Things that seem connected:
Matt thinking about storefronts:
"You would take something like Shopify and make it so I could curate individual items in a MySpace-like environment, and the doorway is my user avatar. Something like that. You would see which of your friends were currently browsing. The whole purchase funnel would have to be managed within my homepage?
Like Underhill says, I would probably want live staffing. Something the generic big box infinite department stores couldn’t offer."
W. David Marx thinking about recommendation:
"Matthew Yglesias noted that the previous paradigm of recommendations involved teachers, older siblings, and surly record store clerks offering pedagogical introductions to even deeper examples in a specific interest area, whereas a capitalistic algorithm may point towards much more general, less sophisticated versions of whatever you liked."
And there's this too:
Scanning *my* professors' bookshelves was such an important part of my own education. Those books served as extemporaneous "boundary objects" in office-hour discussions where I discovered new fascinations. Hard to offer such epiphanies to your own students in an open-plan office https://t.co/q3imD9E8YI
— Shannon Mattern (@shannonmattern) October 19, 2022