A Good Enough Device
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A Good Enough Device
Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices.
Alexis Madrigal • Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
By the eighteenth century, a new ideology was taking form, especially in Britain, that “greed is good” (to use a recent summary formulation), because greed spurs a society’s efforts and inventiveness. By giving vent to greed, the logic goes, societies can best harness the insatiable ambitions, great energies and ingenuity of their citizens. While g
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
and by using the prices of things not only to balance supply and demand, but also to transmit critical information throughout the economy in a remarkably parsimonious way. As Hayek wrote,
Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson • Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
The right metaphor here is not “Let’s stick with horses, even though automobiles get around,” because automobiles were clearly a more energy- and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we f
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