The original note, as written at the time
In the next industrial revolution computers do not have to store full data sets. Instead a grey line format is stored on an offline drive, while the full colour format is stored in the cloud. This way, one can navigate their computer offline but choose to reveal the colour format only when it is necessary. The same principle can be used for communication. All grey line communication formats can be free or cheap, while expenditure is only undertaken when colour is involved.
Ongoing development
In the next industrial revolution, computers do not have to store full data sets.
Instead a grey-line format is stored on an offline drive, and the full colour format is stored in the cloud. You navigate your computer offline, in the grey line, and you choose to reveal the colour only when it is necessary. The same principle applies to communication: grey-line messages are free or nearly free, and money is spent only when colour is involved.
This is a serious idea dressed as a small one, because it separates two things we have fused by accident: the structure of information and the spectacle of it.
Almost everything you do on a computer is structure. A page, a form, a list, a document — the useful part is where things are and what they mean. Colour, image, motion, the rendering that makes it beautiful, is the expensive part, and it is expensive at every step: bandwidth, storage, battery, the data centre, the phone.
So store the skeleton locally and the skin remotely. Navigate the skeleton at no cost and pull the skin when you actually need to look at something. That is one design, and most of computing becomes cheaper, faster and available where there is no signal.
The communication version is the one with real consequences. If a message can travel as structure and be rendered at the far end, then the marginal cost of ordinary talk collapses, and the thing that costs money is only the parts that require richness. That is a pricing model that matches what people actually value, rather than a model that charges the same for a photograph of a receipt as for a bad poem.
And there is a resilience argument. A grey-line representation of a system is readable by a person, on a bad screen, on a weak machine, offline. The colour is optional. Anything designed so that it still works when the rendering is stripped is a thing that survives its own infrastructure.