Next month, I will head west to Colorado to take part in the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual current affairs conference. No surprise there, you might think. These days, pundits, politicians, academics, executives and journalists like me spend a considerable amount of time attending conferences — whether the Aspen event, the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos, the Milken Institute’s global conference in Los Angeles or countless others.
Conferences have become such a deeply ingrained ritual (at least for globetrotting executives and commentators) that you can mark the passage of the seasons by these events.
But in another sense, the fact that I and hundreds of others are flying to Aspen is actually rather strange. One of the great themes discussed by conference attendees is that the internet is turning the business world upside down. Digital disruption has transformed the way media, retailing and industrial spheres work, and it is now spreading into medicine and government.