Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class
So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period.
Wait one minute.
Does he really think people are that stupid?
More people can take pictures than at the height of Kodak’s wealth.
Because cameras are now inside phones and tablets — not to mention standalone digital cameras themselves. People who would have never been able to before take thousands of photos can now do so, cheaply. Without having a middleman extracting money between clicking and seeing.
And there are probably more employees around the world making those cameras (or camera elements) than there ever were employed by Kodak.
To blame the Internet for the downfall of Kodak is to sidestep the bad decisions of Kodak’s management. And what about Polaroid and its bad decisions? And Fuji Film and its bad decisions?
Mike Cane’s xBlog 
There is so much wrong with what Jaron Lanier says in that interview that it’s scary! He has some good points, but it seems to me all of them are based on fundamental misunderstandings. Your comment is spot on, but what shocked me the most was when he said, “… it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism.”
I just wanted to scream “RADIO” and “TV!” Sergey Brin didn’t invent “Free.” That was the free-to-air model for these services for decades. Lanier grew up with that; how could he just forget about it?!
Thanks for pointing this one out. I would definitely not buy his book, but it was fascinating to read the interview.
Yes, TV and radio — not to mention The Village Voice newspaper, which went from paid to free.
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