Category: opinion

The End Of Free Content

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

There is seldom a day that passes when I trawl through the feeds of my social media accounts and stumble upon an article or post that laments the current state of affairs for many individuals in the creative/media industry. It is true, especially in the last 15 years, that many writers, journalists, musicians, songwriters etc have had a rough time. The internet, since it’s mainstream adoption almost 30 years ago, has had a colossal effect on this industry.

The emergence of the music file sharing site Napster at the end of the 90s was the first real taste of the seismic effects that the internet would have on the music industry in the coming years since this platform was first unleashed onto the world. Yet, even back then, very few people were able to foresee the long term effects. The internet and technology were moving at an exponential rate and much of the music industry was slow to adapt. In fact, some of the large record labels decided to fight those early disruptive file sharing platforms rather than to evolve and try to stay ahead of the curve.

In the past, bands and artists were able to make a comfortable living on their physical record sales alone. The most successful bands and artists sold records in the millions. Today, the internet has completely taken a sledge hammer to this business model. It is now very easy to listen to most music for free. In the past 10-15 years, streaming platforms such as Spotify have emerged where for a monthly subscription fee one has access to vast libraries of music both old and new. Unfortunately, for the musicians, even a substantial amount of listens does not generate anywhere near the same income like back when people actually bought records. There is the option to purchase or download a song or album, but against options like Spotify and You Tube, nowhere near enough people consume music via this route making it very hard for musicians to make a decent living just via their songs alone.

The internet and digitisation of the printing presses have also had a corrosive effect on the incomes of many writers and journalists. Now many people can create a website and start a blog to share their own articles and written content. Print sales of newspapers have been in decline and the revenues from digital subscription sales falls short of revenue numbers for physical sales from years gone by.

However, I don’t think the current status quo of oceans of free content will continue. In the coming years we will see artificial intelligence (AI) play an increasing role in the way we live our lives. I have been fascinated by the development of AI for over ten years now, yet it’s only been in the last few years that it has really entered the public consciousness and everyone seems to be talking about it. Yet, despite this, most people are understandably very worried about the development of AI and see an almost dystopian future ahead.

I am going to throw my hat in the ring here and say that AI will benefit humanity and lead to a much better world. In the context of the creative industries, I think AI will be on the side of the creators. In my view, I think that as AI continues to improve it will get to the stage where it will be able to do most tasks better than humans can. As the internet further evolves, I can see the net also being policed around the clock by increasingly sophisticated AI. This will be a very good thing as it will lead to a crackdown on all the toxic and nefarious forces of the net. Currently, the internet is a very messy place, but AI will do a remarkable job of cleaning it up and protecting users from the dangerous aspects of it, making it very hard for unsuspecting users to fall victim to fraud, deception, undesirable entities etc.

Ever since the internet first became mainstream, it has, for the most part, been a free wheeling and wild west place and many government bodies and authorities have been slow to keep up with it. However, with AI, I expect in the coming years that the internet will be much more regulated and less of an uncontrolled wild west space. The implications of this will be lots of new legislation created and passed and also applications put into place, which protect internet users.

I think when all this is finally realised, it will have a huge effect on the way we consume content. Suddenly, almost all content will not be free any more. It will not be possible to listen to a song for free or read an article for free like we currently do. To listen to just one song or read just one article, you will have to make a payment in advance. The super strong and sophisticated AI that now controls the internet will mean that there is no other way around those rules. It will be impossible to fight these AI safeguards. Today, free content is taken for granted, but it won’t always be like this and people will eventually have no other choice, but to accept this new reality. I would go as far as saying that people will and with it their values will change. They will begin to fully appreciate what they are consuming and they will be happy to pay for it.

Musicians and writers will be able to make a decent living again through their art. Popular streaming services like Spotify will be doomed if they don’t change their business model. I envisage that if they want to survive they will have to go down the same route as Apple and offer music as a download service where the consumer pays for each downloaded song and album rather than a flat monthly fee for an unlimited tap of music. Furthermore, AI will provide much of the traditional print media with a new financial bonanza. Many news sites have been struggling with the decline of print sales and falling ad revenues. Subscription revenues have been meagre by comparison. However, when people start paying per article I think that there is a good chance that revenues will cease to decline.

Contrary to much of the prevailing narrative that AI will only further increase the hardships of musicians and writers, I think AI will financially enrich them. Back in the beginning of 2022, I wrote an article entitled, ‘The Future Could Be Very Bright For Song Rights’. At the time that the article was written, many musicians were selling the rights to their songs. Some, like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, for vast sums of money. However, despite all this, I was stressing the importance for musicians to think twice before parting with their song rights – even with lots of money involved. You see, it is very likely that AI will open up many new income streams for song rights. The big labels also foresee this, which is why they have been very active buying up all the song rights they can get their hands on. They see these huge new potential money fountains that AI will give birth to for song rights and they are acting now before it becomes a reality.

