Exploring Privilege in the Digital Divide: Implications for Theory, Policy, and Practice

AGI, like an animal in the wild, is supposed to be able to deal, at runtime, with unforeseen circumstances. An ability to adapt quickly and reliably will not only push forward the next generation of robotic explorers and personal assistants, but can also be seen as a key aspect of intelligence. Intelligence is a term with many meanings.

However, learning at runtime is an ability which gives intelligent animals a key survival advantage. What has made machine learning so successful is a narrower idea of learning.

In a social media landscape that typically compels you to spend hours staring at a screen—often distractedly flitting between multiple screens—Clubhouse lets you multitask while you listen. Like podcasts, you can listen while you take a walk, fold laundry, or work out.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

Inventing Y2K: Why Gen-Z Love the 2000s So Much

When an item is collected by hand, the picker scans it with a handheld device to ensure that the correct object has been taken. And every item’s progress throughout the warehouse is constantly monitored thanks to a series of points at which it is scanned again – for example at the moment of being labelled with the customer’s name and address. “We are able to track where the item is at any one time at the fulfilment centre,” says Low, who is both confident and clearly proud of the attention to detail.

The purpose of this essay is to present a grander vision of an educational system in which technology is used not in the form of machines for processing children but as something the child himself will earn to manipulate, to extend, to apply to projects, thereby gaining a greater and more articulate mastery of the world, a sense of the power of applied knowledge and a self-confidently realistic image of himself as an intellectual agent. Stated more simply, I believe with Dewey, Montessori, and Piaget that children learn by doing and by thinking about what they do. And so the fundamental ingredients of educational innovation must be better things to do and better ways to think about oneself doing these things.

Three principal conclusions may be drawn concerning the significance and implications of the ideas that have been presented.6a First any possibility for improving the effective utilization of the intellectual power of society's problem solvers warrants the most serious consideration. This is because man's problem-solving capability represents possibly the most important resource possessed by a society. The other contenders for first importance are all critically dependent for their development and use upon this resource. Any possibility for evolving an art or science that can couple directly and significantly to the continued development of that resource should warrant doubly serious consideration.6b Second, the ideas presented are to be considered in both of the above senses: the direct-development sense and the 'art of development' sense. To be sure, the possibilities have long-term implications, but their pursuit and initial rewards await us now. By our view, we do not have to wait until we learn how the human mental processes work, we do not have to wait until we learn how to make computers more intelligent or bigger or faster, we can begin developing powerful and economically feasible augmentation systems on the basis of what we now know and have. Pursuit of further basic knowledge and improved machines will continue into the unlimited future, and will want to be integrated into the "art" and its improved augmentation systems—but getting started now will provide not only orientation and stimulation for these pursuits, but will give us improved problem-solving effectiveness with which to carry out the pursuits.6c Third, it becomes increasingly clear that there should be action now—the sooner the better—action in a number of research communities and on an aggressive scale. We offer a conceptual framework and a plan for action, and we recommend that these be considered carefully as a basis for action If they be considered but found unacceptable, then at least serious and continued effort should be made toward developing a more acceptable conceptual framework within which to view the over-all approach, toward developing a more acceptable plan of action, or both.6d This is an open plea to researchers and to those who ultimately motivate, finance, or direct them, to turn serious attention toward the possibility of evolving a dynamic discipline that can-treat the problem of improving intellectual effectiveness in a total sense. This discipline should aim at producing a continuous cycle of improvements—increased understanding of the problem, improved means for developing new augmentation systems, and improved augmentation systems that can serve the world's problem solvers in general and this discipline's workers in particular. After all, we spend great sums for disciplines aimed at understanding and harnessing nuclear power. Why not consider developing a discipline aimed at understanding and harnessing "neural power?" In the long run, the power of the human intellect is really much the more important of the two.

A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building and the Internet is one of the greatest network building tools of all time. However, DARPA doesn’t have a strong web presence and the idea that DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence may be how they avoid asymmetric career risk suggests that there are good reasons for the low Internet utilization. However, the Polyplexus project, a DARPA effort to foster an idea-generating online community, suggests that DARPA may realize that it’s no longer at the pareto front of this tradeoff and that it might be able to more effectively use the Internet to execute on its model. The Internet could conceivably help PMs find people working on the edge of a space, foster communication between performers, and find gaps in the state of the art. What would a riff on the ARPA Model built to take advantage of the Internet look like?

Bret Victor is trying to: Share the magic of computers and dynamic media with everyone Help people; do engineering for a cause, for a higher purpose Build creative tools for human expression Empower people; help everyone see and understand through insightful representations and humane interfaces Provide direct manipulation tools and immediate feedback Liberate us from the constraints imposed by poor tools and stale ways of thinking Encourage active reading and informed discourse Reinvent the way we represent thought Build a career around a guiding principle

Victor points out that the Internet age was built on a non-commercial research culture that incubated the underlying technologies for decades. The personal computing and Internet industry exploited this culture, generating massive global wealth, but then failed to meaningfully contribute back. The dominant players today are "not planting seeds for a humane future". And so, we find ourselves at crossroads: now is the time do decide what the future of computing will look like. Will Victor have more success than Engelbart in winning funding to fully realise his vision? Will we curl ever deeper inward into our shiny rectangles, or are we witnessing the dawn of a new era in social, humane computing?

