The Chomp #042

Curation as a Service, The Effects of Unlimited Information, and More...

Hey Everyone,

Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best strategic thinking content and top emerging business trends from the internet and beyond, designed to expand your mind and get you thinking. If you’ve been sent this email and you’re not a subscriber, you can join by clicking on the blue button below. With that, let’s dive into it.

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Quick Bite

Curators Are the New Creators: “Curation, in a sense, is its own form of intertextuality, or the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. Content doesn’t exist on the Internet in a vacuum: it takes up space, and it forms a web of influence and connections. We have the content. Now, the question becomes: what will we do with it?”

Content in 2020 is like air—there’s an abundance of it. Every second of every minute of every day new content is being created and published on the internet. There are over 40,000 search queries on Google every second, and 682 million new tweets a day! In one sense, this is amazing. We have unlimited access to information and knowledge at our fingertips. In another, it’s becoming increasingly harder to siphon out the signal from the noise.

We no longer live in a world with a scarcity of content, we now live in one where there is a scarcity of attention. With so much to choose from, consumers are now overwhelmed by what Gaby Goldberg has coined analysis paralysis. It’s impossible to absorb everything out there, so we need to make decisions on which information matters the most for us. Or, we can find people who the curating for us.

As more high-quality information becomes available, the need for high-quality curation increases. So does the willingness to pay for this curation. While there are countless newsletters that do this curation for free, such as mine (which I appreciate you choosing to read!), there is a steady growth of newsletters and content bundles that are successfully charging for their work.

In this article, Gabby points out Nathan Baschez and Dan Shipper’s Everything Bundle as a prime example. They put together a bundled version of their newsletters and went from 600 to 1,000 paying subscribers in under a month. Their success is just one example in proving the notion that everything unbundled one day gets bundled again.

With both the rising want and need of curation as a service (I’m coining this CaaS), there lies a real market opportunity to make curation profitable. We’re in the early innings of this now, and as curation services become more popular we’ll only see them spread out across more categories. To date, we’ve seen successful curation with newsletters, podcasts, and music. These are just the tip of the iceberg of a future where curators are the new creators.

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Deeper Dive

Unlimited Information Is Transforming Society: “When we look back on the past 175 years, the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a central domain of both scientific and technical advances. Techno-scientific innovations have sometimes delivered on their promises and sometimes not. Of the biggest advances, three really did change our lives—probably for the better—whereas two were far less consequential than people thought they would be. And one of the overarching impacts we now recognize in hindsight was only weakly anticipated: that by moving matter and energy, we would end up moving information and ideas.”

Prior to the 19th century, innovation and invention primarily emerged from people outside the field of science. New inventions typically emerged from people involved in craft traditions who weren't familiar with important scientific developments. That started to change in the late 1800s as craft traditions evolved into “technology”. New technology became closely related to science, and scientists started to get more involved in applying theories to answer practical problems.

Despite this shift, advances in technology continued to unfold more in parallel with science than in sequence. Technological advancements and accomplishments often leaped ahead of scientific knowledge and understanding. For example, as Naomi Oreskes points out in this wonderful essay, aviation took off before scientists had a working theory of lift. Scientists of the time believed that flight by a machine heavier than air was impossible, but sure enough, airplanes took flight.

Over the past 175 years, Oreskes argues that there have been three advances in technology that truly changed our lives: electricity, telecommunications, and computing. There are also two that failed to live up to their initial hype: space travel and nuclear power. Why is that the case? Wishful thinking, for one. You can also add in exorbitant costs and high levels of risk. Space travel and nuclear travel both have levels of risks that are acceptable for the military, but not in civilian contexts (yet).

Additionally, neither nuclear power nor space travel was a response to market demand. They both stemmed from governments that wanted these technologies for either military, political, or ideological reasons. Interestingly though, the internet wasn’t created in response to market demand either. It was also built by the government and then transitioned to civilian use over time. The government also played a big role in the success of electricity and the telecom industries.

When thinking about each of the above advancements in hindsight, we can now recognize that their overarching impact was one that we weakly anticipated. By moving matter and energy, we ended up moving information and ideas.

This leads us to the realization that prediction is a difficult business, especially about the future. Oreskes rightly asserts that “historians are loath to make prognostications because in our work we see how generalizations often do not stand up to scrutiny, how no two situations are ever quite the same and how people's past expectations have so often been confounded.”

That being said, Oreskes bucks the trend of historians and gives us her prediction for the future. She concludes that a major change is already underway in the movement of information. There have been increasingly blurry boundaries between consumers and producers. As a result of this, we can expect a further blurring of many conventional boundaries, such as work and home, amateurs and professionals, and public and private to come.

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Chum Bucket

• Amazon’s Profits, AWS & Advertising (Benedict Evans)

• Zoom, Unity and the Quest to Scale Corporate Drudgery (The Generalist)

• How Microsoft Built Its Folding Android Phone (The Verge)

• America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral (The Atlantic)

• A $200 Million Seed Valuation for Roam Shows Investor Frenzy for Note-Taking Apps (The Information)

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Tweet of the Week

Richard Feynman @ProfFeynman

Schrödinger's Plates: The plates are both broken and not broken until you open the door.

Song of the Week

Apple Music Link

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Books

Currently Reading

Recently Read

• In Certain To Win, Chet Richards does a great job of translating John Boyd’s legendary military strategy to business. Along with creating the OODA Loop, Boyd developed a number of additional theories and methodologies that have shaped our modern approach to warfare. While Boyd’s writing focused on military tactics and he never explicitly laid out business strategy, he studied it deeply. He voraciously read about the Toyota Production System and considered it an implementation of ideas similar to his own. Having been a close associate of Boyd, Richards is able to offer a unique lens into Boyd’s thinking applied to business. This quick read packs a powerful punch and belongs on the book-shelf of any so-called strategist. (4/5)

Parting Thoughts

This Week in History

• On September 9, 1776, the Continental Congress formally declared the name of the new nation to be the “United States” of America. This replaced the term “United Colonies,” which had been in general use. (Source)

“We should not, like sheep, follow the herd of creatures in front of us, making our way where others go, not where we ought to go.”

— Seneca

If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.

-CM

This newsletter is created and authored by Cody McCauley and is published and provided for informational purposes only. The information in the newsletter solely constitutes Cody’s own opinions. None of the information contained in the newsletter constitutes—or should be construed as—investment advice.