Summaries*

The term 'knowledge work' appeared in The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959) by Peter Drucker.[12] Drucker later coined the term 'knowledge worker' in The Effective Executive[13] in 1966. Later, in 1999, he suggested that "the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."

I use “we” loosely because Swisher’s intended audience is not you or me, but instead those with power: she writes about and for them. Over the course of a long and storied career closely reporting on the tech industry and its titans, she has aped their motions, sat at their dinner tables, drunk their wine, gone to their weird parties, played with their baubles, repeated their lies, and offered them counsel. Swisher may style herself as Silicon Valley’s critic laureate, but she’s much closer to the court fool.

‘speak truth to power,’

By insisting the issue with Uber was largely cultural, Swisher ends up affirming the myth that Uber was not only an inevitable but ultimately good innovation, a few bad apples notwithstanding.

In fact, Uber’s top lawyer—Tony West, a Black man—has been the public face of Uber’s campaign against laws that would force the company to pay livable wages to its largely Black and brown workforce.

“white male homogeneity”

Sam Harnett’s 2020 paper “Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies Into Existence” remains one of the best accounts of how swaths of the media enthusiastically generated on-demand propaganda for the tech industry, directly setting the stage for these firms to exploit, codify, and expand legal loopholes that largely exempted them from regulation as they raided their users for data and generated billions in revenue. Such intellectual acquiescence would, as Harnett writes, “pave the way for a handful of companies that represent a tiny fraction of the economy to have an outsized impact on law, mainstream corporate practices, and the way we think about work.”

The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.

All missing letters are charged out anonymously in theusual way, the slips being marked missing.

The last card representsthe reverse side of the previous card and shows how to utilise the back of cardswhen necessary.

Correspondence

163

A very effective way of differentiation is themarking of the upper edge of the cards with ink,either its whole length or any portion of it.

No provision is made for charging out cards, becausethey are not supposed to be withdrawn at any time.

Thus the name written on the tab will indicate theposition of the guide among the cards, that is : the tab bearsthe term or name on the card immediately following the guide.

Frequent re- arrangements are a distinct disadvantage,for with every change the filer loses much time in becoming familiaragain with the new positions.

Kegisters refer to the materials and help tolocate them, indexes refer to the information contained in thesematerials. Ag their function, so their construction is quite distinct.Both however treat the same materials, only in different ways.In some offices no indexes may be required.

The most important portion of the face of the card is the left uppercorner, and this place should always be reserved for the subjectof the register.

A central registercertainly offers considerable advantages, it is a great saving incards and labour, the making of corrections which is a consider-able item is reduced to one register instead of many which in itsturn will reduce the percentage of errors to a minimum.

On the other hand the alphabetical register of firm names mustbe regarded not only as indispensable but as occupying a some-what different position from the others.

It was said (76) that it isimpossible to devise a system wliich could be applied universally,the card registers give a very clear illustration of tliis.

As the functionof the caU number is separation, so the function of references isconcentration.

AU references are indicated by the word " See," " See also,"" compare," etc. preceding the term to which reference is made.

It is the object of crossreferences to bring these materials together again when required.

Now the strength of consecutive numbers undoubtedly lies inthe fact that there cannot be any gaps, whatever the size of afile, the series of numbers is always complete.

registering

filing

indexing

registersor directories

recording.

cataloguing

The card system suffers at presentunder one great disadvantage, it has no fixed terminology.

Devising Once a proper system has been devised, it requiresCard Systems

Elaborate library classifications were either inapplicable or much 74too complicated and therefore unmanageable. Their applicationto business was out of the question. Something simple, easy toimderstand and easy to handle was required. This was foundin the numerical arrangement. The numerical classification inspite of its arbitrary character will always have this advantagethat it ensures accuracy with the least trouble, and this is stillmore the case where large quantities are handled. It was quitenatural therefore that this should be preferred for business purposes.As there are many sets of things arranged numerically, it isnecessary to distinguish one set from the other, so as to know towhat set a given number refers. This is done by affixing dis-tinguishing initials to the numbers, each class being assigned somecharacteristic initial of its own.

