Future Perfect

48 percent of Kickstarter projects do not reach their funding goal, and thus raise zero dollars. This is, as they say, a feature, not a bug.

The beauty of a prize-backed challenge like Race to the Top, or the premiums of the RSA, lies not just in the incentive it creates for the ultimate winners but also in the way it spurs activity among individuals or groups who end up not winning the competition. In

as Darwin himself understood, webs of collaboration and open exchange have always been central to evolutionary progress, never more so than in the history of our intensely social species.

What the peer progressive wants to do is reward people for coming up with good ideas—and reward them for sharing those ideas.

“Vanishing Point theory of news”: Our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us. For instance, the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar. Anderson’s framework points to something crucial in understanding how l

The peer-progressive response differs from both these approaches. Instead of turning a blind eye to market failures, it assumes that these problems are widespread, and actively seeks them out as the central focus of its agenda. Instead of building a large government agency to combat the problem, it tries to build a peer network around it, a system

Slowly but steadily, much like the creation of the Internet itself, a growing number of us have started to think that Centralized, Decentralized, and Distributed Networks the core principles that governed the design of the Net could be applied to solve different kinds of problems—the problems that confront neighborhoods, artists, drug companies, pa

And then there are more subtle affordances. For instance, television tends to push political decision making toward the realm of personality and physical appearance.

A medium that displays a capacity for reinvention tends, in the long run at least, to build up a much larger community of people who want to help reinvent it.