TomBomb.Com

Forget Red or Blue State: Are You Wireless or Wireline?

Nip and tuck.  That’s what most political polls describe the race between Barrack Obama and John McCain.  Might as well throw the polls in the trash.  Turns out that standard political polls exclude cell-phone only voters-those young, tech savvy, largely Democratic (but not always)  voters-who no longer bother to install a landline in their homes or apartments.  If that is the case, we know every little about true public opinion and this presidential election is probably not close at all.

By excluding cell phone owners from their surveys, political polls ignore the young, tech savvy voters and do not give us a true picture of this election or of the new America.

I know at least a dozen people who don’t have phones in their homes.  Don’t get me wrong; these folks are very connected and often have multiple cell phones in their lives; they simply no longer bother with a redundant landline in their homes.  And my friends are not alone. More than 32 million American adults have now ditched landlines for cell phones, up from 5 percent in 2004, according to a recent federal study.  Problem is: the opinions of these people are not captured by current political polling.  That’s right, the pollsters don’t call cell phones.  As a result of this structural flaw, a giant swath of American opinion is missed and as a result we have no idea where this race for the White House stands today.

This oversight is another example of how the political process has failed top keep up with our changing culture-a culture being rapidly reshaped by technology.  Just as political operatives everywhere were overwhelmed by Senator Obama’s ability to raise a quarter of a billion dollars in $100 increments via the Internet, the polling professionals failed to appreciate that a big and growing block of Americans don’t see the logic in having both mobile and landlines.  It’s a new mindset created by our emerging mobility and technical power.  And frankly, even if pollsters started calling cell phones tonight, they won’t find the same kinds of people at the other end of the handset.  First, the young, tech savvy voter isn’t going to stop the car or leave the restaurant to take a survey.  They probably aren’t going to take your call, at all, frankly, because they don’t know you.  And they certainly won’t be solicited by some stranger to think or act or vote in a particular manner.  Instead, he or she is getting all the information they want from a small coterie of friends and associates who share ideas, review and recommend products, and gossip about stuff they have already decided to care about.  They likely prefer to chat via IM, maybe a leisurely email, more likely a Twitter or Pownce blast.  As such, their attitudes and opinions probably won’t be the same as the land-bound phone owner.   

Nope, even if the political pollsters start calling the cell-phone only households right now, they would probably be amazed by how out of touch they are with the new America.  Forget Red State or Blue State, the question is: are you wireless or wireline?

The Future of Business is More 'Perfect'

For a century economists have tinkered with the theory of the "perfect market," a state of equilibrium where both sellers and buyers share access to all information, act with cool rationality, and enjoy barrier-free entry and exit.  According to the hypothesis, the perfect market would be a highly-efficient, highly-stable, highly predictable nonzero-sum world without scarcity, crime, passion or want.  In other words, a pipe dream.

Like most theories, notions of a perfect anything are doomed to failure in practice as soon as you add in the human element.  Trickier still, imperfection has a long history of being profitable.  From the earliest trading posts to the NASDAQ to the tony storefronts of Shibuya, the dance of supply and demand, the gravitational pull of scarcity, the down card dealings of insiders and other inefficiencies are long-accepted characteristics of organized trade.  This imperfect market operates on the tension created by imperfect information exploited by a carnival of arbiters, middlemen, and every stripe of snake oil hucksters.  At least, that was true when one side of the counter had the upper hand.  Today, the game has changed with the potential for a better deal for all.

The concept of a true perfect market remains theoretical, perhaps unattainable, but that doesn't mean we cannot adapt and evolve to a more perfect model.

The idea behind the idea, is that perfect markets operate to both sellers' and buyers' maximized ends.  Like a bakery that sells out its confections every night, or an open source software project, the fruits of which belong to all who contributed.  In other words, a win-win world.  Today's social technologies are taking us closer than ever to such a theoretically perfect marketplace.  The emerging social media landscape is creating a new type of market, one that operates on a more perfect syncopation than we could have ever before known.  The emerging Network-driven markets are self-selected, self-organized, self-serving.  Buyers and sellers are on equal footing.  In the new schema, there is heightened awareness for symbiosis and mutual benefit; often consumers are also producers, and prosumers respect each other in ways transactional relationships can't imagine.  Transparency and shared information are keystones, as are systems of trust and reciprocity.

