EPTTo me, this was the chapter that resonated the most with me. I think I've been searching for an environment where people pursue creative monopolies as opposed to slugging it out with defined rivals.
This leads me to my other point: the funny thing is that Silicon Valley is opposed with horizontal (or classic) competition, even if it professes to be about creative monopolies. From 2000 through 2015, it was a grand chess match for people's attention; from 2015 onwards, it will be a competition for proprietary sets of data. S/he who wins the following equation wins:
Quantity of data x quality of data x ability to process data, broken out as follows
Quantity (or Q1) = rate of ingestion x ingestion points
Quality (or Q2) = h (age of the data), where h is a "half-life" function of the data's uniqueness (e.g. how it becomes more and more known over time) that is unique to each "class" of data
Ability to process data = algorithm efficiency, which itself is a recursive function predicated on aggregate Q1*Q2 from prior time periods
Which means the game becomes very much about your ability to ingest the freshest data the mostest and process it more efficiently than any of your peers.
The logical conclusion of this is a single entity (I won't call it a company) that owns everything, because it knows everything.
Prediction time:
1. I predict governments will nationalize all chunks of the above equation, or they will fade from relevance
2. Since social media provides such a huge Q1*Q2, governments will either nationalize social media or social media will overthrow governments
3. Since algorithm power appears to be linked to compute infrastructure, certain governments will subsidize compute investment to excess (think the Soviet Union and blast furnaces)
4. Much as bankrupt cities have privatized their parking spaces or trash collection, they will soon privatize their municipal CCTV feeds to Google or Facebook for facial tracking of people everywhere. As that experiment generates success in public safety and public finances, expect people to become more okay with leaps and bounds towards computational omniscience.
5. The next war will be fought over data access - the two sides of world war 3 will each be alliances that are mutually exclusive data collection environments.
6. The final frontiers of data will be genetic variation and physio/psychological data - expect at least one company to emerge that gives away free implants in people in exchange for a live feed of your genetic sequence and body/mind state. Eventually governments will mandate these implants, because y'know, it helps the war effort.
5 means there will be one alliance that "wins", so everyone will be in a single data collection environment. 6 means there is no escape from data collection. 5+6 means humans will become a literal hivemind. The concept of a human soul as a discrete von Neumann machine will be passe. We will attain immortality by shedding the self.
As to how that relates to creative monopolies - well, if society shifts its value base to chasing creative monopolies, then it accelerates the coming of this day.
EDIT: I guess this is how you go full Silicon Valley... you oscillate between the Singularity and bitching about traffic and housing prices.
