My theory behind this is that they’re actually trying to divert traffic to the websites and keep it out of the stores. If I buy my new external hard drive from their website, the entire process is automatic until it gets to the guy who puts it on the truck. They don’t have to pay the retail employee.

On a single-sale basis this may not seem to save money, but it adds up. If Apple only sold iPods online, they could cut their Apple Store employees by at least 50%. In fact, a G5 tower really is an online-only item, but these aren’t exactly high-volume.

What’s my point here? I see the future. Malls are going virtual, but not as quickly as some would say. The Internet as we now know it will never replace physical retail. I really did say “never” there. People like to touch and feel things for themselves before they buy. They like to try things on, try them out, pick them up and put them down.

The trick will be when we can create a virtual copy of the items in question. Some manner of VR will be involved, but I don’t know what, and I’m not sure it matters. Some company will develop a way to touch, feel, and try on items remotely by using a sensory simulation.

The machinery that pulls off this trick will be huge. At first, the virtual store will be AT the mall, since consumers won’t be able to afford or house it. Several conglomerate-owned companies will merge their storefronts into a single virtual experience. Pick an item in the VR booth, click buy, your credit card’s RF tag is scanned and the item arrives on your doorstep the next morning.

Only after the technology is small and cheap will we see malls die. This will not only take technological development, but a gradual, multi-generational change in the way we think about buying things. The physical buying experience is part of our capitalist training, and it will take a concerted re-education program by corporations to re-program mall culture. Instead of meeting your girlfriends at the gap, you’ll meet them at Gap.com and try on fake clothes, together, in a place that doesn’t really exist.

This may be my capitalist mall training talking, but I’m glad I won’t be around to see it.

Many creatures in nature collect what they see as scarce resources. If it might make their lives easier or better or just more fun later on, they’ll drag it back to their nests.

If I were living out in the wilderness in a cabin with no modern amenities or contact with the outside world, what would I do? If I had enough food, water, etc. to last me for a bit, I might wander the forest for 8 hours. Let’s call this my work day. Perhaps I pick up 3 shiny rocks and a really cool stick. This would be my pay for the day of work, yes? So if I pay for a Nintendo DS or a Video Card or some other materialistic object for my own enjoyment, that’s my day’s work.

A human creature whose needs are satisfied will fill their time by collecting objects for their own enjoyment, like a raccoon hoarding bits of shiny metal. “Materialistic” people do the same thing that any animal will do, and I really don’t see anything wrong with that. As long as one’s needs are met first, why not have fun with the rest of your abstracted money/time? It’s only natural!

It frightens me because I don’t think Utopia is worth the cost of human interaction. This may sound odd coming from a computer geek, but I like people. I like being around them. There are days when no video game, anime, computer problem or Battlestar Galactica marathon can cheer me up, and I sit alone craving human contact.

In the past week, I’ve watched a documentary called The Corporation (thecorporation.com) and participated in a long discussion of Ambient Intelligence (wikipedia.org). The Corporation advocates ideas of corporations destroying the world and making us all their consumer slaves in the post-apocalyptic shopping mall of the damned. Advocates of Ambient Intelligence are pushing for a world where computer systems replace direct human contact, even between parent and child in the same house.

Do these things seem bad to anyone else? American consumers are destined to be forced into solitary, mediated existences with nothing to keep them company but the microchip in their skull. If this is the “good” future, I want the bad one. Give me Megacorporate Arcologies full of worker drones and let me be free on the streets. I’ll take the fetid tenement and mechanical prosthetics if it means I can live like a real live person with other real live people.

So, while Corpotate Zombies talk to their children through a panel on the kitchen wall and their contact lenses let them show their spouse what they’re up to, I’ll be off in a cabin in the woods somewhere. I’m betting Celebration, FL (celebrationfl.com) will be the first to fall. Disney owns them, and we all know how Disney loves mediated experiences.

Oh well… maybe by the time it happens I’ll be old enough not to care. Here’s hoping.

…and I think I had good reason. Before there was “The Blogsphere,” blogging was the realm of high school and college kids complaining about their lives, saying nasty things about their friends, and moaning to anyone who would listen about how much their privaleged, suburban lives sucked.

This still goes on. People still invite their friends to a party in a public blog posting and wonder why some of them don’t get the invitation. Hell, I’m starting mine off by complaining about complaining. As the national media will tell you, however, blogs as an outlet have expanded in their scope and possibility in recent months and years. Now I’m in a new place. Far from my family and my hometown, the contents of my life distilled to a 14′ U-Haul. Maybe it’s time I grew up with the technology.

This brings us to my shocking change of heart. Partially at the urging of one of my professors here at DU, and partially because I’ve played the petulant child on the subject long enough, I’m going to give this a try again. I’m hoping to come up with a post a week at this point. I’m not sure yet if I’ll have a topic, but since this counts as a post, I have a week to figure that out, don’t I?