Digital Economics
last updated on November 11, 2002
"Plastics.""Exactly how do you mean?" asked Ben.
"There's a great future in plastics," replied Mr. McGuire. "Think about it. Will you think about it?"
Now that we're in that future, of course, plastics are no big deal. Is digital destined for the same banality? Certainly. Its literal form, the technology, is already beginning to be taken for granted, and its connotation will become tomorrow's commercial and cultural compost for new ideas. Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence.
The decades ahead will be a period of comprehending biotech, mastering nature, and realizing extraterrestrial travel, with DNA computers, microrobots, and nanotechnologies the main characters on the technological stage. Computers as we know them today will a) be boring, and b) disappear into things that are first and foremost something else: smart nails, self-cleaning shirts, driverless cars, therapeutic Barbie dolls, intelligent doorknobs that let the Federal Express man in and Fido out, but not 10 other dogs back in. Computers will be a sweeping yet invisible part of our everyday lives: We'll live in them, wear them, even eat them. A computer a day will keep the doctor away....
Consider the term "horseless carriage." Blindered by what came before them, the inventors of the automobile could not see the huge change it would have on how we work and play, how we build and use cities, or how we derive new business models and create new derivative businesses. It was hard, in other words, to imagine a concept such as no-fault insurance in the days of the horse and buggy.
We have a similar blindness today, because we just cannot imagine a world in which our sense of identity and community truly cohabitates the real and virtual realms. We know that the higher we climb, the thinner the air, but we haven't experienced it - we're not even at digital base camp....
So far, people saving for retirement through 401(k) plans have done what experts hoped they'd do in the face of a prolonged bear market: They've held onto their stocks and continued to save.
But there is troubling evidence that American workers may be losing their resolve while watching their retirement dreams evaporate: The stock market has whacked 27 percent from the Dow Jones industrial average, 41 percent from the Standard & Poor's 500 index and 73 percent from the tech-heavy Nasdaq over the past 2 1/2 years.
Some fearful workers are cutting back on the amount they're stashing in their 401(k)s. Some are dumping stocks in favor of more conservative investments. Some are deciding not to invest in 401(k)s at all. And nearly three out of five workers surveyed recently said they'll overhaul their investment strategies if 2002 hands them a third straight year of losses....
Mention the Bubble Economy and, for many Americans, it now conjures up images of shredded documents and half-built Houston mansions, depleted pension accounts and executives being led off in handcuffs. But it didn't start out that way.
Roughly from 1995 through the end of 2000, the Bubble Economy was known as the new economy, and nearly everyone thought it was a marvelous thing....