I’ve always been fascinated by connections between corporations. They’re immaterial entities with a material footprint, and they wear many faces – it’s as if we live in a world populated by mythical monsters, only we’ve become so inured to them that we don’t notice any more. A mystery novel I wrote a few years back had, as a major sub-theme, a visualization one character had built to model connections between a large number of corporations.
Turns out that a group of complexity theorists is due to publish a paper announcing that they’ve done the same for the transnational economy. Their motivation – figure out how connected the world financial system really was. Turns out, it’s very connected.
This story will be neat to watch…