Our Non-Fungible World
In 1989, Bill Gates founded Corbis to purchase and license exclusive digital rights to great works of art. Most museums were reluctant to participate. In 1995, Corbis bought the Bettman Archive of 16 million photographs for an undisclosed sum. In…
Ghost Town and Peak Valley
Ghost Town? A few weeks ago I took my car to the mechanic in downtown San Francisco. It was nice day, with nothing else to do and contemplating the assorted possibilities of COVID exposure in an Uber or public transport,…
The Incorporeal Economy
In October 2006, Netflix launched a contest. They offered a $1 million prize to any team that could improve their movie-recommendation software engine by 10%. Netflix’s global hackathon eventually engaged 30,000 engineers loosely organized and endlessly re-organized into hundreds of…