Thread by @gravislizard

so in 1976 General Instruments produced the AY-3-8500, an integrated circuit that seems extremely depressing: it plays pong. that's literally its purpose, to let other companies bang out identical pong clones

you literally just make a circuit board that wires up these pins and a plastic chassis to put it in and you're off to the races, so everyone can sell their "own" pong that's literally identical to every other one

my reaction to this as a 2010s consumer is revulsion. fuck this thing sideways because the reason it exists is so that thousands and thousands of companies can pump out *redundant* wastes of plastic, so people can go to KB Toys and confusedly decide between *identical items*

it's cool that Kingston et al created NAND flash chips with native USB interfaces but it means that there are fucking millions of """companies""" pumping out hundreds of millions of USB drives per day, and the great sweeping bulk of them will eventually go to a landfill.

we don't actually need that many drives, but every company (or shell company spun up for the duration of a single production run) has to produce enough to satisfy all *possible* demand just in case people happen to buy their 'version'

people only need so many drives, and the goal of flooding the market with a billion companies is basically to diffuse the money spent so that some of it happens to go to companies that did nothing to deserve it over others; brownian motion and unbelievably high profit margins

now
if we step back to 1976, I wonder if my perspective actually applies?

i wasn't there, so i don't know if it was like now. General Instrument is an American company, presumably targeting other American companies with this product. Indeed, several of the listed devices using it are from American companies.

In 1976, how easy was it for an east-coast manufacturer to produce hundreds of thousands of something and ship it out west? Like, my understanding is that businesses used to believe in something called a 'regional market'

There's none of that now - if someone makes plastic and electronic shit it's all made out of country and shipped over, so the cost of getting it to one state over another is all the same, and the retail stores are also stocked through brownian motion

What makes Best Buy carry a Kingston USB drive? What makes Fry's stock the bewildering array of crap they have? Does any of it matter thanks to Amazon?

In other words my theory is that of the (supposedly) 200 devices that this pong chip was used in, *were* they actually all sold at the same time, in the same places? Or were they weird one-offs you could only find in a few mom and pop stores in Ohio or Utah?

(i messed up the language on that post pretty bad but you get the gist)

I know Magnavox's offering was probably all over, but for how long did they sell it? And was it only at Sears? Did the other offerings fill in spots in stores that couldn't order big enough quantities to buy from larger names?

Basically I'm saying that to my knowledge the landscape of retail was very different in the 70s when *things other than corporate megachains existed at all*, production costs weren't pennies, and maybe companies didn't just automatically make a million of everything

It was so hard to actually reach consumers in that era without spending a fortune on constant TV ads that maybe Magnavox knew that and didn't bother even trying to compete in some places. Et cetera

the phrase i coined for the modern state of things is "windfall capitalism," where nothing is ever even attempted unless it's attempted at a completely global scale. this is deeply unfair, is the thing.

see, what i'm saying is this: my knee-jerk response to this chip existing was "ew! bastards! obviously this is bad because only one company needs to make Pong and then it's done, you don't need competitors who are doing the same thing!"

but why did I automatically assume that *anyone* making the same thing was a competitor? was a shoemaker in New York a competitor to one in Houston in 1908? not... really? because he... wasn't... there. in Houston. physically.

the answer is that shipping made the world tiny to anyone with capital, and i don't know what the ecological and economical impacts of that are but I know it ruined the world completely for anyone who wants to make anything

I'm sure economists already know the answer to this, but: does anyone benefit from single-origin manufacturing? is it actually worth it to make everything at a single place and then send it out to the world on boats and trucks?

yeah i know the boats and trucks consume oil and so on but is that compensated for by not having to make and operate more injection molding presses and PCB making machines and fluorescent tubes to light the factory floor?

this is semi-rhetorical up to this point, but then we get to the shittier stuff: for more sophisticated electronics, isn't it worth it to have it all made by one company, because then we don't suffer from learned lessons not being distributed evenly?

if one company makes all the USB drives, then when they find out there's a problem with their soldering process that causes a drop in yield, they can fix it all in one go. it's logistically difficult to fan out that fix to thousands of little manufacturers

and of course there's the question: if everyone's dependent on a single source for the *chips*, does it really matter that they're making the less important parts independently? does that really improve things that much other than giving make-work factory jobs?

practically speaking, capitalism is based on this deeply uncivilized scavenger mentality where if you want to make money you should find some niche that isn't actually unfilled, or doesn't exist, and fill it

so i think at some point a lot of people who wanted free money decided to attack problems like "steve wants to buy a bagel slicer but the closest store is twenty minutes away so he's not going to do it today" by offering steve the opportunity to not drive for twenty minutes

and then once you do that, it's impossible to reverse. if i proposed that maybe you *should* have to go a couple miles to get some products, a lot of people would be terribly upset at me. when should we do this? where does this extra free time come from? we're barely scraping by

"food deserts" are bad particularly because you can't tell your boss "i need to leave a couple hours early to go shopping" because your boss "knows" you don't need that extra time, because they "know" there's a grocery store five minutes away with everything you need

when the nearby grocery store DOES close, suddenly your life just sucks more because you lose 40 minutes every time you need food. if you have to go two places instead of one, that eats even more time.

blah blah mumble mumble