Doctorow compared the mobile phone industry of today to the music industry of the '90s, where SIM cards are analogous to CDs. Computer users enjoyed their music collections more when they started putting everything on their hard drives. It appears that as the times have changed, even the compact disc is not compact enough; people want their media stored on their computers. We realized that the disc was just the middle man between the music and our stereos, so the middle man was eliminated by many people when they realized it was unnecessary.
The same will inevitably happen for mobile phones. The Subsccriber Identity Module (SIM) in most mobile phones will make its way bit for bit into the phone's internal memory. Thus is already the case for Verizon. I suppose Nokia, a former phone company, is falling behind in the race for better, more user-friendly gadgets.
Doctorow felt this was a pretty big deal. Frankly, it seems not near as monumental of an issue than putting your music on your PC. Perhaps his vision of the future is better than mine. He definitely seems like he knows what he's talking about, even with his claims of "slaughter[ing] virgins and bathe in their blood" and "urinary tract infections" as moderately effective analogies. Overall, Doctorow is a very influential speaker that I would like to see advance beyond the medium through which he gives these presentations; perhaps 20 years from now we'll be voting for him in Washington.
- Team 1
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