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July 20, 2005 12:31 PM PDT

Gilder's dark future

by Michael Kanellos

Speaking at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University, futurist George Gilder predicted a harrowing future for humanity. TV will die, he said, and be replaced by blogs.

"TV is dying fast and it will be followed by Hollywood. These industries fed on scarcity. There are only a few channels available. TV was technology of tyrants. It fed this advertising model that has collapsed," Gilder told an audience at the conference. "The thirty-second spot is just going to die. Nobody is going to watch any ads they don't want to see.

"Book culture and blog culture can redeem a civilization," he said.

Humanity, however, is resilient. After the Middle Ages, Italian thinkers rediscovered the classics during the Renaissance. So who knows--after six centuries of blogs, maybe future generations will rediscover Mannix.

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