Good for both buyers and sellers, the new milieu makes less profitable the old world exploitation of imperfection and unfair advantage.  As is often true, markets are ahead of organizational response.  The new dynamic creates change that ripples through our industrial age, mass media traditions.   Affected are tired ideas about distribution, marketing, customer relations and even product design.  Organizations that cling to the old will come under increasing pressure to change-or they won't; they will simply become artifacts of an era past.

For a good example of perfect market transparency in action, consider the national real estate brokerage group Redfin.  To the dismay of old school brokers, Redfin breaks the mold and exposes the often unsavory underbelly of the real estate brokerage process, demystifying and debunking the once-hidden details of how agents operate and make money.  Armed with more perfect information, consumers can buy just the services they want, know the implications of choices they make and can get a better financial deal when they buy or sell a home.  At the same time, brokers win by having more and happier clients with right-sized expectations.  And, thanks to its Consumer Bill of Rights and the growing ranks of fellow brokers who have signed the Bill, Redfin is helping to change the real estate world for the better.

Another characteristic of a perfect market is freedom to enter and exit at will and a great example of this total latitude comes from Amazon and its Mechanical Turk job matching site.  A twist on the growing "elance" movement, according to its FAQs, the service gives "businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient."  Basically, Mechanical Turk recognizes that there are still many things humans can do better than computer programs or bots and the platform allows people to earn nominal sums for small tasks that  they perform whenever they want to. 

Giving the customer a role in product development and support is another perfect strategy.  In the era of the Wiki and crowd-sourcing, it is easier than ever for companies to tap the wisdom of their customer communities.  Motorola, for example, allows its customers to substantially rewrite the User's Manual for the new Q phone.  Since every customer is a test lab unto themselves, this gives the Q community the benefit of more and better information, and it gives Motorola a massively-dispersed, cost-free development lab.  Everybody wins from this "perfect" partnership.

Yes, the perfect economy remains a theoretical notion.  But like pure democracy, that doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to it, or strive to approximate its virtues.

Undeniably, Network-driven markets are becoming more perfect.  No matter how out of balance things may become short term, the long-term trend is in the right direction: more transparency, more choices, better quality at lower prices, increased productivity and efficiency and greater customer satisfaction. Businesses must become more perfect too.  The smart companies, the more opportunistic companies-the profitable companies-of the future will adopt more perfect practices.  In fact, perfect is the only viable business strategy for the long term.

The Next President Must Be Tech Literate

“I do understand the importance of the computer,” Mr. McCain reassured in The San Francisco Chronicle last week. “I understand the importance of the blogs.” He said, “I am forcing myself — let me put it this way, I am using the computer more and more every day.” But keeping up with technology “doesn’t mean that I have to e-mail people,” he said. “Now, I read e-mails.” The staff is “constantly showing them to me as the news breaks during the day.”

Does that make any of you uncomfortable?

A recent piece by Mark Leibovich in the New York Times on Senator McCain’s unabashed ignorance of all things digital has me alarmed.

Now, I am not saying that John McCain (or Barack Obama, for that matter) needs to know HTML, or explain what sputtering is, or even follow me on Twitter (although it’s a good idea).  I am saying that he should be a little more respectful of what technology means to our world today.  At minimum, he should be less proud of his ignorance. 

After all, the Internet is no longer a mere convenience of the global economy–it is the global economy:  some 183 billion emails–2 million per second–are sent every day, there are 80 million bloggers roiling in the blogosphere, and many Americans spend more on connectivity every month than they spend on gasoline.  No, I don’t think the Senator needs to be a geek-in-chief, but he does need to show that he understands the paradigms of technology, because they are to a large extent the new forces behind the world we live in. 

Ours is a complex world today made ever more so by the very technologies Mr. McCain diminishes.  If elected he will find no blinking red phone on his Oval Office desk connecting him directly with the leader of the Other Side.  Instead, he will need to link into a distributed world of shadowy networks(like the all-Internet Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Harakat ul-Mujahidin, Abu Sayyaf, and on and on); where policy decisions are fraught with hyperlinks and jump points and track backs and easter eggs; and urgent emails lose their oomph when printed out and bound into a briefing book.  Mr. McCain aspires to lead in a world where 1000 days from now more people will be online than off, where every citizen owns a printing press cum TV station cum intel network; where the political landscape is an always-on lattice-work of data indicating either immediate dangers or imminent opportunities.  In this new world, the US is a node–a big, vital, beautiful node to be sure–but a node nonetheless.  Navigating that landscape is more challenging than ever and it helps to think in sync with these fragmented times.   It will clearly be a handicap to be an analog thinker in a digital age.