It is increasingly likely that at some point over the coming years, many musicians will deeply regret that they sold the rights to their songs. At the time they probably thought that they were making the right decision, especially given the precarious and fragile state of the music industry and their natural concern that it will continue to get worse. Recently, Queen sold it’s entire music catalogue to Sony for over $1 billion. A monumental sum of money. However, there is a good chance that over the next ten years, the value of Queen’s back catalogue swells to $5-10 billion. If this were to happen it would become prohibitively expensive for any of the surviving members of the band or members of their family to buy back those rights. This is something to consider for those tempted to sell their song rights at this stage in their career.

By Nicholas Peart

(c)All Rights Reserved

8th August 2024

Image: Larisa Koshkina

The Next Fifteen Years

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

When I look back on the last 15 years going back all the way to the beginning of 2009 and the aftermath of the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis, it is clear that this has been a difficult and rocky period for humanity as a whole. In some ways it feels like many people have still not fully recovered from this crisis. There are so many people who are still struggling and with that there’s a palpable sense of tension and discontent. 

In the UK, for example, the early years since the financial crisis were marked by government funding cuts and austerity. Most notably, university tuition fees were tripled. The last fifteen years for young people, especially, have been very tough. As the years progressed we saw the emergence of politicians from the more extreme ends of the spectrum come more to the fore; reflecting this discontent. 

Economically, the last 15 years have been a disaster for many people. For over a decade, from 2009-21, the main central banks such as the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the ECB, etc, kept interest rates at near zero percent. The effect of this has been very real. When interest rates are at rock bottom levels, prudence is thrown to the wind. There is no incentive to save money (as it yields no interest) and only encourages rampant speculation and risk taking. And this is what happened during this period. Asset prices for property and many stocks and securities went to the moon. Also, due to interest rates being so low for such a long time, debt levels exploded. During this time frame, total US government debt went from just over $11 trillion at the beginning of 2009 to almost $30 trillion at the end of 2021. As I write this US government debt is now over $33 trillion. Furthermore, average US house prices doubled and the S&P 500 index increased more than 5 times in value. Meanwhile, during this time average wage growth was relatively flat. 

Keeping interest rates at such low levels for over a decade has been very damaging for society as a whole. The huge inflation in asset prices, far eclipsing income growth, has not been a good thing. This is certainly true for most of the younger generation where the possibility of owning a home is now very remote. But it isn’t just younger people who are hurting. This prolonged period of Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has resulted in a level of inequality not seen since 1929 just before the great stock market boom of the Roaring Twenties collapsed and led to the 1930s Depression and a lengthy period of unrest and stagnation. 

Globally, it feels like the recent 2020-21 COVID pandemic was this monumental event to manifest during this difficult 15 year period pushing an already hurting population even further into the abyss. It was almost like the punishing final act.

In my view, I believe that we are now at a stage where we have reached a major turning point in economic history. Looking beyond the last 15 years, I think we are now at a moment in time where the wheels of this era of neoliberalism that has prevailed since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in power are slowly coming off. This epoch is coming to an end. 

What Will The Next 15 Years Bring?

I envisage that the next 15 years is going to be a period of enormous societal and economic changes. The current status quo and core orthodox beliefs of today are going to be turned upside down. This will be an incredibly disruptive time, but ultimately I truly think that it will be beneficial for all of humanity. If I had to compare this forthcoming period to a period in history, I believe that what we are about to experience will be similar to what happened during the French Revolution and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as well as the Reformation more than 200 years before those two events. 

The Industrial Revolution was a time of unprecedented change through game changing innovations that radically transformed the lives of society. Yet in the beginning, at least, some of these inventions were met with fierce resistance from a population worried that such inventions were destroying their livelihoods. However, these inventions created new opportunities and new types of work. Before the Industrial Revolution, large swathes of society, especially those not born into aristocracy, worked gruelling and extremely long hours without the aid of any industrial production units that today are taken for granted. 

The French Revolution occurred around the same time as the Industrial Revolution was already getting going. It was a seismic period in history that completely altered the status quo in French society that prevailed for too long. Before the French Revolution, France had a feudal estate based system where society was divided into three estates; the First Estate (made up of the clergy), the Second Estate (made up of the French nobility), and the Third Estate (made up of “commoners”). The Third Estate comprised over 98% of French society that were not part of the clergy or nobility with next to no chance of improving their lot. Basically, if you were not born into money or privilege you were trapped. The Revolution was a violent and bloody event in world history, but it ultimately transformed French society for the better creating a much fairer and more progressive society. 

