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Creative destruction

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I'm sure I'm jet-lagged. All of my thoughts and conversations of the day are running together. But here's the idea: in times of fundamental change -- whether the rise of digital publishing in a time of the Big 5 publishers in America, or the rise of the Internet amidst Russia's increasingly totalitarian state - you don't bet on the systems of control. You bet on the creators.

Regarding publishing, why would an author give up 90% of the profit when without the author there's nothing to publish? Regarding politics, why would a new generation of workers agree to be penned into a closed, archaic industrial system when they've tasted an open global network?

If the economic or political system can't accommodate the new and developing, then it is by definition old and decaying.

So for the Big 5: your attempt to consolidate and lock down the market is doomed. The writers really don't need you anymore. And for Putin: to a new generation, it doesn't look like patriotism to prop up those who seek to control you.

Both want freedom.

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