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" Let me tell you about a digital company built by a few acquaintances of mine called Newspaper Club. Newspaper Club has, for five years, been allowing people to make their own newspapers through a web interface and the use of newspaper printing companies that no longer have as many newspapers to print because so many people now get their news through the internet. Or, as Russell Davies of Newspaper Club said: &amp;quot;We broke your business, now we want your machines.&amp;quot; This is a hallmark of the current tech scene, since it counts as beloved &amp;quot;disruption&amp;quot;\u2014murdering businesses and then haunting their corpses. This isn&amp;#039;t immediately going to seem connected, but bear with me: Google has self-driving cars, so now, apparently, Apple wants them too. Hilariously, the rumour is that Apple is testing a self-driving minivan, because minivans are so sexy. And they will have to work off Apple Maps, or else the following will happen: Google will decide they want the business that you have parasitically mounted on top of Google Maps and take away your access ... which is what will likely happen to Uber, which critically requires access to Google Maps, because Google would really like to conduct that Uber business with, yes, self-driving cars. What is Uber doing? Hiring mapping engineers and desperately trying to hothouse their own self-driving car in advance of the attack. Regardless of what you think of Uber and its corporate behavior, the lesson should not go unlearned: If you build your business on top of someone else&amp;#039;s system, eventually they&amp;#039;re going to notice. Just last week, the livestreaming app Meerkat, which uses Twitter to transmit, felt a cold breeze pass through the room when Twitter bought the competing system Periscope, which will doubtless be baked into Twitter as soon as possible. Digital businesses can murder and haunt their own parasites.  In the midst of all this? Rich, crazy Elon Musk, who intends to put large and efficient electric batteries into people&amp;#039;s homes. Which may not be one of his weird side projects, like Hyperloop, especially since Apple is hiring his car-makers away, and their car sales and shipments are under the projected numbers. And because it fits right in with the &amp;quot;disruption&amp;quot; thing. You know Musk has a solar panel company, right? This seems quite clever: SolarCity will let you lease their panels, or you can take out a 30-year loan with them. SolarCity doesn&amp;#039;t charge you for installing or maintaining the system, and you pay SolarCity for the power the system generates, thereby paying off the loan. Electricity as a mortgage. Now, combine that with a rechargeable fuel cell in your home that could probably power your house for at least a week all on its own. Welcome to Basic Utilities Disruption. Have you been reading this and thinking, Hmm, I&amp;#039;m not very interested in technology and disruption and ghosts and whatever else the hell you&amp;#039;re talking about? Well, I bet you&amp;#039;re interested in a future where it remains cost-effective for your local electricity substations to be maintained even after a critical number of homes in your area have gone off the grid, or, in the extreme open-market scenario, if it remains cost-effective to even supply electricity to your town at all. And what unforeseeable haunting might happen in the chilly aftermath... We only sleep at night because Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Elon Musk don&amp;#039;t want our businesses. Yet.  Facebook and Google fighting with balloons and drones to bring internet to Africa. Apple making Big Phones. Android NFC wallets versus Apple Pay. iCloud and Amazon Storage. You know what&amp;#039;ll happen once these self-driving consumer-facing services go online? They&amp;#039;ll be doing same-day purchase deliveries, going head-to-head with Amazon in cities, a fuller and faster version of Google&amp;#039;s piloted Shopping Express. Jeff Bezos owns a rocket development firm, by the way, so maybe go carefully with that. Oh, and Apple apparently want into enterprise support business, which will put them against Amazon, where all the enterprise data is stored, and, of course, sleepy, old Microsoft. Keep breathing. Stay warm. Things are going to get weirder yet. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/cars/a33732/warren-ellis-new-tech-disruption/>