Capitalism’s brutal lessons for BuzzFeed, Vice, Gawker. And: Will Tucker Carlson’s Twitter bet pay off?
In his novel This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald makes occasional mentions of something he calls “the electric.” The book, Fitzgerald’s first, was written in 1919 and published in 1920, precisely the era when cars were overtaking the horse and buggy; “the electric” was how people a century ago referred to an electric car.
Electric cars were expensive, but if you had money, you favored them because they didn’t require a hand crank. It wasn’t long, though, before the electric was overtaken by Henry Ford’s cheaper, more reliable—and gasoline-powered—Model T. After which every entrepreneur who had bet on electric cars was soon out of business. They’d made a bet on the future, and they’d lost. Welcome to capitalism.