But by means of the cards, these materials canbe arranged and re-arranged in almost endless variety, we mayclassify them roughly or minutely, we may arrange them by thealphabet, by numbers, trades or professions, territories, we maylimit ourselves to certain trades or territories only

The card system has undoubtedly come to stayand will more and more replace the book system.

It must not be forgotten that the directaim of the card system is : maximum of work with minimumof labour (60).

It will be seen from the foregoing that care isrequired in the appKcation of the card system,and that neglect must sooner or later lead to failure. There wasindeed a time when it seemed doubtful whether the card systemwould survive the first attempts. It was even tried and abandonedby some. These early failures were in the main due to the absenceof expert labour and to the higher order of accuracy required ascompared with the book system. The systems were not thenplanned out with that care that is bestowed upon them now. Onesystem would be started and presently there would be a decisionto alter it so as to fall in with riper experience. In the absenceof one system consistently adhered to the files soon got into achaotic condition until at last they had to be abandoned, for infact they had become useless.

It is there-fore to be expected that the initial cost of the card system is nota fair criterion of its cost when in working order.

Accuracy This is one of the chief claims of the card system. 63To increase accuracy in fUing, the materials arealways arranged numerically. We thereby approach as nearlyas possible to mathematical exactness. The advantages of thecard system become more and more apparejit as the files increasein bulk, and accuracy must remain a constant factor in aU workconnected with it. It will also bring its reward in the smoothworking of the files and the immediate accessibility of anythingrequired. In accuracy might be included consistency, which isindispensable for effective work (356).

Labour saving therefore means systematic application of expertlabour.

The development of the card system and itsmore universal adoption within recent years isundoubtedly due in the mail to the development in modernbusiness and factory organisation ; it may be regarded as anoffspring of manufacture in quantities. (Massenfabrikation, Gross-industrie.) The recognised principle in manufacture in quantities ismaximum of output with minimum of labour. The means to attainthis end is specialisation, which in its turn yields greater precisionand accuracy as it^ result. All this is equally applicable to thecard system, and the last factor, greater precision and accuracy,is one of its most conspicuous claims.

Card Each drawer should be provided with a catchDrawers

It requires but a moment's reflection to perceivethat even the vertical files with the correspondence binders arebut an imitation of a set of cards, on a larger scale. The set ofcards can fairly be regarded as the basis of the entire system,hence it is properly called the card system.

When the card guidesare also used for classification purposes (144) a specially strongguide should be selected, as their replacing entails a great dealof re-writing.

The quality of the cardshould correspond to the performances required of it. Cardsused for permanent registers or indexes should be of good strongquality, for temporary work a cheaper card can usually be employed.

All cards should be matliematically uniform insize and uniform in thickness, both the indi-vidual card in itself and card as compared with card. The cardsshould he perfectly flat, and if bent, must on release at once assumethe original position. These conditions are necessary for thequick handling of quantities of cards.

All screws used on the face of the drawers should be sunk in.Round headed screws are apt to tear the skin of the fingers.

It is best to have the verticalcabinets and the card cabinets entirely separate.

The charging cabinet, which provides a system, by whichmaterials withdrawn from their places can be debitedto the person having possession of them for the timebeing, that is : each article is charged out to whoevercalls for it and is charged off when returned.

In each class the individual articles or the folders containing anumber of articles belonging to the same firm are numbered con-secutively, CI, C2, Tl, T2 etc. that is : a new series of consecutivenumbers is started with each initial letter. The correspondenceof Smith & Co. may for instance be in a folder marked C34, thecatalogues of Jones Bros, may be numbered T89. But theremay be a hundred letters to and from Smith & Co. and a dozencatalogues from Jones Bros, so that it will be necessary to dividefurther until each specific article will have a specific numberby which it can be quoted exclusively reserved to it. This isdone by suffixing the date to the previous numbers thus : C34-3VII7or T89-1906 etc. The former refers to a letter of Smith & Co.dated July the third 1907, the latter refers to a catalogue ofJones Bros, of 1906. No matter how large the files will becomein time, the meaning of these numbers will remain the same, andthere can be no other articles bearing these numbers. If a numberor numbers refer to more than one article, confusion is invariablythe result

The text in this book is numbered by paragraphs and where asubject is treated in more than one place, the numbers in bracketsindicate the additional paragraphs bearing on the subject underdiscussion.

