CoolHunters
ThoughtStorms Wiki
I didn't find the concept of "cool hunting" very interesting. After all "cool" in this sense of "cool consumer habits" was pretty tawdry.
But last night I realized that "cool hunters" are, of course, the market-traders of NetoCracy. Their job, to discover "high-quality" obscure information and bring it to a wider audience (not to the general public, but a set of companies who then bring it to the general public.
Compare BrokerageAndClosure
WilliamGibson has a novel about them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PatternRecognition(novel)
Freestyling. Compare the basic model of a SteamEngine as used in the development of the second law of ThermoDynamics.
A steam engine consists of
- a store of heat
- an engine
- a sink of cool
Heat flows from the hot store to the sink and the amount of energy available depends on the difference between the store and the sink. Now, markets have traders who arbitrage prices. CoolHunters are one of the professions which is about divulgating information from a small group to a larger group. In doing so, they devalue the information
STOP PRESS : they don't "devalue" it. Or at least, not it's UseValue. They devalue it's ExchangeValue. But information isn't "exchanged". But there nevertheless should be an equivalent to ExchangeValue which is dependent on the desirability and obscurity of the info. And of course, what cool hunters and other info processors do is help arbitrage or help the work of entropy as the information is diffused. They do some real work. Consume some friction of their own. And spread it into a wider pool. But clearly the same info can do work several times as it spreads.
This is probably InformationEconomics 101. I wonder what the technical terms for all this stuff is.
More :
- TypesOfInformationTraders
- NetworkEpistemology
- DanahBoydOnMySpace
- OnEpidemiology
- Cool brains (hilarious) : http://web.archive.org/web/20041025075544/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/brain.html