Does no one else consider the idea of this horribly decadent? They give as an example, ordering a delivery pizza for you, which is already a decadent activity and something you can accomplish with a single phone call anyway.
Maybe for the rich high-flying silicon valley types, your time and brain space is so valuable that this service makes sense. But if that is the case maybe you should re-examine your lives.
This isn't interesting because of pizzas. This is interesting because of the potential to centralize and offload all decisions of a certain type. It's like a pay-per-use secretary.
What I do find.. "decadent"... is people like you, judging masses of other people on the basis of what they find interesting or useful. Especially when you can't see past the low hanging fruit and aren't able to grasp any potential a service might have.
Piece of advice: If a majority of people are interested and finding use in a service, re-examine your own evaluation skills before telling everyone else to re-examine their lives.
I don't think OP wasn't judging anyone, you took his comment a little too personally.
The majority people on this site may find this service to be useful, but I gurantee, outside of the SV bubble, this service would get laughed at by the actual majority of Americans.
The market here is exclusively the faux rich. If your time was actually this valueable you would have a real assistant. The service as useful as a upper middle class doggy spa. It's viable, but it fails to solve any _real_ problems.
I partially agree with the spirit of your comment, but I disagree that this doesn't solve real problems. If you think critically about all the little innovations out there that add convenience, it adds up to a lot more leisure time. I'm sure people thought car washes were decadent at one point.
For better or for worse, modern Western life is built on a thousand now-invisible time-saving innovations. I think we're at a transitional time in our culture. All this leisure time has historically mostly served to allow us to fill up our lives with increased complexity, but I think we've hit the point where that no longer scales, because it's simply too much to track. What Magic gets right, in my mind, is that it's part of a trend of abstracting away that new complexity. It gives you a single entry point through which to leverage a bunch of innovations that you don't even have to know about.
Where I think services like this can really win is if they can use economy of scale to improve upon the individual's own ability to optimize value for cost. This is possible, if say, they maintain a knowledge base of the best deals.
A service like this simply isn't economical for the overwhelming majority of people.
If you perceive your time to be so valuable that you can't bear the five minutes it takes to order a pizza online or by phone, you probably should re-examine that valuation.
Especially when five minutes ordering exactly what you want directly from your preferred supplier is replaced by a fifteen minute exchange with a stranger who has to interprets vague inputs, has misaligned incentives, doesn't know any of your preferences beyond those you expressly state, etc. all of which you then pay a premium for...
My first thought was that if your time and effort really is so valuable that it economically makes sense to use a service like this one, then you probably can afford and should have a real concierge/personal assistant. It seems to me this hinges on an emotional (i.e. economically irrational) need of (upper?) middle class people to feel rich and too “important”. Which is actually not a bad business model at all, tapping into people's feelings. It's actually one of the best things to base a business on.
But I could be wrong. Maybe there's a sweet spot in the price-utility ratio where this makes sense for people who are not technically rich and busy maintaining the wealth. It's interesting.
It's also not an interesting idea because it will never get off the ground. It's like one of those businesses that go on that TV show with the billionaires who bid on their ideas (forget the title). You pretty much never really hear about them again. Like some kind of American Idol of the start-up world. I'm sure these guys will make a little bit of money, but how hard would it be to get current AIs to do this crap for you for practically nothing?
I'll elaborate a bit. I'm not concerned with criticizing this service or its users. It triggered my previous comment as it serves as another example of the life of well off westerners becoming one more step abstracted and insulated from reality, which is something that ought to be resisted. The more removed you are from your source of food, water, clothing etc. the more wasteful the process of obtaining it is in terms of resources and damage to the environment. Also, if you read Jared Diamonds book 'Collapse' (wherein he deduces from various examples of collapsed societies a framework of factors that lead to collapse) one common factor in societal collapse is: the elites and decision makers being insulated from the negative consequences of their decisions. A modern example would be, an oil magnate decides to maximise profit by using a dirty refining process, this pollutes the ground water in that area, but of course he can afford to live far away in a gated community and drink bottled water. Thus he is insulated from the negative consequence of his actions. This can lead to the elites and decision makers making a series of decision that eventually lead to the destruction of the entire society (for example cutting down all the trees on Easter island)
I'm aware that this may all seem a bit dramatic when we're talking about pizzas, but the mindset of the elites is important in this case. Services like this encourage not knowing where your food, water, clothing etc. is coming from.
All this is well and good, and I agree with it, but it doesn't really have anything to do with this service.
> Services like this encourage not knowing where your food, water, clothing etc. is coming from
You don't know where those products are coming from. The ingredients in the food you're ordering have been gathered industrially, processed industrially, probably moved between four different countries, ended up at your city's warehouse, were ordered in bulk by a grocery store in your city, were once again ordered in bulk by your local restaurant, were prepared by a chef you'll never meet, packed by some cashier you probably haven't seen and only then does it reach the delivery boy.
And you're telling me adding one more layer on top of that is decadent because you don't know where your food is coming from? Please. The general point is excellent and worth talking about, but it simply doesn't apply here.
Yes, I completely agree. Ordering a take away pizza yourself, buying a frozen one, ordering one at a restaurant, making your own using bought ingredients, they are all steps along that path. My point doesnt really belong here. In my last post I used the word "triggered" because that is what reading about this service did. I was witness to yet another small step being added to that path. At times like this maybe we can all step back for a moment and think about the ridiculousness of the system we have built.
Both my grandmothers grew up in a time and place where you had to grow your own food, and one of them still grows her own veggies and raises chickens. Frankly, a system where you're forced to do so, sucks, and they certainly don't miss the long hours, the hunger that comes from the inefficiency of the production, etc.
You say this system is wasteful, but I disagree - probably much less human effort was wasted achieving the basic need of feeding that person than what was needed before - which is well shown by the fact that it cost much less (even with the Magic fee) than it did back then.
I don't agree that merely having more layers makes it necessarily more wasteful - if they're the result of specialization, it isn't.
You have a point about the disconnection and unmindfulness that comes from having these layers, but it reverting to the previous processes is akin to burning your eyes so that you can better understand and empathize with the blind. That would be waste, and I think better ways of maintaining that connection are possible.
contd. Though maybe this is as good as forum as any? In order to have a less wasteful and whimsically arranged society perhaps we need to constantly analyse and critique it, to not ever be passive and thoughtless of the consequences of things?
I don't see it as horribly decadent. At least not in any obvious sense.
Anything that is more convenient than things were previously can be seen as decadent. I suspect so much that everyone takes for granted today would have seemed decadent to people 50 or 100 years ago.
Maybe there's a number of people that such a service would really help out? I don't know, but single parents are one group that comes to mind. For helping them get items that they can't easily go out and get themselves because of having to stay at home with the kids. It's hard to predict how new services may end up being used and being useful.
Maybe the current cost is too prohibitive for many people at the moment (i don't know what they charge and don't live in the US so wouldn't know how to judge the figures anyway), but if such a service proves useful and popular maybe the prices will come down. Anyway, I don't see anything inherently wrong with a service that not everyone can afford.
Even married couples with kids who make $100,000 a year and live in the midwest couldn't intelligently afford to use this service regularly. This is just my experience with a family that is able to cover expenses and put $500 in savings each month.
Well put. I had a long chaotic reply discussing why maybe living as we did 100 years ago (or more) might be a good idea, but, this is not really the place for that. Maybe I'll write a book the subject!
I do. I feel as if this solves nothing important, but makes it easier for people to be lazy - if they have money.
While businesses have to be focused on the markets that have money, I feel like this has gone to far; how can this be used to solve the problems of people who are busy but do not have money?
