Old Phone, Tired Photos
Condition. Grade. Repair.
Value moves hand to hand.
Recirculation as new habit.
Resale Realism
I’ve been using my Pixel 6 since it arrived on launch day in 2021, but whilst I was away in Sri Lanka I was really feeling its age, especially when saving photos, or processing computationally heavy things on device like gaussian spalts. So last month I pulled the trigger and got a second hand Pixel 9 Pro. It’s the first time I’ve ever bought a used phone, and I’m really pleased with it. The one I got had a ‘good’ quality rating, and It arrived without a single scratch on it and 94% battery health. Not bad.
Until early Jan I had never heard of backmarket, but since then its come up several times in conversations with my totally unprompted. As have Reverb and GigGear for second hand music gear. From general chats with my friends, it seems it started during the pandemic and accelerated during /post the cost of living shocks in 2022 onward. ®
The size second hand economy is growing super fast in the UK, about 11% a year. Unsurprising given the state of the economy, and the that everyone is broke. For the last year or I’ve been checking Vinted before buying a new piece of clothing, so I thought I’d look at their stats.
Vinted user bases has grown from just 1.2 million in 2021 to 16/17 million users in the UK. Which is nearly one-quarter of the population, and makes it the UK’s 3rd largest clothing retailer with a market share of ~95% market share in the p2p clothing sector. This growth means that their UK sales have grown over 200x since the first half of 2020, which is the kind of growth curve you normally associate with behavioural change, not product market fit.
The single biggest feature / anchors shops in UK high streets since 2008 have been charity shops. There are 5 on Surbiton High Street alone. Roaring second hand economies always show up during economic downturns, but after 2008 I don’t remember buying stuff second hand (amongst my social demographic and income group) being totally normalised. But talking with friends recently, I suspect there’s an infrastructure-level change occurring in how people provision everyday life. There’s seems to be a shift in the UK’s “default relationship to stuff”. I’m certainly going though one myself, plus as I said, 18 years of austerity, Brexit and zero wage growth means everyone is broke.
I’ve been thinking about this against the UK’s faltering GFP figures. If households shift more and more of their spending from new goods towards used goods, then only the service margin/fee they take is going to show up in GDP. So we end up in a world where there’s lots of consumption going on, but the measured growth looks weaker than the actual lived experience of buying and selling. We are moving into the world of two way, high frequency circulation of second hand goods.
For zoomers who grew up on Depop and now Vinted having “stuff” is more like a temporary parking of value. Plenty of people I know (admittedly, mostly women ) will buy a top on Vinted, wear it once at a thing, wash it and then move it on.
I wonder what the knock-on effects are going to be. The high street is already dying. Maybe retail stops being primarily about persuasion and desire, and starts being about assurance and condition. Which is a problem for fast fashion and brick and mortar retail, as most of the stuff on the high street is crap. I was in New Look the other day waiting for Eve to queue up and buy something; there were tops on the racks with unfinished seams with no backstitching! Brand new on the hanger! Total Crap!
In a healthy second-hand market, brand value shows up as resale value and repairability. The real premium move is for a brand hold value in circulation, be the thing people will buy used without it feeling like a gamble. Resale Realism. Which does mean higher upfront costs for people though.
Another thing that comes to mind with 1/4 of the population on Vinted is that you start shopping by procurement filters: condition, battery health, grade; etc. Rather than seasonal drops and “must haves”. This is a subtle change in how attention is organised. Matt-curios posted a link this week to a website called How it wears:
TOOL 002 is a website (and soon, an app) which lets you analyse the materials of a given piece of clothing, to understand its potential lifespan. Just upload a photo of the label or paste in the materials, and you’ll receive a report on how this material composition is likely to age, respond to care, and whether it can be repaired. You can also work out the cost-per-wear of an item to help you decide whether it’s worth your hard earned money.
This is extremely sick! Something I’ve wanted for a long time.
Maybe this is what a post-austerity generation’s relationship to stuff looks like? Caring about how something was made, how it ages, what can be fixed, what holds value, what the seller can prove etc is extremely encouraging. Very solarpunk and unglamorous. You don’t buy things so much as you route them through your life, and the better the metadata, the easier it is to keep the good bits moving. Meanwhile GDP still prefers new value creatinon. New things and new intangibles. I don’t think that split holds for long though especially if there’s a war coming. . Eventually the digital trading layer and the real world merge back together, and we have national inventories of value.
Anyways. I got massively side tracked. I wanted to say that I’m really pleased with my Pixel 6 Pro for the price I paid. Camera lenses on it are amazing.
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
I’m really on the look out for work! does anyone have any leads? lol.
