The Triumph of Gray

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In the world of digital electronic commerce, the severely binary black-and-white dichotomy is giving way to an ascendant gray.

In the black-and-white world… well, things were either black or white. Ambiguity and ambivalence were frowned upon.

A brand, shiny, new car was good; a used car was a testimony to your lack of means. A new book right off the bookseller’s shelf was good; a used book was for penny pinchers and bookworms willing to rummage through boxes of such books at garage sales or thrift stores. A fresh shrink-wrapped videotape of a popular movie was the way to get great entertainment; a shoddy copy of the video was for those losers who could not afford the real thing…

The commercial capitalism of the high-industrial era was based on private, individualized, one-item/one-owner model of property. The economy – based increasingly on the proliferation and expansion of the muscular, giant, smoke-belching manufactory – depended on new goods being churned out en masse and sold to endless streams of customers in national and later global markets. The seamy businesses of recycling, reusing, reselling, refurbishing – these sorry relics of the old, penurious, preindustrial times – were shunned at worst and tolerated at best. In fact, the epithet “Used Car Salesman” came to characterize the worst concatenation of dishonest human traits.

This still was the case way back in the ancient early 1990s… before the assault of digital e-commerce and person-to-person (P2P) networks.

Then came eBay… and Napster… and Amazon…

eBay made the garage sale fashionable and profitable… it was no longer the recycling of junk, it was the global offering of oh-so-wonderful-must-have-bric-a-brac…

Napster was quashed but its mutated offspring transformed the sharing of music and video files from “copying and piracy” into a technical art form worthy of cocktail party adulation…

Alongside the brand new editions of bestsellers and weighty academic tomes, Amazon.com started offering cut-rate used copies of the same books via its network of affiliated merchants….

Even arcane B2B Exchanges made it possible to pick up surplus and/or used computers, armored vehicles, airplanes, soda ash, steel girders, or what-have-you at discount prices…

Such digital assaults on black-and-white capitalism are eroding its foundation and slowly promoting gray flea-market bazaarism, the outlines of which we barely understand yet. Gray markets are moving out of murky shadows and basking in glorious cybernetic sunshine. Gray is good, gray is great… as long as gray is digitally encased.

Gray capitalism – if it can be called that – is not even a decade old. Those who make a living from the commercialization of creativity – book publishers, music labels, and movie studios – either hate it or are trying to find opportunities in this fast-spreading grayness. Economists, politicians, and social scientists are mostly clueless about how to decipher, contain, fight, or promote such changes.

The emergent gray economy is based on partially private, shared/sharable, multi-item/multi-owner models – and I would refrain from adding the words “of property”, because that term does not quite apply to these emergent phenomena. The digital gray economy is based on the global proliferation and expansion of communication networks. Businesses of recycling, reusing, reselling, refurbishing, remixing, relaunching, and reengineering are ascendant.

Yeah… at this messy interchange of technology, economy, politics, and culture, the time has come for some serious rethinking!


Nik Dholakia




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