5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.

[Darren Dirt]

5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

The future is going to hang on whether or not businesses will be able to convince you to pay money for things you can otherwise get for free.

Some of you think I'm about to talk about file sharing and DRM and the evil record labels. But that's just a teaser of what's coming. The world has changed. All the rules we were trained to believe about society from birth until now are about to go out the window.


think about how many people you know who live in apartments or trailers barely big enough to host a game of Twister but who don't care because they spend every waking moment at home either playing World of Warcraft or surfing the Internet. They're not looking for a two-story house with a swimming pool and a white picket fence. With a $300 netbook and a $20-a-month Internet connection they can connect with friends, meet girls, get their entertainment, pursue their hobbies and stay in contact with family or co-workers. They may even work from home.

Look at how many of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs they're getting digitally:





Everything from that second tier to the capstone, they can get at a cost that rounds down to zero, if they so choose.
We Internet types are so busy haggling over video games with DRM that we're not grasping the scale of this. We're like a dog who's been cooped up behind a fence his whole life, and now a storm has knocked down the gate. The dog looks out and thinks, "Wow, out there is the front yard!"
No, Fluffy. Out there is the whole world.



The future will be ruled by FARTS. Forced ARTificial Scarcity.

It works the same way with all digital goods -- from entertainment to communication to the software you use to do your job. A significant chunk of our economy runs on FARTS now. And as time goes on, more and more of what we use and rely on day to day will be enveloped by that invisible cloud.



Remember the dog and the fence. The world has changed.

For everyone.

Lars makes money selling his music. You make money selling your labor. At some point down the line, like his music, your skill as a human being can and will be converted to an electronic format for a fraction of the cost, rendering your skill worthless.

Thanks to technology, much of the labor is about to become to employers what Internet porn is to you now. Post-scarcity.

Human society only exists because we need the things other humans produce. Mutual need is what made us gather and share resources and form the first villages. We need things, and we need other people to need the things we make so they'll be willing to give us the things we need. It's a cycle that has been running for thousands of years, and it's about to stop.
And so, to save society, we're going to have to rely on our old friend, the invisible force that has saved humanity again and again. It's a little thing I like to call bull@%&#.
Bull@%&# is the next growth industry. People who deal in it are going to be more valuable than surgeons -- yes, the same people who convinced us that bottled water comes from an enchanted mountain spring and made uneducated mothers believe that contaminated baby formula was a life-giving health potion. Only they can save us.

As civilization advances, these heroic protectors of FARTS will build a culture where we will pay for things we can get for nothing, based purely on a vague superstition that it makes us better people. You know, the way an Apple logo will hypnotize people into paying twice as much for a product when cheaper alternatives litter the landscape.

And if someday we do perfect cold-fusion reactors or nanotech manufacturing and everyone has 100 GB/second Wi-Fi connections downloading data into a computerized contact lens, the bull@%&#ters will be the guardians of the Old Way, convincing you that you shouldn't use those shoes that your replicator spits out for three cents a pair. You need to buy their shoes, for $80. Because they're "handmade".

[Darren Dirt]

http://www.cracked.com/article_18458_6-subtle-ways-news-media-disguises-bull%73hit-as-fact.html


and, no, I do not have 10 Cracked tabs open.

There's only 6 right now, peak was 8. pttttth