Unlike the interaction with culture controlled by traditional entertainment businesses, society's culture on the Internet is a two way street. More artists find a way to those who appreciate their work than could ever be accommodated through the method of branding elite names as employed by the vastly more expensive promotional machinery of traditional entertainment companies. On the Internet, artist and consumer share a voice in the evolution of art, whether they are active distributors, eager recipients, or both. Thoughts are shared, ideas are born, and it is inevitable that people look to cultural artifacts to establish the basis for commonality.

Businesses that manufacture traditional entertainment artifacts like CDs and videos are correctly perceived to move more slowly, be more costly, and be less able to meet the needs of diverse audiences and matured by Internet communications. If these entertainment businesses are to survive, they must accommodate the increased speed with which society thinks, communicates, and shares its culture. Traditional entertainment business cannot afford to continue ignoring the future, focused on delivering one-directional products, copy-protected against the consumer's will to use and re-use it.

This is especially true because the tools of production, promotion, and distribution have spread everywhere as media of every imaginable kind has been converted to digital formats. If individuals don't create their own tools, they can find them offered by those who do, throughout the network.

Through their use, all art becomes a form of light. These tools enable "massive thought", shared by millions, that moves at the speed of light, as if light were thought's substance... and so it is, light and vibration in myriad rhythms, cadences that rise and fall as the human heartbeat. In the expansively brilliant dialog that ensues, the consumer, is a willing participant in culture's constant recreation. Ordinary people become the impetus of extraordinary cultural development. Whereas, before, consumers were fed their culture, through the Internet they are one with, and unable to be separated from, the tools of art's free expression.

It's not surprising that entertainment, the shimmering mirror of human existence, changes in this environment and, especially, does the economics of show business change. These formulas are altered, if for no other reason than that show business becomes a smaller part of thinking, because whole artifacts are easily shared, almost as easily as random thought bounces through the ether. Where before it took a trip to a store to get a record or a video, now the pictures and sounds are on the kitchen table, in the study, or anywhere a wireless connection can be made in the wide open spaces of any metropolis. Since the sum of all thought, inseparable from the whole community, is valued more than the value of any one business (including show business or its artifacts), entertainment is challenged as never before to join in the dance or squander the value of its traditions, endangering its future existence.