Somewhere, USA

The October 2008 Wall Street financial meltdown is already reshaping Silicon Valley. Everyone here is bracing for the imminent perfect economic storm of a deep global recession. Lay-offs at both start-ups and established companies have become de rigeur. Venture capitalists are advising their clients to cut to the bone. The Bentley dealerships and the local real-estate market have suddenly gone very quiet.

Just as the last economic miasma, the NASDAQ crash of April 2000, marked the end of the Web 1.0 and the beginning of the Web 2.0 age, so I expect that October 2008 will mark a symbolic watershed in the history of new media. The Web 2.0 revolution, with its over-supply of social networking businesses and user-generated-content sites, has become very stale over the last couple of years. So the October 2008 meltdown arrived just in time in a Silicon Valley perpetually on the move toward the next big thing.

What’s next? In some garage or dorm-room, some smart kids are figuring out the future of media and technology. Global financial meltdown or not, Silicon Valley’s creative destruction – its law of motion -- is unstoppable. My own sense is that we need software and services that resynthesize the digital and real worlds. As NYU sociologist Dalton Conley suggests in his 2009 book Elsewhere, USA, technology has unmoored us from our real lives:

Our daily lives have changed, slowly but radically, over the past three decades. The division between work and home has been all but demolished; our weightless, wireless economy encourages us to work 24/7; marketing has invaded the most intimate aspects of our lives; leisure has become a lost art.

Silicon Valley thus needs to work on reuniting work with home. Having destroyed leisure with their always-on media, the smart technologists needs to reinvent it. The digital economy now must figure out ways to speed up the analog world. Silicon Valley's laws of motion must become America's laws of motion. The weightless economy needs to become rewired in somewhere USA.

Comments

[Stephen Smoliar]

Is this "a consummation/Devoutly to be wished" or just a recipe for the next boom-and-bust cycle? Leisure may constitute only a sliver of the arts we have lost. I continue to hold to the believe that our very "sense of reality" (a phrase that I cribbed from Isaiah Berlin) has been significantly eroded, rather than enhanced, by recent technologies; and those "social software" technologies are among the most corrosive:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/07/childs-conception-of-social-networking.html

At the risk of going all Heideggerian, the fundamental art we have lost is the art of "being in the world;" and we have lost it because Silicon Valley has been such a successful breeding ground of positivist junkies who cannot see beyond the boundaries of the objective world. Do you seriously expect that the guys (and gals) who destroyed leisure are capable of reinventing it? At best, they will invent new ways for us to amuse ourselves to death (with apologies to the memory of Neil Postman).

[Just read your]

Ooops.

Looks like the "experts" really mucked things up, hey? And thanks to our "professional" "journalists", you are reading about the Great Financial Swindle of 21st after the fact, since, the "professional" "journalists" work for corporations, after all, since "all the news that is fit to print" is to the point (after all) and fitness is determined by the "Core Authority Group", so you losers lose. Boo hoo.