In other words, dominance in a market, not aggregate GMV across many markets, is the goal of any marketplace and ultimately what determines equity value.
One takeaway from this is that no age has a monopoly on insight, and different levels of experience offer different kinds of lessons. Vishal Khandelwal recently wrote that old guys don’t understand tech, but young guys don’t understand risk. Another way to put it is: everyone has something to teach.
I think there are three algorithms that have reshaped the American press in ways that we are just now starting to confront. You have Google and Facebook, which can serve up this incredible fire hose of traffic to publishers so long as they cater to the ever-shifting whims of that algorithm.
One of my favorite lines from Walter Ong's classic book, Orality and Literacy, is "Writing heightens consciousness." I think that applies to what you're describing about the nature of conversation. Writing, that is externalizing thought in this quasi permanent symbolic way, makes us more aware of its nature and possibilities than the exchange of... See more