EV is one-year old! A special birthday edition follows.

Why AlphaGo matters; the important of art and entrepreneurship to growth; design as participation; the end of Keck’s Law; the true potential of CRISPR; Facebook has eaten journalism. The best stories of the past year.

Please recommend EV to chums: Twitter (thanks!) | Facebook (merci!)

Dept of the near future

AlphaGo’s win in Seoul is an amazing milestone. The Economist on the ramifications is excellent. See also this excellent comment on HN, Frank Chen’s tweet storm, and Rick Klau on why Go matters. MUST READ

🎨 Entrepreneurs and artists matter. A study over 1300 years shows their presence is associated with faster long-term growth, but the association does not hold for notable military, political or religious figures. EXCELLENT.

💡 Kevin Slavin on design as a form of participation: “"you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.”  SUPERB, INSIGHTFUL

🚠 After decades of exponential growth, fiber-optic capacity may be facing a plateau. The end of Keck’s Law beckons. **GOOD READ
**

🔬 The real power of CRISPR is understanding how genomes work.

🗞 Facebook is eating journalism and the world. Here is what to do about it.

Happy First Birthday Exponential View!

Exponential View is 1-year-old today. We’ve grown to over 7,000 subs. Thank you to each of you, it has been your referrals that did this.

As of last week, subscribers have clicked 105,964 times on the 1764 articles I’ve recommended. Assuming around 5 minutes of reading time, that means more than 500,000 minutes of reading that you’ve given over to EV recommendations. #honoured

The best of the best

With 1764 articles to choose from, I’ve listed below the top 20 of the past year as weighted by EVrank (it’s proprietary). If you are a more recent subscriber, you might not have seen some of those. I commend them to you. Some are a few months old, and perhaps their age allows you to reevaluate them.

Here they are in order.

1. Mark Leslie: In technology, the small fish almost always eat the big fish.

2. The future of the web looks a lot like bitcoin

3. Maciej Ceglowolski’s blistering attack on internet ads business models

4. Edward Snowden on how to retain your privacy

5. What makes Uber run

6.  As God might be. “Conversations about technology are almost always conversations about history.“

7. John Markoff: veteran Silicon Valley commentator on "the next wave”

8. Brett King: “the death of bank products has been greatly under-exaggerated”

9. Eric Beinhocker on complexity economics and new economic thinking

10.The number one predictor of career success, according to science.

11. How Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm works

12. The end of apps as we know them

13. Yann Ranchere: The insurance industry is about to radically change

14. Networks & the nature of the firm

15. The New Yorker on Nick Bostrom and the AI Doomsday

16. Albert Wenger: Land, capital & attention

17. Six things technology has made insanely cheap

18. The price of the internet of things will be a vague dread of a malicious world

19. Chris Dixon: what is next in computing?

20. Is advertising morally justifiable? The ethics of protecting our attention

Connect with me

👻 I’m happy for you to connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Snapchat (has occasional unique content!)

👍 And if you’ve been enjoying Exponential View, this is the **tweet to retweet. **

Thanks after one year

EV has been made possible and supported by lots of people. So a big thank you to the many hundreds of you who have supported it so far. A special shout-out to Martijn de Kuijper, Laurent Haug, Shehnaz Suterwalla, John Henderson, Albert Wenger, Fred Wilson, Sonal Chokshi, Tom Standage & Tina Asgari for support, feedback and referrals over the past year.

If you are interested in curating your own newsletter, the folks at Revue are offering a special discount code on their premium services. Just sign up here and use the code AZEEM.

End note

Have a great week!