That's going to be hard to follow. I've written a speech and the reason I tell you this is
because I normally don't. I give a lot of presentations and I do a lot of talks, but
what I don't usually do is write a speech because actually I prefer just to talk to
people. And the way I usually do that is this. I use the monitors like that to put up short
little subheadings. You see the subheading, I see the subheading, and we both know what
it is I'm talking about. And then I talk about that until it's time for the next subheading
and then I move on from there. It's a good system. It feels natural. It keeps me focused
and it stops me going off on tangents or at least it helps with the tangent thing. There's
no actual cure for that. The point is I don't normally script out what I'm going to say
like I have today, but I've chosen to do something a little bit different this time. Hence the
script. So I'd like to tell you a story. It's about a theatre director. I should make this
clear this is not a true story and worse it's a historically inaccurate story. So if there
are any real theatre directors in the audience or indeed any historians in the audience, please
forgive me, this is merely illustrative, it's a parable. There's this theatre director,
let's call him Anthony, and he is good. On top of his gang, this is a theatre director
who really knows his stuff and not just his stuff. He knows everybody else's stuff as
well. He understands lighting. He knows the ways in which scenic carpentry can make or
break a show. His timings immaculate, his settings are spot on. He knows how theatre
can work a crowd. Theatre is his home. It's his medium. And more than anything else, the
two things he knows best are narrative and performance. This is a man who can use all
of the tools at his disposal to tell a story. He knows plot development, pacing, character
placement, staging, and how to get the most out of his actors in the service of the story.
Now Anthony even wrote a couple of plays that were warmly received, but even he secretly
knows that he's at his best, staging the works of the master playwrights. Other theatre
directors actually admire him for this, some are even a little bit jealous. Now although
it's a smallish theatre in a smallish part of town, Anthony makes a decent living out
of the theatre. He marries an actress called Felicity, and they live happily ever after,
at least for a time. One day, the theatre owner announces that there's been this fabulous
new invention. This invention allows people from all over the world to see into the theatre
and watch Anthony's plays. It's called a television, and it's a little bit like the movies, but
it's in people's houses. The great thing, of course, is that now everyone can enjoy
Anthony's work if they have a television set. And while he's not really able to see
quite how he can get all of those people to buy theatre tickets, that can come later.
The important thing is that now he can get his work out there to a much wider audience.
Not only that, but some very influential people might see his plays. Who knows, perhaps he'll
get the opportunity to work at one of the great theatres as a result.
So Monday rolls around, and the men from the television station arrive. And they bring
the cameras, and they bring their vision-switching desk and their big fat cables. And frankly,
it's all a little annoying and quite technical. Anthony and his colleagues trip over the cables.
The cameras take out some of the best seats in the house. The television controller starts
making demands of Anthony's staging so that it works for the small screen even if it compromises
the immersive nature of the theatre. And worst of all, the demands of the television
controller make it clear that while he might understand the technical requirements of television
and how it all works on that end of things, he knows nothing of narrative and character.
In fact, before long, Anthony's a bit fed up with it all. It's great. In fact, it's
become important that he uses this new medium simply because now all of the people who used
to come to his plays have all got television sets, or at least they know someone who does.
But he's not selling as many tickets as before because their range of choice has increased
dramatically. And what's more, most of what he's competing against is free, and it's
really, really convenient. In fact, as a theatre director, televised plays are not really doing
it for him. And so he's sitting up in bed one evening, and Felicity is listening to
him talk about all this. And she says something that's quite surprising. You're not good
at theatre. What? You're not good at theatre. Theatre is not what you're good at. But bloody
is, you know. No, listen, I mean, what specifically are you good at? I mean, specifically. And
Anthony says, well, I tell a good story. I know how to move an audience. I get spectacular
performances out of actors. I know how to move things around to convey that sense of
drama, pathos and comedy. I know what needs to be where and when, and I know pacing really
well. That's all true, says Felicity. Well, that's theatre. Is it? Tell me, what do the
television people do? Not a lot. Complete waste of space, most of them. I mean, they
know how to plug it all in and point it at my plays, but they don't get that connection
with audiences. They don't understand that it's a conversation, that it's rich and immersive.
They're technocrats. And for most of them, it's just commerce. I mean, I get that theatre
is a business. I'm not doing this just purely out of the goodness of my heart. But basically,
they're just interested in advertising revenue. They're not much bigger, they're not much
better than the big theatre chains, actually. Felicity smiles at this, knowing that this
whole story is a metaphor for the music business and the internet. And these television people
just kind of get in the way and point their equipment at what you do. Exactly, he says.
