Excerpt: 'The Chaos Scenario'

August 6, 20096:24 PM ET

See, the thing is, "The Digital Revolution" isn't just some news-magazine cover headline. It's an actual revolution, yielding revolutionary changes, thousands or millions of victims and an entirely new way of life.

It's not just that you can talk to your refrigerator or bank online or E-ZPass your way through the toll booth while those other suckers in the right lanes are backed up clear to that horrible rest stop with the price-gouging Sunoco and ammonia-scented Sbarro. Those are just minor conveniences afforded by the very same binary code fueling the real conflagration. Maybe you've been too busy fiddling with your smart phone to notice, but the mass media and mass marketing structures that have more or less defined your connection with the world for more than a century are in flames.

As you shall see in the first chapter, "The Death of Everything," the times they are a changin'. Traditional media are in a stage of dire retrenchment as prelude to complete collapse. Newspapers, magazines and especially TV as we currently know them are fundamentally doomed, as they shudder against three concurrent, irresistible forces: 1) audience shrinkage with consequent advertiser defection, 2) obsolete methods and unsustainable costs of distribution and 3) competition from every computer user in the whole wide world. What you call articles and TV shows and songs, and what the media industry calls "content," will never be the same again. This will change your media environment in dramatic ways. It will change the advertising industry in melodramatic ways.

Madison Avenue, after all, exists to create ads to subsidize the vast expense along the vast expanse of old media. It has footed the bill for Gilligan's Island, The New Republic, The Family Circus, Rush Limbaugh, TRL, and The Wall Street Journal not for the fun of it, but because marketers depended on those media to reach mass audiences. Indeed, they've paid increasing premiums for the opportunity as audiences have shrunk, because even in a fragmented media world, the largest fragment network TV is the most valuable. Now they realize that they are losing not only mass but critical mass. When that is gone, marketers have no reason to advertise, no remotely similar place to spend that $47 billion a year. Therefore, as culturally improbable as it may sound, the days of Madison Avenue dictating messages to you are all but at an end. Goodbye, Mr. Whipple. Fondle all the Charmin you want, but do it on your own time.

Mind you, I'm not talking about the death of marketing and media. I'm talking about a dramatic rebirth in marketing and media, in approximately the way the end of the last Ice Age yielded exponentially more species, and more advanced species, than had ever prospered on earth. When the TV Age finally succumbs to the Digital Age, we will be living a different world. And (mainly) a much better one. But for those entrenched in the status quo, involuntary change can be a difficult concept to accept. Titans of the Old Model have spent the past five years wallowing in various forms of hubris and denial. You'll see some examples in Chapter 2 ("The Post-Advertising Age") but for the moment let me just share the 2007 comments of Sir Martin Sorrell, chairman of the WPP Group, the world's largest advertising agency holding company: "Slowly, the new media will cease to be thought of as new media; they will simply be additional channels of communication. And like all media that were once new media but are now just media, they'll earn a well-deserved place in the media repertoire, perhaps through reverse takeovers but will almost certainly displace none."

The italics are mine. The absurdity was Sir Martin's. Does he not see that the internet is not just some newfangled medium like TV displacing radio? No, it is a revolutionary advance, along the lines of fire, agriculture, the wheel, the printing press, gunpowder, electricity, radio, manned flight, antibiotics, atomic energy and, maybe, Listerine breath strips. The digital revolution is already having far-ranging effects on every aspect of our lives, from socialization to communication to information to entertainment to democracy, and these Brave New World effects will only be magnified as the Cowardly Old World collapses before our eyes. Not that this will happen.

This is happening. Right now.