Mark Cuban: "[T]he net is the plain vanilla boring, never really changing platform that it is."
Is this what they call hyperbole or is it just unmitigated irony, coming from a guy who made billions by selling a boring concept, broadcast.com, to Yahoo! back when only freaks, geeks, nerds, and losers went online?
I don't know, but I do agree that there's so much "me-too" stuff on the Net these days, and that there's probably more interesting things happening in /on places other than the Net.
But to me, the reason why the Net is getting boring is the same reason why most movies from Hollywood are garbage, why most music from big record companies stink, and why our consumer culture is generally flooded with nothing but straight-up pabulum: unimaginative business people.
When the only rhyme or reason for doing something is to make money, then all you are going to get is boring ideas that can and will be repeated over and over again by round after round of increasingly less-skilled business operators.
The real innovators get in first, and then are followed by the copycats, who'll eventually squeeze the vitality out of anything.
The billions that Cuban made by selling broadcast.com, which he did invent as a labor-of-love, if you believe his story, attracted the early waves of cyber-entrepreneurs.
They wanted to get paid too.
And what we've seen since then is more money chasing dumber ideas and dumber ideas executed more incompetently.
And that's why to some, like Cuban, the Internet today, is dead and boring.
But then, the same could be said about our entire consumerist era: if you have to buy things, or eat things or generally fritter away your time pursuing trivial concerns in order to find meaning, eventually, you're going to discover nothing but boredom.
To me, the Internet is a virtual replica of the so-called real world, and that world, as we experience it today, is pretty boring too.
You have to manufacture excitement.
It's not something you can download, or buy, or watch in high-definition.
You have to invent it for yourself.
Damn, what a boring post.