The Monetization of Everything or God Bless the Child

As the Christmas season fades into memory, my sons delight with his new PS4 continues but with some reservations. It seems that with his favorite video game when purchased, gives a certain level of play and access but for all the bells and whistles- playing on line with friends and other upgrades, you need to purchase a membership package, monthly, quarterly or yearly. While he is disappointed, the game still has its allure, it stands as an example of today’s move toward monetization of relationships. It seems like it wasn’t that long ago when you purchased a game and you had full access though there may have been a membership or club that you could join you basically had full access. Today it seems purchase is not the end result but the beginning of a slow financial drip to keep us engaged as long as possible. Not only games but web services among others have also run to this strategy. While LinkedIn is free, I am constantly swatting away the notices that, for a small fee, I can access the premium service which offers services that used to be offered as a part of the free service. Many other services are revising their free offerings and moving formerly free perks behind the velvet rope of membership or access fees. While companies eagerly swallow up our data exhaust to refine their marketing to us, we are asked to pay for what was once was in the free realm. We seem to be on our way to the monetization of everything, where every transaction comes with a price. With the defeat of net neutrality that seems to be more and more the norm- you can help yourself, but don’t take too much or you have to pay. God bless the child who’s got their own (bank account).

The Persistence of the Cuckoo Clock

It was with a note of concern that I noticed the posting about a new service from LinkedIn, their Open Candidates tool which allows one to discretely put their resume in front of recruiters without having to make a public statement about looking for a new position. While at first, I thought it was a brilliant idea, having been in that situation in the not too distant past, looking for a job but doing very much on the down low. Then I thought a bit more about the new service and what it really meant. Growing up I lived in a world where my parents and the adults I know got a job and you stayed there till they got the gold watch when they retired. Just typing those words make me feel old and I realize that even that statement is probably outside of the frame of reference for many readers. The new constant seems to be inconsistency. Where we used to have a job for life we now seem to have a job as a brief perch between transition to the next job. Perhaps transition has become the new constant in the internet age. Perhaps everything is moving so fast we can hope only to understand the blur as the present rushes by, racing to be that past that we can only hope to comprehend.
While it could be tempting to leave things there on a note of gloom and despair that seems to be in vogue these days, it is also helpful to look at the last time we had a disruptive innovation, at that time with the advent of print which ushered in the Renaissance and the Reformation. Heraclitus knew best, our universe is always in flux as much as we wish to cling to the one unmovable spot, the center of a wheel (which is also moving). Perhaps Harry Lime was right and wishing for a constant unchanging world would leave us only the cuckoo clock.

 

 

 

Harry Lime’s (Orson Welles) speech from Sir Carol Reeds film, “The Third Man” spoken on a Ferris wheel in the heart of Vienna to his friend Holly Martin.

“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.”

 

 

For another Friend of Harry Lime, with many thanks and fond memories.