*I hope the awesome youth rebel here is all philosophical when he himself gets
shuffled off with a yellow robe and wooden begging bowl circa 2035 AD.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-04/01/peter-kirwan-the-great-transition.aspx
(...)
"As a member of Generation X, I’m situated on the right side of the fundamental psychographic divide of our era. I don't mean the gulf between digital natives and digital immigrants: what I’ve got in mind is the deeper fault line that separates the baby-boomers from everyone who came after them.
"On the far side of this divide, a vast cohort of executives born between 1946 and the early 1960s controls the commanding heights of the media industry. Their power to block the arrival of the future has increased, is increasing and ought to be reduced.
"My proposition? It’s time for a cull.
"Most of the baby-boom generation clings to a world view defined by scarcity rather than plenty. They continue to fight what I call Branson’s War – the effort to expand every available revenue stream in the face of imaginary opposition from the long-departed Captain Mainwaring types who ran the economy 50 years ago. (((This being WIRED UK, our author would be referring to Sir Richard Branson, that elderly, tottering, longhaired, spacefaring gentlemen with the private Caribbean fiefdom littered with nude, sunbathing models.)))
"Entrenched within Big Media, surrounded by the pain and sorrow of declining ad revenues, they feel cut off from new sources of growth, innovation and wonderment. (((Thanks to my Twitter account, I'm kinda maxed-out on new sources of wonderment. I'm so entirely over-wondered that I can barely read BoingBoing, the net's ultimate wonderment wunderkammer.))) Some continue to pine – secretly, because it’s become a source of embarrassment – for a secretary who will print out their emails.
"Boomers find it hard to accept that super-abundant credit has resulted in a world that is over-supplied with me-too products. Asking them to consider the gift economy of open source feels a bit like trying to explain Maya hieroglyphics to Cortez the Killer. (((I think he's gonna want to pick another metaphor here, because Cortez won and permanently burnt 99.5% of the Mayan open-source documentation.))) Confronted with a new business proposition, their first question concerns pricing power, rather than the creation of value for customers. The second is usually about the lock-in mechanisms that will generate economic rent.
"In 1977, when I was 13, The Clash released Complete Control, their rant against the baby-boomers (((Joe Strummer born 1952, Mick Jones born 1955, but what the heck, carry on ranting))) who constructed the music industry in the image of a Victorian panopticon hooked up to a cash machine. Boomer attitudes haven’t changed that much, but the music industry’s cash machine has started to malfunction spectacularly. Hence the need for change – and not just in the music industry.
"Take, for example, the outgoing chairman of a major quoted UK media group (aged 56), who recently told the FT – in apparently hushed tones – that some pioneering media companies now allow advertisers to book ad space via the Web. He seemed blissfully unaware that Google has been doing precisely this since 2002. Or the editor-turned-managing director (aged 52) who offered up the following considered judgement: "I have the impression that the internet is like going into a bar where everybody is shouting, whereas when I read a newspaper it is much easier.”
"In some ways, these are the best of the bunch...."
