Think that ticket you just bought to see Lady Gaga, the kids from Glee, Disney on Ice or the latest playoff game is ACTUALLY yours? HAHA–you fool from the old world, that 20th century time when humans actually got to own things that they paid for. Groupon, LiveNation, Ticketmaster and others who love the “cloud” are working to end that silliness here in 2011. Think it’s no big deal? Read on.
Some have asked me why, on a blog about Living Life Well, I spend time warning about things like technology run amuck. Well, the easiest answer would be that because its what I am interested in–hey, its my blog. The deeper answer is related to the fact that it will be harder to live well if we allow certain factors to change our culture and world, then it will become harder and harder to live well. Don’t believe me? Go read Brave New World or 1984 or any several of Philip K. Dick’s books.
In case you’ve not been keeping up, here’s a list of the recent blog posts on how our culture is being changed from underneath our own feet. I’m raising an alarm here folks; take it to heart.
Replacing teachers with just computers??
The growth of everyone’s love of the “cloud” relative to computing??
Overuse of the Internet’s negative tweaking of the brain!
The new mantra of “you should own nothing.”
It’s the last one that perhaps scares me the most as it tears away at the foundation of property ownership. As I told you here, Western Society as we know it was developed during the 1600s in England (and mostly England alone) around the fact that a person was created with rights, created by the Christian God with these rights. The government had nothing to do with it. No human can give you these rights!
Yet, here in 2011, slowly but surely, forces are at work to tear away this foundation, and the force of this energy comes from the “technology is good” crowd. They are aided and abetted by the “humans have screwed the environment” crowd, so anything that can be done to eliminate anything you can actually hold and touch is good.
The latest fuel to the fire? We’ve lost the ability (mostly) to actually get to own our own music that we have bought or our own movies that we have bought or our own computer programs that we’ve bought. Now, according to one of my techie sources, Groupon is working with LiveNation to eliminate you ever actually owning a ticket to an event that you’ve purchased. Wow–won’t that be fun–try buying tickets for someone as a gift or getting a group together or dealing with passing on tickets to an event that you can’t now make—probably just out of luck giving them to your friend.
Yeah–I’m really loving it here on this new planet. Gotta love that whole cloud stuff.