Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
Surplus
You instinctively know how to gauge restaurant sizes or bus capacity by seat count rather than floor area. But would you buy farmland by the hectare or the number of goats it can support? We humans make value assessments in our personal lives all day long and rarely pause to question if the way we do it is appropriate.
Some might argue that the giant tech companies are the Viking hordes of today. Today’s shopfronts might be likened to the walls of monasteries, masking a profound sense of loss after everything of value has been carried off, repurposed to the benefit of others.
Some have warned for decades that the tech giants need to be regulated otherwise they’ll recreate the monopolies like those of the American railways in the nineteenth century. The analogies for today’s supply chains include fibre as rail track and the servers as locomotives. Platform versus content. Utility versus consumable.