In Dynamicland, the computational media is not "hidden away in isolated virtual worlds", but rather exists in the common meatspace for all to see and get their hands on. This enables powerful ways of collaboration and sharing, working together with many hands and in eye contact with others around you. Dynamicland is "as multiplayer as the real world". Another Dynamicland principle is that everyone, not just specialist technicians, can make apps, these dynamic documents of the new medium. And everyone can modify existing artefacts to make them do what they want, just as anyone can craft artful or useful things from paper and clay and office supplies. In Dynamicland one walks the path from playing to crafting to remixing all the way to building useful things. This is programming liberated from the confines of the iridescent rectangle.

Operationally Dynamicland, Victor's research lab, follows the spirit of Douglas Engelbart and Xerox PARC, who decades ago invented the technologies and principles that became the foundation of the computer revolution and the information age. This first DL instance in Oakland is being realised by a small non-profit research group with a long-term orientation, something Victor is highly passionate about.

"I just have this feeling that instead of making toys for rich kids, or devising ways to make computers go 5% faster, I could somehow somehow somehow be using my skills to save lives. Or significantly improve the global quality of life. Or something big and noble and hopelessly idealistic like that."

In my view, Victor is part of a transitional tech generation, who were both a little late to experience both sides of the personal computing revolution, and a little too early to truly belong in the saturated social media culture we live in today. Victor certainly thinks about the future of technology by drawing on the thinkers of past generations for insight and inspiration. Victor is early Web, but more Xanadu at heart.

Development of a method and tools to support collaborative intelligence This challenge requires: ways to share, filter, process, and integrate diverse interpretations, since future reality is dependent, not only on data, but on our interpretation of what the data means, patterns recognised, through which we interpret data to enhance collaborative intelligence; an effective collaborative problem-solving system with capacity to visualise not only objects but also processes — problem-mapping to visualise the status of problem-solving in process, to track convergent threads, and to position incoming contributions where they fit; ways to support collaborative autonomy,while retainingindividual uniqueness and ownership in collaborative knowledge-building, avoiding consensus and maximising the richness and diversity of input (as in living systems “genetic diversity” plays a key role in evolutionary creativity).

Future media and technologies – including what happens when virtual reality and augmented reality, for example, are combined with accelerated computational power – could amplify this angelic tendency, says Miroshnichenko, and bring about a new kind of “augmented humanity”. “Now we are about to totally live inside our latest medium. Almost all our activities are already there. Humankind is resettling from biological bodies into the digital body.”How, ultimately, media and technology affect us all – and the degree to which human nature is remoulded and redefined by our ‘tools’ – is open to debate. And that’s McLuhan’s point: “The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message,” he told Playboy magazine. “That by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them.”

“Electronic media cancelled the physical time and space limitation for humans to be present at events. Digital media advanced this new quality of human beings even more, they make time elastic, which is impossible in physical reality. In video games, a player can slow down, stop, reverse, repeat time. Resurrection becomes everyday routine for video game players, who save and restart their digital selves, and for social media users, who can delete and restore their profiles.”

Future reading

Bret’s magic bookshelf reminded me of a quote by Alan Kay. Explaining his Dynabook concept to a group of children in 1968, he said: ‘I want to be able to do all the things you can do with a book, but be dynamic.’ There was something about the playful quality of the magic bookshelf that felt like it had achieved spiritual lockstep with Kay’s goals. The bridging of the digital and physical seemed oddly and unexpectedly fresh, prescient, like a rich vein worthy of continued mining.

The next step, Bret said, was to get all of the books properly scanned and indexed. Soon enough, you’d be able to type in any search term, and the related physical volumes would glow, their collected relevant pages appearing above. But this was possible only by performing your own scans, owning your own data, placing it in an open, malleable format. A supple data source, it seemed, was the only way to hold forth these investigations.

From behind me, Bret said: ‘Watch this,’ and pointed a small green laser at one of the books. The spine – the physical spine – lit up and above the bookshelf the book itself exploded onto an empty swath of wall. The entirety of its contents, laid out page by page by some hidden projector. The laser tracked by some hidden constellation of cameras. In his hand, Bret held an iPad, and as he pointed the laser at various projected pages they appeared on his device. As he slid from page to page on the iPad, the corresponding pages on the wall enlarged. It was a way to view both the macro and micro of a book – the overarching structure of the whole and the minutiae of the paragraph. The margins, it must be said, were gorgeous.

In early August I visited Bret Victor’s Communications Design Group research laboratory in San Francisco. Against the far wall of the lab’s library stood a 10-foot wooden bookshelf. It was stuffed with manuals on the history of computers and programming and interfaces, novels and countless non-fiction books.

Previous attempts to make devices such as Kay’s Dynabook real – eg, Sony’s LIBRIé, released in 2004 – had been hampered by small libraries. Amazon’s library had no bounds, it had one-click purchasing. And, more generally, technology had improved: batteries were smaller, processors faster, e-ink displays higher-resolution. In the year of our lord, 2007, under the auspices of one company, all of the pieces came together making real those techno-prophecies of yore. Those of us of a certain codex geekery – myself included – were enthralled by its eccentricities and potential.

