China Grabs Car Market, Jaron Lanier Speaks To Reality

What do you call a liberal without a car? An environmentalist. What do you call a conservative without a car? Broke. Chinese, pursuing some happier middle ground, flush with cash and not particularly focused 24/7 on carbon footprint size, are buying automobiles at a great clip. This has moved China to the front of the list as the world's largest car market, overtaking the U.S. The score? 13.5 million China -10.4 million US. That liberal we mentioned will be a bit disturbed at this, but we don't begrudge China the right to do what every country in the West has long done. Conservatives of course are disturbed too, since they still view China through a 1960's framework, and won't be happy till the Chinese shed their communist-in-appearance government, or collapse.

The Guardian tells us their market grew by 45% or so in 2009, causing a shift in focus to that market among some car makers.

This isolated stat tells us a great deal about how strong the economic reorientation of the world is, which leads us to a unrelated yet related screed put out by Jaron Lanier, an American scientist and pioneer of the virtual reality concept.  His book You Are Not A Gadget will be out in a week or so, and he has a very perceptive piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he decries the move toward utopian internet conceits that present a creativity numbing collectivization as something beneficial to society. In some ways it's the last thing you might expect to hear from the mouth of a computer nerd type, if you were to pull him out of a hat of computer nerds. After all, open source and Wikipedia-like collaboration are often praised as the ideal, and it takes an astute mind to see where that kind of thing leads, not to mention what it does to existing creative endeavors.

He states:

There's a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn't proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe's Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth.

(Wall Street Journal)

He goes on to link this idea of collectivization and the free software as a pathway to American economic stagnation.  Jaron captures this dichotomy in a way many others are far too content to ignore.

Digital collectivism might seem participatory and democratic, but it's painting us into a corner from which we will have to concoct an awkward escape. It is strange to me that this isn't more obvious to many of my Silicon Valley colleagues.

The U.S. made a fateful decision in the late 20th century to routinely cede manufacturing and other physical-world labors to foreign competitors so that we could focus more on lucrative, comfortable intellectual activities like design, entertainment and the creation of other types of intellectual property. That formulation still works for certain products that remain within a system of proprietary control, like Apple's iPhone.

Unfortunately, we were also making another decision at the same time: that the very idea of intellectual property impedes information flow and sharing. Over the last decade, many of us cheered as a lot of software, music and news became free, but we were shooting ourselves in the collective feet.

(Wall Street Journal)

It's good to see people thinking about this, and every time we read stats like that from China, which is becoming a source and repository for all things, our eyebrow rises in concern. The pathway out of this is not to see China's rise as evil, or something to fear, but rather a challenge by another good team. I am glad that some guy in China can for the first time can get a vehicle and drive across his country, or take a date into Shanghai to eat McDonald's. But we err to close our eyes and not make sure that Americans are holding our own competitively while being good stewards of our own assets, whether they are physical, intellectual, or the people who create both.

Other News:

• The disillusion of home owners. The newspapers are forever leading people from one extreme to the other. Here, home ownership is not cracked up to be what the newspapers were telling you it was during the market peak. Way to shape shift N.Y. Times.

• California comes begging. We had no idea they would seek to fulfill one of our 2010 predictions so fast. Whether they get the money from the Feds is another story.