“Just how inventive can an anonymous group of people be? Could an online mob produce a poem, a novel, or a painting? We like to believe that the blue bolt of artistic inspiration strikes only the individual. ‘[The] group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man,’ John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden. Hollywood scriptwriters constantly moan over how their brilliant ideas were mutilated by studio ‘editing by committee’. But collaboration has a long history in art.