Beyond its substance, though, Future Shock resonated just as much for its style. Taking a cue from the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose ability to deliver big concepts in snappy sound bites was obviously an inspiration, Toffler made the medium the message. His tone is equal parts alarmed and energized, professorial and breathless. He speaks of a “fire storm of change,” the “electric impact” of new concepts, populations “rocketing”; his language emulates the propulsive speed he’s describing. He shares catchy terms like ad-hocracy; he makes the future the most spectacular show on Earth, and you’d be foolish to look away. Even when Toffler depicts the potential dangers of accelerated change—offshore drilling accidents, for example, or decision-making algorithms—and proclaims the necessity of regulation, he believes that solutions must come from a thorough orientation toward future transformations. “The power of the technological drive is too great to be stopped by Luddite paroxysms,” he writes, and the book, despite its occasional cautionary tone, intoxicatingly sets the terms of its own worldview. “Is all this exaggerated?” he famously asks, before answering his own question. “I think not.”

The chief strategy for combatting future shock, according to Toffler, was to double down on the future itself. He called for government committees to fund large-scale future studies, for science-fiction writers to bring more methodical forecasting to their stories, for American schools to teach future-oriented courses (as a counterpoint to history classes). “To create such images and thereby soften the impact of future shock,” he wrote, “we must begin by making speculation about the future respectable.” This was not a new challenge; even H. G. Wells had taken pains to emphasize that the systematic attempt to project potential futures based on contemporary data could be a science, not mere fortune-telling. But Toffler’s book pushed futurism into the mainstream, not just in the realm of militarism (i.e., the type of nuclear-scenario planning pioneered at the RAND Corporation) but also in the “soft” spaces of everyday life, from “politics and playgrounds to skydiving and sex.”

Spotify and Bandcamp could not be more opposite. Where Spotify highlights playlists, most often of its own creation, Bandcamp sticks to the album (or any other format, as determined by the artist). Where Spotify pays royalties according to little-understood formulas that can only be analyzed by reverse calculation, Bandcamp lets artists and labels choose their own prices. Where Spotify requires working through a limited number of distributors to access their services, Bandcamp is open to anyone. Where Spotify has revenue streams dependent on ads and data, Bandcamp operates on a simple revenue share with artists and collects no information on its users.

Under a White Sky is one of several major books on warming being published this winter, presumably timed to the inauguration of a new climate-conscious president. But unlike Michael Mann’s The New Climate War or Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, it marks a notable turn in perspective for its author. Kolbert is, by temperament and intellectual inclination, a preservationist and a conservationist. Her first two climate books, The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes From a Catastrophe, were works of explicit lamentation and implicit exhortation. The new book begins from the premise that the world is already past a point of no return: “Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future,” she writes. The book’s key question is: What innovations will we jerry-rig, and what risky interventions will we conscience, as we slide down the precipice? Her ambivalent response is “If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control.”

Yevgeny Zamyatin

OpenAI and other researchers have released a few tools capable of identifying AI-generated text. These use similar AI algorithms to spot telltale signs in the text. It’s not clear if anyone is using these to protect online commenting platforms. Facebook declined to say if it is using such tools; Google and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.

OpenAI released a more capable version of its text-generation program, called GPT-3, last June. So far, it has only been made available to a few AI researchers and companies, with some people building useful applications such as programs that generate email messages from bullet points. When GPT-3 was released, OpenAI said in a research paper that it had not seen signs of GPT-2 being used maliciously, even though it had been aware of Weiss’s research.

Weiss discovered GPT-2, a program released earlier that year by OpenAI, an AI company in San Francisco, and realized he could generate fake comments to simulate a groundswell of public opinion. “I was also shocked at how easy it was to fine tune GPT-2 to actually spit out the comments,” Weiss says. “It's relatively concerning on a number of fronts.”Besides the comment-generating tool, Weiss built software for automatically submitting comments. He also conducted an experiment in which volunteers were asked to distinguish between the AI-generated comments and ones written by humans. The volunteers did no better than random guessing.

Live Voice Conversations Embedded EverywhereIn this mature phase, we will see live conversations embedded on every single webpage, article, and beyond. Using APIs, these social audio conversations will be available as users read articles, watch shows, play games, and traverse the physical world. Imagine reading an article, then choosing to listen to experts discuss the content in real time or hear opinions recorded from your trusted circle. Users could leave voice messages or recorded conversations in physical locations, like the geocaching community leaves physical items.

To build this weapon – the ‘automatic simulations’ that gave the company its portmanteau name – Simulmatics assembled top scientists from MIT, Johns Hopkins and the Ivy League. According to Lepore, many of the academics ‘had been trained in the science of psychological warfare’. The result was the creation of a ‘voting-behaviour machine, a computer simulation of the 1960 election’, which was ‘one of the largest political-science research projects ever conducted’. The simulation was meant to provide granular predictions about how segments of the population might vote, given their backgrounds and the circumstances of the political campaigns. The company claimed responsibility for JFK’s win, but the president-elect’s representatives denied any relationship to the ‘electronic brain’, as newspapers dubbed it. Simulmatics went on to predict much else: it simulated the economy of Venezuela in 1963 with an aim of short-circuiting a Communist revolution, and became involved in psychological research in Vietnam and efforts to forecast race riots. Soon after, the company was the target of antiwar protests, and filed for bankruptcy by the end of the decade.

Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author and engineer, and is chairman and co-founder of Applied Minds.  Previously, he was Vice President and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering and was a co-founder of Thinking Machines Corp. Danny pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, and RAID disk array technology used to store large databases while completing his PhD at MIT. He holds over 150 U.S. patents, and is the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.  Danny is also the Judge Widney professor of engineering and research medicine at the University of Southern California, and serves as co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation, and is on the board of the Hertz Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Leadership Forum, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of EE at MIT. Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the MIT computer science textbook “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”. Sussman has had a number of important contributions to Artificial Intelligence, and with his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming language in 1975.

