I edited out a funny crack about Farmville for you. In fact, I edited out a lot of great stuff about Facebook to bring you this.
Well since this is supposed to be an idea book, here is an idea to chew on:
Why are we so quick to ignore history?
If I were to tell you twenty years ago that there would be an Internet company with hundreds of millions of subscribers all paying upwards of $20 a month for the honor of sorting through spam emails and checking sports scores you would call me crazy – then ask me what the Internet was.
If I would have told someone who was born ten years ago that the company I was talking about was America Online, they would look at me funny – then ask me what America Online is.
The point here, ladies and germs is that we are all trapped by our spectacular lack of imagination. It’s hard for us to predict which of the shiny, new things that we think are so important today will actually turn into revolutions and which will pass quietly into the pressure cooker of time.
Since we are awful at these kinds of predictions, we would be wise to take a more measured approach to our pet revolutions. Instead of saying every neat, new widget we run across will redefine the way we see the world, instead we could look at it as a fancy next step in a process that never ends, the process of building out the future.
They are GPS coordinates rather than citadels.
The real question should never be what we have and why it is so darn important, it should be what will eventually usurp it and why, because if history tells us anything the two things we can be sure of is that the future will always look a lot different than the present and that given enough time, everything dies.
