Rory Sutherland writes a fortnightly column on technology and the web for the Spectator (U.K.) where wry and intriguing observations of our dramatically changing culture are in long supply. Here's a sample from his latest:...In a little over a decade the country’s biggest, most interesting bookshops, electrical shops, music shops, cheese shops, hat shops, junk shops have all moved. They are no longer found in London but online. And they are exactly the same whether you browse them in Knightsbridge or Bonar Bridge.
Retail is only part of the story. Even if you move to the kind of place where children still wave at passing cars, you can tune in online to the same 10,000 radio stations you have in London or New York. Television isn’t yet quite as universal, but a couple of phone calls to a local chancer will get you a Sky subscription almost anywhere in Europe. Wikipedia alone is probably more useful to most of us than a British Library card.
All of this supports the vital point made by a character in a Douglas Coupland book — who claims that the ultimate aim of all geek activity is to make physical location irrelevant. The endgame of the tech ‘project’ is to allow anyone to do pretty much anything from anywhere. The social value of this is huge.
Networks, it seems, have an immensely egalitarian effect, as it is in their nature to offer the same thing equally to everyone connected to them. Anyone wanting to open a speciality hat shop in 1992 would have moved straight to SW3 or the Upper East Side. Now, when www.villagehatshop.com opens (in San Diego, as it happens) its presence benefits about a billion people equally. Yet the benefits of this egalitarianism do not show up on any economic measures — since these only record the money people earn, not what they can buy with it...
