Facebook Inc (FB) & eBay Inc (EBAY): Efficiency and Productivity in a Real-Time World

Rushkoff: Yeah, although when the Internet first came up in the late ’80s, early ’90s, we looked at it as a technology that was going to make time. It was going to make us not just more efficient, but allow us to do things — work from home in your underwear, on your own schedule — and what we ended up doing was really, we used the Internet as kind of a last gasp for this, for the Nasdaq stock exchange.

The Internet became the dot-com boom, and then human attention, human time, became the new commodity. We ended up strapping the devices to ourselves and having them tweet us and ping us every time someone is going to send us an update or do a little thing.

We’ve ended up in this state of perpetual emergency responsiveness, which is not an appropriate state for a human or a business. It’s because our markets needed new territories to grow. Colonial conquests were over. There were no new territories. There’s nothing left to extract, so we try to extract it from ourselves instead.

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Brendan Byrnes has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends and owns shares of eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB).

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