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I think there are some parallels between your view of the wasted potential of radio and mine on the wasted potential of the internet. Your thesis could be resta

I think there are some parallels between your view of the wasted potential of radio and mine on the wasted potential of the internet. Your thesis could be restated: the potential of radio was never realized because of the choice to be greedy and optimize for low cost and high margins rather than value to listeners. These optimizers that prioritize growth of private wealth naturally gain an advantage over visionary types (the talent, you say) who might prefer to invest into creating universal value. (I.e. music or other audio content which can be shared in a way that makes everyone's lives better on average.) Optimizing their way to economic advantage leads to domination by those optimizers, they continue to optimize even if the audience is worse off for it, and so we all are. Greedy optimizers have pretty clearly come to dominate the IT space as well, and like in radio, they disrespect the audience. They don't aim to create shared value except in order to have more of the pie. Visionary types that gave us a lot of the foundational ideas which made the internet so great (anywhere to anywhere communications, open protocols allowing global interoperability, www, chat, email, e-commerce) are forced to work within and are stifled by the frameworks now enforced by the dominant, greedy actors. I suppose it may sound to some like I'm complaining about capitalism, but I don't take issue with money and liberty. I take issue with people's choices within the system. It's their choice to make accumulating power their goal over using what power they have for more utopian goals. (E.g. a higher "net quality of life", or furthering civilization somehow.) I'll concede that self-interest is somewhat indispensable, as it is in nature. However, for us big-brained, civilized humans, there's a balance to be struck against shared interest, and the balance, in many contexts, is off to a degree that is harmful to everyone.

ddingus 4y ago
Yes, that resonates with me strongly. Makes a ton of sense. Your restatement is accurate, in my view. Easy, predictable money seems to be higher value money, or maybe they feel they can do the same thing a ton of others did and that is load up the station with even more future value paid out today as debt, coupled with an even more aggressive and lean cost model. Probably will happen. "The Talent" has two bodies of people: One, you identified as the visionaries. Yes. Agreed. In my comment above, I was also talking about the people behind the mic. That talent is the mind people find compelling, entertaining and informative. They gutted those people, while the ones you talk about just left seeing the mess to come! Whoever is there now I would bet, expecting low odds, on them believing some AI / Machine learning thing can push out the last of the people, leaving the whole thing as some sort of passive medium others can push content through.

ddingus 4y ago

Yes, that resonates with me strongly. Makes a ton of sense. Your restatement is accurate, in my view. Easy, predictable money seems to be higher value money, or maybe they feel they can do the same thing a ton of others did and that is load up the station with even more future value paid out today as debt, coupled with an even more aggressive and lean cost model. Probably will happen. "The Talent" has two bodies of people: One, you identified as the visionaries. Yes. Agreed. In my comment above, I was also talking about the people behind the mic. That talent is the mind people find compelling, entertaining and informative. They gutted those people, while the ones you talk about just left seeing the mess to come! Whoever is there now I would bet, expecting low odds, on them believing some AI / Machine learning thing can push out the last of the people, leaving the whole thing as some sort of passive medium others can push content through.