It is best not to trust too much tomemory until the routine vrork is thoroughly mastered.

Volume 2 will be almost entirelydevoted to the work of indexing in the sense of analysing literatureand will go more fully into the question of classification and themanagement of guide cards. The present volume is confined asfar as practicable to the use of plain cards. Tabulated cards,methods of tabulating and the application of tabulated cards topractical business will be dealt with in volume 3, " The CardSystem at the Factory."

Male orphans were taught to hold a musket as soon as they werephysically able.44

As Reverend Bolzius had observed, if slaves were encouraged to“breed like animals,” then poor whites could not reproduce at the same rateand hold on to their land or their freedom.

By 1760, only 5 percent of white Georgians owned even a singleslave, while a handful of families possessed them in the hundreds. JonathanBryan was the perfect embodiment of the “Slave Merchants” whoOglethorpe had warned would dominate the colony.59

In 1750, settlers were formally granted the right toown slaves.58

Georgia also instituted a policy of keeping the land “tail-male,”which meant that land descended to the eldest male child. This feudal rulebound men to their families. The tail-male provision protected heirs whosepoor fathers might otherwise feel pressure to sell their land.53

In the largerscheme of things, his reform philosophy recognized that weak anddesperate men could be led to choose a path that dictated against their owninterests. A man might sell his land for a glass of rum; debt and idlenesswere always a temptation.52

ProslaveryGeorgians were not above accusing Oglethorpe of running a prisoncolony.50

trustees: “to relieve the distressed.” Instead of offering a sanctuary forhonest laborers, Georgia would become an oppressive regime, promoting“the misery of thousands in Africa” by permitting a “free people” to be“sold into perpetual Slavery.”48

A NorthCarolina proprietor, John Colleton, observed in Barbados that poor whiteswere called “white slaves” by black slaves; it struck him that the samecontempt for white field hands prevailed in the southern colonies in NorthAmerica.47

Many contemporaries connected slavery to English idleness. WilliamByrd weighed in on the ban against slavery in Georgia in a letter to aGeorgia trustee. He saw how slavery had sparked discontent among poorwhites in Virginia, who routinely refused to “dirty their hands with Labourof any kind,” preferring to steal or starve rather than work in the fields.Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for theysaw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought ofwork out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves.”

Slavery, however, could not be kept apart from future projections inGeorgia. After allowing South Carolina to send over slaves to fell trees andclear the land for the town of Savannah, Oglethorpe came to regret thedecision. He made a brief trip to Charles Town, and returned to discoverthat in the interim the white settlers had grown “impatient of Labour andDiscipline.” Some had sold good food for rum punch. With drunkenesscame disease. And so, Oglethorpe wrote, the “Negroes who sawed for us”and encouraged white “Idleness” were sent back.46

Oglethorpe felt the disadvantaged could bereclaimed if they were given a fair chance.

He marveled at how the SouthCarolinians deluded themselves in believing they were safe, burdened asthey were with a large slave population—“stupid security,” he called it.

Having foughtas an officer under Prince Eugene of Savoy in the Austro–Turkish War of1716–18, he understood military discipline. This was how he came to trustin the power of emulation; he believed that people could be conditioned todo the right thing by observing good leaders. He shared food with thosewho were ill or deprived. Visiting a Scottish community north of Savannah,he refused a soft bed and slept outside on the hard ground with the men.More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of thepeople, promoting collective effort.43

the colony’s motto, Non sibi sed aliis (Not for themselves, but for others)

According to Francis Moore, who visited the settlement in its secondyear of operation, two “peculiar” customs stood out: both alcohol and dark-skinned people were prohibited. “No slavery is allowed, nor negroes,”Moore wrote. As a sanctuary for “free white people,” Georgia “would notpermit slaves, for slaves starve the poor laborer.” Free labor encouragedpoor white men in sober cultivation and steeled them in the event they hadto defend the land from outside aggression. It also promised to cure settlersof that most deadly of English diseases, idleness.41

Conservative land policies limited individual settlers to a maximum offive hundred acres, thus discouraging the growth of a large-scale plantationeconomy and slave-based oligarchy such as existed in neighboring SouthCarolina. North Carolina squatters would not be found here either. Poorsettlers coming from England, Scotland, and other parts of Europe weregranted fifty acres of land, free of charge, plus a home and a garden.Distinct from its neighbors to the north, Georgia experimented with a socialorder that neither exploited the lower classes nor favored the rich. Itsfounders deliberately sought to convert the territory into a haven forhardworking families. They aimed to do something completelyunprecedented: to build a “free labor” colony.

under the direction of anambitious projector.