On that same note, I think that during the next 15 years we are going to experience something similar to those years towards the end of the 18th century. We will see many groundbreaking innovations just like during the Industrial Revolution. There will be new and emerging technologies and inventions that will be met with resistance and in some cases with violence by some sections of the global population. However, ultimately, this will all be hugely beneficial for all of society. As a specific example, let’s focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI). This technology has been around for some time, but recently it is being increasingly discussed and there is now a lot of hype around it. Yet there is no denying that this is a powerful technology that doesn’t stand still. People are right to be fearful and concerned by this technology, but I find that a lot of people are looking at it all too myopically. The very real possibility that it will eventually have the power and skills to do any kind of job that a human can do should be embraced. I actually think that AI will make the world a much better place. It will vastly reduce or even eliminate global poverty and will also negate the need for people to work. By this point I don’t even think that we will have an economic model based on Capitalism any more. In an earlier article I wrote back in 2019 entitled, THE TRUE SINGULARITY: A Universe Of Unlimited Abundance And Eternal Harmony, I stated how there would eventually be a “Post-Scarcity” economy of unlimited abundance facilitated by the exponential growth and development of new and emerging technologies like AI, 3D/4D Printing, nanotechnology, etc. Such a “Post-Scarcity” economy of abundance would negate the need for and nullify all the previous economic and ideological models of the past. 

I also believe that the political leaders of the next 15 years, compared with the last 15 years, will be of a much more enlightened breed who have more empathy and more of a human touch. They will be less self-serving and less career driven. They will encourage and support new and emerging technologies whilst making sure that everyone benefits. This culture of greed, Silicon Valley mega riches and extreme wealth inequality that has prevailed for far too long will become a thing of the past within the next 15 years. 

In the last 8 years, we have already had a taste of the discontent that many feel. Of those who feel neglected, marginalised and struggling economically amidst an unprecedented level of wealth inequality vote for more radical leaders. There is a sense that the current system and status quo is just not working any more for increasing swathes of the population. As long as the can of the current system continues to be kicked down the road, the more unrest and distrust there will continue to be. This is why I foresee in the coming years an event similar to the French Revolution. It will be an ugly, violent and potentially dangerous and unstable time, but it will also result in much needed changes that will lead to a better and more stable world. It will also create a society with a completely new set of values and core beliefs. And I would even go as far as saying that we will all be much more enlightened and more caring and altruistic as a society. I very much believe, as unrealistic as it may currently seem, that this is the new kind of world that will exist in the next 15 years and it will be a much better world than this existing one. 

Nicholas Peart

16th January 2024

©All Rights Reserved 

Image: Pexels

Searching For Honesty In Financial Markets And Why Short Sellers Should Not Be Demonised

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

Today, I think there are too many people dabbling in the stock market and investing in highly speculative assets. Despite the cratering in stock prices in 2022 and the very brief crash in 2020, we are still in one of the longest bull markets of all time that began in 2009.

But whether we are in a bull market or not, I am still blown away by the valuations of many stocks and other assets and the sheer amount of dumb money still in the market. Over three years ago, the well known short seller Jim Chanos commented that, ‘We are in the golden age of fraud’. In an interview with the Financial Times from July 2020, Chanos commented on the market environment at the time as; “a really fertile field for people to play fast and loose with the truth, and for corporate wrongdoers to get away with it for a long time”. He further expands on this by getting to the root of how such an environment was created;

‘ a 10-year bull market driven by central bank intervention; a level of retail participation in the markets reminiscent of the end of the dotcom boom; Trumpian “post-truth in politics, where my facts are your fake news”; and Silicon Valley’s “fake it until you make it” culture, which is compounded by Fomo — the fear of missing out. All of this is exacerbated by lax oversight. Financial regulators and law enforcement, he says, “are the financial archaeologists — they will tell you after the company has collapsed what the problem was“. ‘

In this paragraph Chanos nails beautifully the problem not just with the present state of financial markets and the industry as a whole, but with the current zeitgeist. The post truth world of ‘my facts are your fake news’ where real truth and wisdom has been forsaken is a real problem and dangerous. The Silicon Valley “fake it until you make it” culture has been exacerbated by the huge tail wind of a decade plus of zero percent interest rates and mountains of cheap and easy money. Such a background of very loose monetary policy has enabled many startups and companies with shoddy fundamentals that should have gone bust a long time ago to remain a going concern and in some cases even thrive with massively bloated market valuations. During this time wild levels of risk taking and speculation are rampant resulting in highly distorted and inefficient markets. Huge bubbles in highly dubious securities emerge with many dishonest charlatans with large followings on social media pumping these garbage entities to naive and unsuspecting investors. When the bubble eventually bursts it is those same impressionable investors who are left holding the bag. In the worst cases, some bet with money they didn’t have and couldn’t afford to lose. These incidents are especially common in the cryptocurrencies space and also for so called meme stocks – stocks made popular by a large following on social media. Often these stocks have market valuations completely divorced from their true intrinsic value. In some cases these companies should be insolvent, but are kept going by a zealous cult like following of investors happy to pay any price without questioning the fundamentals and integrity of the companies.

Short sellers often get a bad rep. In some cases this is justified. There are indeed short sellers who are nefarious and have a vulture-like mindset. However, there are those like Jim Chanos who play a very crucial role in the markets by searching for companies that are committing fraud and lying to investors. And they are often onto those companies at a very early stage way before the financial regulators get involved. As Chanos comically states, these regulators ‘will tell you after the company has collapsed what the problem was‘.

