economics
Baumol’s cost disease
Small economies
The economic value of old buildings
The mirror-image economy
You cannot consume what is not produced
The Fetish of human life
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
The trend is your friend 'til the bend at the end
The amorality of Web 2.0
An Essay by Nicholas CarrThe Internet is changing the economics of creative work – or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture – and it’s doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time.
Tokenize This
An Artwork by Benjamin GrosserDifferent from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.
Hints towards a non-extractive economy
An Article by Matt WebbThere’s a movement called the circular economy which is about designing services that don’t include throwing things away. There is no “away.”
A non-extractive economy is going to look very different to today’s economy. These points feel opposed somehow but they are part of the same movement:
- With CupClub, it’s all about infrastructure.
- With the battery-free Game Boy, it’s untethered from infrastructure: once manufactured, no nationwide electricity grid is required to play.
We’ll need better tools to track and measure. There will be new patterns for new types of services. New technologies to build new products. New language. So it’s fascinating seeing the pieces gradually come together.
The psychology of a discount
An Article by John MaedaFound on a wall.
The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.
On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning
100% perfect
And through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society...
Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.
One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, both along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in the chest. And they knew:
She is the 100% perfect girl for me.
He is the 100% perfect boy for me.But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fourteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.