The New Frontier

This is a post titled The New Frontier (新边疆) from the blog Trough-side History (槽边往事).

The New Frontier

Author: Trough-side History (槽边往事)
Translator: craigjb
Translation Editor: gregorus

Published on January 13, 2010

Everyone must know about this Google thing by now. Before, Google would always abruptly die, and be silently unreachable.  This time, for better or worse, there’s a death certificate, letting everyone know what happened. So, I’m not going to write something melodramatic, I’m going to write about something different that I’ve been thinking about:

What is it, after all, that has changed our lives?  Is it as sociologists say, that it all starts with changes in people’s way of thinking? Or are the hard scientists right that everything starts with technological and scientific breakthroughs and innovations? Or is it actually just as old Marx said: that all change is contained in the means of production? I, for one, think it’s commerce; only commerce can write the check that changes lives.  Take for example the Taobao website; it lets people support themselves and lead a decent life without relying on the shelter of a support system or possessing exceptional talent. When many people start relying on this sort of business model as their main source of income and providing services to wider groups of people, I think that everyone’s life changes, both sellers and buyers, and it’s hard to go back.

In commerce, goods are exchanged, and money is the medium.  To take it a bit further: what would happen if we went beyond physical goods? For example, I believe that information itself is a type of good, implying monetary value. Because information is always related to a particular duration of time–that is, information and time are interchangable–people are willing to buy time with money. Aren’t they?
Isn’t the reason why so many people are willing to buy “items” in online games because they want to save the time of leveling up and making money? Isn’t the reason why everyone loves using online maps
because it saves you a phone call and is quicker? Not to mention online dating sites; many people have money but don’t have an occasion to meet people of the opposite sex.  They just want to pay money for a membership; the site saves you the small talk and time it takes to find someone to connect with.

Looking at it this way, information is indeed a good. Since it’s a good, it’s on the market, and people engage in trading it, and so certain rules must be followed. It’s easy to infer that this market would best follow free market rules: abundant competition and prices adjusted automatically by demand. If this market followed no rules at all, what would the result be? Similarly, in an unfair, unjust, un-transparent market environment, the price for a piece of information or a type of information might be raised, and the quality of service lowered, but you would still have the opportunity to use it. If other companies tried to enter the market and provide a better service, they would be forced out by some unforeseen tactic.  Or else this type of company would simply never be allowed to enter the market.

When these sorts of circumstances appear, it implies the existence of a conflict of interest, the existence of the problem of what sort of rules to use to operate this sort of commerce. Clearly, a non-market
environment obstructs this sort of commercial model, and influences the production and distribution of profit. Now, let’s imagine an Internet company called, say, www.xyz.com, which provides a service which all of mankind can consume. This additionally means that the entire world is its market and each person in it a potential customer. If one country completely disallows www.xyz.com from providing its service, and instead provides a replacement www.abc.com service, this is unfair competition, implying that xyz company undergoes a great loss because of this, because it is unable to serve a large part of its potential users. [The citizens of the country also undergo great loss because they cannot take advantage of xyz.com's possibly superior service.]

In ancient Rome, the imperial army guarded the roads to Rome, preventing the barbarians from invading and cutting off the routes of trade. Where soldiers were stationed was the empire’s frontier. Today, with the appearance and popularity of the Internet World, national borders are no longer the border lines of geography–they have become very blurry. Wherever commerce reaches is the new frontier. Similarly, as the profit produced by the Internet grows, information has become like the goods transported by Roman merchants, and the point of dispute is no longer limited to trade roads, it’s concentrated in how to protect free flow on the information superhighway, how to get rid of its “mountain passes.”  Only with free flow of information will the profit sources never stop producing.

This is the situation we’re currently facing. The first and second world wars were fought over territory, resources, and population, with each country vying for a vaster domain. Today these things don’t have
much meaning, and what people are fighting over is the right to control and guide the information superhighway, the new frontiers of the Internet World. In this fight, there will be no gunpowder smoke, no battlefield; capital and technology will take the floor, determining the final right to control. And again, it will probably be hard to bear those who decide to circle a piece of land for themselves, putting up a sign saying “restricted area.”

So, I say I believe commerce will change lives. People will change the world in the pursuit of profit. We will see more and more conflicts on the new frontier, and the power of capital and technology will be victorious with the help of the market. In this sense, I won’t [quietly say goodbye].

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1 Response(s) to The New Frontier

poster: xiaoxixi (“information-tion” / “laugh-he-he”)

I’ve always liked Google, but in this country google sometimes isn’t as useful as baidu. What is the reason for this? Maybe it’s just because google isn’t accustomed to the climate, in the mystical land of China, there are too many things that [they] can’t understand, but people living there are already used to such strangeness. Is google really going to [翻强]? Then I really don’t want to go back behind the tall wall, if even searching has to be [翻强], then what fun is it to go online