"And there is truly nothing wrong with that! I am not saying, “The internet is turning us all into children, isn‟t that awful;” quite the contrary. Cultural neo

"And there is truly nothing wrong with that! I am not saying, “The internet is turning us all into children, isn‟t that awful;” quite the contrary. Cultural neoteny can be wonderful. But it‟s important to understand the dark side." This is from a book from Jaron Lanier called "You are not a gadget". I think Jaron Lanier is just lost like any of us trying to explain the current present and especially the use of cybernetics in our life. We know that a lot of people were afraid of technology and the changes introduced in our societies (including myself). If you ever read Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich or even Theodore Kaczynski, you'll see the issues of changing our human societies with the technologies (especially the ones that we cannot control) can be really scary. It's really difficult to evaluate the positive or negative impact of technologies when you are directly living the change. In the previous book of Jaron Lanier, I think Jaron was still trying to find the balance between the positive and negative side of technologies. Nowadays, he is more into the "sole" negative side... To go back to the example of Kodak, I'm not sure that's the right example. Especially that Kodak completely overlooked the aspect of film processing for the online market where Fujifilm was ahead with their "minilabs"... even it was a difficult step for Fujifilm, they moved into something profitable on the long-run.