After inflation, the whip-crack

Broken telephone, but for back-orders.

Cory Doctorow
7 min readJul 1, 2022

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An icon of a person cracking a bullwhip; their head has been replaced with the frowning head of Uncle Sam. Each ascending peak of the whip’s passage has a different icon; in order: ATM, shop, truck, warehouse, shipping containers, container ship, factory. In the background is a blurred out supermarket aisle, stocked high with goods. Image: Lars Frantzen (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Supermarket_full_of_goods.jpg CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/d

There’s a school of economics that likens the economy to a computer, one that we all power. Every time we buy something — or walk away from an offer — we feed data to the computer, which transmits this price- and demand-information from consumers to producers to financiers, so that demand can be met with supply.

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