And, if for no other than practical reasons. Mr. McCain needs to get keen on computers and the Internet right now.  Consider the game-changing role the Net and Blogosphere are playing in this year’s election.  For one thing, Senator Obama has raised more money than any candidate in history largely from small donations via the Internet.  Perhaps he’d be a more competitive fundraiser if Senator McCain embraced the technology behind the coin of the realm.

If Mr. McCain needs a quick primer on the bedrock ideas behind today’s technology–and he is, I understand, a quick-study–I urge the Senator to reach out to Silicon Valley.  Regardless of political stripe, the geeks here will gladly, proudly help him.

Nobody wants to be a pencil in a world of Blackberries.  Certainly not the leader of the free fast world.

Corporate World Needs to Address Four-Day Work Week Movement

The remote work imperative--"Third Place Thursdays"--is a way for corporate America to co-opt the four-day work week movement.  Better to get in front than to be dragged from behind...

A Way to Cut Gas Costs and Auto Emissions by 20%--Third Place Thursdays

In my new book Jump Point, I argue that Internet "culture" is going to change the way we live, work and play in the next 1000 days.  I want to offer a specific opportunity right now: companies should set aside one day a week for employees to work remotely.  Let's call it "Third Place Thursdays."

At $5 for a gallon of gas, it is no longer a rational approach to business resource management to impel most office employees to spend time and gas (not to mention spewing millions of pounds of carbon compounds into the air) commuting an hour each day to an office complex where we warehouse them--heat them in the winter, cool them in the summer--only to have them spend the day emailing to (or otherwise networking with) colleagues in next door cubicles.  That is more than dumb, it is irresponsible.

The fact is, we have the technology today to reinvent the way we work.  We simply need to change our thinking.

Third Place Thursdays (Don't like Thursday? Pick a day) pays recognition to the possibility that technology can improve the way we work--and maybe save the planet too.

Thanks to the ubiquity of notebook computers, BlackBerrys, readily available WiFi, plain old mobile phones--it is now practicable to do productive work from a remote location.  Those of us who travel a lot do it all the time.  Why not take a day--20 percent of the work week--and allow employees to work from a "third place"--not the office, not necessarily the home.  Keeping employees off the highways and byways saves time, gas and the environment--and in all likelihood, will produce a better work product.  The effects could be life- and economy-changing.

Sample HR Policy:

Unless business conditions dictate otherwise, and at the discretion of supervisors, employees are encouraged to work remotely on Thursdays.  Please check with your managers and work teams to be sure remote work is both appropriate for and possible within your group.

Come gather you information workers and symbol manipulators: instead of inching along in mind-numbing freeway traffic just to attend an endless series of phone or online meetings, you could walk down to a neighborhood Starbucks, stroll to a nearby park bench, or take public transportation to the beach, crack open a networked computer and do the best work of your week.  Work long, work hard, get out of the house, avoid the office commute, be a human.  As an employee, what's not to like?

The benefits are even greater to organizations--and most are ready to adopt a remote work scheme.  In my career as an executive at companies like HP and Applied Materials, I have had hundreds of employees who worked away from me geographically.  In fact, in more than a few cases, due to geographic distribution I had never (ever) met face-to-face with some of my best, most loyal, most productive employees.  But, I interacted with them routinely throughout the day.  Being under my thumb didn't make people work harder or better.  Respect did.  And now technology can make remote work easier to imagine.

Progressive companies like Intel and US Cellular have implemented Email-Free Fridays, as a means to manage information overload.  That idea seems to be gaining traction.  As a way to tap technology culture to improve our lives, Third Place Thursdays goes that idea 10x better.  Propose the idea to your company management and let us know what happens.  It only takes an intrepid few to change the world.

