<how soon do we become irrelevant ? > Millions already are. With the USA minimum wage and 10% unemployment, there is no shortage of irrelevancy with millions with not much useful to do. There are a couple of billion people worth not much money so the process is well under way. "We" is not a single variable. We is made up of billions of unique individuals. Some of them are extremely valuable, but Google alone is worth an order of magnitude more than any of them.
We are becoming irrelevant at different times. Hordes have been disintermediated already. Retailers are losing market share to direct sales at a great rate. Economic value is surging into Cyberspace by the $trillion already and the process is just revving up. Just Apple is nearly worth $1 trillion. Add up all the value of transactions through Cyberspace and because of it and throw in the consumer surplus and it's a good portion of the world's economy already.
Mostly, the value is not even recognized because it's free. Google gives search results in a second with no acknowledgement of the value of the result. The results are worth $trillions but nobody pays. It's just free access to knowledge which was unobtainable at any price a decade ago and even if it was available it would have taken ages to obtain and would have therefore become useless.
But all that is still value related to people.
For now, the combination of Cyberspace loyalists and Cyberspace needs is forming into the most powerful "country". People think China will be the most powerful place soon. No it won't. Cyberspace will easily beat it. I'll vote [in Cyberspace, and pay] to defeat China's intrusions into my "country" and to free Cyberspace patriots in China [and Iran and everywhere]. People's primary loyalty is to family and their economic success, not some ephemeral self-dealing politician who has got their nose in the trough. Loyalty to "country" is more cant than reality. Half the USA can't stand Obama who currently is a good chunk of the USA's power. So they aren't loyal to him. When the soldiers salute their boss, a lot of them are doing it through gritted teeth. A lot of them are not loyal to the legislation Congress passes either, and want Obamacare repealed for example. The constitution has been reamed out. So they aren't loyal to that. Some of them are no doubt contemplating secession so they are not even loyal to the borders. Do Texans and Arizonans really want to be bound by Obama and the flaky Californian cranks?
For your neck of the woods, Quebecois have traditionally mumbled about independence.
Increasingly, there is value which is transacted by the components of Cyberspace on behalf of components of Cyberspace. The people value provides the foundations for the internal needs to be developed.
Already, the digital divide is large. It's growing quickly. The difference between Cyberspacoids and regular humans will quickly become greater than the difference between Londoners, New Yorkers, Tokyoites, Hong Kongese and Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Egyptians, Papua New Guinean and Amazonian forest dwellers.
The industrial revolution and all that came with it separated people into two lots. The Cyberspace revolution is doing a bigger job faster. Then Cyberspace Itself will move increasingly into It's own realm, perhaps with some symbiotic genetically enhanced humans acting like mitochondria and T cells in the human body.
Mqurice |
