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Bundling reacts to differentiated desires by creating a less differentiated publication that’s fairly valuable to everyone. But as the cost of the reader’s time rises, focus pays off. And the subscription newsletter model makes it easier than it’s ever been to profitably focus on exactly one topic, and build a one-person monopoly.

What changed was the feed, something uniquely enabled by digital. Whereas a newspaper had to be defined up-front, such that it could be printed and distributed at scale, a feed is tailored to the individual in real-time — and so are the advertisements. Suddenly it was print that was worth pennies, while the Internet generally and mobile especially ... See more

Live by the medium, die by the medium. It’s not a ponzi. It’s that when everything is a measurable market, you see how fast people can move on. And that is a very different environment to get used to.

Immediately upon entering the Web3 rabbit hole, one realizes that it’s hard to talk about crypto without also talking about gaming — specifically a highly financialized form of “gamification” revolving around microtransactions and “play-to-earn” (P2E) incentive design, whereby players win real tokens with real financial value for specific behaviors... See more

The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

Another big shift in the toy industry is the move to subscriptions. Lovevery offers educational toys for kids on a subscription model, with each toy designed for children of a specific age. Subscriptions are easy for consumable products and challenging for durables—to sell a toy subscription is to suggest that it’s a toy the child will get bored of... See more

To avoid confusion, I should note minimal extraction doesn’t mean cryptoassets that capitalize protocols will capture minimal value; if something is minimally extractive, but globally produced and consumed, the coordinating asset can capture a significant amount of value.