CAPITOL IDEAS: A Slow-Motion Revolution
Bethell, Tom
VEN IN THE QUIETEST OF TIMES it's hard to figure wherethecountryisheaded,butinarevolutionit's impossible. And we are living through a revolution--a slow-motion one, or perhaps not so slow....
...TheInternethasevenkeptaheadofregulationand taxation...
...We don't...
...One is that market forces keepgettingstronger.Asforthepoliticians, theypretendtoignorethis(somegenuinelydon'tunderstand it) but either way their maneuvering room is more restricted and their sound and fury signifies little...
...But nowadays the customers, backfromtheirjoyride,say:"Ilikethecar.Letmeget back to you...
...His basic complaint was this: Campuses are no longer centers of rebellion...
...As for the Time Warner-AOL disaster (from the point of view of Time Inc...
...If free-market ideas can penetrate the campus, maybe they can even reach into the Democratic Party...
...On the hustings,atleast,thesocialistdreamliveson,particularly in the realm of medical care...
...He just didn't need Time's "content providers"toachieveit.AOLitselfhasn'tsurvivedthe competition...
...Dionne, a useful idiot for the left, is yelling with excitement because Obama & Co...
...Foreign policy is a key exception...
...So it would be rash to predict the way the world will look even a few years hence...
...Thetalkshowhostsfumeaboutthe"mainstream media,"andit'struethattheytiltinaliberaldirection...
...English departments with their absurd critical theorists have become a joke...
...Salon's Washington bureau chief Walter Shapiro wonderedtheotherdayhowjournalistswillbepaidif present trends continue...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor ofThe American Spectator and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...He had me there, because I never listen to contemporary pop and if there is less of it I would regard it as a blessing.ButItakehispoint(whichisthattheyarestill grindingitout...
...People with the ability to be wheelers and dealers were "pawing their way up academic ladders and throwing their weight around in literary and artistic cliques...
...The prestige of the businessman is no longer what it used to be," and was moving toward the universities...
...And who would have thought that the leading GOP candidates would be the former mayor of New York and the former governor of Massachusetts...
...A friend of mine in England owns an automobile dealership near Guildford,awealthyarea30milesfromLondon.Heis 66 years old and hoping to retire soon...
...How do we rebel against parents who sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do...
...more government is their universal remedy...
...AOL'smergerwithTimeWarnerstilllayinthefuture...
...That catastrophe, in which Time Inc.'s feckless CEO Jerry Levin was duped by Case and others into thinkingthatAOLwasworthaboutfivetimesitstrue value, is well told in a later book, Fools Rush In, by Nina Munk (2004...
...Free content is likely to mean unpaid journalists...
...I guessed he wouldbeabletocommandagoodpriceforhiscarbusiness.Butapparentlynot.HetoldmewhenIsawhimin July that he probably won't be able to sell it at all...
...But the truth is that whoever gets to be president will be severely constrained by market forces...
...Meanwhiletheprestigeofentrepreneurialcapitalists has soared...
...The Internet thereby greatly increases competition, driving prices down and forcing everyonetobemoreandmoreefficient.(Formyfriend,the goodnewsisthattheunderlyinglandisworthquitea bit--far more than the business itself...
...At full price, his profit from the sale of a new car might be 10 percent...
...We rebel by not rebelling...
...True, many websites rely on information dug up bymainstreamjournalists.Sothedemandforreportingisundiminished.Butdollarlossesexperiencedby print and television greatly exceed the online dollar gains...
...Its consequences are likely to be as farreaching as those of the printing press, but it's all happeningmuchmorequicklythanGutenberg'srevolution...
...are promising to raise our taxes...
...Youhavetogoback30or40yearstoseeit.The longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer argued that the direction in which ambition and talent flowed reveals much about a society...
...Vast attention is paid to the presidential election, because journalists love it...
...and its employees), theirony is that Case's vision of the online future was basically correct...
...Network television audiences are melting away and look at what's happening to the stock price of the New York Times (stock symbol: NYT...
...We are inclined to think of revolutions as arriving like tornadoes,liketheRussianRevolutionin1917.Thisone inchesforwarddaybyday.Butitisinexorableandweare onlybeginningtoseeitsconsequences...
...By the late 1960s, however, Hoffer saw that a big change was underway...
...To which a junior at Yale responded: "How do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution...
...But guess what name doesn't occurinMunk'sindex:Google.Itsinitialpublicoffering occurred later in 2004...
...Meanwhile, politics plods on as though nothing has happened...
...The Post had C A P I T O LI D E A S 4 6 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 by Tom Bethell ASlow-MotionRevolution E reporters working on it for weeks before anything appeared in print and it wouldn't surprise me if their up-front cost, salaries included, came to $100,000...
...Presidents seem to have been granted the power to lead the country into war at will...
...We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the Internet...
...No blogger and few websites could afford that.So,caninvestigativejournalismsurvivetheInternet...
...But if a Democrat wins next year, I wonder if that will really happen...
...That one took maybe 250 years to mature...
...College professors are two-a-penny and hardly anyone pays attention to them...
...T O MB E T H E L L N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 4 7 TheInternettherebygreatlyincreases competition,drivingpricesdownandforcing everyonetobemoreandmoreefficient...
...ThankstotheInternet,hesaid,hisdealershiphadbeen transformed into something rather different: a platformfromwhichcustomerscantest-drivenewcars...
...I was just reading a book called AOL.com, by KaraSwisher,telling"howStevenCasebeatBillGates, nailed the netheads, and made millions in the war for the web...
...That has now been reversed, surely...
...Then they go online and find another placethatwillsellthesamecarfor5percentless.And so on and on...
...I refertothetransformationusheredinbythehightech world...
...The late Petr Beckmann, who taught electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, used to say thatonlyprofoundtechnologicalchangecantransform thesocialorder.Thatiswhatweareseeingnowwiththe digitalrevolutionandthedevelopmentoftheInternet...
...Most energies and talents flowed toward business...
...My friend replied that very similar things are happening to popular music, because songs can be downloaded for little or nothing...
...in the New York Times Magazine,notedthat"thedistancebetweenthecampus and the market has shrunk" (a bad thing, in his view...
...In this country until not very long ago the social landscape was steeply tilted toward the marketplace," he wrote...
...Washington Post columnist E.J...
...Certain trends are nonetheless unmistakable...
...In the campus turmoil of 40 years ago, few would have anticipated the current "saturation of higher education with market thinking...
...Rick Perlstein, who wrote "What's the Matter With College...
...BUT THERE'S A DEEPER and less noticeable trend...
...I mentioned this to a friend of mine who has had greatsuccessinvestinginSiliconValleystart-ups.Take the case of the Washington Post's investigation of the problems at Walter Reed hospital, I said...
...Today it is struggling to turn itself from an Internet provider into an "advertising specialist," and its top employees are moving from Dulles, Virginia, to New York...
...The transformation wrought by the web is affecting all business, not just the news business...
...Areweexperiencingashortfallofpopmusicasaresult...
...Meanwhile, however, the old media companies are being eaten up before our eyes...
...Although published as recently as 1998, it already reads like something from a time capsule...
Vol. 40 • November 2007 • No. 9
