Saturday, January 01, 2011

Like The Lone Ranger, The Australian's anonymous editorialist strikes again ...


(Above: the illustration used for the anonymous editorialist at The Australian to present the house line on the NBN, in Please pick up the policy phone, Senator Conroy, and containing the immortal words "This newspaper is embracing the digital age and is at the forefront of developing new platforms for journalism". And if you believe that, you can be persuaded to believe anything).

For sheer hutzpah, it's impossible to beat the anonymous editorialist at The Australian, renowned throughout the digital world - or at least to the select band of inner suburban elitist loon ponders - as the 2010 winner of the loon pond prize for extreme silliness.

And by golly, they've started strongly in 2011 with A New Year wish: more digital visionaries. That's right, the rag that spend the entire previous year decrying the NBN and fear mongering about the cost (three thousand to rewire, four hundred bucks a room) and denouncing faster broadband as a high cost entertainment system has suddenly discovered that the intertubes is a revolutionary beast with revolutionary potential requiring digital visionaries.

The extent of disruption -- and potential innovation -- is only now apparent as technology opens Australian business to another round of competition. Industries that once thought they were immune from globalisation -- free-to-air broadcasting and retailing, for example -- now find their models under attack. They must reinvent or fail. This may only be the start. The revolution is taking place in an age of uncertainty: no one knows for sure where it is going and how individual sectors will respond.

Sssh don't mention Foxtel. Or newspapers. Or News Corp. Or The Times' paywall experiment.

But one thing's for sure, we know how one sector of the newspaper industry responded - with luddite attacks and the swing of a broad axe and a fervent desire to cling on to the past and to copper, of all things.

And if you want some ongoing blather from The Australian's unique comedy stylings, the anonymous editorialist is ready to serve it up:

The market will determine the direction, but the job of government is to put the macro settings in place to give business the flexibility to respond to rapid change. Government must avoid wrong calls and dismiss the notion that it can somehow protect us from the forces of globalisation. It cannot and should not even try. At the same time, our politicians must understand the extent to which the revolution will affect the jobs and economic wellbeing of some Australians.

Yes, especially the hacks scribbling silly anonymous editorials for a Murdoch rag ... but typical of the rag, for highlighting the negative - the impact on jobs and economic wellbeing of some - rather than accentuating the positive. Like the way the anonymous editorialist can venture into the world and start a blog ...

Flexibility in where and when people work will be crucial and Australian companies must confront rather than retreat from the growth of online retailing. Big retailers, Gerry Harvey among them, have called on the government to protect their old business models by removing the GST exemption for purchases valued at less than $1000 that are bought from offshore online sites. This is a complex issue but it is clear that we can't turn back the clock on the internet.

Actually it isn't a complex issue at all, much like the long touted, much vaunted, keenly awaited paywall for Murdoch rags in the antipodes, currently given to breaching The Times' paywall by publishing the odd story for all the digital world to see.

Gerry Harvey was a goose way back when, and he's an even bigger goose today. Back in 2008 Harvey was running around telling anyone who listened that online retailing was a fad or a folly:

Recently during an interview with SmartCompany Harvey said "The whole world was conned with online retailing. People say I'm a dinosaur, and I've had people coming to me with sites and saying, ‘Oh, look at this, they have 10,000 or 20,000 hits!' – but it's a con, a complete con." (here).

Well you can read more of the thoughts of the conned goose in Why online retailing is a dead-end: Gerry Harvey, and Kogan calling out his bluff about setting up a China-based website to avoid GST costs (Kogan Calls Gerry Harvey's Bluff) and an answer to his claim that no one could rustle up the Top 10 online retailers in Australia.

Google Gerry Harvey, in the modern way, and you can see he's an unreconstructed dinosaur of retailing, living in the bricks and mortar era, the Blockbuster of retailing, in much the same way as Murdoch rags have campaigned vigorously to make sure they can stay in the analogue information age for as long as possible. And in the usual way, having missed the point, Harvey wants the government to help out, in much the same way as the Murdoch minions want the government to help out, by doing nothing to increase speed or capacity ...

That's why The Australian tries to give itself some wriggle room, doing a joint vision and anti-vision jig in a kind of Pythonish nightmarish dance:

There are plenty of signs that we are entering a period of transition that no government can ignore. But the Rudd and Gillard governments have not yet joined the dots, as the Hawke and Keating governments did, and instead have taken a disappointingly fragmented approach. Labor failed the test of micro reform (parallel book imports) while gambling billions in public money on trying to pick winners (the National Broadband Network).

