Small publishers will make their take on their specialty. Of course pornography will pioneer this technology, as porn tapes perpetuated the VCR. Some guy takes nudie photos of himself, advertises the link. Thumbnail pictures are free – to see the screen-size in graphic detail is gonna cost you. Without a printing press, a delivery truck, a marketing staff, or a host of lawyers, he’ll be kickin’ it freestyle.
When you turn on your computer, your wallet will boot up on your desktop. From Internet tolls to pay-as-you-play software, you will be assessed endless bursts of miniscule fees by a dizzying array of personal purveyors.
[Online speech restrictions] open the door to censorship and the chilling of free speech. It’s a growing problem across the United States.
It may be that in two years’ time, everything we know today about the Web will have become wrong. This principle will apply as much to asset creation as any other part of the Web experience … Don’t expect the Web ever to stabilize to the point where you can file your deed of title to virtual property in the online property office.
Identified by and targeted for our product consumption, we will find ourselves receiving more personalized mail from products than from people. They will know us, and they will manipulate us. We will end up hating the Internet, and ourselves.
Instead of deciding what we want and when, advertising companies, their corporate clients, and big computer systems will be figuring it out for us … Subject to endless pitches, we will be identified by our consumer habits, immediately conscious of being encouraged to consume by people who seem to know us better than our friends.
As society and culture assimilate the Net, our attitudes as a group will evolve, leading to various calls for increased and decreased freedom in different aspects of Net activity and attempts to enshrine those freedoms or limits on freedom in laws … We will see increasingly complex and subtle battles over Net control and freedom, where no one clearly wins most of the time, and everyone protects their turf.
You buy a pack of gum about every two weeks. Since you buy it with your cash card, everyone in the sweets industry has your name on their frequent-buyers list. Ten days after your most recent purchase, you log onto your computer and you have e-mail from Wrigley’s and Bubblicious – coupons, with a button – click here for gum delivery. You have become a habit. It may not seem that bad, heck, it might even seem like they are providing a service. Project this over the immense number of goods we use in our lives, and it becomes immediately scarier.
If you give individuals more control over their personal information, it will force industry to get acceptance from consumers before selling personal data, and I think that’s a desirable goal. One of the outcomes clearly could be that industry would be more responsive and more respectful of individual privacy right.
As soon as digital cash comes out, there will be incredible demand to set up small shops – there will be transaction technology for a small-scale Web-content cottage industry.