Have an opinion or want to start a movement; write to me at tom@edgelings.com

Rapid Cell Phone Adoption Accelerates Arrival of the Jump Point Economy

Great item from the New York Times on the rapid adoption of cell phones leading up to the Jump Point.

To get a sense of how rapidly cellphones are penetrating the global marketplace, you need only to look at the sales figures. According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two.

How to Get Rich During this Recession

Recessions always tell us something.  This one is telling us that the world economy is changing and we are not ready. 

While disruptive, recessions often have a silver lining.  The upside to this slow down is that we get a needed breather to rethink and retool for the coming Jump Point economy.  In the transition period leading up to the 2011 inflection year, the way forward is less about what to do, more about what to change.  Want to get a leg up on the next economic boom?  Here are some major thematics from Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business:

• The convergence of personal computing and communications has created a worldwide network that allows people to connect directly to each other without middlemen, brokers or arbiters between them.  This is a lousy time to be a middleman, broker, or arbiter.

• Consumers, overwhelmed by information overload, struggle to reconcile the many competing claims for their attention in daily life. This is a bad time to be an attention-stealing, interruption advertiser.

• People don’t want anyone dictating when they do something, buy something, or watch something. This is an unfortunate time to be in an inflexible or time-bound business.

• People don’t want restrictions on how they use, enjoy, manipulate, store or share their property. Trying to command and control information rights is a losing proposition.

• Consumers are acutely aware of their power to change the equations, flip the ratios and obliterate the old market rules. Provide mechanisms for customer influence and expression . . . or go home.

• People don’t trust their governments, large corporations or political parties; they have an inherent trust in each other and in authenticity.  This is a dangerous time to be untrustworthy or shifty or phony –   especially if you are a large, established institution.

We are not in a business-as-usual recession.  This is the trembler before the tsunami.  You won't succeed by continuing to do after the recession what you did before it.  Use this period to rethink your business model, refine your value proposition, rework your go-to-market strategy, and get ready for the Jump Point and beyond. 

Coming up, we will look at some of the new strategies companies are adopting to win during and after this recession.

How Local Economies Can Compete After the Jump Point

As the founding chairman and CEO of the economic development network, Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, over the years I have often been asked what makes regional economies successful.  My answer invariably reduces down to a few essential characteristics.  As the global economy approaches the Jump Point in the next 1000 days, those qualities are more important than ever.

First, it should be understood that regions compete against regions in the new global economy.  In that view, a national GDP is actually the aggregate product of regional economies.  Successful regions have within them export-oriented, industry clusters—food chains of competitive and complementary players.  Economists call these agglomerations.  These clusters usually include industry leaders or innovators, a specialized workforce, specialized suppliers and often at least one major academic or research institution. 

The X factor is the support of the surrounding community, including local governments.  That support always includes a positive regulatory environment, but the most important feature—the one I focused on as head of JV:SV--is that the community promotes connectivity.  I don’t mean Internet connectivity here—although that is increasingly the medium of choice.  Here connectivity means helping the members of the community connect to each other and then helping the entire region connect to the outside world.  Communities can do many things to improve their regional economies and competitive position—everything from investing in research to providing superior or specialized infrastructure—but if they do one thing well it must be to connect participants and promote collaboration and cross-pollination. 

In the run up to the Jump Point, the global competition between regions is going to get more intense than ever.  The winning regions will be those localities that use the power of the network to organically grow new enterprises, attract new industries and jobs from elsewhere, and position local companies and products in global markets.

The Attention Rights Movement

I have written a piece on the emergence of an Attention Rights movement over on Nicole Ferraro's terrific microsite, InternetEvolution. Check it out and join the global conversation.

As marketers and advertisers hungrily explore ways to monetize online attention, they face mounting challenges. Consumers have migrated online precisely because they want more control over the media they consume. The old bargain -- content for attention -- is broken. Empowered viewers now reject TV’s standard promise of 22 minutes of content in exchange for eight minutes of brain-dead ads. With place- and time-shifting technology at their disposal, viewers, listeners, and readers do not want, nor need they endure, advertisements. As a result, online ads, be they behavioral, contextual, or declarative data-based, are all falling short. Give consumers the choice, and they would rather get information from a trusted friend or expert. This is giving the old Hollywood/Madison Avenue nexus fits. The ROI on a dollar of integrated advertising today, even when measurable, is dismal.