Explorers, amateurscientists, and early ethnologists like William Byrd all assumed—andunabashedly professed—that inferior or mismanaged lands bred inferior,ungovernable people.

He mused that colonization would have had a better outcomeif male settlers had been encouraged to intermarry with Indian women.Over two generations, the Indian stock would have improved, as a speciesof flower or tree might; dark skin blanched white, heathen ways dimmed.Here, Byrd was borrowing from the author John Lawson, who wrote in ANew Voyage to Carolina that men of lower rank gained an economicadvantage by marrying Native women who brought land to the union.

In a “porcivorous” country, people spent their days foragingand fornicating; when upset, they could be heard yelling out, “Flesh aliveand tear it.” It was their “favorite exclamation,” Byrd said. This bizarrecolloquialism suggested cannibalism, or perhaps hyenas surrounding a freshkill and devouring it. How could these carnivorous swamp monsters bethought of as English?37

The Mapp of Lubberland or the Ile of Lazye (ca. 1670) portrayed an imaginaryterritory in which sloth is contagious and normal men lack the will to work.British Print, #1953.0411.69AN48846001, The British Museum, London, England

When Byrd identified the Carolinians as residents of “Lubberland,” hedrew upon a familiar English folktale that featured one “Lawrence Lazy,”born in the county of Sloth near the town of Neverwork.

In milder weather they got as far as thinking aboutplunging a hoe into the ground.

Evenbefore his betrayal, though, he felt little identification with the colonists,writing that North Carolinians were the most “cowardly Blockheads[another word for lubber] that ever God created & must be used likenegro[e]s if you expect any good of them.”29

In an unexpected development, the proprietor Lord Shaftesbury came toCulpeper’s defense. He delivered an eloquent oration before the Court ofKing’s Bench, arguing that a stable government had never legally existed inNorth Carolina. Anticipating Locke’s Two Treatises of Government,Shaftesbury concluded that the colony remained effectively in a state ofnature. Without a genuine government, there could be no rebellion.Commentary like this merely underscored northern Carolina’s outlierstatus.26

The misnamed Culpeper’s Rebellion (1677–79) isparticularly instructive. In a contest with Thomas Miller, an ambitioustrader and tobacco planter who wanted to crack down on smugglers, collectcustoms duties, and gain favor with proprietors, Thomas Culpeper, asurveyor, sided with the poorer settlers.

By 1700, we should note, slaves comprised half the population of thesouthern portion of the Carolina colony, an imbalance that widened to 72percent by 1740. Beginning in 1714, a series of laws required that for everysix slaves an owner purchased, he had to acquire one white servant.Lamenting that the “white population do not proportionally multiply,”South Carolina lawmakers had one more reason to wish that a corps ofLeet-men and women had actually been formed. Encouraged to marry andmultiply, tied to the land, they might have provided a racial and class barrierbetween the slaves and the landed elites.13

“lazy lubbers,” meaning stupid, clumsy oafs,the word that came to describe the vagrant poor of Carolina.11

The Fundamental Constitutions was really a declaration of war againstpoor settlers.

unemployed men entitled to poor relief.

“Leet-men,” who were encouraged to marry andhave children but were tied to the land and to their lord.

A court of heraldry was added to this strange brew: in overseeingmarriages and maintaining pedigree, it provided further evidence of theintention to fix (and police) class identity.

The Fundamental Constitutions did more than endorse slavery. It was amanifesto promoting a semifeudalistic and wholly aristocratic society.

Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury,

Albemarle County, named after one of the proprietors, GeorgeMonck, Duke of Albemarle.

he authoredthe Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), which granted that“every Freeman in Carolina shall have ABSOLUTE POWER ANDAUTHORITY over his Negro Slaves.”

