I think things are different, just in ways that are not necessarily apparent to e.g. normal Americans living out their lives. Our awareness of what has changed is largely confined to the specifics of our individual lives (profession, community, subculture)... but as with newspaper reporting, we make assumptions about the parts we don't interact with as deeply, only noticing acute change when it's right in our domain.
I call this the 'postmodern Potemikin village'– the constructed and maintained illusion that the world we live in is in large part unchanged from the one we lived in in e.g. 1995 (and most definitely 1975).
The clearest way to clarify what I mean is in this HN venue is maybe to say that: the B2B realities that back to the B2P experiences of most people are radically different than the ones we grew up, in many industries, unrecognizably different.
It is only the 'last mile' to our doors and into our pockets that maintains the same branded feel.
The footnote to this is of course the ubiquity and centrality of the internet (including by mobile), I don't know if there's ever been such a radical change introduced so quickly and then so uniformly renormalized to.
In this one case it's less a lack of obvious change, but a change that brought with it such a deep sense of inevitability and obviousness that we forget it's new.
But back to the change thing.
Good examples are probably Amazon and Walmart. Depending on your social stratum, the role that these play is probably equivalently profound in your life. And the core logistics behind both business [models] is predicated on a set of technologies and integrations with other related industries that is radically unlike what came before it.
In our normal human lives, we don't see the scale of that change. We just 'order a bit more for home delivery' than our parents did. Or shop at a store that's yes, a little bigger.
But that sense of familiarity about the sourcing of our lives from those places is false.
Other examples include the slow-boil but now nearly complete homogenization of the commercial landscape in the US. If you didn't grow up in e.g. the 70s or earlier, the ubiquity of a couple hundred brands and the insignificance of anything but large regional competitors (aside from in a few exceptional industries perhaps) is actually a very different and quite new reality.
Again, we still e.g. stop for fast food. It's the scale and sophistication of consolidation that is genuinely new.
This is btw in no way a value judgment, just an observation.
The point is simply, the rate of change has not actually diminished...
...it's just that the majority of its effects are in domain outside the public sphere, and hence forgotten, discounted, or invisible a lot of the time.
> Good examples are probably Amazon and Walmart. Depending on your social stratum, the role that these play is probably equivalently profound in your life. And the core logistics behind both business [models] is predicated on a set of technologies and integrations with other related industries that is radically unlike what came before it.
But we had Walmart in 1995. It was as awesome for poor folks then as it is now.
> Other examples include the slow-boil but now nearly complete homogenization of the commercial landscape in the US. If you didn't grow up in e.g. the 70s or earlier, the ubiquity of a couple hundred brands and the insignificance of anything but large regional competitors (aside from in a few exceptional industries perhaps) is actually a very different and quite new reality.
I remember people commenting about that exact phenomenon … in the 1990s.
Both of those are, I think, good example of what I was getting at: things changed hugely from 1974 to 1995, but not nearly as radically since then.
I call this the 'postmodern Potemikin village'– the constructed and maintained illusion that the world we live in is in large part unchanged from the one we lived in in e.g. 1995 (and most definitely 1975).
The clearest way to clarify what I mean is in this HN venue is maybe to say that: the B2B realities that back to the B2P experiences of most people are radically different than the ones we grew up, in many industries, unrecognizably different.
It is only the 'last mile' to our doors and into our pockets that maintains the same branded feel.
The footnote to this is of course the ubiquity and centrality of the internet (including by mobile), I don't know if there's ever been such a radical change introduced so quickly and then so uniformly renormalized to.
In this one case it's less a lack of obvious change, but a change that brought with it such a deep sense of inevitability and obviousness that we forget it's new.
But back to the change thing.
Good examples are probably Amazon and Walmart. Depending on your social stratum, the role that these play is probably equivalently profound in your life. And the core logistics behind both business [models] is predicated on a set of technologies and integrations with other related industries that is radically unlike what came before it.
In our normal human lives, we don't see the scale of that change. We just 'order a bit more for home delivery' than our parents did. Or shop at a store that's yes, a little bigger.
But that sense of familiarity about the sourcing of our lives from those places is false.
Other examples include the slow-boil but now nearly complete homogenization of the commercial landscape in the US. If you didn't grow up in e.g. the 70s or earlier, the ubiquity of a couple hundred brands and the insignificance of anything but large regional competitors (aside from in a few exceptional industries perhaps) is actually a very different and quite new reality.
Again, we still e.g. stop for fast food. It's the scale and sophistication of consolidation that is genuinely new.
This is btw in no way a value judgment, just an observation.
The point is simply, the rate of change has not actually diminished...
...it's just that the majority of its effects are in domain outside the public sphere, and hence forgotten, discounted, or invisible a lot of the time.