1/ A neglected aspect of software-driven unbundling is unboxing: the elimination of a containing element in an old bundle
Conversation
2/ Unboxing and reboxing constitutes a bigger proportion of unbundling the more abstract the product. At the limit boxes = institutions.
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4/ When books get unbundled into serialized blog posts, prefaces, indices, cover art and (for physical copies) bindings vanish
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5/ What is interesting about these elements is that they often embody a lot of the socialization and transaction cost logic of a thing
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6/ Gold/platinum records, autographing of copies of books, credit attributions, pricing tiers, access control, security etc are at box level
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7/ As a first approximation, the box value vs. content value reflects the transaction costs vs. cost of the product/service
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8/ Even better, the box-cost as a proxy for transaction costs actually captures a lot of illegible tx costs beyond explicit Coase ones
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9/ Box-cost includes, besides search/negotiation/monitoring costs, such intangibles as memetic socialization, pricing psychology etc etc
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10/ Okay, all this is a set up for what I actually want to talk: organizations. These things are *primarily* boxes. They're like Coke/Pepsi
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11/ About 150 years ago, if you wanted to drive societal change through institutions, you'd fund things like universities: "mission boxes"
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12/ The boxes got smaller and smaller. Institutional ambitions went from nation-state level to university level, to lab level
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13/ At some point, rather than get smaller, institutional ambitions began manifesting in unboxed forms and calling themselves "networks"
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14/ Institutional forms didn't suddenly "discover" networks as an organizing structure. They merely unboxed them and allowed them to connect
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15/ Example: founders of w00w00, the hacker collective, cited Xerox PARC as an inspiration. PARC was a network in a leaky box, w00w00=no box
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16/ Here's something we don't yet know: where do the box-level attributes/features of institutional landscapes go? There is no simple answer
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