Gerald Jay Sussman compares our computational skills with the genome, concluding that we are way behind in creating complex systems such as living organisms, and proposing a few areas of improvement.

Smalltalk was a revolutionary system developed by the Learning Research Group (LRG) at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, led by Alan Kay. Smalltalk was comprised of a programming language, a development environment, and a graphical user interface (GUI), running on PARC’s groundbreaking Alto computer. In fact, it is most famous for being the GUI that inspired Steve Jobs when he and a group of Apple engineers visited PARC in 1979. Smalltalk pioneered overlapping windows, popup menus, and paned browsers, all controlled by a mouse. All of these UI elements have come down to us today through systems like the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Smalltalk was also one of the earliest, and most influential, object-oriented programming languages, which make up the most dominant type of programming languages today. Object-oriented languages are designed to make it easy to reuse existing pieces of code, but in a flexible way. Python, Java, Ruby, and Objective-C, among others, all owe debts to ideas originally developed in Smalltalk.

The Smalltalk Zoo is a collection of historical versions of the revolutionary graphical programming and user environment Smalltalk, originally developed at Xerox PARC, ranging from the 1972 version all the way to the modern “Squeak” version whose development began in 1995. These emulated Smalltalk environments run in your web browser and are hosted by CHM at smalltalkzoo.thechm.org.

Second, advances in materials and manufacturing were probably necessary for a commercially successful bicycle. It’s a bit hard, from where I stand, to untangle which advances in design were made possible by new materials and techniques, and which were simply sparks of inventive imagination that hadn’t been conceived or developed before. But the fact that people were willing to put up with the precarious high-wheeled design indicates to me that pneumatic tires were crucial. And it’s plausible to me that advanced metalworking was needed to make small, lightweight chains and gears of high and consistent quality, at an acceptable price—and that no other design, such as a belt or lever, would have worked instead. It’s also plausible to me that wooden frames just weren’t light and strong enough to be practical (I certainly wouldn’t be eager to ride a wooden bicycle today).

First, the correct design was not obvious. For centuries, progress was stalled because inventors were all trying to create multi-person four-wheeled carriages, rather than single-person two-wheeled vehicles. It’s unclear why this was; certainly inventors were copying an existing mode of transportation, but why would they draw inspiration only from the horse-and-carriage, and not from the horse-and-rider? (Some commenters have suggested that it was not obvious that a two-wheeled vehicle would balance, but I find this unconvincing given how many other things people have learned to balance on, from dugout canoes to horses themselves.) It’s possible (I’m purely speculating here) that early mechanical inventors had a harder time realizing the fundamental impractiability of the carriage design because they didn’t have much in the way of mathematical engineering principles to go on, but then again it’s unclear what led to Drais’s breakthrough.

To understand the process of discovery—not so much what was discovered, but how it was discovered. Primary sources are best: the words of somebody who discovered something, as they were discovering it. The more examples I see, the more likely I'll be able to discover something tomorrow. To understand the process of failure. We learn a good deal from historical errors, not only from our own. It also helps to know that even the greatest minds are unable to grasp things that seem obvious to us. Leibniz spent much time working on combinatorics, and most of what he did was underwhelming and totally wrong. To celebrate the contributions of many cultures. There are many ways of thinking, many points of view, and many independent researchers. Fibonacci numbers were discovered in India long before Fibonacci. Catalan numbers were discovered in China, a hundred years before Catalan. Many uneducated people have discovered wonderful patterns in numbers, and I can share their joy of discovery. Telling historical stories is the best way to teach. It's much easier to understand something if you know the threads it is connected to. Give credit to Fibonacci, but also to Narayana in India. The complete story is of many separate individuals building a magnificent edifice with a series of small steps. To learn how to cope with life. How did other scientists grow up, make friends or enemies, manage their time, find mentors, mentor others, and serve their communities? Balance is important. To become more familiar with the world, and to know how science fits into the overall history of mankind. What was life like on different continents and in different epochs? The main difference between human beings and animals is that people learn from history.

The plan for NDN is one approach to what's known as information centric networking (ICN), an idea with roots in Ted Nelson's 1980s experiments with hypertext. It wasn't until 2006, however, when projects at Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and at the legendary Xerox PARC launched the idea into the networking mainstream. Internet pioneer and PARC researcher Van Jacobson, whose talk at Google in 2006 has been widely cited as the start of the ICN movement, is now a leader of the NDN project alongside Zhang.

Anyone who is serious about mitigating the damage done to humankind by the social web should, of course, consider quitting Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and any other algorithmically distorted informational environments that manipulate people. But we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change. The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

The site will explore three broad investigative categories: how profiling software discriminates against the poor and other vulnerable groups; internet health and infections like bots, scams and misinformation; and the awesome power of the tech companies. The Markup will release all its stories under a creative commons license so other organizations can republish them, as ProPublica does.

Now, with a $20 million gift from the Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, the data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting The Markup, a news site dedicated to investigating technology and its effect on society. Sue Gardner, former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, will be The Markup’s executive director. Ms. Angwin and Mr. Larson said that they would hire two dozen journalists for its New York office and that stories would start going up on the website in early 2019. The group has also raised $2 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and $1 million collectively from the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative.

