Economics
Everybody Can Dunk Now
Basketball tryouts run on a piece of equipment nobody talks about, and it isn’t the ball. It’s the tape measure.
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The Intimacy Economy
Making a living from creative work has come down to two options. Run the brand economy: become a person worth following, and let the work be the marketing for the merch. Or run the performance economy: sell the one thing that can’t be copied, being in the room. AI is squeezing artists toward both, because the artifact itself is going free and the value is migrating to identity and tribe. I walked through all of that in The T-Shirt Economy , and it ended somewhere bleak and mostly correct. I’m a horrible salesman, so I wasn’t thrilled.
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The T-Shirt Economy
At a club show, the band makes more on the shirt than on the performance. Not marginally more. Ticket money passes through a promoter, an agent, and the venue before any of it reaches the people who actually played; the shirt costs a few dollars of cotton, sells for thirty-five, and the only thing standing between the band and that spread is whatever the room charges them for the retail booth. That cut turns out to be contested enough to have produced an organized campaign to abolish it , with hundreds of venues signing on. Nobody organizes over the part of the business that doesn’t matter. I could throw a rock here in Nashville and hit a working musician who could have told me this without doing any math.
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Nobody Told the Scribes
In 1492 a German abbot named Johannes Trithemius wrote a passionate defense of the monastic scribes, the monks who copied books out by hand, one letter at a time, the way it had been done for a thousand years. He was alarmed by the printing press. He argued that the copying was holy work, that a hand-inked page held a devotion no machine could stamp into paper, that something sacred would die if we let the contraption take over. It’s a genuinely moving little book with quotes like, “He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of holy Scripture.” He titled it In Praise of Scribes .
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The Diamond Was Always a Story
My wife designs rings. She has the eye: proportion, the way a stone sits in light, when to use a flat rose cut vs. an elongated cushion or an old mine cut, and when the positioning of each reads as intention instead of approximation. What she didn’t have, until fairly recently, was room to use it. A mined center stone of any real size is a four- or five-figure commitment before she’s sketched a single prong, so every design was an expensive bet, and you don’t place many bets when each one costs a mortgage payment. Then lab-grown diamonds got good and cheap in the same handful of years, and the bet got a lot smaller. Now she works the way a painter works: try it, rework it, chase an idea three rings deep just to see where it wants to go.
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