Historically, it has always only taken 'a village' to raise a civilization. Is a million (~1 in a thousand) inquisitive minds (globally) too generous or too low a figure? There has to be at least 100k serious minds and they are networked. That's a lot of brain power. And the trash consumers are definitely serving a purpose. They are both social ballast (providing the necessary inertia for stability of norms) and economic precursors (by fueling the low value economic activities that support high value 0.1% projects and aims). Those n billion eyeballs are the reason the 100K can teleconference in realtime and soon have AI assistants chipping in.
Are they? Shouldn't the place be famous by now where those 100k people meet? I would rather think that those 100k are spread all over the internet and that their innovations are lost like the many Yanomamö innovations that must have happened over time.
Everything is organized in timelines. Things fade into obscurity once the focus shifts. There is plenty of innovation but I doubt that a network of 100k minds can be maintained without everybody else trying to steer it into their directions and thus destroying it.
OpenAI vs Google, Meta's legless avatars, etc. FAANG is known, but are they the village to rise the next level of civilization?
People at FAANG are at the center of our culture. Can they question the foundation of their wealth? Maybe Apple will allow them to sacrifice a cash cow. Otherwise, it takes an outsider like Tesla to facilitate change that had been possible for quite some time.
