The internet is the most effective means of giving stuff away for free that humanity has ever devised. Actually making money from it is not just hard… - John Lanchester

: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as parts of stem (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”). When it comes to the shiniest wonders of the modern world—as the in our pockets communicate with satellites—science and technology are indeed hand in glove. For much of , though, technology had nothing to do with science. Many of our most significant inventions are pure tools, with no scientific method behind them. Wheels and wells, cranks and mills and gears and ships’ masts, clocks and rudders and crop rotation: all have been crucial to human and economic development, and none historically had any connection with what we think of today as science. Some of the most important things we use every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method.

We are more connected in more ways to more people than we ever have been at any point in human history. This is changing everything, and it would be deeply strange if it didn’t change money too.

Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin. That’s technology, not science.