Bruce made a related point last year, as he came up with the concept of “stacks”:
“In 2012 it made less and less sense to talk about ‘the Internet,’ ‘the PC business,’ ‘telephones,’ ‘Silicon Valley,’ or ‘the media,’ and much more sense to just study Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image. ”
This is pretty well-established theology at this point, but I think we’re still in a transition with attendant confusion. These stacks and related businesses are all about media and marketing, and they require massive cycles of content, not so much as product but as fuel for the engines of commerce. So the pipes are full of information, but it’s less reliable than ever – we’re missing the intermediary vetting within the cycle, everybody’s running just to stay in the race. And where media is amplified by a proliferation of content – channels and sources – there’s more room for media manipulation, political propaganda and commercial marketing messages are embedded, often indistinguishably, in the signal and the noise.
Source: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2014
the anamorphic man 