As a Concept, Prime Time Television is Dead

According to a recently released Digital Life America tracking study conducted by Solutions Research Group, nearly 80 million Americans (43 percent of the online population) have watched one of their favorite TV shows on the Internet, up significantly from 12 months ago when that figure was just 25 percent. One out of five Americans online said they watch TV on the web on a weekly basis, and that's not including the 14 percent who say they use cable's video-on-demand option.

From MediaPost Communications:

Those who viewed one of the leading 20 prime time shows in the past 24 hours were asked to identify the source of viewing. Overall, 25 percent of prime time viewing was time shifted using a DVR, broadband, mobile or similar. Among viewers 18-34, one-third (34 percent) of viewing was time-shifted. And among 18-49 households with a DVR, a remarkable 55 percent of the leading 20 shows were time-shifted.

If a household has a DVR and broadband, DVR is the preferred means of time-shifting. DVR users are becoming more aggressive in skipping commercials-65 percent say they "always" skip commercials compared to 52 percent a year ago.

Oscar's Weak Showing Speaks Volumes About State of TV, Movies

Jump points throughout history bring big change, but arrive in small doses. The trick is to watch the trend lines.

If we read the writing on the wall from two very fresh data points on popular media, TV and movies as we know them are in for a rough transition.

Point 1.

The overnight results announced today by Nielsen Media Research says preliminary ratings for the 80th annual Academy Awards telecast are 14 percent lower than the least-watched ceremony ever. In other words, TV that celebrates cinema is apparently a dud with viewers who would rather use their attention in new ways.

Point 2.

Meanwhile, a report from tech and media consultancy IDG issued a few days ago says that the Internet is where people spend the most time browsing--32.7 hours per week.

Results are based on a sample of 992 U.S. residents 15 years of age or older, who frequently use the Internet, including quotas by gender, age group, ethnicity, region, and income.

The firm says people spend 70.6 hours per week on average with all media. They spend 16.4 hours glued to television and 3.9 hours with newspapers and magazines.

Karsten Weide, the study's program director of digital media and entertainment, confirms what the ad media market has been doing for the past few years, as broadband Internet access has mostly supplanted narrower conduits making the Web a video medium. "This suggests that advertising budgets will continue to be shifted out of television, newspapers, and magazines into Internet advertising."

There is growing evidence that the old exchange of content for attention is changing and the resulting tsunami could wipe out those players who fail to pay heed to the trend lines. That means you Hollywood.

Maybe next year's Academy Awards celebration should be webcast instead.

Trust is the New Money (Part 4)

"Stupid people, you don't use a secure password."

The was the note left behind by a hacker on the Harvard University website Monday as a compressed 125 MB file described as the database for the Web site of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences showed up on the Bit Torrent index, Pirate Bay. Apparently a lot of personal information about students was exposed. The hacker claims the stunt was intended to show the university's Crimson-faced IT department just how vulnerable they are. Not too often the Harvard folks get called stupid. Just another warning of the threats that come with the opportunities after the Jump Point -- and the obligations we all have to preserve trust as the coin of the new realm.

The post-Jump Point world will be populated by numerous scammers---so-called seeders and leechers, employing malware, adware, spam and spear-phishing to get the unguarded to give up valuable information. And nowhere is the new network more vulnerable than inside the social media sites that have emerged as the new market spaces. MySpace, Facebook, bebo, Hi-5, and the myriad communities like them are very attractive consolidations of consumers but they are also porous, unregulated frontier towns. And, frontier justice can be a bitch.

A warning today from an InfoWorld item:

"Companies need to adjust their security policies for Web 2.0 world today, they need to tailor their Internet use policies and create rules that include social Web sites, blogs, and all the other types of sites being created out there, the usage policies need to be spelled out specifically and enforced," said Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at network gateway maker Secure Computing.

"Beyond that they need technical safeguards to back those policies, but the outlook for all this is still pretty grim," he said. "Most companies are barely providing sufficient protection in the context of Web 1.0."

