The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand Year History

The "code economy " refers to the evolving technologically-driven environment we live in. In services or manufacturing, outputs emerge more and more from coded computerized systems and less as assembled mechanical devices and procedures. Industries seek algorithms to make software not only more pliable for firms' development of products and services, but also to market them and ease their purchase and use by consumers. This process automates jobs. It gives increasing economic advantage to entrepreneurs who can harness "code " to serve on the large scale the growing niches into which consumers are organized. Yet, mastering the "code " also gives individuals and informal social networks the resources to bundle products and services and put them up for sale and convenient use at more local levels. The economics of the rest of the 21st century will see the movement away from traditional firms and more toward people's relying on themselves as the sources of their livelihoods. The code...