It sounds like you need to work with them a little bit. Find out just enough of the
technical stuff to be able to communicate with them properly. The same way you do with
the scenic carpenters, the lighting people and the sound guys, but then use that to do
what you do best. Narrative, characterisation, drama, pathos, all that cool stuff. Start
including their cameras into the stuff that you move around to make the story. And he
says, you mean? And she says, yeah. Stop making theatre that gets televised. Start making
TV programs. So yeah, like I said, parable. If you miss the point of it and it is a little
bit of juice, this is something that I tell to musicians and independent music industry
people about understanding the medium within which you're operating and using that medium
to its best advantage. And we're going to come back to Anthony because he raises an
interesting point. The logical parallel to his situation for musicians is kind of uncomfortable
and for a lot of people I talk to, it's either scary, ridiculous or incomprehensible. But
it's an issue that has to be addressed. Just as Anthony faces the dilemma and you'll have
guessed that in the end he decides to stop making broadcast plays and starts making television
in inverted commas, musicians are now faced with the idea that they've got to go past
making music and putting it online and start making internet. Now I'll say that again because
it takes a moment to sink in. Stop making music, start making internet. Scary, ridiculous
or incomprehensible, whichever you like. Now Marshall McLuhan, who's another character
we'll come back to, once famously said that the content of any new medium is its predecessor.
And just as Peter Jackson may have enjoyed less critical and popular success if he had
merely pointed his cameras at a book, perhaps with Elijah Wood turning the pages or even
Suri and McCallan reading the text aloud, the music industries are equally faced with
the question of what to do with the medium of the internet. Do they just point the internet
at their music and show it to people? Because we've seen what the music industries have
made of the internet. I mean let's leave aside for a moment the stupid bits of legislation,
the repainting of copyright infringement as piracy, the insane economics of the lost
sale, the dubious marketing practice of branding all of your customers as criminals and the
extraordinary business strategy of stopping people doing what they want to do and forcing
them to behave in a way that meets no need and fills no gap. Let's just forget all of
that nonsense for a moment. The enlightened, independent, progressive and crowd-pleasing
musicians and music enterprises have, for the most part, not yet had Felicity's light
bulb moment. Music online, like televised theatre, wireless telegraphy or horseless
carriage, is a medium being expressed in terms of its former incarnation, without really
understanding what happened and what it means. Most artist websites are electronic brochures
for an experience that resides elsewhere. Most people trying to sell music recordings
on the internet think of MP3s as a format, in the same way that CDs or records were
a format. The thing that you have to understand, or at least the things that the anthonies
of the music world have to face, is that this is not a shift like the one from records
to CDs. This is more like the shift from sheet music as the dominant mode of mainstream
music business, to recorded music as the dominant mode of mainstream music. Are you wondering
why CD sales are declining and MP3s aren't taking up the slack? It's not piracy, it's
a complete transformation of core principles, or slightly better put, it's a complete
readjustment of ratios. Because you know what, records didn't kill sheet music. You can still
walk into a music store and buy the notation for pretty much any popular song. You can
take it home and you can play it on the piano in the parlour, if you wish, and if you have
a room that you can still call the parlour. It's just not the main way in which music
is consumed or purchased anymore. As media, music is changing. Now it's worth saying that
I teach music industries at a university, it's actually Birmingham City University.
University of Birmingham is another one. They're the bad guys. We actually have three different
schools at the university that deal with music. There's the conservatoire, and they handle
the composition and performance, and they're quite good on jazz, which is very important.
There's the technology innovation centre, what you and I might call engineering, and
they do music production and music technology, and we're the school of media. So why would
you study music industries within a department that handles journalism, radio, television,
web and new media, public relations and media photography? Well partly because it all ties
in well, so well with everything else. Music is like the all-purpose prefix. We teach
music journalism, music radio, music television, music web design, music promotions and PR,
and music photography. But it's mostly because music is a media form, and in particular recorded
music is media, and not everyone gets that straight away. And I often get confronted
with the art versus commerce argument about music, and music equals media gets uniquely
out of that particular dichotomy. So I'll draw you a parallel from another media form.
