What Happens When Ideas Have Sex

Dense cities and new tools like social networking help to make ideas promiscuous. Like the growth of trade in an earlier era such exchanges generate progress and prosperity. Those are some of the concepts spelled out in today’s Wall Street Journal by Matt Ridley in his fascinating essay, Why Humans Triumphed, about the evolution of humankind

Although anthropologists once believed that humans grew to dominate the planet because of the evolution of their brain, Ridley says research suggests what really made humans so strong was their ability to work as collectives, specializing in certain kinds of work and then exchanging one kind of work for another. Where trade in goods was the source of our early strength, today it is the trade in ideas that is the source of our prosperity. “The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefoldworld-widein little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.”

There was a time when I believed the Internet, which allows people to exchange ideas, and operate businesses, over long distances, would negate the need for people to live in crowded, expensive cities. But as we are learning, metropolitan areas like Seattle with active art scenes are the places where smart and innovative people like to congregate. It is in these environments where they meet, exchange ideas and create new technologies and business models. Those new ideas, in turn, procreate, generating new generations of ideas. Ideas turn into products and services that then evolve as ever new business. Each new service provides tools that enable us to be more productive, further adding to the speed of innovation. This development of new ideas is accelerated by competition from Silicon Valley and fueled by a steady supply of new talent from China and India. The flowering of new social networking companies in Seattle is an example of this. At first blush, many of these companies seem absurd. I Can Has Cheezburger is an example. But then it becomes clear that every new connection encourages exchange. Maybe a lot of the material traded on Facebook and Youtube is silly. But those websites are new arenas for human discourse that stimulate new ways of thinking, new ways of looking at the world. I met recently with Michael Weithorn, the director of “A Little Help” a movie starring Jenna Fischer and Chris O’Donnell, which premiered at the Seattle Film Festival on Friday night. He began in television, and this movie is his first full-length feature. He told me that there are people in Hollywood now who first made a name for themselves on Youtube.

While Hollywood is likely to remain the center for film, it has the biggest collection of script writers, actors and film-makers, Seattle is world-class when it comes to the world of idea and software, the primary way in which ideas are turned into products and services. We are creating many of the new products that increasing man’s ability to trade in ideas. These activities generate the excitement that draws young new talent to the region. It’s a positive feedback loop that assures Seattle a bright future.