Chanos is famous for his large bet against Enron. At the time it was a darling stock and very popular with investors, but Chanos after having undertaken a deep fundamental analysis on the stock realised that the company was cooking its books and that at some point this would land the company in serious trouble. Whilst numerous financial commentators would be speaking glowingly and talking up the stock, Chanos, however, knew that something was rotten in the state of Denmark. The financial regulators were asleep at the wheel only acting after the fact.

Today we are still living in the golden age of fraud. Despite the 2022 wobble in equity prices and inflation spikes and rapid increases in interest rates, there are still too many investors playing foolish games who haven’t learnt their lesson. There are still zombie companies and entities trading on eye watering market valuations and worse, companies still trading at huge valuations that are committing fraud and the financial regulators continue to do next to nothing. This is precisely why short sellers like Jim Chanos should not be vilified. In fact, quite the opposite. They should be revered and respected. They search for honesty in the markets, pointing out the bad actors and the companies engaging in crooked behaviour. And I have no problem when they make money. Even when they make a lot of money. It is much easier to go long on a stock than it is to go short. Short selling is a difficult and highly risky venture. Even if you have spotted a company engaging in fraud and other egregious activity, the difficulty is getting the timing right when betting against it. The market valuation of the company may continue to remain irrationally high for a very long time creating huge losses for those that chose to bet against it. Short selling can be a very lonely path and often a financially ruinous one too.

Nicholas Peart

January 3rd 2024

(c)All Rights Reserved

LINKS:

Financial Time article: Jim Chanos: ‘We are in the golden age of fraud’ July 24th 2020 (https://www.ft.com/content/ccb46309-bba4-4fb7-b3fa-ecb17ea0e9cf)

Image: https://pixabay.com/photos/reading-glasses-book-read-4330761/

In The Future, Everyone Will Want To Be Anonymous For 15 Minutes

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

in-the-future banksy

Fame can be a dangerous thing. Some people seek it because in their minds it fills a void. If you are talented and have a lot to offer it presents the opportunity to be valued and respected by many people. Fame has always had it’s drawbacks yet I feel there are two different periods of time that one must be aware of. These are Before The Adoption Of The Internet (BTAOTI) and After The Adoption Of The Internet (ATAOTI). In The last 25 years, the growth and development of the internet has been staggering. We currently live in a world of instant hyper connectivity.

If I had to pick a time to be famous I would pick BTAOTI in a heartbeat. News travelled slower back then. The digital world was less developed. I have no nostalgia or desire to live in the past, but when I look at the growth and development of social media today I flinch at the concept of fame. I would even go as far as saying that eventually it may even lose it’s appeal. It would take real guts to go down that path so much so that anonymity would become increasingly attractive. Andy Warhol said that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. The internet has provided a platform for everybody to publicly project themselves if they want to. There is so much content on the internet today. There is no way one would be able to absorb all the digital content out there in one lifetime. According to Statista, as of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video content was uploaded to YouTube alone every minute.

It is increasingly a rarity nowadays to not have any personal platform or content online. To be purely anonymous will be rarer and more cherished than fame itself.

By Nicholas Peart

22th June 2021

(a)All Rights Reserved

Image source: https://wellsbaum.blog

Real Talent Is Rare And Not So Cheap

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

A few years ago I wrote a post entitled ‘Talent Is Cheaper Than Table Salt’. In this post I outline how talent is actually not so rare and rather it is hard work that matters when it comes to finding success.

I’ve often thought about this post, especially as it is one of my most viewed posts. Yet since I first wrote it, I’ve increasingly began to question it, even though, at least at a logical and basic level, it may be correct. But what if, just what if, I may have got it completely wrong regarding talent? Maybe genuine talent is actually rather scarce. To be clear, when I say this, I mean a kind of talent that is just so special and very hard to replicate.

The quote in my original article by the writer Stephen King goes like this; “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”

King is correct, especially if one also takes into account the second sentence of his quote. It is all true. Yet talent and hard work are two different things. Anyone can develop a hard work ethic, but not everyone has real god given supernatural talent. I think we need to really reassess how we define talent. I also dispute this notion that if you work hard you will automatically be rewarded. We fall victim to something called ‘Survivorship Bias’ – only looking at success stories and overlooking all the failures.

There are countless stories of those who worked extremely hard and didn’t ‘make it’. Yet those stories seem to be lost on us. But that doesn’t mean that one should not work hard. Absolutely not. Hard work, unexpected challenges and multiple failures are an important part of one’s character building. Saying that hard work is a waste of time sets a bad example.

As a whole, we often neglect to take into account just how random the world can be. Please see my other post Fooled By Randomness. Life is not as linear as we think it is. There are some things that are simply beyond our control.

