The Law Of The Inevitable

People like to live in denial. Media won't face up to the 'Google gap' - that billions of its revenues have gone and aren't coming back no matter what belated actions they take online. But this is just a footnote to our denial over the very thing powering out TV sets.

Big oil continues to dominate the world economy, and even an Internet TV blog can’t afford to ignore this since, without power, there are no servers or PCs, in fact, no television at all. And power is a far bigger issue for Internet TV than bandwidth going forward.

George W Bush, possibly the most incompetent incumbent of ‘the most powerful job on earth’ role ever, was an oil man and set his agenda accordingly. In this respect he had the correct orientation, albeit with disastrous implementation. And the media, being dumb and short-termist (hence its current predicament) is dreadfully worried about the price of oil. The real story is that, to all intents and purposes, the oil is gone, forever; especially since what is left has been hijacked by those stalwarts of the hedge fund and derivative trading industry who order Petrus and moan about Brown’s new expat taxes from their third homes as the rest of us suffer interminably from their actions.

It also astounds me how everyone – all of us - from motorist to food consumer are moaning about oil rather than acting sensibly and protesting for more wave, wind and nuclear power.
As Britain found in the Second World War, depending on imports for food became the country’s biggest weakness. Now the USA, UK and many other countries are accordingly on their knees over energy, beholden to some of the world's most crackpot and suppressive regimes. It is going to impact everything from servers to advertisers, so however abstract it may seem, Internet TV is beholden.

The analogy is a fine one – the media matters very little next to food, warmth and travel, but we have equally grown used to our entertainment. There is an absolute denial of a world that has passed, and a total aversion to replacing this or creating a new world order. Imagine a world where people in Russia can afford to power their servers and TVs, but in the UK we can’t. It isn’t so fantastic any more.

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