School’s Out: The Hyperlearning Revolution Will Replace Public Education

The majority of the future “workforce” is destined to be made up of contractors and consultants, including temporaries and part-timers, whose role is more one of “supplier” than “employee.” As intellectual property becomes more central to the valuation of businesses, and as most “production” work is eventually taken over by machines, workers in most fields will want compensation in the form of “points” and “residuals”: that is, a share in the ownership of capital.

It’s the Context, Stupid

Channel-surfing will be an early casualty, as the first thing to disappear in a 500-channel world will be the channel selector along with the channels themselves. Viewers will welcome the menu-driven TV Guide simulacra that replace this click-and-surf world, but even these menu schemes will be merely transitional forms on the road to far more exotic context tools taking their inspiration from outside the TV universe.

It’s the Context, Stupid

[An] avalanche of content … will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift and sort and gather the pearls that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools.

It’s the Context, Stupid

From Gutenberg to Sarnoff and on to today, developers have wondered how we would ever fill the pipe, yet content volumes have always outstripped channel capacity … The same will be true for digital networks. There will be no “dead air” on our new conduits. This doesn’t mean that content is king though, for if history is any guide, most of it will be fungible commodity properties such as game shows or old movies today, or utter trash … Now the “vast wasteland” … will be supplanted by a vaster wasteland brimming with utterly new forms of interactive cyberdreck.

The Five Worst Predictions of the Internet Age

Jupiter Communications projected “$3.1 billion in annual business-to-consumer revenue for e-commerce by 1998.” Forrester predicted $2.3 billion. The real number turned out to be more than $13 billion.