Economy of Specificity

Description

Rosalind Marino:

Dividing between Copy-Paste Economies and Economies of Specificity:

"Starbucks’ strategy has been ubiquitous reproducibility. Globally, you can walk into a starbucks, and get pretty much the same product, no matter where you are. Starbucks does actually adapt some to local cultures, adding menu items exclusive to a particular place and palette. But the business model is copy and paste. And Starbucks is everywhere, at one point seeking to be visible from every office window in cities like NYC or their home of Seattle. It does not matter who is working behind the counter, nor what local bean roasters might be in business, Starbucks will produce the same cup of coffee and carry the same pre-roasted beans on the shelf.

This is in contrast to the local coffee shop that roasts their own beans which they source from a few family farms in Guatemala. The person working behind the counter matters quite a bit, not just for their skill as a barista, but as a source of community news and gossip. This coffee shop might work with a local bakery, or add a menu item named after one of their regular customers. While still tied into global networks of exchange, this is an economy of specificity. They are reliant on their particular relationships and exist only in their context.

But local coffee shops are a pattern, a global phenomenon. Collectively they have a greater market share than coffee chains, even though they are not organized under a single business. Their risks and rewards are distributed.

Economies of specificity make communities richer. Rather than extracting wealth for global corporations, the more local, “inefficient”, flows of exchange feed back into the mutual relationships that these economies require. They also make communities richer in the sense that they increase intangible values like quality and uniqueness while knitting the social relationships that are needed for sustainability."

Discussion

What Does Any of This Have to Do with Tech: The Cozy Web

Rosalind Marino:

"Well, I’ve been thinking about the Cozy Web lately. Secluded spaces like Discord servers, niche forums, and Signal group chats are where a lot of the activity of the web actually happens. These spaces allow for customization and cultural development, in contrast to the large social platforms like Meta and X. The large social platforms rely on advertising and the collection of user data. They operate through scaled, ubiquitous extraction.

What is the economics of the cozy web? A lot of institutions like Signal have to rely on donations and public funding. This is one model, but we need more. And I see economies of specificity as one lens through which to find solutions.

SAAS is one model that can be revolutionized from its current form. What if we were paying development teams to add custom features to open-source software? This would open up a direct line between user needs and software development. It also provides a more direct funding stream for the maintainers who keep the fundamental building blocks of our networks functional (and yes I am thinking of the XZ Utils incident and the classic xkcd comic Dependency).

Additionally, as we start seeing more peer-to-peer software that can provide interconnectivity without servers, the SAAS model will need to adapt.

Similarly, we need more custom web designers and less Wix sites. We need more applications built for local township governance, food waste mitigation, and citizen science. B2B applications are an opportunity for custom solutions to situated problems. Approaching development as an act of customizing open-source software lowers overhead while building more fit to purpose applications and creating a thriving developer industry. Not everything needs to be a unicorn startup that gets sold off to the same monopolies capturing the rest of the internet.

We need to rewild the internet."

(https://hackernoon.com/economies-of-specificity)