Eleven wafers and one question

On the counter of a small shop in Imbaba there are eleven wafer bars in a row, and from a step back they are the same bar.

Same size, same shiny wrapper, the same photograph of a wafer split open to show the cream inside. One says hazelnut, one says strawberry, one promises extra crunch. A child with a few coins picks whichever is nearest.

Each of them began as somebody's decision to make what was already selling. That is not laziness. It is how the whole machine works. Factories, distributors, trucks, salesmen, the people who stock the shelves: all of it is built to find something people buy and produce more of it, faster, cheaper, in more places. Almost everything on any shelf is a version of something that sat on that shelf before.

And the machine is astonishingly good at it. Give it a product that sells in one district and within a year it will be in every village with a shop, at a price a child can pay.

What it does not do is ask what it is making more of. It cannot. Its only question is whether the last batch sold. So we get more wafers, more flavours of the same crisp, more cartons of the same detergent, an ever thicker layer of slightly different sameness.

None of that will stop. The machine will carry whatever it is pointed at, with the same energy either way. So the interesting question for anyone making things is not whether they can make more. They can, easily. It is which thing deserves the more.