Virginia Postrel:

As peer groups get richer, the balance between private pleasure and publicly visible consumption shifts…

Their primary luxuries [become] time and attention.

You have to cut through the racial typing to get the meat of the issue, and I’m sure some folks will get it right away. But I am curious - if time is the new luxury, why do so many waste it sipping lattes in urban Starbucks?

Time Magazine punted this year, and declared their “Person of the Year” was you. Yes, you. It was supposedly the year of user generated content - unfortunately, the magazine missed the boat. They forgot that all the user generated content sucks (Spamroll included) - everyone creating that content was too busy fighting viruses to producing anything of value.

Damn it, 2006 wasn’t the year of user generated content - it was was the Year of the Zombies!

Well, maybe Time did get it right; they just didn’t know it.

UPDATE: Even Microsoft gets it. Now, let’s see if they do something about it, since last time I checked Linux and OS X installs weren’t getting hijacked too often.