This relative lack of envy is one sure sign of a Golden Age, says Peter Hall. Here he is describing turn-of-the-century Paris but could just as easily be describing twenty-first-century Reykjavík: “They lived and worked in each other’s pockets. Any innovation, any new trend, was immediately known, and could be freely incorporated into the work of any of the others.” In other words, the Parisian artists of 1900 believed in open-source software. So, too, do Icelanders. Sure, they compete, but in the way the word was originally intended. The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin competure,
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