Dammit, dammit, dammit!!!! I didn't say you could charge me for that water heater until the thermostat needed to be cranked all the way to 400 degrees farenheit with a reserve capacity of a half gallon and pin holes to spare!
This is the autocracy of the infrastructure. Gas, electric... dare I say Hydrogen with a Capital and hegemonic 'H' accompanied by a rambunctious desire to afford the same technology that includes a warranty which won't expire before I actually get a return on my capital investment... including tax.
This is the way of culture today. The wired culture carved before us from the remanants of the cyber world between the ears and between the handsets. The electric space of some modulated pulse that pounds our ears and pins the ears back with the squelch of ownership.
But somebody's got to do it. The ownership of the infrastructure has to exist. Co-exist within the ephemera of the culture that got the guy down the street with the interest and the time on his hands to do for the bunch that wanted it and group them all together with the neat stuff he'd introduced to them.
Like all good things the buts and wherefores and howevers crop up eventually and the group, seeing that someone else could get newer, cheaper and better 'stuff', ultimately decides that to hire their man's nephew at a reduced price to do the same job is better. They form the competition that is intended to put their well meaning friend to task on price and service or push him over the edge in an attempt to get something better out of the deal from someone who cares. Of course, in there as well is the actual reduction in price of the equipment the nephew works on. Eventually, unless the infrastructure is special enough to remain costly or forced by regulation into some form of uniqueness serving the public good, the profitability of fixing is outweighed by the price of just chucking it all and replacing it. Perhaps the reason brownfields are now undergoing economic renewal is not because our decision makers are environmentalists, but because the practical financial reality is that the intrinsic value of land is its proximity to infrastructure. The fact that industrial users did not salt enough money away to afford reclamation and that now the public trust must pay for or seek long term partnerships with business for win win solutions in reclamation shows the shortsightedness of the profit motive. As lands became marginalized by pollution and less attractive to use their monetary value diminishes and, in wind swept trailer park fashion, business moves on leaving the mess behind for someone else. This is where infill economics must eventually come into play and why it takes so long for reclamation to take hold. It's the same reason homeowners don't often renovate an entire household all at once but, instead, move from room to room over the course of a lifetime. Cash flow is everything.
In there somewhere there is a lot of talk about the cycle of technology and its long-term usability and then someone who notices sees that a regulatory environment would protect culture, ownership and language (language being a cultural phenomenon, apparently) along with lesser issues such as public access and in the final stages, buy in at all levels to ensure cultural equilibrium.
The technology and its infrastructure become key to culture. Shifts within the original technical infrastructure become the deepening hooks of entrenchment and de facto indicators of infrastructure value.
Culture today is both broadened by technology and saved from upsetting influence largely by those infrastructures that are corporately owned and which receive broad-based market share.
Today's ISP game has moved from ISP supplied web portals to specialized content managers whose role in connectivity is to provide the user experience context. One of those contexts is entertainment and another is access to information.
But wait. A portal and its content co-exist as software programming and content programming, the two being unbreakably linked together. This inseparable relationship in the wireless era makes software, infrastrature and culture all one in the same. The key to it all seems to be who pays for it, who steals it and who just sits there and soaks it all up.
-- tim
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