Nobody Walks to Canterbury

Will Manidis, writing a beautiful essay about the medieval parish system and the digital economy:

The great work of the digital economy is not that it has created new things worth having. It is that it's made the distance to everything approach zero.

The frame is sharp: the parish solved for access, the pilgrimage solved for meaning, and the entire internet has been a parish project. When everything is one tap away, nothing is worth the journey. Only things that function as "sacred centers" — the three-star restaurant, the first edition, the destination you'd board a plane for — still generate real pull.

It's a lovely piece. The Michelin insight alone is worth the read — that the stars were never a quality rating but a distance rating. Worth a stop, worth a detour, worth a special journey. That reframe lands.

Where it wobbles: Manidis tells a story about tech executives spending six figures on first-edition sci-fi novels they'll never read, and frames this as modern pilgrimage — "demonstrating movement and sacrifice towards the sacred totem." But a medieval pilgrim arrived sore and broke. These guys have their dealer fly to them in San Francisco. That's not pilgrimage. That's collecting. Scarcity is doing the work here, not sacredness, and the essay needs them to be the same thing.

The binary is also too clean. "Either it makes someone get on a plane, or it's scrolling" is a great line, but it defines away the entire middle of human experience where real value gets exchanged without anyone booking a flight. Three focused hours with a difficult book isn't a pilgrimage, but it isn't scrolling either.

The piece is itself a product of the dynamic it describes: beautifully packaged, rhetorically confident, and arriving at a conclusion that flatters people who fly to London and buy rare books. The insight that convenience dissolves meaning is real. The suggestion that only the ultra-scarce retains value is a conclusion that happens to validate a very specific tax bracket.