This may well be my longest post yet (and is rather geeky), so feel free to skip this if you’re searching just for fun stories and pics about some member of the family. Still here? Read on, then.
All the literate entities who dwell in this house are repeat readers of both the Vancouver Housing and vancouver (un)real estate blogs. One of them had a post a few days ago about a poli-sci professor from Calgary who wrote a book which said something to the effect of bloggers who rant and roar are at heart truly lonely and powerless people at the edges of delusion about the power of their words. My first thought was about how completely out of touch this man was. How many times has an emerging technology been attacked by whichever establishment is most threatened by the innovation? Let’s see: printing press, industrial revolution, radio, television, email…yeah, pretty much. This set me thinking; if people are doing this now about things that have been in use for a few years already, what will they be doing this about a few years from now?
Every time a new communication medium comes along, the people who control existing media get all in a tizzy; they’ve become so used to controlling what they have that they can’t envision a world where they don’t have the control. Net-based innovation is slowly eroding many established media, and those who feel they have something to lose are finally getting uncomfortable. Newspapers are on the cusp of becoming obsolete, after which other periodicals will start to suffer.
But all this analysis is so 2004. The big question is: what up-and-coming, net-based technology will set “the man” on his ear? What other controls over aspects of modern life in an industrialized nation can be wrested from those who currently control them?
In short, what’s next?
Anything that can be represented electronically is a target. Distribution of media is already undergoing the paradigm shift with the advent of torrents. In the near future people won’t be buying music or movies on physical media anymore; they’ll just download it to do with as they please (poor attempts to the contrary nonwithstanding). In general, any sort of artificial control over information sources and the consumers of that information will erode. To get back to the real estate theme from earlier, I think it’s likely that real estate agents will exist only in niche markets: domestic long distance or international moves where the buyers may not speak the same language as the seller, let alone be on the same continent. Anyone looking to buy or sell a property locally will just…do it; no agents taking three percent to act as glorified couriers, shuttling contracts they didn’t write (or even fill out) between parties. This is disintermediation at its best. The fewer hands information has to go through, the cheaper it will be to do business on either end of the transaction.
One area I can see really changing the market would be fabrication. What would life be like if people had a machine small enough to fit in a garage that could make things? What if you could purchase equipment that cost the same as a midsize car which you could use to make housewares, or machine parts? What if you could make your own electronics or clothes?
If people don’t need to go to a store for these things, what would Wal-Mart sell? What would the world look like without Wal-Mart?
The people at MIT started asking these kinds of questions a while ago, and they’re starting to come up with some interesting answers. Now if we can hook these folks up with the alternative energy source crowd, we’ll really have the makings of paradigm shift.