Future Troll - 29 May 2051

At long last David Farrier’s *highly* subcribed webcast is to be axed. The only surprise is that it’s taken more than a month for Medianet to get on trend. Despite the predictable (and predicted) flaming, this is not a binary issue. You’re not a 0 or 1 on this. It’s not even close.

Where did it all go wrong for Dave? Let’s start by blocking everyone who's trolling Clone Julie Christie (let’s also delete the squeamishness – she’s EXACTLY the same as Vagina-Born JC, who’s dead, so where’s the possibile confusion? Next Profit & Delight: clone rights). It’s not her fault.

We have to face the data. Internet is a dying platform. The rest of the world is moving inmind. Dave needed to adjust, but he’s part of a millenial web-surfing community that thinks there’s something important about letting subscribers use their eyes and click-follow their curiosity. Todays, if you’re not directly in the demographic’s thoughtstream, you may as well be literature.

Ten million follow Dave on twitter, and he has six million subscribers. From an advertiser’s point of view, those figures are as small as they are intangible. Even if every subscriber was a verified biological consumer, they’d only comprise 10% of NZ’s total demographic. And just because you subscribe to a channel doesn’t mean you process it.  I subscribe to 60.3k+, and only have time to scan two-thirds.

Medianet can’t compete with the online might of iTVNZ, but it can like the updates. Traffic shot off the graph last week when perennial Jack Tame’s sidekick #whatshername went on fertility leave and was replaced by a hovering wig and pair of tits. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but logic needs to raise the child. The Apple simplicity of the solution called into question the purpose of all that money advertisers kickstarted into cloning Jim Hickey from the DNA vault.

While the future was happening, Medianet was market-testing a proposal to replace Vagina-Born Dave with a Clone Dave in his 30s. Critics claimed this was a nostalgia-driven miscalc, but I process it as the first step in a long-term plan spanning at least one month. Medianet wanted to divest themselves of Dave altogether. Either way, all this speculation amounts to checking the findmyiphones on Flight 370. Dave’s career is now in cloud-based storage.

The real blame should be DMd @ Dave's subscribers. For all their well-meaning petitions, most of his demographic consume the majority of their data inmind, and the backlookers view the internet as a neuron-microwave and restrict their offspring’s access to it. Personally I think that amounts to child abuse, but I guess we’ll never know for sure because only Dave would have cared enough about the issue to start a thread on it.

Beyond Dave, this whole feed has nothing to do with an individual webcast and everything to do with a fundamental debate on the internet as a demographic good. Debate's over. It's not.

Colmar Brunton has been in power for three survey cycles. How much longer will we allow them to base their venture capital decisions on blatantly qualitative data? Why are we even discussing demographic funding for web-based content? That's not where the demographic congregates. I have to scan history to find a similar situation. One result. 0.12 seconds.

1.  A generation ago it took nearly two years for Mayor John Campbell (who some might remember started in television) to stop financing costly upgrades to Auckland's waterfront. The only users of this space were the seagulls that shat on it. The only contemporary  trace of Campbell's crusade is the appropriation of the archaic word 'public' to describe the birds that bounce round rubbish bins pecking at chips.  

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I realise my thoughts can seem cold. Know this: I have feelings. I’m aware that Dave and his team of three relied on their share of the ad revenue to provide nutrients to their inner circles. I’m a contemporary of Dave’s. I knew him in the flesh and I followed him from television to online. If anyone should weep for his demise it’s me. I just can’t. I hope that Medianet’s decision affords Dave the freedom to migrate to an inmind format. But something tells me he won’t want to. His working days are done and he caught more attention along the way than most. There's no need to fear. No matter what Dave does from here, we’re going to be OK. Information is like a flower to our demographic bee. If it does whatever flowers do that make them attractive to bees, pollination will occur. My simile falters only for lack of knowledge of bees. What I mean is that if it's really worth knowing that kids in South Bombay are browsing at slower speeds than their parents did at the same age, then someone will link us to that. 

But then again, what would I know? I’m just a brain in a jar.