this may all seem like the misbegotten reverie of a man trapped in his longing for a simpler day, but I actually think there’s a crucial applicable insight in this tale. It’s not like the video store was a nonprofit: it was a commercial enterprise, which offered a service within that era of the attention economy for a price, and sought to turn a profit. Its value was the outgrowth of a technological innovation (the creation of VHS cassettes, later DVDs) and then a set of businesses that grew up around that technology.
