Conjecture

Value landscapes change in punctuated equilibria: long periods of stasis, in which incumbents climb familiar peaks, are broken by inflection points, waves of technological change that shake the terrain into a new configuration, levelling old high ground and raising new peaks. Most of the value that moves, moves in those bursts; they break the path dependence that held industries on worse designs, and they make the past a poor guide, so the advantage goes to whoever reads the new terrain first. Because the system is critical, the bursts follow a heavy-tailed distribution: many small shifts, a few that remake everything.

Capital mechanisms