The bottom line: After the Jump Point, three billion people will buy, sell, trade and exchange with each other directly--no government, middlemen or arbiters between them. And, they will do so, most of them, without ever coming face-to-face. Three billion strangers operating on one thing: trust. There are two sides to that coin. Be trustworthy, in fact be the most trusted source in your industry or segment. Make bank on trust. But you also have to be guarded and responsible stewards of trust. Don't be vulnerable and hackable. Remember old Ron Reagan's favorite Russian proverb, "doveryai, no proveryai." Trust but verify.

Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business

Today my new book, Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business, officially launches.

Jump Point is a book about change, particularly the sweeping changes our world will undergo in the next 1000 days. The book t ells the story of how our lives will be forever altered when the world is finally united in a single economic system: the Networked Economy. At the current rate of technology adoption, that historic event—the Jump Point--is expected to take place sometime before 2011.

After the Jump Point, three billion people—the world’s entire workforce-- will be able to connect—buy, sell and trade—with each other unimpeded by intermediaries, regulators or arbiters. In this new world, individuals trump institutions, old school scarcity economics is replaced with the new school network economics, and everything about the way we live, work and play will change.

The book is not about technology per se, but rather the social, political and cultural changes technology is rendering on the world. I see it as an adventure story.

One obvious change will be the mass influx of billions of new consumers and producers into the global mainstream. Many of these people will have been thrust into the modern global economy straight out of medieval times. For many, connection to the networked economy will be by the first piece of technology—probably a web-enabled mobile phone—they have ever used. That means the world market will soon be influenced by many new and strange demands and wants by consumers who are more likely to have eaten bat meat than a Big Mac.

Another big change will be the size of the economic pie. It will get much larger, as two billion more people contribute to the creation of wealth. The result will be a massive global marketplace of a scale we have never known before. The era will welcome our first million employee company, our first trillion-dollar company. And the world’s richest person? It will not be Bill Gates or any other American.

I hope you will not only pick up a copy of Jump Point and read it, I look forward to having an ongoing conversation--debate even--with you about the changes the next thousand days will bring us.

Yahoo Should Join Forces with Google to Defeat Microsoft

My message to Yahoo: Do No Evil Empire.

Okay, maybe it's a Silicon Valley thing, but for all the durm und strang surrounding the Microsoft seizure of Yahoo, has anyone fully thought about the unpleasant implications of a world where MFST rules the Net? For the press, the deal points are all the rage, along with he drama and the desperation (Yang eschews Ballmer for Murdoch?), but the ballyhoo has permitted a false premise to take hold. The rationale for the acquisition is that Microsoft needs Yahoo to protect itself from Google. Hell, after that, who is going to protect us from Microsoft? Fight on little friend, fight on. Maybe Yahoo and Google could Think Different and come up with an alternative scheme to save the world from the jack boots. Stranger things have happened.

Worst Super Bowl Ads Ever Constitute Attention Theft

My attention was stolen on Sunday and I can never get those lost moments back.  And I am riled up. 

Sorry, but that is how I feel about this year's crop of of anemic Super Bowl Ads.  I, like 100 million other people, allowed my attention to what I really cared about --the Game--to be hijacked every few minutes by mostly boring, often amateurish schlock.  After every change of ball possession, every injury, every time out, we viewers were assaulted with a parade of pathetic pitches--including wrap-arounds, embedded graphics and sponsorships.  What made it worse, is that I had high expectations that this annual display of what is supposed to be our best commercial videos would actually be entertaining, and therefore worth my attention.  It was not.  Computer-generated forest animals, talking babies and a sophomoric send-up with Carmen Electra?  That is the best Madison Avenue can do for $3 million a pop? 

As the worst year for overall ad quality in modern memory, this year's Big Game fallout gives us all a chance to reconsider the sanctity of our attention.  After my family, my attention--my capacity to receive new information--is the most precious thing in my busy life.  What advertisers did on Sunday was steal from me--and you.  And, the problem is bigger than the Super Bowl.  Look around.  Every time you are confronted with unwanted ads and misplaced messages, someone is trying to steal your attention for their benefit.  Ask yourself: what's in it for me?  In exchange for 22 minutes of mediocre television programming, we are bombarded with eight minutes of intelligence-draining dreck.  Is that a fair exchange of value for value?  I don't think so.  There has got to be a better way.  Life is too short to live in a fog of cognitive larceny.

It may be time to launch the Attention Rights Movement.