But getting back to the subject of talent. When I look at the people I admire throughout history one thing they all have in common was that they were special. They were not like everybody else. They had talent in spades and often there was hardly any chasm between their life and their art. Now THAT is rare.

By Nicholas Peart

June 21st 2021

(c)All Rights Reserved

Image: storypic.com

The Anti-Tourist

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

According to the writer Daniel Kalder;

‘As the world has become smaller so its wonders have diminished. There is nothing amazing about the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, or the Pyramids of Egypt. They are as banal and familiar as the face of a Cornflakes Packet.’

He further embellished on this via the following decrees originally established at the Shymkent Hotel in Shymkent, Kazakhstan on October 1999 as part of the so-called ‘first international congress of Anti- Tourists’;

The duty of the traveller therefore is to open up new zones of experience. In our over
explored world these must of necessity be wastelands, black holes, and grim urban
blackspots: all the places which, ordinarily, people choose to avoid.

The only true voyagers, therefore, are anti- tourists. Following this logic we declare that:

The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable.

The anti-tourist eschews comfort.

The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels.

The anti-tourist seeks locked doors and demolished buildings.

The anti-tourist scorns the bluster and bravado of the daredevil, who attempts to penetrate danger zones such as Afghanistan. The only thing that lies behind this is vanity and a desire to brag.

The anti-tourist travels at the wrong time of year.

The anti-tourist prefers dead things to living ones.

The anti-tourist is humble and seeks invisibility.

The anti-tourist is interested only in hidden histories, in delightful obscurities, in bad art.

The anti-tourist believes beauty is in the street.

The anti-tourist holds that whatever travel does, it rarely broadens the mind.

The anti-tourist values disorientation over enlightenment.

The anti-tourist loves truth, but he is also partial to lies. Especially his own.

Considering these resolutions were written a little more than 20 years ago, I wonder what Kalder would make of travelling today? In 1999, the internet was barely a few years old. Back then, households that had an internet connection had a slow dail-up connection. There was no broadband and neither were there smartphones. 1999 seems rather ancient compared to the world today in the context of the exponential growth of global digital connectivity.

The world today is much more globalised than the world of 1999. A consequence of this has been even more demand to visit the worlds ‘wonders’ be it the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall of China or cities such as Venice and Florence. The ‘very desirable’ places that the so called anti-tourist snubs.

Then again, on the other hand, such wonders are an important part of the history of a country regardless of whether they are popular or not. Most visitors to India visit the Taj Mahal yet the Taj Mahal is an important part of the history of the Mughal Empire. Indian history is fascinating and one of the best documenters and narrators of this history is the writer and historian William Dalrymple. Dalrymple is a black belt regarding the history of the Indian subcontinent and has a deep passion and interest for that part of the world. So much so that he has lived in India for over 35 years. What this means is that this goes beyond any labels or identity. Dalrymple is neither a tourist nor an anti-tourist. Traveller or dilettante. He is simply someone who loves the subcontinent and dedicates a substantial chunk of their time to writing, educating, reading and learning about it.

When I think of my very first trip to India, I did a lot of the typical tourist things. I visited the Taj Mahal in Agra, I visited all the well trodden places in Goa and went on popular tours. Yet I also, unwittingly, did a lot of anti-tourist activities. I stayed in some of the cheapest and most unsavoury guesthouses I could find. I ate street food at rock bottom prices. I developed a habit of roaming the streets of the more down and out parts of the cities I visited. I didn’t document any of this neither did I really brag about them. I had no digital social media accounts at the time and I never kept a physical journal. Friends and family would ask me if I was writing about my trip, but I had no desire to. It wasn’t indolence. I suppose I was adrift in multiple intangible fleeting experiences and frequent moments of disorientation and I had no inclination to hole myself in my threadbare guesthouse room to put it all down to paper. People often talk about ‘finding one-self’ or ‘becoming enlightened’, but I wanted to get away from myself. In at least a semi-masochistic way, I revelled in my anonymity and frequent discomfort.

Every time I spoke to a tourist who expressed an interest to visit Brazil they would invariably say that they wanted to visit Brazil during Carnaval and specifically visit the city of Rio De Janeiro. In my mind I would say to myself, ‘I would like to visit Brazil anytime except during Carnaval.’  During this period, especially in Rio, accommodation prices go through the roof, many parts of the cities become unbearably overcrowded and the levels of crime spiral out of control. Rio is already a dangerous enough city at night, do I really want to visit it when it becomes even more dangerous? Nao obrigado!

