Sony is an interesting case. My daughter helped to launch Blu-ray, so I have something of an in there. We think that they make their money from manufacturing machines like Play-station, Walkman and flat-screen TVs. But 75% (or so) of their revenues come from DVDs. They have been the feudal baron of the rent-protection regime, as in the famous case where they were caught for putting spyware in CDs, but now, faced with Apple’s even more restrictive DRM monopoly, they have joined with Microsoft and others to form a cloud-based digital downloading scheme, Ultra-violet, which claims to be more ‘open’ than Apple. But of course they are unlikely to succeed because of their established corporate bad habits. This kind of dialectical movement appeals to me and I look forward to finding out more through your book.

This does not mean that I am indifferent to the new forms emerging in the rest of the world. I am currently writing a book about African development in the 20th and 21st centuries, my main intellectual base these days is in South Africa and I consume voraciously what I can about India and Brazil in particular. So from that point of view, your comment is more about what my post was not than about what it was. I would like to pursue your questions, but don’t know how to here without writing a different post.

Yes, the DIGITAL does portend enormous upheaval — some of which I hope to capture in my still-being-written book, The Digital Bomb.

Note also, that the “national capital” you assign to the 20th century did not develop under conditions of the “mechanical” dominance that enamored Marx in the 19th but rather was driven by “electric” technology — which is why McLuhan also must be studied and understood, staring with “The Gutenberg Galaxy.”

The “digital age” depends on Moore’s Law, which was first announced in 1965 but didn’t begin to have economic impact until integrated circuits took over from ANALOG transistors in the 1970s. But, by any account, we are roughly 40 years into this new era and, in strictly media “environmental” terms, roughly 20 years into the effects of the Internet. That’s a good part of our lifetimes. So, what do we know about our own times and places?

When I launched Wall Street coverage of SONY in 2005, I specifically tasked the company to shift from “royality” payments to become a “services” company — which as you can imagine was an interesting topic to discuss with the Hollywood-rooted (and investment-banking trained) US-based management. Btw, the company was set-up under that name in the 1950s with the “free” grant of the exclusive Japanese license to Western Electric transistor patents and has extracted most of its surplus since then from television and audio patent payments — making it a “rent” based corporation from the beginning.

We have been living our DIGITAL lives for many decades (at least in the “post-industrial” regions), so, as we’ve discussed, why don’t we have a lively debate about DIGITAL economics? There’s just no spare “rent” to pay for it?

Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY

It’s all well and good to look at the established economies and their capitalism or semi-capitalist styles (or the semi-socialist states of western Europe), but it is in the emerging economies that many of the new rules will be established or renounced.