[LINK] When the proletariat all become the elite, who will unclog our non-virtual toilets ? - Was Business fetishism (was Four Corners NBN)

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Greg Taylor
> Sent: Wednesday, 13 April 2011 10:57 AM
> To: Link List
> Subject: Re: [LINK] Business fetishism (was Re: LINK] Four 
> Corners NBN)
> 
> On 2011/04/13 9:42 AM, Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> ><SNIP>
> > > SMTP
> > VoIP (invented by John Walker because he wanted on-network 
> calls from 
> > Europe to the US) HTML (Tim Berners-Lee)
> > Skype
> > Google
> > BitTorrent
> >
> > I realise that I'm ignoring counter-examples, but I would 
> expect that 
> > any competent study would find successful, pervasive user-led 
> > innovations outnumber business-led innovations on the Internet.
> >
> 
> Totally agree. I would add to your list open source and 
> community-developed software, e.g.
> Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Gimp, Drupal, Wordpress, Firefox etc. etc.
> 
> Many of these products have been eagerly adopted by business and 
> government because of their obvious advantages compared with 
> proprietary 
> software (and not just on price). The Internet would not have 
> developed 
> so rapidly without them.

Err, I would have said conversely these products would not have
developed so quickly without the crowd sourcing capacity of the
Internet.

Therefore this is the perfect example of the ultimately symbiotic
relationship between technology, crowd sourcing (open source) and
economic and technological growth.

Torvald opened the floodgates, Mozilla consumerised the waters and eBay
commercialised it. I think the others were mainly interface refinements.
Although blogging and camera phones did severely dent the News services
unique patch of turf.

The real winners in Richards' list above were mostly the products that
were the most economically disruptive:

SMTP wiped out the bulk of Telecoms International Facsimile revenue
(which was more than the voice revenue) within three years.
VOIP managed to introduce competition into the Australian voice
telecommunications and lowered STD/Community/ISD call costs by 98%
within five years.
HTML unfortunately was a rewrite of SGML which was developed by IBM in
1960 so it was the "re-release and publicity" of a 32 year old
technology which became successful because it divorced users (more
disruption) from the proprietary interfaces of CompuServe, Minerva and
AOL and facilitated the possibility of competition (ISP's).
Skype was not a terribly business model altering technology. It was
based on the development of Kazaa and is merely VOIP with a community
sharing policy (P2P). Before Skype there were other VOIP programs (like
iPhone and Netphone) that were equally as successful as Skype on a
percentage basis (but were six years too early) - Today Skype boasts a
regular user base of only an aggregate 20 million.
Google's algorithm for referencing was definitely a prioritisation
reference service that the internet needed to remove much of the dross.
Bittorrent unfortunately is merely another revision of community data
sharing (P2P) that has managed to disrupt only NNTP servers but did act
as a supercharged mechanism to force content creators to distribute
their content digitally. 

The real disruption was the initial commercialisation of the NNTP
community sharing practices into a consumer friendly gui program and
that was Napster.

Very few recognise the rise in economic value of the companies that
increased their value because of the commercialisation of Internet and
the economic risks taken by thew early ISP entrepreneurs. 

For example, Time Warner http://www.perceptric.com/images/Napstertwc.gif
The corporate behemoths only mention the negative aspects, (real or
imagined). 

All in all, the NBN, the Internet and the worlds connected population
have created a new economy that is based on peer review and not
artificial public company  shareholder profit requirements.

I am told continuously that the retired folk depend on those dividends
for survival. This of course produces an interesting conundrum. What if
the monopolistic existence of their investment choice is destroying the
economy for the next batch of retirees ?
This alteration in the baseline of traditional fundamentals has created
considerable potential and realised angst to our general socio economic
well being. 
In other words, the Internet is creating a socialist environment that
must ultimately, due the preponderance of persons sitting on fat
posteriors become a welfare state.

There are only so many virtual or service products that can be created
electronically in an environment where the global population is
constantly growing.

So comrade, how is that NBN thing going ? Is Australia making anything
yet - or is everyone just holding high speed broadband teleconference
committee meetings ?

Qualification:
Economically, I believe the NBN is good for evolutionary, technical,
social and economic development [but only for those that have obtained
an education].
Those that opted [or were unable to collect the necessary survival skill
sets], will become infrastructure rollout road kill. 
Notwithstanding the foregoing, the big problem in ten years time will
be... How can we convince an Internaut child to take on a plumbing
apprenticeship ?

In Germany in the seventies, the Government opened it's immigration to
the people of Turkey who then took over entire segments of the blue
collar trades. Yet even that option hatched a whole new set of
unsolvable social problems. [1]

And eventually, integration into the "virtual" society. [2]

[1]...learn German or face deportation
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/may2001/turk-m04.shtml
[2]Turkish Entrepreneurship and Multiculturalism in Berlin1
http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working papers/WPTC-01-19 Pecoud.pdf


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