It's kind of interesting, in a peculiar way, when you realize a post that's written start to finish for about 4 hours, when it gets published it shows a 3 min read. The time difference is just huge and I wonder how much of the 4 hours is just thinking, deleting, rewriting the same sentence five different ways until it sounds right.
On a higher time frame, movies are made over months, sometimes years, and the final cut that gets released is normally just under 2 hours. I'm sure there's an element of perfection here that works on having a specific vision replicated on the screen.
It looks almost wasteful on the surface with regards to the ratio of input to output. However, I'm of the opinion that it's the cost of excellence, and such a gap between effort and outcome only reinforces that much of value is in the process as opposed to the event.
Keep calm and carry on
Not so surprisingly, there are the inversions where the ratio flips entirely, i.e., highly leveraged ideas. Example being a single tweet can take 30 seconds to compose and spawn days of debate, think pieces, and cultural commentary.
Obviously, these happen more within the digital realm, I don't think much of this inversion is applicable to physical labor since output remains strictly tethered to man-hours.
At least to me, what makes these inversions seem significant is they show the asymmetry of influence towards opposite direction. It could be that the viral tweet mentioned in the example distilled a cultural tension that's been building for years into 280 characters.
Actually, this was the case more or less for the famous "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster. It's a simple five-word phrase created in 1939 that lay dormant for decades before exploding into mainstream media.
Immediacy premium
Still in the realm of peculiarity, isn't it irrational that a book costs $17 and contains five years of research, 18 months of writing, and countless revisions, only takes me about eight hours to read?
Meanwhile, a meal at a nice restaurant costs $50, took 30 minutes to prepare, and I consume it in 15 minutes.
Why don't I blink at the meal's price (I do, sometimes) but deliberate with the book?
Part of this is tangibility. The meal is immediate, sensory, ephemeral, I can't resell it or lend it to a friend. The book persists, which makes it seem less urgent or exclusive.
There's something else at play too, unconsciously anchoring value to consumption time rather than creation time. A movie ticket which can costs $15 for two hours can seem reasonable. Same $15 for a three-minute song feels super absurd, even when the song might have taken longer to produce than any individual scene in the film.
If invisible labor is undervalued, what would it mean to intentionally price or present work in ways that make the effort visible rather than invisible?
I'd slide toward a "proof of work" model, which is basically the price reflects the years of expertise poured into the seconds of output, rather than the clock on the wall.
In some ways, blockchain technology is already helping via creating an immutable record of provenance, however it's not yet to the extent of overturning our deep-seated habit of pricing goods by arbitrary market conventions.
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