I think this is less of a market inefficiency and more a downside of “democratization” and the eternal September.
In many fields of human endeavor, there’s the passionate or early adopters who seek out the best, most innovative, high quality producers and pride themselves on that.
But even the most sophisticated/snobbish of connoisseurs doesn’t have time to be that way about more than a few things. Very few wine snobs spend the time to investigate the cost/quality ratio on their toilet paper in a similar way.
Most people don’t actually care that much about the thread count on their sheets and the production value on their TikTok clips.
They care more about spending time with their kids or, heck, even their community. Simply clicking buy on the algorithmic Chinese slop in the featured slot gets the job done well enough, most of the time.
I don’t see how digital algorithmic scarcity is any different than the battle to appear on scarce shelf-space when everything was still in the real world.
The fundamental issue in both cases is still scarcity of human attention. The market is pretty damn efficient at giving customers exactly what they want, and the hard truth is most people want “as cheap and low effort as possible.” I think the author just wishes other people were more passionate like him in the areas he cares about.
In many fields of human endeavor, there’s the passionate or early adopters who seek out the best, most innovative, high quality producers and pride themselves on that.
But even the most sophisticated/snobbish of connoisseurs doesn’t have time to be that way about more than a few things. Very few wine snobs spend the time to investigate the cost/quality ratio on their toilet paper in a similar way.
Most people don’t actually care that much about the thread count on their sheets and the production value on their TikTok clips.
They care more about spending time with their kids or, heck, even their community. Simply clicking buy on the algorithmic Chinese slop in the featured slot gets the job done well enough, most of the time.
I don’t see how digital algorithmic scarcity is any different than the battle to appear on scarce shelf-space when everything was still in the real world.
The fundamental issue in both cases is still scarcity of human attention. The market is pretty damn efficient at giving customers exactly what they want, and the hard truth is most people want “as cheap and low effort as possible.” I think the author just wishes other people were more passionate like him in the areas he cares about.