Red Lights along the Yellow Brick Road

An article about sex and commerce in the Wall Street Journal yesterday got my attention (see link below). Sex may be the procreative force behind human life itself. But what about business and commerce? Traditionally that's been reserved for material necessities--things like food and shelter. But what would happen if our species should evolve to the point where our material requirements had been satisfied? (I speak of course for those who have money to spend, not the masses who don't.) With the 21st Century that day of capitalist reckoning may have dawned. It may no longer possible for material neccesities, nor even material luxuries, to drive our economy. But the American system is premised on one big factor; Growth, GROWTH, and yet MORE GROWTH. If companies don't grow, then nobody will invest in them. So we gotta' have growth, folks, and lots of it. But if those of us with money have all the "things" we need, how are we going to keep growing? That question seemed to be answered in the '90s, when--like a prince in shining armor-- along came the New Information Age. A new "primary need" was mercifully invented, something upon which a saturated economy could continue to grow. But here again a problem arose. The people could only absorb so much information. For a while we were kept busy in abosorbing information about information, as we poured our hearts and souls into the task of learning all the new technology of information. But that phase could not go on forever, now could it? What's more, it became clear that we were soon going to reach our thresholds on "content" absorbtion. We can get the entire Encylopedia Brittanica on a few cheap CD-ROMS. Visually, we can now view details on all the streets of our fair land with a few zooms on our computer screen. With amazing speed, we've become victims of INFO GLUT. So what's left? Well, friends, it seems it's back to square one. Back to Sex, where it all began a few million years ago, with the first upright walking homonids, who once lifted from the ground began to grunt intelligently, and then to speak, and eventually to write. Yeah, sex got us to where we are today. And now that we seem to have shot our wad on intelligent things to do, it's time to get back down on the floor of our caves to procreate some more real growth for our stalled economy.

Turns out the great internet bubble at the turn of the millenium has left us with something more than hundreds of thousands of shrunken retirement accounts. Left standing, and girdling the earth, was a splendid system of internet highways collectively known as the Broadband. A slick consortium of "telecosm" con men persuaded millions of us to plunk down our savings to build that highway, by buying stocks like Global Crossing and scores of other super inflated stocks like it. (In this they were aided and abetted by the American business media, which assured us these stocks weren't really inflated when one considered...the future.) We were assured this splendid Yellow Brick Road (for that is what it was) would immediately fill with profitable traffic, and the value of our investments would grow as the gigabytes turned to petabytes, and yet more magical fiber would need to be laid across continents and ocean floors to handle the demand. Such was not the case, and the rest is history. But the Yellow Brick Road is still there, hugging the ocean bottoms as it circles the earth, waiting, waiting, waiting for some...traffic. Any traffic will do, so long as it tosses coins into the toll booths and finally starts making some real money for the old con men who, thanks to the bankruptcy laws, are now free to make fortunes on the road that people like you and I built with our "dumb money."

So how are these new Highway Toll operators going to start raking in some cash, at long last, on our stolen road? With sex, friends, with sex. For some time now we've known that sex peddlers have been a primal force in getting the internet off the ground. Now with a glut of unused broadband waiting for users, waiting to make some money, sex is moving off our computers and onto our cellphones, as reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal .