The curse of cyberspace is that everything we want to preserve will get lost and everything we want to lose will be preserved.
Paul SaffoBefore the iPhone, cyberspace was something you went to your desk to visit. Now cyberspace is something you carry in your pocket.
Paul SaffoIf you look at the last 150 years, about every 30 years or so, a new scientific discipline emerges that starts spinning out technologies and capturing people's imaginations. Go back to 1900: That industry was chemistry. People had chemistry sets. In the 1930s, it was the rise of physics and physicists. They build on each other. Chemists laid the experimental understanding for the physicists to build their theories. It was three physicists who invented the transistor in 1947. That started the information revolution. Today, kids get computers.
Paul SaffoWe tend to use a new technology to do an old task more efficiently. We pave the cow paths.
Paul SaffoThis new economy that's just emerged has a new central economic actor. It's not the worker, the person who produces, nor the person who consumes, the purchaser. It's a new actor that does both things at the same time, call them a creator. They both create and consume in the same single act, and we're just beginning to see the shape of this new economy and it changes not just the economy itself, it's going to change the whole nature of the work relationship.
Paul Saffo