For a “book” is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year. The Future Book is here and continues to evolve. You’re holding it. It’s exciting. It’s boring. It’s more important than it has ever been.

In response to this email explosion, the startup Substack launched in 2017 as a newsletter publishing and monetization platform. Most newsletter platforms and payment systems aren’t integrated in any smooth or meaningful way. Charging for access can be an onerous task. Through the Substack system, though, a publisher can easily set up metered access to a newsletter for a subscription fee. As of October, Substack boasts over 25,000 subscribers across various newsletters, paying on average $80 a year. Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi recently launched his novel, The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing, in serial on Substack. Judd Legum’s Popular Information is also published via Substack.

It’s this thing that we were warned about. It’s this thing that we knew could happen. Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics, warned about it as a possibility. And despite all the warnings, and despite all of the cautions, we just walked right into it, and we created mass behavior-modification regimes out of our digital networks. We did it out of this desire to be both cool socialists and cool libertarians at the same time.

In particular, try to go deep on multiple things. (To varying degrees, I tried to go deep on languages, programming, writing, physics, math. Some of those stuck more than others.) One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won't change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can.

For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding. “One person turns up every few days. Some of them have heard about the promise of Solid, and they are driven to turn the world upside down,” he says. Part of the draw is working with an icon. For a computer scientist, coding with Berners-Lee is like playing guitar with Keith Richards. But more than just working with the inventor of the Web, these coders come because they want to join the cause. These are digital idealists, subversives, revolutionaries, and anyone else who wants to fight the centralization of the Web. For his part, working on Solid brings Berners-Lee back to the Web’s early days: “It’s under the radar, but working on it in a way puts back some of the optimism and excitement that the ‘fake news’ takes out.”

The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Web. Working with a small team of developers, he spends most of his time now on Solid, a platform designed to give individuals, rather than corporations, control of their own data. “There are people working in the lab trying to imagine how the Web could be different. How society on the Web could look different. What could happen if we give people privacy and we give people control of their data,” Berners-Lee told me. “We are building a whole eco-system.”

And Apple has a wonderful product called Swift Playgrounds. It’s an app for your iPad but it’s really an environment where kids can learn to program. Apple is of course invested in getting as many people to use their technology products as they can, and in fact they promote their Swift programming language with this page on their site, with the headline “Everyone Can Code.”

I think often and fondly of Bret Victor’s lab in Oakland. He’s been exploring – with admirable determination – new modes of physical computing. And he’s doing so by using really boring technologies: a constellation of networked cameras and projectors smartly deployed. That’s interesting. Bret and his crew made a magic bookshelf. They are concerned with the real world. They are concerned with accessibility and connection. I think many of the philosophies of quietude and disconnection and silence not only can be applied to technology, but should be. Must be. Technology and quietude are powerful partners.

I’ve been reading about John McPhee’s process of writing his giant New Yorker essays thirty or forty years ago, and wow, it sounds like an alien world. The process is so slow and deliberate. At the end, he would hand in an eighty-thousand-word piece. That’s a book! Whatever structure allowed McPhee to write this way back then, it barely exists today. Unless you cobble it together yourself, or hunt it down through non-profit institutions.

A 1971 issue of the radical feminist journal off our backs includes an announcement for a May meeting in Atlantic City “against the misuse of technology.” An announcement for that meeting also appears in a 1971 issue of alternative publication The Realist. There, CPP placed a call for activists to appear at that year’s Spring Joint Computer Conference, an event that the ad points out is “overwhelmingly dominated by white males,” so as to call attention to issues that are critical today — namely, “the use of computer information systems as a means of social control,” “corporate racism,” and “the role of automation on rising unemployment.”

According to Frederick Hayek’s book Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), “civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess.” A civilized cyber-world will be one where people know how to assess critically the reputation of information sources, and can empower their knowledge by learning how to gauge appropriately the social “rank” of each bit of information that enters their cognitive field.

Patrick’s desk is covered in books. There’s a copy of The Dream Machine, about J.C.R. Licklider, the technologist who conceptualized and funded the early internet. The volume was out of print, but Patrick loves it so much he bought the rights and paid to publish hundreds of copies for employees and guests. The wallpaper on his computer displays a countdown clock for his life: He has 52 years and a few days left. “This is a very coarse estimate, but it’s a reminder that you get old quickly,” he says, a touch of gray now in his red hair. “When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.”

Seven years in, however, Stripe’s mission is less to send more books, vacuums, and grooming kits into the world than to “increase the GDP of the internet,” Patrick says. To do this, the company is beginning to move beyond payments by writing software that helps companies retool the way they incorporate, pay workers, and detect fraud. It’s part of an ambitious bid to revamp how online business has been conducted for 20 years and to give anyone with a bright idea a chance to compete. “We think giving two people in a garage the same infrastructure as a 100,000-person ­corporation—the aggregate effects of that will be really good,” Patrick says.

And it’s not just that these early Silicon Valley wunderkinds didn’t have children themselves–there were no women or minorities or older people around either, as sociologist Judy Wacjman points out. “Silicon Valley is notorious in particular for not being family-friendly,” she says. “It’s notorious for being full of young male designers. It’s great that they’re thinking about this now that they’re having kids, but I wonder if one could envision a different design community full of people of different sexes, full of people of different ages. Some of the design that you get is the reflection of the limited cultural understanding of the young guys who are doing the designing.”

