A host of services via a new “network of networks” combining fiber and coaxial cable … will forever change definitions of channel and audience and will replace one of the boxes on the average TV set: the VCR.
Eisner said he believes the “creation of the electronic superhighway will take longer than people think.” He cited a research report, commissioned by Blockbuster Entertainment, that estimates the cost of laying fiber-optic lines and installing interactive converter hardware at $30 billion to $200 billion in total private investment.
The hardware may be dazzling, but it won’t make any difference if our intellectual product, and that of other reputable companies, isn’t right. If you are to be truly successful, you’ll be marketing, promoting and publicizing programs with inherent quality.
In [one vision of the future,] viewers are blessed with the great gift of interactivity … They have become couch potatoes of the tenth power. Equipped with special glasses and a headset, people use their TV links to experience all sorts of events and sights and trips without ever stirring from their ergonomically designed lounge chairs. Virtual reality has now become primary reality … Cocooning becomes a form of self-burial and a relative to paranoia. [In another, television is] a “catalyst” for people to share common experiences … interactive television could not replace the “shared experience” of watching … the World Series … “Digitally compressed interactive high-definition television is not going to be the center of the universe. Why? Because there is no substitute for being out there, meeting, working, traveling, mingling and learning.”
You should be able to link microcapital to microtrade to micromarkets to microtechnologies, and get a global economic system which is much more finely granulated than the coarse system that we now have … what I’m saying is, computers are going to drive down the cost of the money system. Computers are going to make possible microtrade, they’re going to make possible microinvestments, and microcultures. The dangerous and difficult part of this is that it also makes possible micro-weaponry. Changes cannot happen without intense conflicts as power shifts in the world.
The cultural reality that seems not very far off is 500 or 1,000 channels of television bringing in images Fiji or Kazakhstan, automatically translated into my own language, carrying along ideologies and religions that blow the mind, and that create in every country a configurative culture, in which elements have been adopted from elsewhere in the world.
The fact is, the more knowledge-intensive military action becomes, the more nonlinear it becomes; the more a small input someplace can neutralize an enormous investment. And having the right bit or byte of information at the right place at the right time, in India or in Turkistan or in God knows where, could neutralize an enormous amount of military power somewhere else. So it is no longer necessary to match battalion with battalion, tank with tank, in order to neutralize the other guy. Don’t think in terms of countries. Think in terms of families. Think in terms of narco-traffickers. And think in terms of the very, very smart hacker sitting in Tehran.
If you look at war we’re going to niche economies and niche warfare … That’s exactly what we say we didn’t do vis-a-vis Saddam, but what we will do. In fact there is a kind of dialectic here. We’ve always believed that many of the changes that we identify as carrying us into a third-wave civilization, or whatever, actually re-create preindustrial conditions on a high-technology basis. And what you then see is individual assassination. That’s the way the Medicis did it. It creates a scary world, certainly not a serene and stable world. And it does look a lot more like chaos theory than it does like equilibrium.
If you change the way you make wealth, you inevitably change the way you make war. And if you change the way you make war, you ought to be thinking about changing the way you make peace … If we are now in the process of transforming the way we create wealth, from the industrial to the informational, or call it whatever you wish, there is a parallel change taking place with warfare … In military terms there will be attempts to coordinate all the knowledge-intensive activities of the military from education and training to high-precision weaponry to espionage to everything that involves the mind – propaganda – into coherent strategies.
If we begin to put very powerful, small, cheap technologies into regions and cities to make them economically viable in a way they never were, it might increase conflict. The cultural, ethnic and regional differences, which are now the source of argument, but which are opposed by many on the grounds that they make no economic sense, could very well make economic sense at some time in the future. This is why you might see conflict in, say, Europe.