Has anyone here ever seen a TV show called The Wire? Okay, cool. Right, so The Wire is
a great case in point. We're agreeing, I'm assuming, that as a television show, The Wire
constitutes media. Somebody has to write that. I mean at some level it's a creative work
of art, albeit one that understands the context of its production. So I call that the composition
phase. Then somebody has to point cameras at actors. The film has to be edited, and the
whole thing gets packaged up as a TV show. That bit's called the production phase. Anthony
does that bit, incidentally, and he's quite good at it. Once it's made, it has to be
broadcast, sent out to homes all around the world, and that's the distribution phase.
And then people sit and watch it, collect the DVDs, talk about it around the water cooler,
and have favourite characters and episodes. That bit's the consumption phase. And ongoing,
throughout most of that, concurrent and consecutive, is what I call the promotion phase. Billboards,
magazine ads, press interviews, et cetera. Composition, production, distribution, consumption,
and promotion. That, in a very simple form, is how media are structured. From that, it's
not difficult to see how the contemporary music industry fit in and make it as media.
It gets composed, it gets produced, it gets distributed, it gets consumed, and if we're
doing it properly, it gets promoted. One caveat, though, you might have noticed that I don't
talk about the music industry. I talk about music industries in the plural deliberately.
In fact, I teach a music industry's degree. If there's one master stroke that the record
business has accomplished in the last 20 years, it's getting all of the other mainstream media
to call them the music industry. They're not the music industry. It's like the lions calling
themselves the zoo. They might be the noisiest bit with the sharpest teeth, but the zoo is
a rich, diverse, and complex ecosystem with lots of other stuff going on. And sometimes
you even stumble across Nathan Haynes and Holly Smith, if you're lucky.
Now, lions are great and impressive and all that, but let's not forget about the otters.
Otters are really cool. And likewise, there are places in the music industry for all sorts
of interesting people who do all sorts of interesting things that are not making and
selling pieces of plastic and selling them to people one at a time. So when you ask how
the music industries are doing these days, we can say, you know what, things are pretty
interesting right now. We're doing all sorts of great stuff, and some of us are doing really
well at it. The record business is kind of limping along because some of them haven't
figured out that bit about the readjustment of ratios. They're all a bit understandably
fearful and defensive. So some of them are acting out in quite anti-social and unpleasant
ways, bless them. But on the whole, the music industry is a pretty exciting place to be
right now.
So one of the hard things for the poor musicians involved is a shift in mindset. Because things
are changing, the musician ponders, I get the sense I need to change what I do in some
way, but I don't know how or in what direction. And you know what, I don't actually have the
answer for that, but hopefully by the end of this you'll see why that's a good thing.
Before I go any further though, I wanted to spell a false impression that I often seem
to give, and I apologise for it. I'm not a fan of technology. Seriously, I don't think
the internet is some brave new world, an exciting utopian democratic world fixing super cool
thing that the old fashioned people need to either deal with or fade away. This stuff
is as much genuine threat as it is genuine opportunity. But that's more reason than any
other to embrace it and seek to understand it even more fervently. My message is not
Hark, I bring you glad tidings of great download speeds, but the landscape is changing all
around you and you're standing on a wobbly bit. Which brings me to what you might call
my critical framework. It's helpful here to introduce the concept of media ecology, which
is not about recycling CDs, though you should probably do that as well. Media ecology is
an academic field, I'm particularly interested, even though I don't agree with everything
that's proposed in its name. Technological determinism, being one-trap it often falls
in turn, it's one that I'll deal with in a moment. But what it does have is a very helpful
metaphor, the idea of media as environments. And let's have a think about what that means,
because it's kind of a weird one at face value. And thanks again, incidentally, to Marshal
McLuhan here, he sort of popularised the idea of media as environments. Incidentally, also
coined the phrase, the medium is the message, which you may be aware of, which is actually
smarter than it sounds. And the global village, which means almost precisely the opposite
to what you think it means. So media are environments. We've all heard the phrase,
we live in the digital world, or this is all part of the online environment. But it's
actually interesting to note the extent to which this is quite literally the case. Because
one thing you'll learn from biology, and with a quick Happy 200 birthday nod to Charles
Darwin here, is that organisms within environments change in response to that environment. And
when the environments go through periods of radical change, the organisms themselves
also change quite radically. You may know this as evolution. Now, this is going to sound
like the crackpot academic thing to say at this point, but I strongly believe that this
is actually what happens to human beings in our own media environments. We change, we
evolve, and we do so in response to the technological environment. And when I say we change as
human beings, this is not a metaphor. I know I did the parable thing before, but this is
not one of those. I mean that we quite literally grow wings or lose them, develop longer arms
or webtoes, grow sharper or flatter teeth, or at least we do the equivalent to that in
the way that our brains work. And here's what I mean by that. We perceive the world through
five or six senses, depending on who you're talking to, more if you include things like
sense of direction, sense of humor, and so on. But I'm going to stick with the traditional
six senses, sight, smell, hearing, touch, and the haptic sense, which is that one where
you feel it in your muscles, if you lift or you push or you pull on something, not touch,
but that kind of physical sense. You know what I mean? They count that as one of the
main ones these days, apparently. Anyway, these are the only ways in which we take
information about the world around us. And the technologies we make extend those senses.
