Geek in Review: Brave New World

This week's Geek in Review is about a communications revolution I see happening right now. It crosses generations, and it scares the absolute shit out of a lot of people who benefit from ignorance and the control of information.

Communication empowers people, and an empowered people are very, very scary to the powerful upper class who hope that we’ll just go away, right after we buy a lot of crap from them that we don’t need. And holy shit are they scared right now. The revolution may not be televised, but it’s being blogged, YouTubed, MySpaced, Facebooked, Dugg and Netscaped. Instead of embracing this new technology and the generation that’s growing up with it and taking it for granted, the big media conglomerates and their *AA organizations are spending time, money and energy they could be spending on creating awesome content on trying to destroy the technology that scares them. Is it any wonder the big media cabal want to destroy network neutrality? Is it any surprise that they’re clinging to stupid DRM schemes that punish honest customers and infect computers with rootkits?

The audience isn’t going to stop consuming content online, and creators aren’t going to go back to the old way of groveling at the feet of some network boss or studio head or label president, because they don’t have to anymore. Instead, they’ll just use inexpensive technology to put it all together, and use the Internet to distribute it directly to the audience. The studios have a choice now: continue their full-on war against consumers and technology, or join and benefit from the revolution.

This column has the potential to generate some discussion, you know . . . some communication. Am I nuts? Or does anyone else see or experience the revolution, too?