I’ve been watching something that everyone sees but nobody wants to name.
Every single industry trying to establish itself on the internet has failed to maintain itself through digital presence alone. The pattern is so consistent it’s almost mathematical.
Take streaming. The industry promised to revolutionize entertainment by breaking free from traditional TV models. Instead, the streaming sector now mirrors exactly what it claimed to replace. Bundling content, hiking prices, forcing ads, spending heavily on sports.
The new normal looks suspiciously like the old normal.
The Formula Problem
Here’s what I keep observing: industries want something to work a specific way, but that doesn’t mean it will work the way they want it to.
Even Meta, which absorbed competitors and adapted quickly, and Google, which dominated for years, eventually hit walls. Google now faces monopolies rulings. The Department of Justice has filed cases against every major tech giant.
The pattern reveals something deeper. We’ve reached a critical mass where technological capability outpaces legal frameworks.
It’s become genuinely unsafe to make too much money in tech. Success itself triggers regulatory response.
The Critical Mass Point
What fascinates me is how legacy companies approach this reality. Half of all companies report that legacy technology creates major cost problems, yet they keep forcing old formulas onto new digital realities.
They’re missing the fundamental shift happening beneath their feet.
The crumbling of old industry structures isn’t a transition phase. It’s permanent destruction making space for something entirely different.
But nobody wants to label what’s emerging because labeling it means admitting the old world is actually gone.
What’s Really Happening
I see this as revolution, literally. Not evolution or adaptation, but complete systemic replacement.
The industries that survive won’t be the ones that successfully moved their old models online. They’ll be the ones that recognized the internet as fundamentally incompatible with traditional business structures.
The gap between what can be done technologically and what’s legally permissible creates unprecedented tension. Companies either stay small enough to avoid regulatory attention or grow large enough to become targets.
There’s no safe middle ground anymore.
The freedom I observe in emerging sectors comes from abandoning the expectation that old rules apply. The failure comes from trying to make them apply anyway.
We’re watching the birth of something that doesn’t have a name yet because naming it would require admitting how completely everything changed.
Electric Icarus Project 