Continuations

Dalton Caldwell kicked up a fair bit of discussion with his post on paid-for services including a defense of free by my partner Fred. Here is a slightly different take on the issue at hand when looking at “media” style services (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc). Let’s start off by looking at advertising. At its core it is the routing of attention. You are looking at a newspaper, magazine, TV show, web site, web service (giving your attention to it) and one or more ads are trying to capture you...

There are certain topics that periodically rear their heads, such as privacy. The one that is on my mind this morning is attention. I don’t know whether there really is a deep attention crisis, but my own anecdotal evidence suggests that we may well have a problem. Yesterday evening, I was watching my son’s Little League coach (another dad) desperately trying to get and keep the attention of a dozen 10-year old boys. Now that might have always been a hopeless task, but this was a stunning dis...

Capital is no longer scarce. This is an assertion I made a while back in my post “Land, Capital, Attention: This Time it Is the Same.” Today I want to elaborate on that a bit. Estimates put global investible capital at north of $100 trillion. Global GDP by comparison is around $80 trillion and as an approximation global gross output is likely around $160 trillion. It is important to keep in mind that the capital needed to just operate a steady state economy is meaningfully less than gross out...