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Each of these tiny niches is micro-small, but there are tens of millions of niches.
An open peer-to-peer scheme that enabled anyone to offer to the public ownership shares in their company (with some regulation) would revolutionize business.
That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Several decades ago international banks discovered they had better repayment rates when they lent small amounts to the poor than when they lent big amounts to rich state governments.
Innovation itself can be crowdsourced.
Another popular version of crowdsourcing appears, at first, to be less about collaboration and more about competition.
For instance, Netflix announced an award of $1 million to the programmers who could invent an algorithm that recommended movies 10 percent better than the algorithm they had.
But to repeat the lesson from social media: Harnessing the sharing of the crowd will often take you further than you think, and it is almost always the best place to start.
In the next three decades the greatest wealth—and most interesting cultural innovations—lie in this direction. The largest, fastest growing, most profitable companies in 2050 will be companies that will have figured out how to harness aspects of sharing that are invisible and unappreciated today.
There has never been a better time to be a reader, a watcher, a listener, or a participant in human expression. An exhilarating avalanche of new stuff is created every year.
The number of possibilities we confront has been expanded by a growing population, then expanded further by technology that eases creation.
Opportunities to invest explode. Courses to take, things to learn, ways to be entertained explode to astronomical proportions.
We’ll need help to navigate through its wilds. Life is short, and there are too many books to read.
Someone, or something, has to choose, or whisper in our ear to help us decide. We need a way to triage. Our only choice is to get assistance in making choices. We employ all manner of filtering to winnow the bewildering spread of options.
The problem is that we start with so many candidates that, even after filtering out all but one in a million, you still have too many.
First I’d like to be delivered more of what I know I like. This personal filter already exists.
The danger of being rewarded with only what you already like, however, is that you can spin into an egotistical spiral, becoming blind to anything slightly different, even if you’d love it.
This is called a filter bubble. The technical term is “overfitting.”
Second in the ideal approach, I’d like to know what my friends like that I don’t know about.
A third component in the ideal filter would be a stream that suggested stuff that I don’t like but would like to like.
As they mature, filtering systems will be extended to other decentralized systems beyond media, to services like Uber and Airbnb.
Ubiquitous tracking, interacting, and filtering means that we can cheaply assemble a multidimensional profile of ourselves, which can guide any custom services we desire.
We are still at the early stages in how and what we filter. These powerful computational technologies can be—and will be—applied to the internet of everything.
The inadequacies of a filter cannot be remedied by eliminating filters. The inadequacies of a filter can be remedied only by applying countervailing filters upon it.
“In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”
$3.37. That means that the value of our attention has been remarkably stable over 20 years. It seems we have some intuitive sense of what a media experience “should” cost, and we don’t stray much from that.
A fully decentralized peer-to-peer user-generated crowdsourced ad network would let users create ads, and then let user-publishers choose which ads they wanted to place on their site. Those user-generated ads that actually produced clicks would be kept and/or shared. Those that weren’t effective would be dropped.
Rather this new corner of ad space liberates the small to middle—a billion businesses who would have never thought of, let alone ever got around to, developing a cool advertising campaign.
The principle of paying people directly for their attention can be extended to advertising as well. We spend our attention on ads for free.
The future forms of attention will emerge from a choreography of streams of influence that are subject to tracking, filtering, sharing, and remixing. The scale of data needed to orchestrate this dance of attention reaches new heights of complexity.
We need a real-time system of filters upon filters in order to operate in the explosion of options we have created.
Over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.
This slide toward the free seems to be true for basic things like foodstuffs and materials (often called commodities), and complicated stuff like appliances, as well as services and intangibles.
The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences—which cannot be copied. Everything else becomes commoditized and filterable.
The value of experience is rising.
They are experiences. We give them our precious, scarce, fully unalloyed attention. To the creators of these experiences, our attention is worth a lot. Not coincidentally, humans excel at creating and consuming experiences.
More filtering is inevitable because we can’t stop making new things. Chief among the new things we will make are new ways to filter and personalize, to make us more like ourselves.
real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable. Growth comes from remixing.
all new technologies derive from a combination of existing technologies.
The more new genres, the more possible newer ones can be remixed from them. The rate of possible combinations grows exponentially, expanding the culture and the economy.
The accelerating fluidity of bits will continue to overtake media for the next 30 years, furthering a great remixing.
At the same time, the cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, YouTube Capture, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images and upsetting a great asymmetry that has been inherent in all media.
The vast majority of these non-Hollywood productions rely on remixing, because remixing makes it much easier to create.
If text literacy meant being able to parse and manipulate texts, then the new media fluency means being able to parse and manipulate moving images with the same ease.
As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate, and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience.
In addition to findability, another ongoing revolution within media can be considered “rewindability.”
The great historical shift from oral to written communications that occurred thousands of years ago gave the audience (readers) the possibility to scroll back to the beginning of a “speech,” by rereading
One of the revolutionary qualities of books is their ability to repeat themselves for the reader, at the reader’s request, as many times as wanted.
In fact, anything digital will have undo and rewindability as well as remixing.
Going forward, we are likely to get impatient with experiences that don’t have undo buttons, such as eating a meal. We can’t really replay the taste and smells of a meal. But if we could, that would certainly alter cuisine.
If we expect to scroll back, this will shift what we do the first time. The ability to scroll back easily, precisely, and deeply might change how we live in the future.
