Positional Scarcity

"All parts of our economy were previously based on scarcity. In almost every case, that scarcity has disappeared. The way you win on the internet is to be the starting place where people go - Google, Facebook, these aggregators - or you're highly differentiated and you leverage the fact that you have zero distribution to reach anyone."

In a world of abundance, scarcity evolves. While pre-internet scarcity was about a physically constrained, or otherwise limited, number of resources, post-internet scarcity is about separating signal from noise.

I’ve been thinking about the enduring, perhaps increasing currency of personal recommendations (practically artisanal craft now if you think about it!) as well as the value of connoisseurship and curation in a culture where unthinking automation has left us feeling drowned in a deluge of content.

I suspect that’s the core appeal of all the influenc... See more