My favorite books series is the Mellenium Series (The Girl With the Dragon Tatto Series).
I cherish these books because it uses unconscious personal reader stereotype to have the reader draw a conclusion without even realizing it and then demolishes this stereotype through it’s characters.
Lisbeth taking control of her life, Daniel and his body building girlfriend and Harriet choosing to run away.
Another reason I love this book is because the value and power of information is constantly referenced throughout the text. The characters are looking for data, trends and information.
This summer I am taking a cost benifit analysis class for my economics degree.
A topic currently being covered is asymmetric information.
Assymetric information describes a situation where one party has information another doesn’t. Often in econ assymetric info describes a situation where firms selling to consumers withhold information.
Their are three types of assymetric information: search goods, experience goods and post-experience goods.
Search goods are products that that consumers can learn about prior to purchasing, experience goods are goods where consumers can obtain full knowledge about them after purchasing them and post-experience goods are goods that don’t reveal information to consumers (this is something like a car with a defective breaking mechanism).
After reading this section of the book I started thinking about how the internet has shifted this paradigm. Through feedback loops like reviews, consumers very seldom have experience and post-experience goods.
The internet has made a paradigm where all goods have become search goods.
What’s it like to bungy jump? Here’s a VR vid of the experience.
Will I have addiction issues when they go off vivance? Here’s a Facebook group for people having ADHD med withdrawls.
An experience good, a post-experience good both now a search good.
This train of thought then brought into my mind a tweet I read today from Wikileaks posting a bounty of $100,000 to anyone who produces the Commey/Trump tapes.
WikiLeaks offers US$100k for the Trump-Comey tapes.
You can increase the reward via most methods at https://t.co/lmsmphuH2N (tell us) pic.twitter.com/B1URWyEXZk
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 12, 2017
Again, a situation of asymmetric information and the internet being used to find it.
Please let this soak in, Wikileaks posted a bounty for information and offered up a public Bitcoin key so that the bounty for the information could be crowd funded.
Fuck.
I think Lisbeth is somewhere, smiling.
Until next time,
C