Staying on the subject of Brazil, one popular activity many backpackers undertake when they visit Rio is a ‘favela tour’. Favelas are slums located on the the outskirts of cities in Brazil. Rio has a much higher proportion of them compared with other cities in Brazil owing both to the layout of the city and the extreme inequalities of wealth. Even the richest neighbourhoods in Rio seem to be just a stone’s throw away from one. I think the popularity of such tours is down to the belief that backpackers think they are doing something ‘edgy’ and ‘non-touristy’. Yet the irony is, considering the relatively recent popularity of such tours, they are anything but. It may be considered ‘anti-tourism’ on the surface and such activities do conform to Kalder’s resolution; ‘The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable’. There is nothing desirable about these favelas. Yet neither is it clever or cool to visit such places which are downright dangerous. Also most of the people that go on such tours do so to brag and get a so-called one-upmanship over other travellers. The anti-tourist would never brag or boast about such things. Furthermore, there’s no danger during these tours since you are always accompanied with protection just in case anything does flare up. My Brazilian friend Carlos finds it comical that such tours exist; ‘Why would any tourist want to pay to visit a favela? Anyone who lives in a favela wants to pay to get out!’

There are other tours with anti-tourist themes. They could be ‘street tours’, tours to visit abandoned buildings or tours to visit derelict and defunct places destroyed by war. When I visited Bosnia a few years ago I went on a tour in the capital, Sarajevo. The city was under siege for three years from 1992-95. It was a fascinating tour and I dont regret doing it. Our guide lived through this terrible period and almost died at one point during the conflict. It would be pathetic and poor form of me to categorise it as a tourist or anti-tourist experience. I don’t wish to plunge to such low depths.

I guess the bottom line is that the anti-tourist does not purposefully try to be an anti-tourist. The anti-tourist is not aware that they are an anti-tourist. It is almost like a hardwired way of life with no underlying agenda or anything to prove. We seldom ever hear about such people, because they have no desire for notoriety. They prefer to remain invisible and anonymous.

Calling oneself an ‘anti-tourist’ is missing the point completely.

 

By Nicholas Peart

(c)All Rights Reserved  

 

Image: something-interesting.com

REFERENCES:

http://www.danielkalder.com/antitourism.html

Money Cannot Buy Happiness, But…

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

Money can buy you freedom. That’s it. Not as a means for conspicuous consumption, gaining status or power, or indulging in an eternal cornucopia of mindless, decadent pleasure and self-indulgence.

The Twitter account Orange Book (@orangebook_) recently posted the following tweet…

Things money can buy:

-freedom to think
-freedom to travel
-freedom from jerks
-freedom to learn slowly
-freedom from an alarm clock
-freedom from work you dislike
-freedom from financial anxiety
-freedom from low-cost nutrition
-freedom to pursue a creative purpose

I could add more things to this list…

-freedom to create and invest in ventures that make the world a better place
-freedom to be time rich
-freedom to afford better healthcare
-freedom to help others

All of this is very positive, however there are downsides too. For example, I would include the following…

-freedom to run away from problems
-freedom to avoid the unsavoury aspects of life
-freedom to not live in the real world
-freedom not to grow

As much as having money shields us from the unpleasant aspects of life; from jerks, from jobs we hate etc ; if we never have to deal with these unsavoury aspects of life, this can put us in a very vulnerable and fragile situation if, by some random stroke of misfortune, we ended up in a no money situation. The freedom that money provided in the past is gone at the drop of a stone. When previously, money offered a means to be cocooned from the real world, not having any money now throws us back into it.

It is much better to have money, but at the same time, know how to deal with the real world, how to deal with challenging situations, how to deal with difficult people. This is because, if we ever find ourselves back to a situation without money, then life is not a constant struggle.

 

By Nicholas Peart

(c)All Rights Reserved 

 

Image: Patheos

The Future Of Tech, Work, Education and Living Post COVID-19

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

This year’s COVID-19 pandemic has been highly disruptive in many areas of our lives. As I type this article, there have been statistically nearly 5.5 million cases and almost 350,000 deaths from this pandemic around the world. In addition to the toll this virus has taken on peoples’ lives, there have been grave economic ramifications. Many businesses and industries have been hit hard and as a consequence millions of people have either lost their jobs or have had to take a pay cut.

The unstoppable growth of the internet over the last 20 years has had a profound effect on our lives. It could already be said that we live in both the physical world and the virtual world. Yet during the lockdown period of the last several weeks, we have been spending considerably more time in the latter world. The growth of the internet has already had a noticeable effect on the physical high street as more people do their shopping online. Yet, the lockdown restrictions, at times, have given people no choice, but to buy almost all their groceries online thus increasing greatly the rate of e-commerce transactions. We have also been interacting much more with other people virtually, both for work and pleasure. And as educational institutions remain shut, or at least severely restricted, we have been doing a lot more learning online.

In an article I wrote back in 2017, I discussed new and emerging technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) and how they could change people lives, especially in the areas of education. As students are still currently unable to physically go to university and attend lectures, much of their courses and lectures are now online. In my 2017 article, I discussed how via VR technology one could be completely immersed in a setting and interact with it from anywhere with an internet connection. The education industry has long needed such a change. One of the biggest current problems facing young people is the unbelievably high costs of going to university. By the time they have graduated, they are saddled with staggering sums of debt. Yet I have long felt that it doesn’t always have to be that way and that given time, technology would soon provide a much needed solution to this issue. Even though I went to university and got my degree many years ago, I find that a lot of all the most recent knowledge I have gained has been via content online. I, of course, also supplement this knowledge with books in both physical and digital form. There is so much free and good quality educational content out there on the web. And I am also happy to pay for exceptional online resources too. Yet the total amount of money I pay is still far less than what I would pay going to universities, where tuition fees in the UK are currently still over £9k per year.

