I don’t think ‘public utility’ is the most useful metaphor to understand what Twitter and its peers actually are.Public utilities make sense when the product is a simple commodity, essential for everyday life, and delivered through a set of pipes that are incredibly expensive to install and maintain.
Thiel fellowship should compete head on with Harvard.
Backing up: Thiel Fellowship was started with the intent to show that you could get 20 kids a year to drop out of school and that they would be more successful as a result.
It's clearly been a runaway success and the results of the... See more
Idea machines are not new, but the form in which they appear is changing. For most of the 20th century, the home for idea machines was foundations, first popularized by John D. Rockefeller in the 1910s.
DAOs are novelty search engines which can more efficiently explore a search space by enabling many cooperating teams to collect and integrate stepping stones.
Consider vacuum tubes. It was obvious to nobody that they would enable the first computers. This only became clear after vacuum tubes and associated computing discoveries had been made, so that someone could make the connection. If you had set out to build a computer in the 1800s (as Charles Babbage did), it’s unlikely that you would have drawn... See more
the problem is with the interface of scientific literature. We cannot expect the wider population to be scientifically literate if they are not given the capability of understanding the artifacts we use to communicate about new scientific developments.