- Had a great call with Rob Morgan about an idea on worlds and audiences I’ve been knocking about. Will post about it soon.
- FINISHED MONSTERS IN THE MIRROR. Recording this week!
- Played that show with forest bed.
- Wrote about future of agent economies will post soon.
Terminal Access
This article: Inside the hideous, exploitative, but still addictive world of vertical dramas over on AV club is really worth your time:
ReelShort’s slogan boasts that “every second is drama,” and that the company’s mission is to create “fast-paced drama for busy women,” among other things. Indeed, it quickly becomes obvious that women are overwhelmingly the target demographic, although nailing down a generational window is more tricky. The gamified, “coin”-based economy involved in purchasing these vertical dramas smacks of the mobile game addiction common to Gen X and Boomers, but the style of content reaches far past your aunt who has sunk $20,000 into Candy Crush Saga, displaying more prominent Gen Z hallmarks, like universally hardcoded subtitles. Perhaps the most important descriptor is “busy,” which could just as easily be “attention deficient.” Ads depict scenarios like a woman getting into an elevator and having just enough time to watch the next 90-second episode before continuing on with her day. If that sounds suspiciously similar to the pitch for Quibi, it’s not far off—but replacing the A-list stars, ambition, and big budgets with non-actors, laughable production standards, and salacious premises.
Dipping the Stacks
Meta spent their vast resources years ago acquiring some generational game talent to build out what was then called the Oculus Studios, and then got distracted with the boondoggle that was and is Horizon Worlds. The Meta vision of the metaverse never coalesced into anything more than an abandoned mall, and ate up a whole lot of money doing so.
Instead of, you know, taking the time to make people excited about the actually great games their talented studios were making.
Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype
It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too). It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run.
A case for tolerating the uninteresting • V.H. Belvadi
Breaking the attention-popularity cycle requires consciously subscribing to and engaging with content that may not immediately interest you, as this passive collectiveness helps newcomers gain the visibility needed to build readership and diversify the IndieWeb community.
MD: We’ve been involved with data politics for a number of years, and accidentally ended up working on that with a lot of different actors. We want to build what Holly would call manners around this stuff. There’s this idea of the public domain that many people under 30 may not even know, because it came with a web 1.0 politic of people saying, “I’m willfully putting stuff out in the world and I want for you to be able to use it freely.”
I Can Say Goodbye To Star Trek Because Star Trek Raised Me
Nevermind that it isn’t yours, and it never was. You are at best a stockholder — at worst, a tenant. The modern media economy dictates that you are, most likely, paying a subscription to access or license whatever it is you love to watch, play, or listen to, and only a sliver of the proceeds will find their way to the artists who move you to do so. Instead, that value is passed up the chain to the financiers and executives, to whom the art you love is just another asset to be exploited. The people who produce it do so with love and care, but it’s our devotion to the brand that makes it an inexhaustible resource to be consumed forever by a class of corporate Doomsday Machines.
Reading
I finished Crowbar by Andrew Edwards. If i was still making 301, I think I would have done a 1k word book review on it’s themes, and the companion novel King of Dogs.
Crowbar is quite frankly, one of the best books I’ve read in year.
A high-velocity 1980s action fever dream: Rhodesian mercenaries and Robert Maxwell brushing up against MKOFTEN-style rogue intel ops, shadowy cults, and Area 51-ish underground bases, all while Doug Engelbart and Jerry Garcia (plus Dead-adjacent orbiters and groupies) wander in and out of the story. However, beneath the bullets and fucked up goings on, the book is actually about a genuine spiritual war, using the momentum as cover to smuggle in a surprisingly complete meditation on the orthodox account of both soul and identity.
Gone back to reading A Million Years of Music.
I’m still listening to Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons by Michael Witwer and I’m honestly really struggling with it. Last week i said it was ‘well written, in that ‘biopic’ style that seems to very very popular right now.’ I realise a few hours in, this style is really not for me.
Music
Girli – Slap On The Wrist
British hyperpop royalty Girli had a new single out recently. Slap on the Wrist is a catchy as hell piece of brexit pop exploring the realities of sexual violence.
It’s really interesting to me that one of the OG PC Music artists has moved in to mid 2000’s era indie. The topics/concerns of her work are still the same, only now it’s over punk. Now that hiphop is ‘dad music’ and probably dead for a generation, guitars are back in the zeitgeist.
Remember Kids:
That’s the point. It isn’t perception, psychology or subjectivity. Roads are different depending which way you go down them. That really is the way it is. Not a lot of people realise that, are equipped to see it and believe it…
Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith
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