Just a quick thing I wanted to get out there:

You hear all this stupid bullshit about how the Internet is “changing everything” when it comes to … well, everything.

But did you ever notice that at the same time this is going on, we’ve had a fucking terrible economy? Aside from a small spurt in the ’00s at the start of the war in Iraq, it was a bad decade for the economy, and this decade is shaping up to be just as bad.

The unemployment numbers the government releases are way, way worse than you think. Everyone is hurting. This isn’t anything new, it’s just been made worse by progressively stupid decisions by the people on Wall Street and politicians on both sides who think, stupidly, that cutting spending in shit economies will solve the problem when that’s never been proven to be true throughout this country’s history.

If you remember, the ’00s started with the dot com crash. So everything from that point forward, when you hear about “disruption” of things like print, television, ect., ect. coincides with some of the worst economic conditions this country has seen in its history.

Now. I’m not saying the Internet hasn’t affected stuff, it has, but what I’m suggesting here is that its “power” has been grossly oversold and overhyped to benefit the ends of a few at the expense of the many.

Print is struggling NOT dying, because of a shit economy. The “disruption” of print by the Internet is mostly a myth. It’s more of a story about people cutting back on unnecessary spending and advertisers foolishly chasing the latest Internet fad because they don’t want to be portrayed as “out of touch” by the same exact people peddling the myths in the first place.

Television is … actually, television is having a bit of a renaissance. You know why? Because nobody has a fucking job! What else are they supposed to do?

You see what I’m saying?

The story of the 21st Century, as told by the Cyber Hipsters and the media, was that technology was going to change everything, but the real story, and the thing we’re all going to remember, isn’t the technology. That’s only a small part of the story. It’s important, but it’s not the thing people are going to ultimately remember.

It’s the economy stupid, and that’s what we’re going to remember. We may remember having better toys, but we’re also going to remember having fewer dollars to own them too.

But all that gets lost in a narrative that isn’t true and never was. You want to look at what’s causing industries to be “disrupted”? Look no further than the state of the economy.