Web Content Management

Chapter 7. Content Aggregation

In his book Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies,¹ César Hidalgo discusses a super car: the Bugatti Veyron.

The author calculates that the Bugatti—which has a sticker price of $2.5 million—is worth $600 per pound. This is quite a bit more than the $10 per pound of a Hyundai or even the $60 per pound of a BMW.

Now imagine that you ran the Bugatti into a wall at 100 mph. Assuming you survived the crash and then gathered up every last piece of the car, it would still weigh the same as the instant before it hit the wall. But it wouldn’t be worth nearly $600 per pound any longer. It’s the same steel, rubber, and glass it was, it’s just not in the same form.

Here’s the key:

The dollar value of the car evaporated in the seconds it took you to crash it against that wall, but its weight did not. So where did the value go? The car’s dollar value evaporated in the crash not because the crash destroyed the atoms that made up the Bugatti but because the crash changed the way in which these parts were arranged. As the parts that made the Bugatti were pulled apart and twisted, the information that was embodied in the Bugatti was largely destroyed.

The last sentence is key: the value of the Bugatti wasn’t in the raw materials of the car, but rather in how these materials were arranged and ordered. Value is created by putting smaller pieces together to work as a whole. The selection, combination, and ordering of the parts is more ...