Ten years ago, you would have to mail dvds because internet speeds weren't fast enough to live-stream the office surveilance camera. Twenty years ago you would have had to snail mail a bulletin every month about status updates.
Today you make a wordpress site with a $3 a year .com address and $50 a month hosting (or host it on the various media sites interlinked like a Tumblr), post live updates, and stream / upload video and audio about progress at a whim.
The middle men of a lot of things (movie production, r&d) did not exist because people wouldn't fund those on their own. They existed because it was infeasible to organize millions of funders and to properly broadcast progress to millions the way such organizations could to a boardroom. That has since changed.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1551949/
> It often takes more than 10 years to deliver a final, licensed vaccine,5 and requires not only excellence during research and product development but also managerial and funding commitment throughout the endeavor. The cost of developing a vaccine—from research and discovery to product registration—is estimated to be between US $200 million and US $500 million per vaccine.6 This figure includes vaccines that are abandoned during the development process. In short, vaccine research and product development is lengthy, complex, and loaded with binary outcome risks.
just because the complexity of a process is abstracted away doesn't mean it's ceased to exist.
Of course they can. Where do companies get their money from? Thin air?
