Seven seconds is the life expectancy of a detail. Phone numbers, names, street signs, the exact words in the last sentence, all gone in seven seconds, give or take a few. Decay is the rule. Yet meaning persists, and if it has any value, it grows.
Meaning is the valued cargo in our trains of thought.
The trains come and go, but their purpose is to leave goods on the platform. None of them have anything to do with what markets were in the first place or how they really work. The first markets were places, not targets , demographics , seats , eyeballs or other abstractions. They were all embodied in seller and buyer. The first markets were central to culture itself.