Like early-2000s blogging, the pandemic disrupts the Internet by turbocharging its distinct qualities. This yields enough digital disruption to change the material world beyond the Internet, made up of things like bank accounts, lifestyle patterns, and with whom you engage day-to-day.
If your work is connected to or conducted through the Internet, consider who benefits from this disruption. Or who takes advantage – and how.
1. 1000s of reddit and 4chan memelords collectively out-sliming Wall St’s pump’n’dump hedge funds by …. publishing new memes daily. It’s hard to know how much certain individual have/will benefit from pumping Gamestop stock, but the increase in market cap is in the billions – and much of it is not held by establishment Wall St hedge funds, let alone investment banks.
2. Jonathan Mann writing a song and producing an accompanying music video every single day for 12 years – who would be better qualified to commemorate the breakup of QAnon and Alex Jones?
3. beeple making and publishing digital art every single day for 13 years, then cashing in for 3.5 million when blockchain and cryptocurrency let him (and others) do so.
4. Adriene making yoga videos (sometimes) every day and giving them away for free, while also insisting that you need to buy exactly nothing to practice yoga. The well-deserved result? Almost 10 million subscribers to her YouTube channel.
There’s a darkside, though.
Soon after COVID first hit, I wrote that: tech entrepreneurs who have created ways for people to benefit from their products and services using the Internet are going to win the pandemic economy.
Unfortunately, this is mostly a story about tech billionaires becoming wealthier tech billionaires (Bezos, Gates, Musk, Page, Brin, Zuck, etc), at a time when others need that wealth much more than ever.
But somewhere in between social media content-stardom and billionaire techpreneurship, pandemic-disruption leaves opportunity cracks for the rest of us, especially if success doesn’t mean obscene wealth and/or fame.
But what can we learn from the above examples?
- Enroll in or create digital communities
- Rebuild the tech stack monthly
- Publish a lot and consistently
- Focus on one or two channels at a time
Just a thought, thanks for listening (:
Rowan