From the leader in this week’s Economist:
“Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.”
s/Financial/Technical/
and it applies just as well. What else are we doing in tech, if not figuring out ways for strangers to deal with each-other? Sometimes we focus on designing safeguards, like firewalls or spam filters, and sometimes we focus on creating opportunities, like social networks or source code repositories.