
Our Ghost Kitchen Future - op03
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/our-ghost-kitchen-future
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dawg-
>By bringing in utilities like electricity, gas, and water, and setting up
“proprietary containers,” the company hopes to turn parking lots into
reconfigurable community hubs. Lots might be “formatted” to include mobile
kitchens, beer gardens, retail pop-ups, vertical farms, auto-body shops,
medical services, rental stations for electric vehicles, and so on. “We have
these pods, which arguably are not pretty, but they’re functional. They can
support any kind of application,” Ari Ojalvo, the C.E.O. of Reef, told me. “If
you want to put a grocery store in there, put a grocery store in there.
Laundry, put laundry.” Ojalvo compares his company to Apple: just as the App
Store allows developers to create and sell iOS-based tools and services, so
Reef provides infrastructure for parking-based businesses. “Apple uses
connectivity as a platform; we use proximity as a platform. We allow third-
party applications to stand on this proximity platform and get closer to
consumers,” he said.

Okay so they are buying real estate and renting it to businesses.

That's a perfectly sound business plan. But I think we are just through the
fucking looking glass with this language about "platforms" and "apps" applying
to regular old businesses which involve humans being in a physical space.

If replacing the term "retail space" with "proximity platform" isn't the most
inane tech bro crap I have ever heard in my life...

"parking-based businesses"...excuse me am I having a stroke?

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op03
hehehe thanks for that :)

