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Re: There's a lot to discuss
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Doc Searls
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Oct 19, 2001 00:10 PDT
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At 8:25 AM +0200 10/19/2001, Carsten Boettjer wrote:
| | Dear list-members,
recently I told that once a start is done the threads of a list
grow and grow, but at the moment we can't find it here. Maybe
some people are too busy but that should have been all the way
and although it hasn't been as silent as these days. So maybe
there is something disturbing or another reason why it is that
silent around here.
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I think we just wandered off to other stuff. Ebb & Flow. No big deal.
| | Has anybody an idea or something that makes him stop to post him
beyond being busy?
Could it be that discussions around here sometimes have been too
theoretical or too abstract or sometimes too philosophical? I
mean there is a lot to discuss these days. Economies around the
world seem to have many structural problems that don't have to do
anything with the awful attacks of Sept, 11th. I wondered whether
the attacks could accelerate some soloutions of these problems.
Or did the attacks accelerate the effects of a structural crisis
around the world? What's your opinion about it?
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The attacks upset a lot of systems. One United Airlines flight
attendant told me, in a nearly empty plane, that the whole country
had a heart attack on September 11. It literally stopped. United's
COO was quoted in the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago saying
that the business wasn't fun anymore, that he wasn't the same person,
that United wasn't the same airline and that the U.S. wasn't the same
country. I think there is some truth to that. Now United is saying
that they'll go out of business completely if travel doesn't pick up
again. I think they're serious. Nothing is more structural than air
travel. Many, many other businesses are connected as well. Shipping,
hospitality, retailing. This is serious shit. We locate our
understanding of 9/11 in Ground Zero and the rubble that used to be
the World Trade Center, where thousands are still buried. But the
real damage to the economy was delivered to the airline business. It
was nearly destroyed in a very real sense. I wouldn't be surprised if
the number of deaths on 9/11 exceeded those of all commercial airline
crashes put together -- over the entire history of the industry. It
was like a fatal carjacking, only done to entire airlines -- the two
biggest in the world. The terrorists hijacked both airlines and
wrecked them. It isn't clear yet whether or not they've been totaled,
but it's close.
| | In times like these people sometimes find back to their roots -
find back to what is important to them. What are the risks and
what are the chances of these days in the US and around the
world?
It is a limbic instruction in our minds, that people need to have
stimmulance in a sense of seeing something new. Could there be
something new that could help the economies of the world? Is this
a crisis of the mood or is it about fear? Is it a crisis about
faith in our future? Or are we just tired? Have the past 5 years
damaged the trust of people to the future, and if, how could we
get this trust back? What would you say?
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I think the Internet changed many, many relationships in business
profoundly, entirely for the good. It equipped demand with far more
power, and disoriented supply radically. Many companies are still in
denial about that one. The dot-com phenomenon was a free money binge
that had us all thinking for awhile there that air guitar was real
music, but it was just a bad dream and now it's over.
I think the deeper stock market question has to do with the real
worth of companies, which has everthing to do with real relationships
with real markets. Some companies have them. Others don't, and never
will.
I think the September 11 crisis actually made many companies far more
human. That clearly happened to the airlines, and to what's left of
WTC survivors like Cantor Fitzgerald.
To me the bigger issue is about what creepy entertainment and content
distribution companies want to do to the Net, which is use
legislation to turn it into a digital rights management contraption.
I like to think the Net can route around that stuff, but with the
current pro-government mood in this country, I'm not so sure. Dissent
is bad form these days. Police state wish lists coming down from
Ashcroft's office are getting rubber-stamped while Net-throttling
legislation authored by Disney is getting ramrodded through congress
in closed hearings (like next week in D.C., on the SSSCA). The
industrial age isn't over yet. Iron Giants still walk the earth. We
need to trip 'em up. Now's as good a time as any.
Doc
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Doc Searls http://www.searls.com
do-@ssc.com http://www.linuxjournal.com
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