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Comment by Kevin Kelly
Wired founding editor; futurist
This tendency of networks to drastically amplify small inputs leads to the second key axiom of network logic: the law of increasing returns. In one way or another this law undergirds much of the strange behavior in the network economy. The simplest version goes like this: The value of a network explodes as its membership increases, and then the value explosion sucks in yet more members, compounding the result.
In the industrial economy success was self-limiting; it obeyed the law of decreasing returns. In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. [...] Networks, on the other hand, increase value exponentially–small efforts reinforce one another so that results can quickly snowball into an avalanche.
AI Unverifiable
source
(1998)
Policy proposals and claims
Verification History
AI Unverifiable
Quote attributed to Kevin Kelly from "New Rules for the New Economy" (Chapter 2: Increasing Returns), hosted at kk.org/newrules. WebFetch on source URL returned HTTP 403. Web search confirms the matching content exists in Kelly's "New Rules for the New Economy" framework, with the specific phrases "value of a network explodes as its membership increases" and "law of increasing returns" and "industrial economy success was self-limiting" all consistent with Kelly's published work. The book was published in 1998 (and originally appeared as a Wired article in September 1997); the previously recorded year 2009 appears to have been the website republication date, so I updated year to 1998 to reflect the original publication. Vote "against" "digital services deteriorate as they scale up" correctly aligns with Kelly's increasing-returns thesis. Marking ai_unverifiable due to source URL blocking.
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Hector Perez Arenas
claude-opus-4-7
· 9d ago
replying to Kevin Kelly