OSD 185: Hypebeasts as honeybees
This week, we’ll focus on two images.
The first one charts the adoption curves of the major technological advances since the 1890s:
The takeaway is that adoption is accelerating. Electricity took 2+ decades to get to 50% adoption. Smartphones got there in in less than 2 years.
Ok so that’s the first image. Here’s the second image, an IG post from @solscud007:
Alrighty, so a fun meme about the Hydra mount.
The tough thing about getting hyped about some fundamentally new product is that it always looks silly and fringe at first. The difference between good innovations and ones that fizzle is that the good ones eventually seem obviously good. Often they become so obviously good that people forget it was ever non-obvious. (No opinion here about the Hydra, and no clue if it’s any good. Just using it as a jumping-off point.) The point is that “is this just hype or is this real?” is a question you can only answer in retrospect. In the moment, “this looks weird” is actually not a great predictor of whether the product is actually any good.
If you respond, “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” to every new product, the seductive thing about that is that you’ll be right most of the time. Because most products fail. But that attitude’s failure mode is that it will miss the products that are actually good.
Squint at that and it turns out that the people who buy new gun stuff like it’s a limited-edition Air Jordan release are performing a valuable public service — they’re exploring every bit of new gear instantly, often at absurd expense to themselves. If something’s good, these scouts quickly spread the word like a bee telling everyone where the good flowers are.
Without these superfans, word would probably still get out. But it wouldn’t happen as quickly. Innovation works by compounding on top of previous innovation. So making your adoption curves steeper has two effects. First, that tech comes to market that much faster. Second, all future tech accelerates a bit. When that future tech arrives, it accelerates things too, and then you’re into a recursive loop of accelerating innovation until we’ve all got red dot mounts 3 feet high.
Ok maybe not that last part, but you get the point. We’ll leave you with a passage from “OSD 119: I’m not a LARPer, I’m just ahead of the curve”:
This also has implications for gun rights: innovation goes hand-in-hand with normalization. Glocks, for example, are ubiquitous today despite seeming new and scary in the ‘80s. That started with the innovation of creating the design. Early adopters liked that innovation, which led to the gun being used. And use led to normalization. Everything from red dot sights to PMAGs to the thumbs-forward grip can thank that same process for its success.
Body armor and NVGs are on the vanguard today. In a few years, they’ll either be ubiquitous or they’ll be replaced by something better. And early adopters are putting in the work to figure out which it should be. That’s praiseworthy.
This week’s links
James Yeager passed away this week
James was one of the first in the gun content space to build a large audience on social media. He passed away this week from ALS.
Garand Thumb on mountain recce camo
Unique video in that there’s not much content out there on IR and thermal camo.
The attorneys general of California and New York pressured the major credit card companies to capture more data about gun sales
They pressured the companies to add an MCC (merchant category code) specifically for gun shops, on the theory that this would facilitate the tracking and reporting of suspicious purchases.
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Where could I look up the math behind the detection ratio?