The model of a company having strict boundaries between internal and external may have made sense in the Industrial Age, but in the Information Age, this model leads to misaligned incentives and unsustainable extraction.
If membership isn’t scarce, the membership loses its signal message. The same applies to physical products: Apple will never offer a cheap iPhone to compete with low-end Android devices – it would destroy the company’s signal message that the iPhone is a luxury product.
For one, this idea of a multi-store or multi-brand shopping aggregator app has never taken off in the US market, and that’s not for a lack of trying. The well-funded startup Spring was perhaps the best example — its big thing was a “universal shopping cart” to make it easier to shop across brands — but there’s very little that’s compelling about... See more
This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore,... See more