Slavery was thus a logicaloutgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emergedfrom three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment ofindentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breedchildren so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.

Slavery was thus a logicaloutgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emergedfrom three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment ofindentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breedchildren so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.

His rescue story perfectly mimicked a popular Scottish ballad ofthe day in which the beautiful daughter of a Turkish prince rescues anEnglish adventurer who is about to lose his head.

a farsexier fable in the dramatic rescue of John Smith by the “Indian princess”Pocahontas.

The best-known, most recent version of the story is the 1995 WaltDisney animated film. Strikingly beautiful, unnervingly buxom, and morelike a pop culture diva than a member of the Tsenacommacah tribe,Disney’s Pocahontas fabulously communes with nature, befriending araccoon, talking to a tree;

The word “Pilgrim” was not even popularized until1794.

The master of ceremonies was their Indian interpreter, Squanto, who hadhelped the English survive a difficult winter. Left out of this story is thedetail (not so minor) that Squanto only knew English because he had beenkidnapped and sold as a slave to an English ship’s captain.

we have the Pilgrims (a people who are celebrated atThanksgiving, a holiday that did not exist until the Civil War), who cameashore at Plymouth Rock (a place only designated as such in the lateeighteenth century). The quintessential American holiday was associatedwith the native turkey to help promote the struggling poultry industryduring the Civil War.

Exceptionalism emerges from a host of earlier myths of redemption andgood intentions. Pilgrims, persecuted in the Old World, brave the Atlanticdreaming of finding religious freedom on America’s shores; wagon trains ofhopeful pioneer families head west to start a new life. Nowhere else, we aremeant to understand, was personal freedom so treasured as it was in theAmerican experience. The very act of migration claims to equalize thepeople involved, molding them into a homogeneous, effectively classlesssociety.

And so the great American saga,as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, less than halfcame to Massachusetts for religious reasons.

The compression of history, the winnowing of history, may seem naturaland neutral, but it is decidedly not. It is the means by which grade schoolhistory becomes our standard adult history.

progress on the march

Monuments imperfectly record the past

These efforts were magnified as a result of promotional skillsdemonstrated by such organizations as the Colonial Dames, who worked toelevate the Mayflower Pilgrims and Winthrop’s Puritans into some of theforemost figures in our national memory.

History of the United States (1834)

the first volume of GeorgeBancroft’s widely praised History of the United States (1834) may be thebest example of how the Mayflower and Arbella washed ashore and seededthe ground where love of liberty bore its ripest fruit

Beyond the web of stories the founding generation itself wove, ourmodern beliefs have most to do with the grand mythmakers of thenineteenth century. The inspired historians of that period were nearly allNew Englanders; they outpaced all others in shaping the historicalnarrative, so that the dominant story of origins worked in their favor. That ishow we got the primordial Puritan narrative of a sentimental communityand a commendable work ethic.

most colonizing schemesthat took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America werebuilt on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy.

John Adams,heralded the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, asan earlier and stronger model for an American patrician-patriarch.

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

waste people

And then themedia giants find new crises and the nation’s inherited disregard for classreboots, as the subject recedes into the background again.

Because of how history is taught, Americans tend toassociate Plymouth and Jamestown with cooperation rather than classdivision.

Wary investors and state officials had to beconvinced to take the plunge into a risky overseas venture. But mostimportant, it was a place into which they could export their ownmarginalized people.

promoters imagined America not as an Eden of opportunity but as a giantrubbish heap that could be transformed into productive terrain.

America’s class language and thinking began with the forceful imprint leftby English colonization.

How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeedaccommodate, its persistently marginalized people?

How does a culture that prizes equality of opportunity explain, or indeedaccommodate, its persistently marginalized people?

Lest the reader misconstrue the book’s purpose, I want to make the pointunambiguously: by reevaluating the American historical experience in classterms, I expose what is too often ignored about American identity. But I’mnot just pointing out what we’ve gotten wrong about the past; I also want tomake it possible to better appreciate the gnawing contradictions still presentin modern American society.