In an earlier article from 2016, I discuss how VR could potentially change all aspects of our lives, not just within the realms of education. During the lockdown period, the video communications app Zoom has taken off in a big way. Zoom has been the default option for not just video calls between family and friends, but also for remote working and playing. By the latter, I mean having a kind of ‘virtual night out’. Rather than physically going out to a bar or club with friends, Zoom has been used as a virtual platform for replicating a physical night out. VR and AR are both powerful emerging technologies and now is the perfect time for them to be harnessed to a greater level. Interacting via Zoom is still a 2D experience, yet VR and AR have the potential to make this a more immersive 3D experience. This would reduce the chasm greatly between the physical and virtual worlds.

There is no question that remote work will continue to grow and these new and emerging technologies will accelerate this growth. Yet will traditional office spaces be made completely redundant? It is tempting to go down this route and its currently all the rage to have the belief that this virus will make the traditional office space obsolete as an increasing number of workers find the option of remote work to be more appealing and perfectly feasible. To be clear, as I already stated, there is no doubt in my mind that remote/virtual work will grow, yet I think it’s at this stage too premature to say that the traditional physical office environment is dead. Even if technology develops exponentially, we are still, fundamentally, organic human beings and creatures of emotion more than logic. As long as we remain 100% organic human beings, we will still long for that human touch and physical interaction. I think to completely 100% forsake the physical world for the virtual world, we will need to physically merge with technology. I am with the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil on his prediction for the coming Singularity in 2045 when Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be at the same level as human intelligence. This will be, arguably, the most significant event in human history and I will never bet against the infinite potential of AI. If software is currently eating the world, soon it will be AI. Yet as AI becomes further developed, the options for us to merge with technology will also arrive. AI, rather than posing an existential threat, I believe, will make our lives easier and more comfortable. What’s more, it will also enhance our lives and enable us to reach our fullest potential.

Going back to the topic of post COVID living, could the development of cities/urban spaces be affected? What if there was a growing trend whereby there was an increasing migration from cities to more rural areas? For some time, as technology improved – more specifically; internet speeds and bandwidth improved further – there has been already to a small degree such a trend. You can go and live in the remotest part of the country, but if you have access to a high speed internet connection over there, then you have full sophisticated access to the virtual world no different to that in a big city no matter how remote the physical environment may be. Yet will there ever be a complete deurbanisation type of migration where the physical location of people is much more fragmented? If such a migration were to happen in the near future and we are still 100% organic beings, we will be incredibly reliant on the virtual world and by extension the cell towers connected to our internet providers. Even if SpaceX, via its Starlink project, intends to beam super-fast satellite internet on all corners of the world in the next few years, for now we are still reliant on onshore cell towers as the source of the internet. This is quite a fragile situation, as any disruption to these cell towers disrupts the internet itself and thus a great chunk of our lives. We become instantly irritated with slow internet speeds let alone having no internet. It is amazing how dependent on the internet most of the world is. The cells towers providing the internet are powered by electricity and electricity is powered by energy from both renewable and non-renewable sources. In spite of all the technological advances since the first Industrial Revolution, we have still not found a permanent and workable solution to the long standing energy problem, that is, how do we generate an abundant and unlimited supply of energy for every corner of the world without having to tap into any non-renewable sources?

I sometimes feel that I overestimate the speed of technological development. Earlier in the last decade,  I thought that within the next few years (now), every household would have a 3D printer and the smartphone would be replaced by some form of smart-glasses with fully integrated and advanced VR and AR technologies. This has simply not happened. Even if these technologies may be available in some shape or form, we still use smartphones. The smartphones of today may be more sophisticated than the smartphones of just a few years ago, but they are still smartphones. Our interaction with the virtual world remains a 2-D experience. This is why I feel that in order for us to live completely in the virtual world with little to no living in the physical world, we have to adopt some form of transhumanism where our minds and bodies are fully integrated with technology.

Going back to the economic ramifications of the current COVID-19 pandemic, I wonder whether, at least in the short to medium term, the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) may become more widely adopted? Already technology has been automating many menial and repetitive jobs that has resulted not only in vast swathes of people losing their jobs, but also in these same people being ‘left behind’ as technology marches on. This is a serious concern as such people become naturally angry and turn to political parties and figures who echo and amplify their frustrations rather than turn to transformative solutions. The virus has hit hard industries requiring a constant physical presence. Some of these industries that have been hit hard such as, for example, the physical high street retail industry, has long already been affected by the growth of the internet. This virus has almost been like the final nail in the coffin.