So really, very simply, television lets us see things that are much further away. And
all of our technologies extend us in some way or another. The wheel is an extension
of the foot, the bomb is an extension of the fist, the microphone is an extension of the
vocal cords. And not only are all of these technologies that we make extensions of ourselves,
they also communicate. Nothing says, I hate you like a missile. And our friend Marshall
McLuhan, who I should point out is deeply unfashionable to be quoting. And I would ask you that you
not actually inform my university that I'm doing anything quite so passe as mentioning
the Canadian. But he'd say that because all our technologies are communicative in some
way, they are all media. And if that's true, and let's give them a benefit of the doubt
here because it actually takes me a good deal longer than half an hour to be convincing
on that particular point. But if that's true, then all of our technologies shape our environment.
That is our world as we experience it. So quite simply, if your world is understood
in terms of what goes into your eyes and ears, and you only watch television and listen to
the radio, then your lived environment is different from someone who only reads books
and listens to the piano and the power. And that input shapes our brains and actually
wires us up differently physiologically. The technology of the printing press contributed
to the development and widespread adoption of literacy, which was a huge change in itself.
But consider what happens when books are how we take in information. We discover privacy,
individualism, sequential logic, because rather than surrounding us like campfire stories,
we start feeding the words into our brain, what at a time, like beads on a string. We
change, we evolve in response to the technology. Now, that section of the audience which constitutes
that Venn diagram overlap of the more astute and the not yet asleep, will have noticed
that this sounds an awful lot like technological determinism. Alarm bells should actually be
ringing at this point. You know what? It sounds quite a lot like Dover just said, that technology
makes us into different people. That's tantamount to saying technology drives history. Or that
we shape our tools and they in turn shape us. Which, yeah, OK, McLuhan did say that.
I kind of wish he hadn't, but here's the bit that I want to get to. It's kind of the
moral of the story. There's this thing called human agency. We get to decide what our responses
are. But we only get to do that if we see what's going on and we choose what sort of
adaptation we're going to make in response to the changing environment. There's this thing
called the internet. Perhaps you've heard of it. We as human beings made it and we are
adapting in response to it. Hypertext is categorically different from book text. Than book text,
I should say. YouTube videos are categorically different than television. MySpace pages
categorically different than records. And here's a good case in point. MySpace is resounding
proof that things are not good just because they're on the internet. Give me vinyl and
liner notes any day. But the content of any new medium is its predecessor. That's significant.
And it's also confusing because what we think we're doing is reading newspapers online. We
think we're listening to radio online or consuming music online. That's not what we're doing.
The internet is no more about online newspapers than cars or about horseless carriages. The
internet is not about online television any more than radio is about wireless telegraphy.
It's its own newish thing and the scary thing is that we can't even see that even though
we're soaking in it. Two things McLuhan like to say. I don't know who discovered water but
we can be pretty sure it wasn't a fish. And we drive forward into the future looking into
the rear view mirror. And if you look at the internet and believe it's just a channel through
which you can see older media forms, you've misunderstood the internet and you're in quite
serious danger of having the changes happen to you rather than having some sort of human
agency and deciding what you and what we as a species want to do with the technology.
Which makes me kind of the early warning system though not actually so early any more sadly.
But here's the bit that most people forget about McLuhan's. We shape our tools and they
in turn shape us. They forget the first bit. We shape our tools. And we shape them in response
to an environment within which we find ourselves. It's like a feedback loop. We respond to the
new media by adapting and creating new extensions of ourselves which are themselves media which
change the media environment and so we respond. In a nutshell, the media environment is a
certain way and we as organisms within that environment change ourselves in order to respond
to that environment. But the way in which we change ourselves is to build more tools.
