More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The trains have been planted off the Delaware shore to create an artificial reef, providing a durable shelter for mussels and sponges that are otherwise challenged by the sandy floors of the northeast seaboard.
No longer needed for mass transportation, the abandoned subway cars have taken on a new occupation in their retirement years. They are now ecosystem engineers.
Platforms have a natural appetite for trash, waste, and abandoned goods.
innovation thrives in discarded spaces. Emergent platforms derive much of their creativity from the inventive and economical reuse of existing resources, and, as any urbanite will tell you, the most expensive resource in a big city is real estate.
Artists, poets, and entrepreneurs are the vibrant fish swimming among the coral of the Keeling Islands: they find it easier to live in an exoskeleton that has long since been abandoned by its original host.
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
The zooxanthella and the coral are like two neighbors who miraculously turn out to have a pressing need for each other’s garbage, and thus meet every night to swap trash cans.
The entire coral reef ecosystem is characterized by similarly intricate and interdependent food webs,
the productive reuse of energy sources by so many densely interconnected species means that the habitat can do much more with less. You get a watery metropolis with astonishing diversity in an environment that by rights should be as desolate as the sandy atoll above sea level. It is not competition that drives that process, but rather the inventive collaborations of density.
Above the waterline, on those vacant atolls, a markedly different landscape appears, much closer to the wasteful ecosystems of deserts.
The Web is not simply an ecosystem; it is a specific type of ecosystem. It started as a desert, and it has been steadily transforming into a coral reef.
The information is not simply flowing in this system; it’s being recycled and put to new uses, transformed by a diverse network of other species in the ecosystem, each with its own distinct function.
the real benefit of stacked platforms lies in the knowledge you no longer need to have. You don’t need to know how to send signals to satellites or parse geo-data to send that tweet circulating through the Web’s ecosystem.
the doxa of market capitalism as an unparalleled innovation engine has long leaned on stories like Willis Carrier’s miraculous cooling device as a cornerstone of its faith.6 In many respects, these beliefs made sense, because the implicit alternatives were the planned economies of socialism and communism.
Distant reading takes the satellite view of the literary landscape, looking for larger patterns in the history of the stories we tell each other.
the diversity of forms is strikingly balanced by their uncannily similar life spans, which Moretti attributes to underlying generational turnover. Every twenty-five to thirty years a new batch of genres becomes dominant, as a new generation of readers seeks out new literary conventions.
Classifying two hundred good ideas into four broad quadrants
Because innovation is subject to historical changes—many of which are themselves the result of influential innovations in the transmission of information—the four quadrants display distinct shapes at different historical periods.
the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals.
This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed.
the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries—da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo.
Scanning the next two centuries, we see that the pattern changes dramatically (see page 229). Solo, amateur innovation (quadrant three) surrenders much of its lead to the rising power of networks and commerce (quadrant four).
Many of those innovation hubs exist outside the marketplace.
most of the key technologies that powered the Industrial Revolution were instances of what scholars call “collective invention.”
the explosion of fourth-quadrant activity.
where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we’ve erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others.
All of the patterns of innovation we have observed in the previous chapters—liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity, noise, exaptation, emergent platforms—do best in open environments where ideas flow in unregulated channels.
Because capitalist economies proved to be more innovative than socialist and communist economies, the story went, the deliberate inefficiencies of the market-based approach must have benefits that exceed their costs. But, as we have seen, this is a false comparison. The test is not how the market fares against command economies. The real test is how it fares against the fourth quadrant.
for the most part the university remains an information commons.
open networks of academic researchers often create emergent platforms where commercial development becomes possible.
Because these open systems operate outside the conventional incentives of capitalism and resist the usual strictures of intellectual property, the mind reflexively wants to put them on the side of socialism. And yet they are as far from the state-centralized economies that Marx and Engels helped invent as they are from greed-is-good capitalism.
They anticipated, correctly, that analogies would be drawn between Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” and the competitive selection of capitalist free-market economies. Marx and Engels just assumed those analogies would be launched as critiques of capitalism.
As it turned out, the exact opposite happened.
Aligning them with the animal world didn’t discredit markets, as Engels had predicted. It made markets look natural.
Yet the true story of nature is not one of exclusively ruthless competition between selfish agents, as Darwin himself realized.
The popular caricature of Darwin’s theory emphasizes competitive struggle above everything else. Yet so many of the insights his theory made possible have revealed the collaborative and connective forces at work in the natural world.
We have been living with a comparable caricature in our assumptions about cultural innovation.
In Darwin’s language, the open connections of the tangled bank have been just as generative as the war of nature.
Ideas, Jefferson argues, have an almost gravitational attraction toward the fourth quadrant.
there is nothing “natural” about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law.
You need only survey a coral reef (or a rain forest) for a few minutes to see that competition for resources abounds in this space, as Darwin rightly observed. But that is not the source of its marvelous biodiversity.
What makes the reef so inventive is not the struggle between the organisms but the way they have learned to collaborate—the
This is the ultimate explanation of Darwin’s Paradox: the reef has unlocked so many doors of the adjacent possible because of the way it shares.
Ideas rise in crowds, as Poincaré said. They rise in liquid networks where connection is valued more than protection.
You may not be able to turn your government into a coral reef, but you can create comparable environments on the scale of everyday life: in the workplaces you inhabit; in the way you consume media; in the way you augment your memory. The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your
...more