It starts withthe rich and potent meaning that came with the different names given theAmerican underclass. Long before they were today’s “trailer trash” and“rednecks,” they were called “lubbers” and “rubbish” and “clay-eaters” and“crackers”—and that’s just scratching the surface.

Britishcolonists promoted a dual agenda: one involved reducing poverty back inEngland, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive tothe New World.

The hallowed American dream is thegold standard by which politicians and voters alike are meant to measurequality of life as each generation pursues its own definition of happinessunfettered by the restraints of birth (who your parents are) or station (theposition you start out from in the class system).

economic stratification createdby wealth and privilege.

eugenics

American exceptionalism, 7, 69, 190, 310, 318

Try the TOSEC archive for C64. You will also find that in the archive. I think they have a lot of those type-ins as .prg files so you can mount them in VICE and run them.

Dawn dweud: A study of colloquial and idiomatic welsh Ceri M. P. Jones

Words like quality and excellence are misapplied sorelentlessly that they border on meaningless.

while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal.

Mistakes are part of creativity.

A subversion takes place in whichstreamlining the process or increasing production supplants the ultimate goal, with eachperson or group thinking they’re doing the right thing—when, in fact, they have strayed offcourse. When efficiency or consistency of workflow are not balanced by other equally strongcountervailing forces, the result is that new ideas—our ugly babies—aren’t afforded theattention and protection they need to shine and mature.

Katherine Sarafian,a producer who’s been at Pixar since Toy Story, tells me she prefers to envision triggering theprocess over trusting it—observing it to see where it’s faltering, then slapping it around a bitto make sure it’s awake. Again, the individual plays the active role, not the process itself. Or,to put it another way, it is up to the individual to remember that it’s okay to use the handle,just as long as you don’t forget the suitcase.

As Brad Bird, who joined Pixar as a director in 2000, likes to say, “The process eithermakes you or unmakes you.” I like Brad’s way of looking at it because while it gives theprocess power, it implies that we have an active role to play in it as well.

Once you’re aware of the suitcase/handle problem, you’ll see it everywhere. People glomonto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning. Advertiserslook for words that imply a product’s value and use that as a substitute for value itself.Companies constantly tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this meansthey will make only top-shelf products. Words like quality and excellence are misapplied sorelentlessly that they border on meaningless.

Imagine an old, heavy suitcase whose well-worn handles are hanging by a few threads. Thehandle is “Trust the Process” or “Story Is King”—a pithy statement that seems, on the face ofit, to stand for so much more. The suitcase represents all that has gone into the formation ofthe phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often,we grab the handle and—without realizing it—walk off without the suitcase. What’s more, wedon’t even think about what we’ve left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carryaround than the suitcase.

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

“Story Is King” differentiated us, we thought, not just because we said it but also becausewe believed it and acted accordingly. As I talked to more people in the industry and learnedmore about other studios, however, I found that everyone repeated some version of thismantra—it didn’t matter whether they were making a genuine work of art or complete dreck,they all said that story is the most important thing. This was a reminder of something thatsounds obvious but isn’t: Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act—and think—accordingly. Parroting the phrase “Story Is King” at Pixar didn’t help the inexperienceddirectors on Toy Story 2 one bit. What I’m saying is that this guiding principle, while simplystated and easily repeated, didn’t protect us from things going wrong. In fact, it gave us falseassurance that things would be okay.

Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust theProcess” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave ussolace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in theend, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

I read many such books as I set about trying to become a better, more effective manager.Most, I found, trafficked in a kind of simplicity that seemed harmful in that it offered falsereassurance. These books were stocked with catchy phrases like “Dare to fail!” or “Followpeople and people will follow you!” or “Focus, focus, focus!” (This last one was a particularfavorite piece of nonadvice. When people hear it, they nod their heads in agreement as if agreat truth has been presented, not realizing that they’ve been diverted from addressing thefar harder problem: deciding what it is that they should be focusing on. There is nothing inthis advice that gives you any idea how to figure out where the focus should be, or how toapply your energy to it. It ends up being advice that doesn’t mean anything.) These sloganswere offered as conclusions—as wisdom—and they may have been, I suppose. But none ofthem gave me any clue as to what to do or what I should focus on.

