Aging & Wisdom Quote by Joichi Ito

Ito is picking a fight with the default morality of the internet economy: that value comes from owning pipes, warehouses, and rights, then charging admission. By flipping “delivery” into the lesser term, he’s arguing that in an attention-scarce culture, logistics are commoditized and discovery is the scarce resource. The real power is no longer moving a thing, but making a thing matter again.

The phrasing is telling. “Old stuff” is deliberately deflationary, almost provocative. He’s not romanticizing archives; he’s defending the messy, democratic practice of finding forgotten work, recontextualizing it, and pointing others toward it. “Find, remix and direct attention” is a creator’s workflow, but also a curator’s: search, transform, amplify. It’s an implicit manifesto for the linkers, DJs, meme-makers, librarians, and platform users who generate cultural value without necessarily originating the underlying content.

Then comes the jab: “deliver it or sit on it.” That’s a shot at incumbents - distributors, publishers, studios, patent-holders - whose business models depend on gatekeeping and artificial scarcity. “Waiting for someone to show up” paints them as passive rent-seekers, not contributors. The subtext is normative and political: reward should track cultural labor (making meaning, shaping taste) rather than mere possession or control.

Context matters: Ito, as a tech-world figure shaped by early web ideals, is channeling the ethos of open networks and remix culture while also speaking to platform-era economics. It’s a pro-commons argument dressed as a market argument: if discovery drives demand, then the people producing discovery are doing the work - and the compensation system is lagging behind.