Who Owns the Future?

In the network age there can be collusion without colluders, conspiracies without conspirators

Siren Servers do repattern the world, however, and conventional business thinking is inadequate to describe how they work

It ideally doesn’t do or make anything. The plan is simply to channel the information of those who do act in the world.

When copying is easy, there is almost no intrinsic scarcity, and therefore market value collapses.

The legitimizing of the levees of the middle classes reinforced the legitimacy of the levees of the rich. A symmetrical social contract between nonequals made modernity possible.

The recent breakdowns of finance can be understood as the symptoms of a fallacious hope that information technology can make promises on its own, without people

Artificial memory became more person-centric out of necessity

Ordinary people can help create new money by making promises. You constrain the future by making a plan, and a promise to keep to it. Money is created in response, because in making that promise you have created value. New money is created to represent that value

Not all new wealth is created from game-changing events like inventions or natural resource discoveries.† Some of it comes from the ability of ordinary people to keep promises

Any information technology, from the most ancient money to the latest cloud computing, is based fundamentally on design judgments about what to remember and what to forget