At its root, this is a design problem. Fadell believes that products like the iPhone, as much as they are communication devices, are more attuned to the needs of the individual rather than what’s best for the family and the larger community.Some of Silicon Valley’s history is rooted in the communal idealism of 1960s California, where technologists believed that a democratizing force called the internet was going to empower everyone through shared information. But Fadell says this philosophy has been perverted. The emphasis on community has been lost; instead, companies like Apple market their products by selling the notion of freedom, that technology is a liberating force for the individual. Fadell believes that’s partly because of who designed the seminal products and services of the digital age.

As its name suggests, Patreon is loosely modeled on the arts patronage system of the Renaissance, which produced masterworks like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. It’s the latest turn in the never-ending cycle of ways people have funded “free” art, from federal grants to corporate sponsorships to, most recently, impression-based advertising. While Kickstarter revolutionized how people raise money for games, gadgets, and other products, Patreon is aiming for something far more ambitious: “We want to fund the creative class,” CEO and co-founder Jack Conte tells me. “Ten years from now, we want kids growing up and graduating college and high school to know that being a professional creator is possible. We’re shooting for this cultural sea change.”

I keep in touch with the PullString crew afterward as they move on to creating other characters (for instance, a Call of Duty bot that, on its first day in the wild, has 6 million conversations). At one point the company’s CEO, Oren Jacob, a former chief technology officer at Pixar, tells me that PullString’s ambitions are not limited to entertainment. “I want to create technology that allows people to have conversations with characters who don’t exist in the physical world—because they’re fictional, like Buzz Lightyear,” he says, “or because they’re dead, like Martin Luther King.”

It’s 1982, and I’m 11 years old, sitting at a Commodore PET computer terminal in the atrium of a science museum near my house. Whenever I come here, I beeline for this machine. The computer is set up to run a program called Eliza—an early chatbot created by MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s. Designed to mimic a psycho­therapist, the bot is surprisingly mesmerizing.

So he stopped his car, pulled out his medium-format camera, and took a few photos using color Fujifilm. Those brilliant greens and pure blues were totally unedited when O’Rear uploaded them to Corbis, a stock photo and image licensing site founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call from Microsoft asking to use his shot of Sonoma County as the default background for its newest operating system.

These noncommercial alternatives would not have to be funded by the government (which is fortunate, given that government funding for public media such as PBS is in doubt these days). Ralph Engelman, a media historian at Long Island University who wrote Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History, points out that the creation of public broadcasting was led by—and partially funded by—prominent nonprofit groups such as the Ford and Carnegie Foundations. In the past few years, several nonprofit journalism outlets such as ProPublica have sprung up; perhaps now their backers and other foundations could do more to ensure the existence of more avenues for such work to be read and shared.

Facebook is fundamentally not a network of ideas. It’s a network of people. And though it has two billion active users every month, you can’t just start trading insights with all of them. As Facebook advises, your Facebook friends are generally people you already know in real life. That makes it more likely, not less, to stimulate homogeneity of thought. You can encounter strangers if you join groups that interest you, but those people’s posts are not necessarily going to get much airtime in your News Feed. The News Feed is engineered to show you things you probably will want to click on. It exists to keep you happy to be on Facebook and coming back many times a day, which by its nature means it is going to favor emotional and sensational stories.

unlike Whole Foods Amazon has no particular desire to be a grocer, and contrary to conventional wisdom the company is not even a retailer. At its core Amazon is a services provider enabled — and protected — by scale.

E-commerce distribution has massive fixed costs but benefits tremendously from economies of scale The cost to build-out Amazon’s fulfillment centers was justified because the first and best customer is Amazon’s e-commerce business That last bullet point may seem odd, but in fact 40% of Amazon’s sales (on a unit basis) are sold by 3rd-party merchants; most of these merchants leverage Fulfilled-by-Amazon, which means their goods are stored in Amazon’s fulfillment centers and covered by Prime. This increases the return to scale for Amazon’s fulfillment centers, increases the value of Prime, and deepens Amazon’s moat

Apple’s goal was not to build a phone but to build an even more personal computer; their strategy was not to add on functionality to a phone but to reduce the phone to an app; and their tactics were not to duplicate the carriers but to leverage their connection with customers to gain concessions from them.

on the game show “What’s My Line”

That’s how journalist Mike Wallace began a 1957 televised interview with 88-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright.

All of the major tech players, companies from other industries and startups whose names we don’t know yet are working away on some or all of the new major building blocks of the future. They are: Artificial intelligence / machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics and drones, smart homes, self-driving cars, and digital health / wearables. All of these things have dependencies in common. They include greater and more distributed computing power, new sensors, better networks, smarter voice and visual recognition, and software that’s simultaneously more intelligent and more secure.

While Olver worked at the county library by day, by night she was creating an online resource for anyone who wanted to know more about Johnny Appleseed or chuck wagon stew or the origins of Sauce Robert. By the website’s first anniversary, Olver was already spending upwards of 30 hours a week on the Food Timeline, compiling and posting all the information she was digging up and answering readers’ questions about the origins of their grandmothers’ crumble recipes. “If you came in the house and you wanted to know where she was, and she wasn’t cooking, she was in the office on the computer,” Gordon recalled.

