From Web 1.0 to Today - by Arnold Kling - In My Tribe

My perspective as an old economist on social media and crypto

At a meeting of tech-minded folks in Austin, the organizer asked me to describe myself. “In two words,” he joked. “I’m old,” I responded. In particular, I am old enough to have been very caught up in Web 1.0, from 1994 through 1999. This affects my perspective on social media and crypto. I am a devotee of Varian and Shapiro’s Information Rules, which anticipated the issues in business strategy that the Internet would create. In particular, content delivered as bits precludes the classical textbook concept of setting price equal to marginal cost. The marginal cost is too close to zero for…

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