Knee jerk that reaction, doctor

An apparently reputable business publication set the blogosphere abuzz recently with the report that a very prominent tech company was planning to make its play in the mobile payments arena. Other media outlets picked up the report and blogs were lit by the fuse of speculation.

The rumors coming out of this tech company are probably true to some degree. However, the source of the insider information on which the apparently reputable business publication based its report is suspect in my view. You would think this consultant with all this juicy information was vetted by the apparently reputable business publication. But who knows these days.

So I researched the consultancy. I can't get to the website. There's always a problem loading the page. I found the consultancy's phone number and called it up. The receptionist said the consultant was on the other line. I asked if I could have the consultant's voicemail. The receptionist said she would take a message. (No voicemail?) When she took my message, I had the impression she wasn't actually writing anything it down. When I said thanks, she muttered something and hung up. (Maybe she's a temp, or his wife.)

I did a little research on the consultant. He seems to have a decent background, is reportedly an expert resource for media outlets. But, on the other hand, he has a crappy website, a lousy receptionist, and no voicemail.

So I am left to wonder about the factuality of his insider knowledge about future product roll-outs by this tech company, and yet one media report using this guy as the source got the whole tech world hyperventilating. It just proves how easily led we still are. 

If a Big Lie comes wrapped in the mantle of authority projected by an apparently reputable business publication, will we have the wisdom to at least take a second look at it before broadcasting it like mindless parrots across the world?

I doubt it.

CAUTION: DISRUPTIONS AHEAD

Mark this event as a small signpost to the Dead Man's Curve we are approaching as a society. A rapper named 50 Cent posted on his Twitter page that all his 3.8 million Twitter fans should buy shares in H&H, a company in which the rapper owns stock. H&H's shares subsequently skyrocketed by 290 percent, as his Twitter fans apparently did what he suggested.

Now 50 Cent is in trouble with the Fed. He may have done something illegal to artificially boost stock in the company. But what exactly did he do wrong? Is it insider trading to make a public statement on a public facing page about stock that you own? I don't think the Fed would care if I made such a statement on this obscure blog. It was the size of the audience he was reaching, the speed with which he reached it, and the immediate effect his suggestion had on the stock's performance that caused the Fed to take notice.

There are all kinds of legal gray areas when it comes to the electronic world. Privacy and copyright infringement concerns immediately come to mind. It doesn't seem our laws are keeping pace with the rate of change that is going on in society.

So how do you change a legal system that is antiquated, overly complex, and deeply embedded in the culture? I don't believe you can. New technologies always create loopholes in laws that can be overtly or innocently exploited. 

When the legal system catches up to restrict celebrity stockholders from posting stock tips on their Twitter pages, the next new technology will already be creating new opportunities for exploitation. As the speed of change accelerates, that gap will only grow. The only thing the government could do is try to clamp down on the Internet. If they do, it will herald a new Dark Age. If they don't (a far more preferable outcome), democracy as we know it will be broken and what comes next is anyone's guess.

A brief post on Time

We have a funny way of thinking. We talk about things that happened in the past, things that are happening now, and things that will happen in the future. But if you think too hard about how we compartmentalize Time, you start to question the categories.

The past is past, we say to ourselves, as if it were a fixed thing. But it's anything but. When scientists excavate the ruins of some mysterious ancient civilization, isn't that civilization now vitally "new" with the knowledge it has to impart to us through its ruins? And how can we say the Crusades of the Middle Ages are a thing of the past when we are still seen as occupying infidels in the Middle East today? 

The present is just as hard to pin down. When does the present begin and end? Is it a second, like the one that just passed? Or is it a centisecond (a hundredth of a second), or even smaller, a millisecond? Maybe it's something larger -- a year, two years, a decade. If there is no acceptable definition of what makes up the present, how can we know it exists?

The future is a funny thing, too. We are worried and excited about it. We are always planning for it. We are constantly thinking about it, imagining it, even though it doesn't yet exist. And it never will. That's the thing about the future; it's always in the future.

So what we call the past, the present, and the future doesn't stand up to even the briefest scrutiny. Maybe one day those artificial distinctions will fall away and we'll realize that Time is an infinity of concentric circles and not an arrow going only in one direction.