Skew
For much of the internet’s history—and, by extension, e-commerce’s history—we’ve been bringing principles from the physical world to the digital world.
Electronic mail, for instance. Skeuomorphic design for another. Web 2.0 was basically shorthand for the web becoming a giant set of communities, yet another physical world principle.
We’ve spent nearly a half century making the digital world look more like the physical world.
We’ve “completed” that project, it seems, because we’re at the precipice of a shift where we begin making the physical world look more digital.
(This is the newsletter, by the way, that we didn’t ship last week, because we couldn’t quite get a handle on it.)
Apple’s Vision Pro product is, perhaps, the most on-the-nose example of this. Technology is now, quite literally, putting a digital filter between us and the physical world.
Notice we didn’t call it “real.”
This skewing of the physical—maybe even distortion—has historically happened in other ways. People get drunk, we get high, we trip out to skew the physical. We’ve started to eat “fake” meat. But never have we put on a screen to alter our physical surrounds.
At best, we’ve used a screen to escape the physical. But that is changing.
The reason, we think, this is worth exploring is that previous versions of skewing the physical have relied on the physical. That is to say, they have relied on traditional commerce (be it in store or online): you have to buy your alcohol, for instance.
18 months ago, crypto maxis were suggesting that Web3 would alter commerce by creating new, digital-specific experiences. They still may be right about that. But it seems more likely that they were half right about that, and that digital components will have the capability to vastly alter the way we experience the physical.
At that point, the most interesting question is whether we will choose to primarily skew the physical with the physical or whether we choose to primarily skew the physical with the digital.
Which “wins” will greatly impact how we spend our money.