The Tech Bloom is another of the WorldChanging ur-texts. Alex wrote it as an editorial for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer around the same time we were starting WorldChanging, and it captured beautifully an idea that has come to inform much of what we do: we are in the midst of an explosion of collaboration fueled in part by technology and in part by a growing recognition that bottom-up solutions can have the deepest impact.

The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.