The emergent property market

Abstract

The title of this piece is a somewhat heavy-handed word play. The property market I’m writing about is the market in intellectual property, which is broken in so many ways, evidenced by the existence of patent mountains and patent trolls, fighting over how many angles they can fit in the 360 degrees around the head of a pin, rather than actually innovating. (It is well known in creative tech circles that pausing to talk to the IP lawyers would never have led to the discovery of the internet protocol). The emergent property I’m referring to is the possibility that such a complex system could fairly suddenly exhibit some new behaviour. In this article, I speculate that this new behaviour could just be that the idea of property ceases to exist. The article is written somewhat derivatively after the 1960s science fiction style of writers such as Cyril Kornbluth, JG Ballard, and John Brunner. Any resemblance to their very creative output is entirely good luck rather than actual skill.