Mark Cuban recently wrote that the internet is dead.
When a smart, rich, white guy who made his money from the internet tells me that the internet is dead, I am skeptical. What’s hot, Mark Cuban? The NBA? Dancing With The Stars? HDTV? Your latest private equity investment?!
Except he writes this, and it strikes a chord with me:
I’ve been inundated with spam on Myspace. Used flicker. Used Digg for sourcing news and laughed at the unending ridiculousness of its posters. Used and posted to Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Veoh, Flickr, Slideshare, used every bittorrent client, got bored with twitter after 7 minutes, signed up for other findme, find you, this is where I am, this is where you are, type app I could find, and the lists go on and on. I read techmeme, techcrunch, extremetech, and tons of other tech sites and I make a point to try every and any new site that seems the least bit plausible or interesting. I spend far far too much time on the net just to make sure I keep up and know whats going on.
Hollaback if you feel Mark Cuban.
The man is known for being an egomaniac and a showman, a carnival barker and a ringleader, but he is absolutely right when it comes to both the uselessness and the missed opportunities of these silly applications on the interwebs. I can barely sustain my first life where I have a hundred unanswered email messages, vacation pictures to organize, and a clogged RSS reader. I have a mortgage to pay and cats to feed. I don’t have time to mess around with Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.
Well, uh, okay. I have a little time with this whole unemployment thing; however, my free time comes at the expense of sleep.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You have a MySpace? What are you, sixteen?
just because he’s bored doesn’t mean it’s dead. i think he’s alluding to the current lack of new ideas to monetize. he’s pretty much right there. but i think we are just beginning to scratch the surface of creative expression via the internet. i believe new artforms and ways of communicating/sharing knowledge are coming. they may not attract the same mass audiences that older forms did, and therefore they may not be as highly valued from a capitalist’s standpoint. but that doesn’t mean they are unimportant.
Dan: I’ve had a MySpace account since I was sixteen. You’re the last to know about it.
Col: The only thing that can save the internet — and humaninty — is art.
PS – Cuban is always talking about money, I suppose, but I read it from an innovation standpoint as well as a technology-saturation standpoint. We are at the point where we mimic The Matrix and hook ourselves up to machines. Where do we go from here?