Yo Adrian, it’s not The Internets

I recently read an article about technologies that don’t know they’re dead. Like aging champs, they dance around the ring complacent, oblivious to the young, hungry contenders that want the title. Like Rocky in Rocky III, really. Rocky fought two mind-blowing wars against the great Apollo Creed, but once he’d won, he lost his mojo and got beaten by the wonderfully articulate Clubber Lang. Besides having a far more awesome haircut, Clubber had better work ethic, more focus, and scarier grunts. This cinematic classic offers various nuggets of enlightenment (Clubber, on a rematch: “I reject the challenge, because Balboa is no challenge. But I’d be happy to beat up on him some more”), the second-greatest training montage ever (which turns into the fruitiest), an opening song that’s impossible not to interpret through victorious gestures, and the baddest ever telling of Goldilocks, but it also proves a triumph as social allegory. Rocky is: landlines, phonebooks, CD’s, CRT TV’s, DVD’s. Clubber is: Cell-phones, mp3’s, hi-def plasmas and LCD’s, Blu-ray. Rocky, of course, made a successful comeback, thanks largely to training he received in a more “athletic” “urban” gym. So, lesson for the old-tech: find some black guys to train with.