http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-08/07/bad-news-what-if-the-money's-not-coming-back.aspx
*No newspapers, much weaker and feebler TV, and many fewer cars. Most of those cars will be ancient clunkers. Or they;ll be cars that you never heard of, because it's become impossible to advertise the cars, due to the loss of the newspapers and the TV.
*Besides, cars just cost too much for most people. Can't get loans. Price of fuel unstable. Not worth it.
*Talking about this in terms of "bad news" or "bad judgment by business leaders" seems archaic. It's like describing World War One as "a serious diplomatic concern."
*No, the money doesn't come back, or at least, not in that old-fashioned form: big cars, big media. The next decade is a different civilization.
*How different? Hard to say, but an interesting guess here; forget the old-school cars and big TV; in a contemporary network culture, you can't even get the lost money back from "culture" or "information":
http://varnelis.net/blog/the_end_of_the_music_industry
"A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.
"Again, a chapter of Networked Publics, this time the chapter on culture is worth taking a look at. Here, we surveyed the changes in consumption and production of cultural artifacts in the last decade. The trends in the book that we identified are all still in play, albeit even more so. (...)
"I know that my thesis that network culture is distinct from postmodernism is controversial, but the change in the music industry is an example of how different things are: where under postmodernism, capital colonized culture, and in turn culture colonized capital, today we watch a massive collapse of the culture industry. Instead of culture and its products (which were still physical), capital sought to trade in the next horizon, information and its delivery. In doing so, however, capital ran across the difficulties of capitalizing on that condition and is now faced with a crisis...."