Get it? Because the government foolishly decided to protect a vocal minor sector in a way that is designed to fail, has failed and will keep on failing - local publishing - it's time to conflate that particular policy about books with the NBN.

That allows the anonymous editorialist to sound like a visionary:

The books fiasco, in which the government maintained protection for local publishing, showed the folly of trying to hold back the digital tide. Amazon, which has already undermined local booksellers, reports that sales of hardcover books have been overtaken by sales of ebooks for its hand-held Kindle. The $35 billion NBN is seen by Labor as "important infrastructure" that "will change our way of life", yet it is being rolled out without proof that it will improve productivity. The government touts the health and education services to be delivered by the NBN, but the project is not commercially viable and it is far from certain that it will generate the new businesses its advocates claim.

Uh huh. So the vision thing is vital, yet a vision thing isn't going to be that useful after all, certainly not one that allows for devastating inroads into the kinds of businesses on view in the Murdoch empire.

Labor has put all its policy eggs in the NBN basket, but it is at best a risky response to such a huge challenge. Australia needs more digital visionaries, not cable-laying nerds, to truly exploit the digital revolution. We need broad thinkers, not just more broadband.

Broad thinkers, not broadband? Is that some kind of broad code for broadly fuckwitted thinking?

Actually what Australia needs is a new scribbler for The Australian, because the current word-laying nerd doesn't seem to understand the truly comic proportions of carrying on about the digital revolution and the need for digital visionaries, while explaining at the same time how we have no need for infrastructure or for speed.

Oh sure, there's the rhetoric:

This ever-present technology and faster broadband, combined with a population increasingly happy to buy and sell goods and services on the net is what Harvard Business School academic Clayton Christensen meant more than a decade ago when he coined the phrase, disruptive innovation. Technology destroys and creates in a cycle that carries huge economic potential as well as challenge.

And then there's the rag's NBN Watch, and its relentless fear mongering, and its gaggle of assault and battery columnists, all lined up in a row to say "NBN bah humbug", and sure enough only a month ago there was the anonymous editorialist scribbling furiously in Labor should go back to basics on carbon and the NBN:

Even if the NBN delivered a top-of-the-line service rather than becoming an expensive white elephant, as some fear, the government has failed to explain why $43bn should be spent on broadband rather than on schools, hospitals, indigenous housing or other essential infrastructure and services. It is not easy to see, for example, why we still have so much single carriageway on Highway One north of Nambour (where Mr Rudd and Wayne Swan spent their childhoods) when the government thinks nothing of pouring millions into an information highway.

Yes, that's the sort of digital vision the country needs. Rhetoric about the need to spend squillions on roads and how there's still juice in the old copper network and bugger me dead why are we spending money on an information highway when we all know broadband just turns up magically, mystically out of the ether. It's so transformative, it doesn't need to transform ...

Gerry Harvey and The Australian? Kissing cousins, or peas in a pod.

Well since we're starting off with a new year's vision, all we want here at the pond is a fast fibre connection outside the home before the Murdoch and Liberal luddites kill it off, so we can tell Optus and/or Telstra to get stuffed, and then a chance - once the Murdoch paywall is in place - to send them an email by superfast carrier pigeon explaining that our information and entertainment needs are being met by others ...

What's the word I'm reaching for?

We are not troglodytes on broadband or climate change, but we will continue to challenge policy that is driven by politics rather than the public good.

Troglodytes. That's it, the very word. So the anonymous editorialist is useful for something, a bit like the way a dinosaur will infallibly entertain a ten year old boy ...

And speaking of large beasts, we can also be grateful the anonymous editorialist did once upon a time nail the elephant in the room.

While acknowledging grandly that the high speed intertubes might have the potential to lift productivity, the scribbler also piously revelled in the rag's principled opposition to the NBN:

It is all so obvious to Senator Conroy that he assumes ideological bastardry, fuelled by base corporate interest, is the reason we query his inspirational plan, (News Corporation, owner of The Weekend Australian, has pay-TV interests).

Not so, they went on, but actually it's obvious to a few more than Conroy ...

Troglodyte ideological bastardy. By golly, that's not bad, not bad for a word-laying nerd ...

Meanwhile a cloud does remain over the NBN landscape, Senator Stephen Conroy's gone quiet but not forgotten internet filter ... What's the betting it will make a comeback in 2011?

Speaking as we are of troglodytes with a futurist digital vision about the interwebbie thingie ...

(Below: a one size fits all cartoon).

1 comment:

  1. "We are not troglodytes..." isn't that one of those phrases like "Some of my best friends are..." that give the opposite impression to what it is meant to?

    ReplyDelete

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