Alexis Madrigal: SunChips and Supercapitalism

I love it when an article on an industry development takes things to an entirely different level and connects the dots between the punch-drunk happenings of now and the aspirations and achievements of the past. Alexis Madrigal does exactly that in this piece in The Atlantic, juxtaposing the wondrous but failed (at least in the US) experiment of SunChips’ notoriously noisy biodegradable bag with the 19th century utopian aspirations of American industrial pioneers. 

His point? 

We stopped fixing bridges and dams and pipelines — and started turning out ever more complex variations on things that we already have and that work just damn fine.

But perhaps realizing that we expend massive resources developing chip bags with just the right sound is a good thing. The silliness of the enterprise is the sort of thing that could symbolize why we need to do something different. And then we can, as Silicon Valley luminary Tim O’Reilly likes to say, “work on stuff that matters.”

Amen, Alexis. Amen.