Brains and Bandwith – The ‘Ball Bearings’ of Our Era...and Technology Does Not care Who You Hate

Seth Godin had this great riff that I quoted in Chapter 9 (‘Brains and Bandwith’) of my book on Trends.

These days, Nokia and Blackberry ($NOK and $BBRY) are the markets whipping boys. People are upset with me on those streams on Stocktwits for cracking too much wise. I understand that. People are losing money. It’s not personal though. I feel I should be on these streams for the people that may be there hearing how ‘cheap’ these stocks are and how a turnaround is around the corner. In Nokia’s case, Microsoft was around the corner so a nice bump did occur. Let’s be honest though…the bump was a freckle on the ass of this whopping market capitalization decline:

The decline of Blackberry is just as horrid.

Seth’s 2008 rant is more alive than ever today (you think Eastman Kodak hates Instagram?). In fact, technology is meaner than ever. It is relentless and NOT ‘slowing down’. It is accelerating. Seth today might add the following to his rant:

AND CNN and Fox hate Buzzfeed 

AND The Taxi industry hates UBER. SQUARE almost saved the taxi industry but in a twist of fate only technology could deliver…UBER and the copycats it spawned… trump Square.

Now ‘Taxi’ was one of my fave shows of all time. One of my favorite scenes of all times was this epic ‘slow down’ exchange:

Let’s face it, this industry was wreckable!

As an aside – there should be two shows on UBER. One chronicling the wild and relentless push to build a global brand in just a few years, and the other a comedy about athletes leaving their guns in UBER’s.

In the future, as it relates to the financial industry, I would speculate that Seth may need to add the following riff:

AND Bloomberg Hates LinkedIn

AND Goldman Sachs hates Lending Club, Angel List and Linked In

AND Fundamental Analysts hate innovation 

AND we all hate FINRA and the SEC