Digital: Boolean Rhapsody

The innovation files 4

Jan van Boesschoten

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Imagine running a company that takes care of the transportation of sheets of papers from A to B. Your business model is based on the stamps that you put in the top right corner. You sell these stamp and only transport sheets of paper that carry a mark. You give these marks funny colours and nice drawings, so people recognise them and even collect them. However, these sheets themselves are worthless. It’s the content on it that is valuable to people, and therefore they are willing to pay you for transport. Comfortably as you are, you lean back behind your desk and see money pouring in. After all, the sales of the stamps are higher than the costs of transportation. You light a cigar, pat yourself on the chest, imaging you are on top of the world. No, even better, you are the world. Then suddenly, a new service arrives on the scene as a luminous snake in the mist. His glooming piercing eyes look at you, ready to attack and drag you in a long slow torturous fight to the death. This new service sends the contents of the paper sheets electronically. It has instant delivery from A to B, and it is free. No stamps, no transportation costs! In 1971 the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson and was considered to be the first killer app that made computer networking inevitable. As soon as the first digital service was released, it undermined the traditional way of doing business, and it has ever done after. It sent many boardrooms into panic, slaughtered industries, devasting a few others so badly that they, hardly alive, had to reinvent themselves. Upcoming blogs I do a deep dive in war, education, finance and business to find out what this roaring, everything devouring beast, we gave the name Digital, did to these sectors. But let’s first dissect it.

Binary
If you dive really, really deep in the digital world, as deep as the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point of the Ocean, you will see zeros and ones. The booleans we discussed in a previous blog post. This deep dark place is the foundation of our digital world, revealing itself through your smartphone, laptop, radio, smart speaker, TV, billboard, headphone, glasses and neural links. Once, it was a system meant to make redundant communication possible between military bases with nuclear warheads. It projected us from foreign nation’s intentions to send us en mass to the…

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Jan van Boesschoten

As an educated historian, entrepreneur and self taught technologist I like to connect the dots of technical, social and economic developments.