Those tools are media. Those media shape our new environment with a readjustment of ratios
and we're forced to respond again. Our choices are either let that happen to us or understand
the process and the technologies that we build and deliberately negotiate and choose our
adaptations accordingly. And in the biological framework what happens when an environment
changes. The organisms which were small and specialist like the mammals start to find
that they're becoming rather dominant and important. Thanks very much. And there's
a reason that major record labels often get to refer to as dinosaurs. They're big, they're
not very adaptable and quite frankly the sky is falling. Early warning system, heady-penny,
call it what you like. But this process of responding to media shift by creating more
media used to take thousands of years and then it took hundreds of years and then it
took decades. And if you think that history is speeding up, you're damn right. You've
got to get good at this fast. We're approaching singularity here. So what do we do with all
this? Well three things. First, we abandon futurology. Second, we understand media shift.
And third, we get out the big piece of paper. And I'll take you through those one at a time.
Anyone who's ever read my new music strategies blog will know I have an almost pathological
thing about futurology. There's enough going on around us right now that most of us aren't
even seeing without going around making shit up. That's not to say we shouldn't look forward.
We should absolutely be inventing the future but you should absolutely run a mile from
anyone who claims to be predicting the future. You can spot them easily. The trend pickers
and media futurists, they say things like, in the future, we will all, and it's that
we will all phrase that usually gives them away. As soon as I hear that, my brain says,
in the year 2000, we will all have jet-packed silver jumpsuits and meals in a pill.
The story I like to tell my students is about the 1955 Christmas issue of Popular Mechanics
magazine. In it, they asked five respected computer scientists, and remember this is
1950, so these are dudes in lab coats, thick-framed glasses and probably carrying test tubes
around with them. They asked them where they thought the world of computing would be in
50 years' time, which would bring it to 2005. They thought about it and then they decided
that the answer was quite simple. The way things were going, in the year 2005, there
would be five computers in the world and they would be the size of skyscrapers. That was
a projection. In fairness to the scientists, that was where it looked like things were
headed. I mean, at the rate of progression and given the increasingly generalist nature
of computing, that's exactly where it looked like when we'd end up. And yet, 2005 rolls
around, we find that virtually the exact opposite has occurred. Why? Well, two reasons, really.
First of all, disruptive technologies are the rule, rather than the exception. And second,
and we get this from McLuhan's Laws of Media, wherever it looks like things are going, we
will probably end up with the opposite. And whatever technology looks like it's all about,
it's not really about that. So, deliberate design and future creation based on a clear
understanding of our current situation, brilliant. Fortune tellers, liars, thieves and idiots,
the lovely. Having said that, and immediately doing some backpedaling and damage control,
despite his billing here as a futurist, I don't happen to believe Bruce Stirling is in that
camp. From what I've read, he seeks to explain the present more than he seeks to anticipate
the future, and I suspect that just as my billing as Knowledge Transfer Fellow in online
music and radio innovation is not a title of my own choosing, someone other than Bruce
called him a futurist, I'm guessing. I get asked to pick future trends a lot. In fact,
I got asked by Kim Hill this very morning to pick future trends, but that's because
people just don't understand what I'm trying to do. I'm not some prophet of a media technology
to come. I look around at what's going on right now, and I shout, for God's sake, people,
start dealing with all this shit before it starts dealing with you. Second, understand
media shift. Okay, here's our boy, McLuhan, again. And again, I should point out he is
the flared trousers and brown stubbies of academic touchstones. But give the man some
credit, he gave us a pretty good set of keys. Laws of media, co-written and, some would
argue, probably mostly written by Marshall's son, Eric McLuhan. Very simple set of principles.
Any new medium acts in four ways. It enhances something, it obsolesces something, it retrieves
something that had previously been obsolesced by an earlier technology, and it reverses
into something that you just weren't expecting. A couple of examples. And there are always
ways in which we could slice this differently, but this is a tool for teasing out meanings.
So think of these as thought experiments, if you like. And you could probably do your
own with any technology you care to think of. Case one, SMS, text messaging. Enhances,
geolocation. Where are you? Meet you at Dave's in five minutes. Obsolesces, social arrangements.
