in your organization, but if you do, you will be trammeled by a competitor who allows their rank and file workers to each rise to the level of CEO as circumstances require– not to mention all the individual operators like me that ignore all the rules.
We are so incredibly productive and efficient now that it’s getting less and less about doing actual “work” and more and more about simply “being in the club.” Relationships are the new currency, be they personal or in having a brand identity as “the place to buy X on the internet.” Work itself has become so efficient that it has very little value. But if people really like you, . . . ah, that’s where the money is.
©) Justin Locke
