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Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google estimates that every two days, Earthlings produce as much information as was produced by all of mankind for the 20,000 years leading up to 2003.
In the lifetime of a typical thirty-year-old American, she has seen the market share (the number of eyeballs watching) of the big three TV networks go from 90 percent to less than 30 percent. In one generation. Pop record sales have gone from a million copies a week to just 43,000 in twenty years. More choice, less mass.
Matt Ridley reported on how much time (or work, or money, same thing) it cost us to buy light, a fundamental building block of our civilization. Twenty-two hundred years ago, you would need to work fifty hours to buy an hour of light from a sesame oil lantern. Today, you can buy an hour of clean, bright light in about half a second.
Consider the tragic case of Van Gogh. He sold only one painting in his lifetime, and he lived in isolation, sure that his work was being (and always would be) shunned. Imagine the impact on his life and art if he had been connected to a burgeoning circle of fans and fellow artists.
Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese government made it a crime to publish a map of the New World or their other imperialistic explorations. They didn’t want anyone to see what was out there. The Web and the tribes it supports are violating that law. Everyone keeps publishing detailed maps so other explorers can go ever faster.
McKinsey advisor and Harvard Professor Eric Beinhocker calculates that there are 10 billion items for sale in New York City alone. That’s up from two hundred items about five hundred years ago.
(more than one in twelve of the people on the planet use Facebook)