Not knowingwhere else to turn, I remember buying a copy of Dick Levin’s Buy Low, Sell High, Collect Early,and Pay Late: The Manager’s Guide to Financial Survival, a popular business title at the time,and devouring it in one sitting.

You need to understand and learn the basic ideas, from scratch.ZK is a lifetime job.

in literature notes, do you write all of the stuff from a single article/book/whatever in one note, or do you split them all into individual notes of their own, one little piece on each card/note?

typewriters are ultimately instruments of human creation, not destruction.

The typewriter division of Wanderer Werke continued unencumbered, manufacturing precision typing machines such as this one, emblazoned with its striking “WW” crest (which bears a striking similarity to the Wonder Woman logo from the 1980s).

The typewriter was made in Siegmar-Schönau—a suburb of Chemnitz—by Wanderer, an early German pioneer in manufacturing bicycles, motorcycles, cars, and later military trucks and tanks for the Wehrmacht, the armed forces in the Nazi era. In the 1930s, Wanderer’s automotive division was one of four car companies consolidated into the Auto Union AG, which later became Audi. Indeed, one of the four interconnected rings on the Audi brand logo represents Wanderer.

They collect artifacts, I collect histories.

a typewriter with the “special key” is no more or less odious than one without; it is just a matter of the meanings we humans impart upon it.

some argue that the typewriter is just an inanimate object; a tool crafted for a specific purpose, which assumes neither the responsibility of the user nor his blame.

More frequent were machines built with the double-lightning-bolt SS Siegrune, usually above the No. 3 or 5 key. With sieg meaning “victory,” the runes became ubiquitous in Nazi Germany as a shorthand rallying cry for “victory, victory!” In their more sinister application, the SS runes became the logo for the Schutzstaffel—the notorious paramilitary units most responsible for the wanton slaughter of 6 million Jews across Europe.

In very rare circumstances, a German typewriter would be made with a dedicated swastika key, like this one at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The largest online typewriter community currently boasts some 29,000 members, with no signs of slowing down.

Larry McMurtry thanked his trusty Hermes 3000 typewriter while accepting his Golden Globe for Brokeback Mountain.

At the conclusion of the war, local Czech authorities, armed militias, and regular military units ethnically cleansed nearly 3 million Bohemian Germans from Czechoslovakia. From the high-altitude perspective of postwar geopolitics, President Edvard Beneš dubbed it Czechoslovakia’s “final solution of the German question.”

As strange as it sounds today, German klein (“small” or portable) typewriters were among the most sought-after souvenirs for soldiers fighting in World War II. Think of it: Adjusted for inflation, top-of-the-line portable typewriters cost roughly the same as your MacBook Pro today, and their usable lives were measured not in months or years, but decades and generations. Consequently, thousands of Uranias, Gromas, Erikas, Rheinmetalls, Continentals, Olympias, and other high-quality, precision-made German machines were looted from Nazi military and government offices, businesses, and even from civilian homes, whether their owners were dead or alive. “War trophy” is of course a pleasant euphemism: It denotes a reward for heroism, bravery, and sacrifice, while simultaneously acknowledging that even the good guys steal, pillage, and destroy amid the haze of total war.

In the 1740s, Thomas Harrison invented a wooden filing cabinet in which the file cards could be hooked on little tin plates. On each of these plates was written the name of the entry (i.e., the re-spective subject heading), and the plates were arranged in strictly alphabeti-cal order.22

Instead of jotting down every note, thought, observation, excerpt, andreading on a single slip of paper and leaving them there, Placcius recom-mends grouping them, by dint of appropriate libros excerptorum (see figure2.5),39 excerpt books that follow the pattern that had guided the design ofregisters and bound library catalogs since Konrad Gessner; Placcius citesthe entire section “ De Indicibus Librorum ” from the Pandectae .40 Perhapshis strong vote for the bound form of this storage technology and againstJungius’s method is a way of warning against lifelong knowledge accumula-tions that merely gather treasures without being recombined and pub-lished as new books. Jungius, keen on including new resources, delays hisown publications time and again, leaving them unfinished or simply asraw paper slip potential in storage, on call. 4

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