Aggregators aren't open-ended
Gordon Brander,
Subconscious, Substack,
Jul 24, 2021
I think there's merit to this post, though I thing it relies on questionable hypotheses to get to where we already are. The first hypothesis is the characterization of aggregators as systems that monopolize demand by consolidating it; Gordon Brander offers Facebook, Uber and Amazon as examples. The second is that aggregators have broken a natural law describing how technology evolves: "yesterday's product becomes tomorrow's component." But you can't make Facebook, Amazon or Uber a component, he argues. There's no way to defeat their network advantage. So where does this leave us? "What if we instead had a small tool that was personal, multiplayer, distributed, evolvable? Maybe this is just a niche category, or maybe it could be the basis for a new open-ended ecosystem?" Well that, I argue, is where we are - at least conceptually. It's what Indieweb and Solid and mastodon and (humbly) gRSShopper are all seeking to attain.
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