Don’t Feel Obligated to Read This, Or Anything Else Online

One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that everybody has a voice. And one of the terrible things about the Internet is that everybody has a voice.

A lot of people don’t have anything worth listening to, and so sifting through that and finding a way to determine the signal out of all that noise is one of the challenges of our time.  It’s part of the hallmark of shifting from an economy and an ecology of scarcity to one of abundance.

Look at a grocery store in the US.  That is a fantastical concept to someone from 50 years ago. It’s still a fantastical concept to people from developing nations.  You go to a Star Market or a Walgreens or a Giant Foods or a Whole Foods or what have you.  How many choices of cereal do we need?  We’ve got like 80 choices of cereal, diet cereal, Chocó Cocoa Crispy, nutty cereal, cereal with oxytocins in them, cereal with herbs and whatnot, weed-infused cereal, probably vodka-infused and baco-infused, Coca Pebbles.

It’s getting a bit nuts and so what that industry has done is kind of thrown a lot of money at marketing and paying for positioning in the store and trying to convince you that this cereal is worth more than that cereal. That is part of the solution, but don’t feel as a reader, as a digester, as a downloader of this vast world of abundance that you have to feel obligated to read it all, to view it all.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.