Meetings can take place in an ad hoc fashion. Retrieves, notes on the fridge door. I'm
at Dave's, sorry I ate your jam. And reverses into Twitter. The conversation in the meeting
place is removed from geolocation. Nobody's at Dave's. Case two, email. Enhances, letter
writing. People put more and more of their thoughts and conversations into text form,
particularly when it comes to sending messages over a distance. It's like letter writing
on speed. I'll just send them a quick email. Obsolesces, the postal service. I haven't
heard of many post offices opening up in rural areas recently. I mean, they do other stuff,
and they're still very important, but I think it's fair to say that stamp purchasing has
taken a bit of a dive. Retrieves, I don't know if this is true of your work, but it's
certainly true of mine, the inter-office memo. Two, all staff. That's very, very 1960s.
But reverses into junk mail, sadly. Advertising, spam. So what the technology seems to be
about in the first place is pretty much the opposite of where it ends up. And that's
the key. You look at a technology. What does it enhance? That is, what does it do better
than ever? What does it obsolesce? Which is not to say, what does it completely kill?
You can still buy sheet music. What does it retrieve? I.e., what's this like that hasn't
been around for some time? And what does it reverse into? In other words, what's its
unintended consequence? Okay, that third, what I like to call the big piece of paper.
A lot of people in the music industry are running around trying to find the new model.
Is it the Radiohead model? Is it the subscription model? Is it the ad supported model? Should
we go with the give away the music and sell the t-shirt model? And actually I know somebody
is doing that quite successfully. Is it the music like water model? Which you may have
heard of. The mobile streaming model. And actually all of this is based on a false presupposition.
That we're in some weird transitional phase where chaos reigns and everyone's all over
the place. But if we can just figure it out and get it to the other side, it'll all resolve
into some sensible new business model and all will be right with the world of music
industries again. And all we need to do is give large sums of money to the futurists
to tell us what technology is going to do to us and based on the trends that they forecast
predict something in the future that we will all do. And then we're going to build our
cars on that section of the beach. And my message is don't wait. Don't try and second
guess a new model. Now back in the UK, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, there was
a controversial slogan that was being displayed on those signs on buses a month or so back
at Red. There's probably no God. So stop worrying and get on with your lives. It caused
a bit of a stir as you might imagine. It could possibly have even made the news here. I'm
not sure if that's true. Yep. Okay. My message is similar. There's probably no new business
model for music. So deal with what you have and get on with your lives. And that's where
the big piece of paper comes in. You get out the big piece of paper. It's what I do with
my consultancies with people though. There's no reason that they couldn't do it for themselves.
If you're doing stuff that's anything remotely like a musician or an independent music business,
then assume chaos. Avoid reading the futurologist because they're always inescapably and inevitably
wrong. Understand the technology as best as you can using the four laws of media and then
get out your big piece of paper. Over here on the piece of paper, this is me. Here are
all my assets. This is what I have. This is what I can do. This is what I make. These
are the people that I connect with. These are my assets. Over there, that's my audience.
This is what they like to do. This is how they like to communicate. These are the things
that are important to them. This is the sort of people that they are. And in the middle
here are all of the tools, techniques and technologies available to me. This is how
I understand them. This is what I think they can do for me and this is what I think I can
do with them. And then you get out your colored felt tip pens and join the dots. You put it
together in a completely customized way that connects what you do to what your audience
wants to accomplish, solve some need, fill some desire or address some gap for them using
the array of tools at your disposal, then put it together in the best way you can to
make that work. And it will be completely unique and customized and it will be completely
appropriate because you understand your audience and you know what buttons to push. Be innovative,
be inventive, create and prosper, rail against the idiots who do not understand and seek
to crush innovation by grasping tightly to institutionalized systems of control that
do not make any sense in the new environment and who would seemingly rather die fighting
than adapt and thrive. And finally, if you take no other message from me today, the important
thing is to foster innovation and to set up the infrastructure so that you have the competitive
advantage. Things which seem outrageous and impossible or which threaten the status quo
are usually exactly the right things to be doing for competitive advantage as an individual,
as an organization, as a city, as a country. Local loop on bundling, check. Free municipal
Wi-Fi, upload speeds that match download speeds, download speeds that at least match international
standards, broadband as necessary infrastructure rather than luxury commodity, opening up with
data sets in local and national government and laws that prioritize open innovation and
entrepreneurship over corporate protectionism. New Zealand is uniquely placed to be the best
in the world at all of this stuff. And it has the creative people and the technological
genius just to make it happen. Someone needs to take the brakes off because if you think
you're doing amazing stuff now and you are, this place could go off like a rocket. I've
been in Britain for nearly five years. Don't be under any misapprehension about this. We
astonish them. There has never been a better time for the number eight wire mentality.
Now go and take over the world. Thanks.
