#59: Lean Hogs Go to Heaven
I used to work for an airline that no longer exists. A conversation you overhear a lot when you work at an airline is airplane enthusiasts getting excited about certain types of airplanes (this was in 2007, before the A380 had even debuted). In an effort to spoil the fun during one such conversation, my coworker, who was in yield management, said he didn't care about any characteristic of planes except for the number of seats they have. I'm on his side—the aesthetic differences between a 737 and an E175 are lost on me—but the conversation perfectly captured what it means for something to be a commodity. Air travel, like every commodity, had to become a commodity: Until the late '70s, fares were standardized and airlines could only differentiate themselves via superior passenger experience. Not long after the industry's deregulation, however, a flight could be reduced to a few relevant numbers, such as time, price, and number of connections (the quick calculation we all perform when we book a flight on Kayak); separating the number of seats on the plane from its qualitative aspects was what enabled this transition. And yet, thirty years hence, airplane heads can still geek out about aircraft models, because the physical reality of air travel is fundamentally the same after commoditization (although less comfortable and less fun), most of us have just been trained not to care about the superfluous details, and many of those details have atrophied due to market pressure.
Becoming a commodity is a violent process: We take something unique and individual, like a lean hog, and isolate the quantifiable sameness that it shares with everything other hog, pooling them all together via a market that translates them into pounds of meat worth certain prices while ignoring everything else, like each hog's distinct personality and hometown. Commoditization is basically information distillation, and software is the ultimate information still, which is why the commoditization process keeps accelerating. We're usually fine with the commodities we've always known as such (like oil or gold) but it's stressful to watch things become commodities that previously weren't in our lifetimes. Toby Shorin has brilliantly catalogued our cultural response to this phenomenon, exploring various quixotic efforts to avoid commodities and finally suggesting that "something being a commodity does not make it intrinsically better or worse." Commoditization, in other words, is a way of seeing something more than a change to the thing itself (although the thing often changes over time to adapt to its new market). You can still go out into a field and observe individual soybeans, or more realistically, you can get excited about the way an Airbus is painted instead of just counting the seats.
Doug Rushkoff makes an important point about commodities: "The problem with commoditization is that the only thing that left to distinguish one brand from another is price." As I said above, most "things" in the world embody a quantifiable core wrapped in countless layers of individualizing detail. Software is currently working hard to distinguish the former from the latter in domains that haven't already undergone the treatment: relationships, art, our own personalities. Branding, in many cases, is the artificial process of re-wrapping goods with qualitative, aesthetic surfaces after they've already been stripped down into commodities. But goods that became commodities more recently also retain their original uniqueness, which the market is devaluing and will eventually dismantle. Some objects, like soybeans, are too boring to be anything but commodities. Plenty of others aren't. Instead of hiding from their artifice, recognize that the newest commodities—the ones that alienate us the most—are the ones that still embody something worth saving.
Reads:
Amazon Urbanism, as revealed through its patent filings: "A colonization of everyday experience; a concerted effort to control an all-encompassing infrastructure of home, office and retail automation, one in which the city becomes a giant fulfillment center, and humans mere inventory pickers.
The Rise of Pseudo-AI: Artificial intelligence compelling enough as a branding approach that companies are faking it with human employees.
The Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one.