The “Yea, it’s good enough” Economy

Here’s a thought exercise: was Tiger King actually a good television show, or was it the perfect storm of Netflix having 180 million subscribers and it being dropped during the earliest stages of the pandemic? My fiancee and I debated this a couple of times, and I’ve seen a lot of memes to that extent as well.

Yesterday, though, the idea was mentioned in a New York Times “On Tech” newsletter, including this section:

Amazon might not have that one thing you want to buy, but it’ll have five other things that are perfectly fine substitutes. Good enough is why I recently sat through multiple episodes of a bad old television series. Good enough is why Apple is combining multiple not-must-have digital services into one. Netflix, TikTok and YouTube are powerhouses of the good enough economy.

Yep. And that means mass-scale companies in terms of users, so-called FAANG companies, are basically the main gatekeepers of the modern world. None of this is new information or surprising; I think most people that have a general idea of what’s going on in tech and the bigger ecosystem of the world understand that, say, Facebook or Google drives a lot of information and people’s views.

But it’s funny, because we basically do live in a “Good Enough” economy, whereby it’s OK, maybe it’s not perfect, but you know, here’s five other things to watch or add to my cart or click on for information.

Do we think it’s kind of a race to the quality bottom? Your take?

Ted Bauer