Subscriber note: Reminder that we are now also operating on Substack. The details of the new plans are here.
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably drowning in information overflow; overwhelmed by frictionless influencers vying for your attention; disoriented by the relentless pace of life; ready to throw up at the prospect of opening your email; and bewildered by the flood of Substacks cramming your inbox — many of which you’re certain you never signed up for.
If you’re anything like me, life today feels like a constant sense of being perpetually unable to catch up with anything. Endless anxiety that you have missed an essential email. Or forgotten to check the spam folder.
The outcome is system-wide executive dysfunction and corporate ADHD.
You see this in everything from how long it takes to make corporate hiring decisions these days to the proliferation of zero-action “conference calls”. Signal is being lost to noise at an alarming rate.
To cope with the problem, society needs once again to reprioritize action over inaction. It must learn to respect stillness and focus again. To enjoy the journey and the craft, not just the outcome. Beauty for beauty’s sake. And most importantly, to reject FOMO. Missing out is fine, because some things are not worth the hassle.
With that preamble out of the way, here’s 1,543 words on why our current pace of life is unsustainable, not just with human biology but also economics. And why, inevitably, the next stage of Western development, especially as the global economy rebalances, will be focused on “the real”, not the virtual. And why, when it comes to the information economy, smart filtering — the art of skillfully missing out — and capital intensity will be the future.
The inventory problem
Modern economies have, for the past 30 years, been structured around inventory aversion — the desire to remain capital-light, flexible, and scalable. It is the logic that underpinned globalization.
Western economies outsourced manufacturing (and inventory risk) to Asia while focusing on design, finance, and services.
But the harmful side-effects of this trend — or more precisely, the side-effects of the prohibitive cost of carrying material certainty — have turned into a critical blind spot in our system.
Rising superficiality, uncertainty and information overload are directly attributable to the phenomenon as well.
When inventory costs are prohibitive, production risk rises, entrepreneurship stalls, and capital avoids the physical. This creates an economy of thin margins and fragile confidence, where prosperity is built on liquidity, not durability.
It turns out inventory — aka having a real stake in the business you’re running —comes with important upsides as well as risks.
China solved this problem by subsidising risk through scale. Its factories didn’t need local demand; they manufactured for global consumption. What got sold got sold. What didn’t got written down by a government funded by financial and worker repression.
Competitive pricing, currency advantages, and an undervalued labor base meant inventory was simply never a cost.
The outcome was a mercantilistic model that preyed on hollowing out the West, to ensure it lost its backbone and ability to compete in anything but the ephereal realm.
As part of that process, Western economies, with expensive labour and low tolerance for capital risk, became the producers of uncertainty and the ultimate end consumers of other people’s certainty.
But this model is ending. Rising costs, environmental pressures, and geopolitical friction are dismantling China’s price advantage. When the cost of “cheap” stops being cheap, the comparative advantage will eventually flip. Suddenly, the Western blind spot — the refusal to own inventory or infrastructure — will become fatal. Only those prepared to invest in their businesses cumulatively in the “Apprentice” style (building your business up from the ground up by trialling and erroring what works and what doesn’t) will come out on top.
From financialization to fulfilment
Some predictions.
As the era of zero-interest rates and capital-light models fades, financialization should, if we’re right, increasingly lose its payoff.
The logic for this is obvious. Value extraction through arbitrage, leverage, and speculation thrived in a world of overproduction and cheap goods.
But as production localises and inventory becomes a virtue, capital intensity has to become the new moat to preserve viable businesses. Owning physical assets, manufacturing capacity, or logistical networks will be the new defensible position — not managing platforms or code. For journalists and workers in the knowledge economy, that translates to “doing the work”, i.e, circulating and travelling in the sectors you cover, speaking to people in real life, not just mindlessly reposting news on the internet.
The receipts will matter more and more. No more stock footage or AI-generated imagery. Only investment in getting to know your story, whether that’s through 25 years of direct experience, isolated story-specific research, or genuine and proven proximity to news (i.e. the return of trusted eye-witness reports) will rise to the top in that regime.
Yes, that will make it harder for new names to break in, but it will also revive the value of mentorship, education and on-the-job learning.
It will allow the system to be recalibrated around a logical reward matrix where experience pays, and the recent “age discrimination” trend, where inexperience didn’t get in the way of job promotion, is finally reversed.
As the natural order of life makes a return, the young will once again be able to invest in family life, because they will have certainty that their salaries will only get higher with age. The truly exceptional will still be advanced, don’t get me wrong, but the payoff matrix associated with job security will make a profound change to everyday lifestyles.
We’re already seeing the effects in journalism, where anything other than an investment-intensive model is becoming commodified and subject to the whims of algorithms. To excel, you have to become algorithm-resistant, relying on readership loyalty irrespective of whether you get cancelled by the algorithm or not.
Soon, the same logic will spread across sectors: those who control tangible fulfilment will control value.
Anyone willing to take inventory risk will hold the new leverage. But it will be self-financed, cumulative, and mission-driven rather than speculative. Retailers that build around community, ideology, and purpose will be able to forecast demand with precision because belief structures will replace price signals as the guarantor of demand.
Good ideas — like beautifully made biodegradable children’s toys [which is what I’d invest in if I were 20 years younger] — will be rewarded because they sit at the intersection of moral clarity and tangible production. When people buy for meaning, not novelty, inventory becomes manageable. The factory will re-emerge not as a risk but as a repository of our collective belief in who we are and how we lead our lives.
At the macro level, capital expenditure will once again be rewarded. From maximal uncertainty driven by overconsumption, the economy will transition toward mission-based certainty.
If we get this transition right, investment will flow toward communities that can promise durable demand — religious, ideological, and value-driven networks. Lending to Christian communities, for instance, who educate and socialize their children within coherent moral frameworks, will become safer than lending to atomized consumers. Capital will chase belief-driven predictability.
The ultimate economic transformation will be from capital-light speculation to capital-heavy conviction.
Durability not austerity
Consumers are already fatigued by abundance. Inevitably, the next frontier of growth lies in reduction — fewer, better, longer-lasting things that fit into a coherent life philosophy. This, however, doesn’t need to be austerity.
When the market rewards fulfilment, not throughput, the best producers will be those who believe in what they make — and whose customers believe too. Cheap disposable toys and novelty “brand” based merch, won’t fly anymore. How many Tote bags does anyone really need? For maximum irony, though, check out our Tote bags here.
Before you scoff, it’s the investment we made in that Shopify experience that has contributed to these learnings.
Our main takeaway from going through the process is that true merch success must be linked to inventory risk and distribution. Anyone can plug into Amazon for fulfillment and sell online, but unless you take the time and effort to put quality goods in front of people’s eyes and convince them at the physical point of sale to part with their money, you’re up against the same algorithmic rat race.
And in real life, quality matters. [Or as my mum used to say, dirt doesn’t show up in photos].
On that note, we
plan to showcase our merch in real life at our pop-up Blind Spot Xmas bonanza in Ealing. But more on that later [we’ll see if we can get it off the ground.]
But back to the point. The blind spot of the past 40 years is the assumption that capital-light equals intelligent and that intelligence without substance isn’t noise. As this becomes better understood, the rebalancing will reverse that: capital-intense will become meaningful again. The new economic model will reward those who
1) are prepared to take inventory risk and own fulfillment
2) build physical or community moats
3) invest in durable, mission-driven production
4) anchor their business in belief structures that create predictable demand.
From the ashes of financialization will rise a world where capex is culture, factories are faith, and fulfilment is the new finance.
If it doesn’t, we’re all cooked.
