I’d be delighted if a “just browsing” reader were to gravitate toward the last third of the book, because that’s really where I explore the implications of the story for humanity’s present and near future.One section that’s key to the narrative but that may—at first—seem incongruous in a book titled The Code Economy is the one about Burning Man in chapter 14, which is titled “Purpose: The Promised Sand.”Burning Man is an annual gathering that draws about 70,000 people to the Nevada desert to create, and then live within, a temporary city—Black Rock City. Rather than a “festival” in any standard sense of the word, Burning Man is an ongoing social experiment in which a petri dish the size of downtown San Francisco is treated with a microbial growth medium that comes in the form of 10 principles and a semicircular urban plan.The Promised Sand is, obviously, a play on words, juxtaposing the arid emptiness in which Burning Man occurs every year with the Biblical notion of “The Promised Land” as a place of glorious abundance. And, to be clear, the setting for Burning Man—the Black Rock Desert where Burning occurs every year—is indeed a vast emptiness.What brings Black Rock City to life is not material abundance but rather an all-pervasive culture of participation. If Burning Man has a rule, it is “no spectators.” As Larry Harvey, the founder of Burning Man, says of the resources participants transport, at great cost and difficulty, to the Nevada desert: “The crucial question is what happens when they cross the city boundaries and decide what to do with those resources. The meaning isn’t stamped into the goods at the factory or something. The meaning derives from what they do with those goods and how they use those goods to connect with everybody here. That’s the curious nature of the economy at Burning Man.”Yet—even while properly accounting for the singular nature of Black Rock City’s participatory culture—this aspect of the city generalizes. All cities are fed with resources from the outside, and meaning derives from what citizens do with those goods they draw from the outside— including how they use those goods to connect with others around them.“I’ve always been very interested in scenes, particularly avant-garde scenes,” said Harvey when we spoke at Black Rock City in September 2015. Avant-garde scenes, he said, act as “a crossroads for people doing radical things seeming unrelated to one another. People start to meet one another, and bounce off one another, and share ideas with one another. That could be the Beats in America. That could be the Bloomsbury Group in London. It could be older scenes even before that, around folks going back since forever. We are that.” Harvey then paused, not for effect but for reflection. “Except we’re the first organization, I believe, that turned a Bohemian scene into a city,” he continued. “Usually scenes don’t do that.”This may come as a surprise, but I actually think that The Code Economy is an important book. My justification for thinking so is that the raw material I had the pleasure to work with during the three years I was writing this book is as good as it gets—the insights of some of the people who, in the past four centuries, have most deeply considered the structure and evolution of human society in the long term. My role was to bring those insights together and organize them in a way that, I hope, is engaging and thought-provoking.To be a bit blunt, the onslaught of information to which we’re all subject creates the danger of a collective myopia that turns ripples on the ocean of history into “news” while, deep below the surface, tsunamis of change pass unnoticed. This book is my effort to correct that myopia. We are not as different from our distant ancestors as we might imagine; the trends of history are not as difficult to discern; the likely future not as difficult to anticipate.As a father of three daughters, two of whom are college-aged, I have an immediate interest in understanding what sort of opportunities the evolution of the economy is creating for the next generation. One widely communicated misconception is that the evolution of the economy is somehow reversible—that past eras of (usually imagined) greatness can be wished or commanded back into existence. No one below the age of forty thinks that is going to happen. An appreciation of evolutionary economics helps show why they’re right.A less severe, but comparably prevalent, misconception is that, because digital technologies are driving the evolution of the economy, then the secret to success in the twenty-first century is learning how to code. This is only partially true. The real lesson of history is actually subtler: every time technology (or code) has advanced suddenly as is happening now, the effect has been to humanize—not to mechanize—work. This means that opportunities in the near future for the majority of people are far more likely to involve compassionate care, authentic expression, and/or culinary creativity as they are to involve mastery of Javascript or Python. Of course, that the advance of code will continue to generate broadly shared benefits is hardly assured. There are things we can and must do to ensure that the future impacts of the advance of code are as advantageous as they have been in the past. The good news is that we’ve been adapting to, and benefiting from, the advance of code for more than 40,000 years. My hope in writing The Code Economy is that by understanding the momentum of history we can use it in our favor.