The Cloud people
15th October 2022
Luftmensch meant a ‘man of air’ who lived detached from the real world, had no income or any way to pay his bills, and yet here he was. With the internet, we’re all cloud people now. Our economy is dominated by companies with unclear business plans except that they somehow involve the cloud.
Facebook, which despite its recent downturn, still has a stock price twice the value of GE, unveiled its big achievement, ‘Legs‘ which will allow its avatars to enjoy the appearance of feet in the metaverse. Netflix’s stock price is double that of IBM, even though it suffered some reverses when investors realized that its plan to continue growing forever while spending $17 billion a year on creating bad movies and TV shows was not actually sustainable. Good thing there’s solar panel and wind turbine companies to bet on.
Beyond cryptocurrencies (just imagine if your money were even more intangible, less secure and backed by even less in the way of assets than it is now) and software as a service (why own when you can rent), the effect of the luftmensch on our society has been far more devastating. The social web eliminated personal and geographic space. No longer were people kept apart by neighborhoods, communities, classes, national borders or even languages. Like a great slum housing project, we were all living on top of one another. And there was never a respite from life in this ugly, loud, noisy and dangerous neighborhood.