“Retail is fickle, especially when you are shipping to individual customers like you and me (rather than, say, stores),” says John Bartholdi, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Tech. “Both Amazon and Walmart have huge populations of product and move lots of it, a few pieces at a time. There is huge product churn as they reconfigure their offerings constantly. It is impossible to plan and manage space in such a dynamic environment.” With products offered in stores changing quickly, it makes even less sense to save dedicated space for one product or another.

One of the best books on the subject is A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Published in 1977, the book outlines a series of architectural patterns (253 of them) that form pleasant environments. Starting on the scale of cities, suburbs, and rural land, A Pattern Language scopes all the way down to the arrangement of seating in a room. Alexander manages to do all this without falling to legibility traps. A Pattern Language is written with the idea that homes and towns should be largely designed by the people who live in them. Rather than a definite prescription, the patterns are more like guidelines, meant to be applied with the local context in mind. Each pattern is numbered for reference and can be used individually or in conjunction with others. Combined, they create beautiful–and more importantly–livable spaces.

Keeping Wikipedia’s culture healthy means moving with the times. “Wikipedia is a child of the desktop internet,” says Mr Negrin. But “increasingly, when people talk about internet users, they’re talking about smartphones.” So the foundation is improving the site’s mobile-editing tools. Typing long articles on a smartphone is inescapably awkward, so attention has focused on helping users to make “micro-edits”, such as fixing spelling mistakes or correcting dates. The hope is that this will also act as a gateway drug for young editors and for those in poorer countries for whom smartphones are the standard or only way of getting online.

In 1985, Aldus, a small startup in Seattle, began working on a software program called PageMaker, to design and organize newspaper layouts. (Paul Brainerd, an Aldus co-founder, who coined the term “desktop publishing,” had previously worked as a journalist.) The company caught the attention of Steve Jobs, who encouraged the founders to adapt the software for a broader business environment. That year, Apple released its first mass-market laser printer, the LaserWriter—a seven-thousand-dollar beige machine that produced professional-grade text and images—and promoted it alongside PageMaker, an early desktop-publishing program for Macintosh. A corporate office or a carpeted den could now become a bespoke printshop. PageMaker’s layout elements mimicked those of a newspaper.

The field of public health had long been haunted by the prospect of a widespread respiratory-illness outbreak like the 1918 influenza pandemic, so Redfield was concerned. Gao, when pressed, assured him that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. At the time, the theory was that each case had arisen from animals in a “wet” market where exotic game was sold. When Redfield learned that, among twenty-seven reported cases, there were several family clusters, he observed that it was unlikely that each person had been infected, simultaneously, by a caged civet cat or a raccoon dog. He offered to send a C.D.C. team to Wuhan to investigate, but Gao said that he wasn’t authorized to accept such assistance. Redfield made a formal request to the Chinese government and assembled two dozen specialists, but no invitation arrived. A few days later, in another conversation with Redfield, Gao started to cry and said, “I think we’re too late.”

The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with George Fu Gao, the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which was modelled on the American institution. Redfield had just received a report about an unexplained respiratory virus emerging in the city of Wuhan.

“The thing about human ingenuity is that when there’s a sharp need for something, it tends to crystallize in discovery,”

The True History of the Aeronauts Who Transformed Our View of the World Above

By studying history, even in different disciplines to your own, you may come across ideas that could transpose into your own field of expertise and take you in directions that you would never have dreamed of. They even have a name for the process, they call it the cross fertilisation of ideas.

As computers became more advanced, their associated software programmes also became much longer and quite cumbersome. Quite often, a computer would need to run the same bit of code again and again. So, rather than rewrite this bit of code every time it was required, functions or procedures were written as semi-isolated pieces of code that could be called upon whenever they were required. This helped software develop in a modular fashion, with individual modules being responsible for certain computational procedures.

We are interested in helping children learn to think better and deeper than most adults can. We have made the Squeak medium to serve as a new kind of electronic paper that can hold new ways to represent powerful ideas. We have written examples of this new literature and they are published over the Internet for children and adults to "read" and play with. Readers can also become writers, because "authoring is always on". In fact, much of the learning of this new way to represent and think is best done by "authoring along with the author" in what we call "active essays".

Background On How Children Learn

One way to understand Dynamicland is as a reaction to the wild success of, and the subsequent regrets about, Xerox PARC. The original inventors of computers didn’t mean to be taken so literally. This was just one possible vision for computing--not the only one and certainly not the best one. Today Bret is showing us a better way forward. A more humane computer. And that computer is not a device. It’s a normal-seeming room.

Why do you want this future? Why would this be a good thing?

It won't be long before almost every one of our daily activities is mediated by a "computer" of some sort. If these computers are not part of the physical environment, if they bypass the body, then we've just created a future where people can and will spend their lives completely immobile.

We've almost given up on the body already. We sit at a desk while working, and sit on a couch while playing, and even sit while transporting ourselves between the two. We've had to invent this peculiar concept of artificial "exercise" to keep our bodies from atrophying altogether.

The "Next Big Thing" is a Room

“Our current conception of what a computer program is,” he said, is “derived straight from Fortran and ALGOL in the late ’50s. Those languages were designed for punch cards.” That code now takes the form of letters on a screen in a language like C or Java (derivatives of Fortran and ALGOL), instead of a stack of cards with holes in it, doesn’t make it any less dead, any less indirect.

