One of the slides in my PowerPoint BlogBoy dance calls the internet a scarcity killler and contemplates what that means for media: when advertisers can always find somewhere else to advertise and when access to scarce airtime and presstime is no longer valued.
It doesn’t kill commerce but it changes the rules and the value. So, for example, the scarce commodity might not be paper but may be trust. And so those who establish trust gain value in the future.
At Always On, George Gilder went on a nice, hyperbolic riff on scarcity:
“TV is dying fast and it will be followed by Hollywood. These industries fed on scarcity. There are only a few channels available. TV was technology of tyrants. It fed this advertising model that has collapsed,” Gilder told an audience at the conference. “The thirty-second spot is just going to die. Nobody is going to watch any ads they don’t want to see.
“Book culture and blog culture can redeem a civilization,” he said.
