Things that don't scale

Image from www.ben-evans.com on 2021-10-10 at 10.23.17 AM.jpeg

Maybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?

  1. ​Morioka Shoten​
  2. ​Stepping out of the firehose​