Idea Suppression is the Gatekeeper’s business and it used to be a good business to be in. The pay was good and the costs were low. If you were in the Gatekeeping business, you really didn’t have to do a whole lot of work to do your job well. To suppress an idea all you had to do was prevent the idea from having a platform.
Idea Suppression and Platform Prevention went hand-in-hand.
As I’ve said before, this whole Urban Gondola / Cable Propelled Transit idea didn’t have a hope 20 years ago. 20 years ago there were just too many Gatekeepers.
Today there’s still too many Gatekeepers, but the tools we now use to maneuver around them has increased exponentially. Use these tools properly and Gatekeepers cease to matter. Today, everyone’s got a platform, everyone’s got a voice.
Gatekeeping is now a lousy business to be in:
- Platform Prevention is expensive at best and impossible at worst.
- No one respects the Gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is as disreputable today as DDT was a generation ago.
- Gatekeepers can be willfully ignored, fully and completely.
I’m sure this is upsetting to the Gatekeepers Union (how awesome would it be if such a thing actually existed?) because it makes their job irrelevant. Why bother hiring a Gatekeeper – or building a gate in the first place – when everyone’s just going to hop the wall anyways?
Not everyone’s going to agree with Urban Gondolas, just as not everyone’s going to agree with LRT, PRT or BRT. And that’s a good thing. But the fact that some fool from Toronto can shout “gondola” and have people pay attention shows just how ineffective and worthless Gatekeeping is as a profession nowadays.
Today any idea has a fighting chance and there’s not a Gatekeeper in the world who can do anything about it.