Beyond the Flywheel
For twenty years, we've lived with a particular story about how digital growth works—the flywheel spinning faster with each turn, users attracting more users, data improving services which draw more data; it's a narrative that explained why Amazon felt inevitable, why Facebook seemed unstoppable, why Uber could burn billions and still look like the future. The flywheel wasn't entirely wrong, of course. It captured something real about network effects and compounding advantages; it gave us services that were genuinely transformative, at least for a while. Yet what looked like perpetual motion from one angle, we now see, looked like extraction from another.