May 09
7
Disruptive Technology – P2P and The New Spanish Inquisition
A story from the US about the demise of newspapers is interesting to think about in terms of the continuing element of surprise that is being seen with regard to disruptive impacts on business and the reasons that people attribute to the disruption.
The story was essentially about the incorrectness of the (US) hypothesis that media bias in favour of a leftist agenda is what is killing newspapers.
It concludes as follows:
because the world around them has been transformed. The growth of the
Internet has left the traditional newspaper business model, with its
vast physical plant and expensive armies of writers, editors,
photographers, pressmen, mailers, truck drivers, and salesmen, in a
shambles. Craigslist and its ilk have vaporized what used to be most
papers' greatest profit center: classified advertising. A decades-long
trend of falling readership, brought on by the rise of television, has
been accelerated to warp speed by the explosion of websites and blogs
offering news and opinion on every conceivable subject, 24 hours a day
- and usually for free.
This is reality. The impact of the Internet takes many forms and you can't just look at one business and analyze that while ignoring other sectors. The Internet cuts across all verticals where things can be digitized. Movies and music are two of those sectors, but newspapers, TV, movies, music are all just content; as are, when reduced to the basics, formulae for mapping the human gene, recipes for food – or for pharmaceuticals for that matter, as are tickets for travel…. All of them things that can be reduced to ones and zeros and shared from one to another in various kinds of social networks.
Imagine, if you will, a next generation of Twitter that is not limited to 140 characters and runs in a P2P environment, where you can share in a social network the gene sequence for a cure for cancer and plug it in to a machine that will fabricate the cure. Will we by that time have allowed the content industry to have legislated out of existence the very technology that will be useful to the whole world?
Remember that joke about computers? There are two kinds of computers…. those that have crashed, and those that will crash….
Similarly there are two kinds of businesses…. those that have been disrupted by P2P, and those that will be disrupted by P2P. (I am assuming for the purposes of this brief article that all business have already been disrupted by the Internet).
Oh and by the way…. why do you think we had a Global Financial Crisis (GFC)? We had it because digital technology disrupted the banking sector. It made it possible for complex algorithms to be created and deployed – where some people just assumed that the smart people creating the algorithms were so smart that they wouldn't make a mistake. And while the sun shined a lot of them made a huge amount of hay.
Now we are living in the wake up period of history. What we need to do now is to really embrace every aspect of efficiency that is made possible by digital technology, and understand that none of the pre-existing rules can be automatically assumed to have relevance or to work in this new world.
It is only by recognizing this and then acting upon it that we will avoid a return to a dark age where all innovation is fettered by a new kind of Spanish Inquisition.
It may sound pythonesque but these are strange times and we actually need to wake up to the fact that there are significant forces arrayed that want to stop technology from evolving into something that can aid humanity by putting shackles on it…