change

An interesting story from an old issue of Wired that I found on my shelf this morning:

^{Picture by Mando Gonzales}

“Morgan had become convinced that there was plenty of gold left behind when the rush ended in 2001. The idea took root in fall 2003, while he was reading The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage’s history of the telegraph. Just like the most ardent promoters of the Internet, the telegraph’s early boosters claimed that the fledgling technology would do everything from helping save lives to ushering in world peace. Over the half-century between the telegraph’s rise to prominence and its eclipse by the telephone, it did change the way people lived and worked, but not in the ways its evangelists had predicted. “The lesson was that while new communications media do change the world,” Morgan says, “they do it much slower than the early adopters think they will.”

From there, it was a small step to the realization that perhaps some of the ideas from the Internet boom might simply have been a few years ahead of their time. Morgan began to revisit the startups he’d put cash into - those that had failed and those that were still breathing. “I was getting reinterested in consumer Internet plays,” Morgan says. “Some of the companies I’d invested in were starting to look like they had made it through the nuclear winter, and I wanted to figure out exactly how they were different from the ones that hadn’t made it.” He set about systematically distilling the lessons of the recent past and applying those lessons to his evaluation of each startup that he considered funding.“

Lift conference editorial director Nicolas Nova revisits technological failures from the past ranging from the videophone to the intelligent fridge. He then describes the reasons behind them and shows that failures can be turned into successes as shown by the videophone, which has now resurfaced on platforms such as Skype.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post by music producer and veteran Lifter Fabian Kalter about the recent Hadopi law voted in France.

Hello dear french,
I saw my french familiy today, they told me some law is being passed right now making it possible to
"take the internet away" from illegal downloaders. for what greater good again? Oh yes, copyright.
Damn, thats harsh. and idiotic. And it will probably happen in Germany, too.

Yet again some old men in legislature having their old man friends in media whine over their soupe au poisson that sales keep dropping, evil donwloaders destroy art and their income.
Yet again some old men having no idea whatsoever about the present (and future) state of things.

So, I wont get into details here, its another discussion, but Id like to inspire you thinking about what you can do for the future ( of art, media, monetization of copyrights etc.) not only what the future can do for you.

-make it clear that there is no alternative to embracing new technologies. ever.
-make it clear that old men who have no idea about things need to listen or they fall. always.
-annoy the hell out of every single part of the chain of monetization that annoys both the consumers and the artists, dont stop until it breaks.

simple action plans, make up more and make them work!

1.
-find out when the law actually is applicable.
-get a socialist party member of your parliament to open up a bank account (preferably at the bank that handles the money from the "le chtis" production firm - for media attention.
-get all the french internet users to listen, should be an easy task at this moment.
-get them to download bitttorents the hell out of piratebay for the week before the law is applicable
-make everybody wire 10cents for each illegal download to the aforementioned bank-account, preferrably one payment for each download
-make the sum public
-have it all withdrawn the day the law is applicable.

2.
-find out french artists single ( or album) (needs to be a physical release) that has chart potential
(means that it will be ordered by big cd retails)
-contact him (or dont)
-get him in the boat (or dont)
-get plenty of people to buy the release in big cd retails - have to be enough to make the thing enter the charts
(easy thing in a summer week slow in releases )
-dont unseal the purchased disks
-return in LESS than a WEEKS time
-buy another copy
-repeat.

3.
...

4.
....

have fun!