Books reviewed by Raphael Badagliacca
Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Technology
by George Gilder (2018, Regnery GatewayTM)
It’s tempting to review half a book. I find myself wanting to stop here, not because the book is not a great read full of compelling information and arguments, but because I have to collect my thoughts before continuing. It’s not even really the half-way point yet, but it is enough to have made insightful observations about the world we live in before the remaining pages can tell us how it can be different. That will occasion a second review.
At the heart of the matter, according to author George Gilder, are issues that cannot be solved by current computer and network architecture: security, privacy, intellectual property, business strategy and technology - in short, just about everything that matters. Security is the most important. It cannot succeed, in his opinion, as an upgrade to existing environments; it must be programmed into the environment from the start.
In the words of the author, we live in “Google’s system of the world.” That world is completely dependent on advertising for revenue, which at least in its current state has a minus value for the viewer. It’s also dependent on giving services away “free”; in yet one more explanation by someone about how there is no free lunch, Gilder nails it by explaining that for “free” you give away your most valuable commodity - time, which is even more valuable than privacy, but that, too.
Google has unturned advertising from a two-way translation between advertiser and publisher to a three-way transaction that includes the user, with results, according to him, that doom it, opening the door to something else.
Stay tuned for what that something else is in this book review turned into a series, like a television series, that, now that I think about it will have at least three episodes.
Technodramatists
Articles, columns, webinars and live presentations I’ve given have promoted the usefulness of theater skills in business. Theater is a concentrated view of the same elements we find in life. Especially illuminating are encounters between people, central to the stage and illuminating for business. The highly experimental Technodramatists Performance Laboratory has a show currently running off-Broadway that uses face-to-sync technology to explore one of the most important aspects of encounters, our facial expressions.
Using face-to-sync technology through a real-time augmented reality app, Technodramatists Performance Laboratory offers us a moving picture of the future — but like the mask of Janus, this production looks both ways, illuminating the past.
One of evening’s four performances - “Error: A Comedy of” - dramatizes selected scenes from the Shakespearean play, with all of the parts played by the face of an actress with the help of her cell phone. Her body does not come into play, except to support the extender coming from the vest she wears that holds the cell phone steadily in place.
She creates the different characters by changing facial expressions as she stares into the phone while delivering her lines. The programming inside the cell phone projects her changing expressions rather beautifully in the image of a mask on a hanging, sheer swathe of material where the audience’s attention is focused.
Character is consistency. It always has been. Consistency of expression defines us. What we project is who we are. Here the technology has brought us back to the bare essentials of character in a dramatic way - the ancient mask has been given a new, electronic face.
The advisement to leaders and everyone that the technology makes so clear is that facial expressions in themselves define character and how important this projection is to the relationships we try to develop and maintain.
Performances run Thursday-Sunday through June 22nd. Third-Saturday 7:30PM; Sunday 2:30PM. Tickets: www.technodramatists.com or 866-811-4111