Content Deliverance
By Douglas Rushkoff, Sun Jan 25 07:45:00 GMT 2004

Content Management is for losers. Young people may have discovered the dark truth about digital media: the person who wins the right to store a piece of data has actually won the booby prize.

A good friend of mine in the user interface business, Mark Hurst, has argued for years that we should all keep our hard drives free of unnecessary data. Although internet industry experts always disagreed with Hurst (they were in the business of manufacturing hard drives, after all) those of us working in the PDA sector and on early cell phone databases realized that he had a point.

In the old world of physical stuff that most of us were raised in, it made sense to collect things. Things have inherent value. He who dies with the most toys, wins. And where has this credo gotten us? End-stage consumer capitalism has rendered the United States a wasteland of 'mini-storage' facilities where the middle class pile up the merchandise they don't have room for in their mortgaged, pre-fab homes. We are, for the most part, as overbought as our stock market, and as consumptive as we are obese.

This is why it was our tendency, in the early internet days, to save and store pretty much everything that passed over the digital transom. Many of my colleagues are proud to have saved every email they ever received, multiple draft versions of every article they have ever written, and full-page saves of website articles they once used, or may someday use, as resources.

The Napster era seemed to confirm that this consumerist attitude towards digital content would survive another generation.

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