TV, retail, advertising and cascading collapses

Benedict Evans

The bigger the underlying change, the bigger the second (and higher) order effects. Those effects often get overlooked in looking at the impact of change (and in trying to understand why expected impacts haven’t happened). Benedict Evans has always been good at spotting and exploring the more distant consequences of technology-driven change, for example in his recent piece on ten-year futures. ‘Cascading collapse’ is a good way of putting it: if the long-heralded but slow to materialise collapse of physical retail is beginning to appear, what consequences flow from that?

Today HMRC announced that 92.5% of this year’s tax returns were submitted online. That too has been a slow but inexorable growth, taking twenty years to go from expensive sideshow to near complete dominance. There is more to do to reflect on the cascading collapses that that and other changes will wreak not just on government, but through government to society and the economy more widely.

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