#stacktivism

Vinay Gupta :: Infrastructure and systems for a nine billion world | Saturday 13 July 2013

Transcript available at opentranscripts.org/transcript/infrastructure-for-nine-billion/

How do we turn what we have into what we need?

WHOLE FOODS: CUSTOMER, NOT RETAILER

This is the key to understanding the purchase of Whole Foods: to the outside it may seem that Amazon is buying a retailer. The truth, though, is that Amazon is buying a customer — the first-and-best customer that will instantly bring its grocery efforts to scale.

Today, all of the logistics that go into a Whole Foods store are for the purpose of stocking physical shelves: the entire operation is integrated. What I expect Amazon to do over the next few years is transform the Whole Foods supply chain into a service architecture based on primitives: meat, fruit, vegetables, baked goods, non-perishables (Whole Foods’ outsized reliance on store brands is something that I’m sure was very attractive to Amazon). What will make this massive investment worth it, though, is that there will be a guaranteed customer: Whole Foods Markets.

(via Amazon’s New Customer – Stratechery by Ben Thompson)

Extremely good essay. well worth a read.

Between the Net and the Street

RACHEL BAKER DISCUSSES THE NETWORK EXPERIMENTS OF HEATH BUNTING

This essay accompanies the presentation of Heath Bunting’s Communication Creates Conflict as a part of the online exhibition Net Art Anthology.

In the 1990s, as activists, artists, and their ilk explored the new possibilities presented by the internet, communities often formed around shared resources such as servers. In London, the cybercafe bulletin board and, later, the Irational web server—both initiated by Heath Bunting—played such a role role. Run on recycled hardware and software, they offered space for posting and exchange that tended towards the aesthetically and politically radical. In this interview, Rachel Baker, one of Bunting’s collaborators, recalls her experience as a participant in these two platforms, which shaped her own work in net art, activism, and internet radio.