ecommerce Archives

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Soylent being very #aesthetic on Instagram.

November 6, 2016

Futuristic Nutrition Is Actually Very Boring

In the future we get up, slurp down rehydrated powder shakes full of caffeine and nutrients, and don’t bother chewing anything! I mean, maybe. Nootropics for sure, but we could be hooked up to a Matrix-like system, sustenance coming through tubes in our spines. (Isn’t that the endgame of VR?)

We could be gnawing on whole grains in order to prove our hipster cred. What the heck do I know?

So anyway, Rosa Labs (the company that makes Soylent) is having quality control problems. But I still really like the idea of “meal replacements” AKA “very convenient ways to eat”.

I tried out MealSquares, because they advertise on Slate Star Codex. The product is basically a scone with four right angles, but it’s made out of “whole foods” and is supplemented with micronutrients, blah blah blah. Sayeth the website:

[T]here’s nothing especially risky or unusual in MealSquares; they’re made from a broad variety of ordinary, healthy whole-food ingredients like milk, rice bran, dates, etc. See our nutrition page for the full list. And unlike many commercial baked goods, MealSquares are free of artificial preservatives and flavoring agents. […]

Given common nutrient deficiencies like magnesium deficiency and potassium deficiency, MealSquares represent a huge improvement over the average diet. Even if there are nutrients unknown to science, they’ll likely appear in at least one of the nutrient-dense MealSquare ingredients — this represents an advantage of whole foods over supplements.

That’s so boring, right? It’s just like healthy Hostess Cakes, delivered via ecommerce.

But I suspect that the future arrives one mundane innovation at a time, on your doorstep in a cardboard box. Friction is reduced just slightly with each new development. It all adds up — or, in fact, it multiplies. Soon enough we go exponential. I hope so, at least!

I spent $90 on thirty MealSquares tonight. That’ll last my partner and I about a month. Then we’ll get another shipment. I like outsourcing some of my food preparation without needing to feel guilty about it.

Header image via Soylent on Instagram.

March 1, 2016

Amagooglezon

Amazon has a whim machine bolted onto their ecommerce system. The recommendation engine is a combination of practical — “Other people who bought X also bought Y” — and bemusingly enthusiastic: “You clicked on X before so I bet you’d really like ALSDJFLKSAJF too! Wow, look at all those letters! Notice how they’re in the same alphabet as X? Pretty impressive, huh?” It’s bad at nuance but it’s good at throwing out options. There are so many options for it to scan and suggest.

This stock photo amuses me. Image via Robbert Noordzij.

Businesses need to solve hard problems in order to be successful. Shopping on Amazon is cheap and convenient and they have a vast array of goods. Selling things cheaply without collapsing is a hard problem, and so is convenience, and so is being stocked with lots of products. Amazon conquered all three challenges. Now the benefits feed into each other. Customers love the cheapness and convenience, so sellers must stock their storefronts. Sellers are much easier to aggregate than customers, so once you figure out the customer bit, you’re golden.

Superstar internet businesses — and I guess most high-value companies in general — are all about positive feedback loops. Circular incentives that channel energy from initial success to intermediate success to dominance.

When you search for something on Google, you make Google better by feeding data into their algorithm, and your presence incentivizes both websites and advertisers to cater to this particular search engine. You come back because the algorithm is so good at presenting the information you want. Websites worry about SEO and advertisers drop $$$$$ because that excellent algorithm keeps pulling you back. The incentive structure is great for Google. That ingenious feedback loop made them dominant and it keeps them dominant.

Fast forward to 2037 when we’re surfing Amagooglezon (or whatever supplants them) with our heads swimming in VR buckets. We’ll bounce from product to product, purchasing and appraising and reviewing and returning and diving into on-demand experiences. I wonder how recommendation systems will work then — maybe they’ll have personalities. Maybe we’ll fall in love with them. Maybe we’ll hate them. Maybe our wallets will be managed by AI assistants and none of this will matter.

December 31, 2015

Who’s A Drug Lord?

We live in a world where people sell drugs on the internet, they get caught, and other people dissect news headlines about them. None of that is weird or surprising, nor should it be, but it represents a technologically mediated system of resistance, enforcement, and renewed resistance. Twitter manifests the new polis.

Brian Van criticized a recent New York Times headline about the IRS agent who pinpointed Ross Ulbricht: “The Tax Sleuth Who Took Down a Drug Lord”. The article was a good follow-on to Wired’s Silk Road saga. Here’s what Brian said:

Brian Van on Twitter

“NYTimes using the term ‘drug lord’ to blur the line between illegitimate e-commerce and murder conspiracists” [sic]. His second tweet reads, “Sales of drugs can be civil disobedience without violence; NYT freely adopts fascist philosophy that ‘all transgressions of law are equal’” [also sic]. He comes close to quoting the Bible: “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”

At face value, I agree with Brian 100%. I think every drug should be decriminalized, and yes that includes unambiguously destructive substances like meth. Why? 1) People should be free to do whatever they want with their own bodies and 2) banning drugs doesn’t work very well anyway. If you want to eliminate a problem, target the root cause — say, poverty and mental illness — instead of outlawing the symptom.

Photo via Health Gauge.

However, I’m curious about whether Brian is trying to imply that Ross Ulbricht was not a drug lord. Maybe the problem is that The New York Times is conflating drug-lord-ism with soliciting a hitman? (For those not familiar with the whole Silk Road debacle, go read the Wired articles that I linked above.) I guess I can’t tell whether Brian is objecting because he thinks Ross Ulbricht is sullied by the term “drug lord” or vice versa.

Tag: ecommerce

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