Technology never stands still and the number of people using the internet will only keep growing. If you look at the S&P 500 (the top 500 companies) you will see that the biggest companies today are all technology companies. My concern however is with the demise of all these low skilled repetitive jobs. Although I personally think that a lot of these jobs are time wasting jobs (and time is an increasingly scarce and valuable asset), which offer no spiritual or intellectual nourishment, many people are employed in such jobs and depend on the income for their survival. If such jobs disappeared on an even greater scale and the people employed in these jobs had little or few alternative skills for other jobs, how will they survive? I hear a lot of emphasis on ‘learning to code’. Whilst computer programming is very useful and currently provides a lot of employment opportunities, who’s to say that such jobs also won’t get disrupted? Furthermore, why would anyone want to learn something purely for the ’employment opportunities’ it will bring? Surely one would learn computer programming, because there are interested and fascinated by it? Learning it just purely to make money seems very flawed and short sighted to me. If we want to continue to live in a capitalist economy then a Universal Basic Income may have to become more widely adopted. Otherwise the alternative is a socialist economy. I do in the long run, however, believe that we will enter a brand new kind of post-scarcity and post-work environment of abundance created by exponential technological innovations. This would transcend any economic model of the past. I wrote about this in greater depth in my article from last year entitled ‘THE TRUE SINGULARITY: A Universe Of Unlimited Abundance And Eternal Harmony’. This kind of vision for the future is also outlined very clearly in the excellent 2011 book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler ‘Abundance’. Yet in order for this to become a closer reality, we also cannot take technological development for granted. One of the early internet pioneers and entrepreneurs, Marc Andreessen, wrote a recent article entitled ‘Its Time To Build’ talking about this. We cannot take innovation for granted and rest on the laurels of the technological advancements of the past. When the virus hit the world, we were unprepared. There was no available vaccine to protect us. Thus we had to adopt measures that have been very disruptive to our daily living. Several companies may currently be working on a cure and it could still be several more months before one is in place, but the point is there was no available permanent remedy at the time. Technology may have provided many vital solutions to long standing limitations, yet, as is currently clear, there are so many more limitations that require solutions. And it is only via continuing to innovate and build that we can ensure that these other limitations begging to be solved are solved.

 

By Nicholas Peart 

Published on 24th May 2020

(c)All Rights Reserved

 

Image: qimono

Don’t Fight The Trend…

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

the trend

But don’t be off your guard either.

A lot of the time, stocks are priced at a value quite debased from their fundamentals. Thus they are either overvalued or undervalued. This is true since markets are, for the most part, driven by sentiment. In the most extreme circumstances, total greed or fear takes over.

I have been rather baffled by the stock market rally over the last few weeks after having witnessed some of the most spectacular series of crashes over the brief one month period from the end of February towards the end of March. This rally far from reflects the economic reality on the ground. Many people have lost their jobs and are struggling financially. Yes, there have been huge stimulus packages to soften the blow, but these are artificial and only increase an already substantial debt load.

Yet markets can behave irrationally for a very long period of time. Far longer than one can stay solvent, to quote the economist John Maynard Keynes. Instead of trying to be right, sometimes it can pay to just go with the trend. That often quoted adage, the trend is your friend, is very true. Rather than fighting it, it can be less painful to simply ride with it in whichever direction it may blow.

But don’t get carried away. Always be on your guard. As the tide can abruptly change without warning.

By Nicholas Peart

(c)All Rights Reserved 

 

Image: Peggy_Marco

It’s Only When The Tide Goes Out That You Discover Who’s Been Swimming Naked

Posted on by Nicholas Peart

low tide

This is probably one of the wisest bits of advice related to the current market turmoil. And it was said by none other than one of the most successful investors of all time, the Sage of Omaha himself, Mr Warren Buffett.

What this present crisis has exposed are those companies that are worst prepared to handle a downtown. A company should always have sufficient emergency cash reserves or at least some margin of safety to protect it in the event of a slump such as the one we are currently experiencing.

The most prudent companies always have this margin of safety. On the other hand, the most ill prepared companies overleverage themselves and take on large piles of debt during the good times. Then when the bad times arrive and the tide goes out, they are the ones who are most vulnerable.

Right now boring old cash is king. Some of the most indebted companies are currently facing a genuine liquidity crisis and the very real possibility of going bust as their cashflows have virtually dried up. However, those companies who have set aside enough cash, have no or at least manageable levels of debt, and don’t have unsustainable overheads (or a low cash burn rate) will survive this downturn period the best and will bounce back the strongest when the markets do eventually recover.

I think this is something we can all learn when we make investment decisions, especially when we buy shares in companies during a bull market. It is always important when doing your own due diligence on a company to figure out how well it would fare when the tide changes. When the tide goes out, will it be sufficiently covered?

 

By Nicholas Peart

(c)All Rights Reserved 

 

Image: TimHill