By the time he gave the talk that made his name, the one that Resig and Granger saw in early 2012, Victor had finally landed upon the principle that seemed to thread through all of his work. (He actually called the talk “Inventing on Principle.”) The principle was this: “Creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.” The problem with programming was that it violated the principle. That’s why software systems were so hard to think about, and so rife with bugs: The programmer, staring at a page of text, was abstracted from whatever it was they were actually making.

Though he runs a lab that studies the future of computing, he seems less interested in technology per se than in the minds of the people who use it. Like any good toolmaker, he has a way of looking at the world that is equal parts technical and humane. He graduated top of his class at the California Institute of Technology for electrical engineering, and then went on, after grad school at the University of California, Berkeley, to work at a company that develops music synthesizers. It was a problem perfectly matched to his dual personality: He could spend as much time thinking about the way a performer makes music with a keyboard—the way it becomes an extension of their hands—as he could thinking about the mathematics of digital signal processing.

Victor has the mien of David Foster Wallace, with a lightning intelligence that lingers beneath a patina of aw-shucks shyness. He is 40 years old, with traces of gray and a thin, undeliberate beard. His voice is gentle, mournful almost, but he wants to share what’s in his head, and when he gets on a roll he’ll seem to skip syllables, as though outrunning his own vocal machinery.

Bret Victor does not like to write code. “It sounds weird,” he says. “When I want to make a thing, especially when I want to create something in software, there’s this initial layer of disgust that I have to push through, where I’m not manipulating the thing that I want to make, I’m writing a bunch of text into a text editor.”

The programmer, the renowned Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1988, “has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.”

“The problem,” Leveson wrote in a book, “is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”

The Coming Software Apocalypse

But seeing the impact that his talk ended up having, Bret Victor was disillusioned. “A lot of those things seemed like misinterpretations of what I was saying,” he said later. He knew something was wrong when people began to invite him to conferences to talk about programming tools. “Everyone thought I was interested in programming environments,” he said. Really he was interested in how people see and understand systems—as he puts it, in the “visual representation of dynamic behavior.”

Swimming with the Fish

Good Design: A system should be built with a minimum set of unchangeable parts; those parts should be as general as possible; and all parts of the system should be held in a uniform framework.

We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming language) that serves as an interface between the models in the human mind and those in computing hardware, and a language of interaction (user interface) that matches the human communication system to that of the computer.

"Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the 'Computers - Threat or menace?' school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar."

The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar.

That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers - Threat or menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush.

Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.

Capstone’s vision comes in three three main pillars: A digital-information collection tool. Pros need a place to collect many types of digital media: the raw material for their thinking process. Our focus for this project is collection done on a desktop computer’s web browser. A place to sift, sort, find patterns and insights. Once the raw material is collected, the user should be able to sift and sort through it in a freeform way. All media needs to be represented in the same spatially-organized environment. Use a tablet and stylus to its full potential. Pen-and-paper solutions, especially the A4 notebook, seem to be more conducive to thinking and having better ideas. Our hypothesis is that the thinking step should happen on a tablet with freeform inking via the stylus.

Transclusion is including one part of a document into another, and maintaing a link between the two. This is different to copying. A copy isn't inherently linked to it's original, and can be changed in the duplicate version.A transclusion is directly linked to the original, and contains the exact same contents. Someone viewing the transclusion can easily open and view the original document. By doing this, transclusions create a single source of truth for that element, and a Bi-Directional Link so you can navigate between the original source and its instances across the web.

They're not following the same conventions as what we've come to know as the "personal blog". Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like freeform, work-in-progress wikis.They're collections of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time.They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing. It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites "should be." It's an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined.

“The stream has dominated our lives since the mid-2000s,” Caulfield says. But it means people are either posting content or consuming it. And, Caulfield says, the internet as it stands rewards shock value and dumbing things down. “By engaging in digital gardening, you are constantly finding new connections, more depth and nuance,” he says. “What you write about is not a fossilized bit of commentary for a blog post. When you learn more, you add to it. It’s less about shock and rage; it’s more connective.” In an age of doom-scrolling and Zoom fatigue, some digital-garden enthusiasts say the internet they live in is, as Caulfield puts it, “optimistically hopeful.”

INTERVIEWER Could you say something of your work habits? Do you write to a preplanned chart? Do you jump from one section to another, or do you move from the beginning through to the end? NABOKOV The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.

Playboy: Can you tell us something more about the actual creative process involved in the germination of a book—perhaps by reading a few random notes for or excerpts from a work in progress? Nabokov: Certainly not. No foetus should undergo an exploratory operation. But I can do something else. This box contains index cards with some notes I made at various times more or less recently and discarded when writing Pale Fire.

How do you write? What are your methods? I find now that index cards are really the best kind of paper that I can use for the purpose. I don't write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end. I just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind, picking out a piece here and a piece there and filling out part of the sky and part of the landscape and part of the-- 1 don't know, the carousing hunters.

On Reading and Books

You start out deciding to tidy your room and you realize that in order to do that you'll need some more trash bags, so you need to go to the shops, which will involve you getting out the car, but the car needs gas, so you'll need to go to the gas station first, which means you should probably find your gas discount card, which involves finding your keys, which are in the room somewhere...

SoftBank buys far more call options than the market is used to handling. The market-makers have now sold far more call options than they're used to and need to hedge, meaning they're going to be buying that underlying stock. That pushes the price up, meaning they will need to buy even more of that stock to hedge. And let's not forget the COVID + software will eat the world stories, which are very true. Does anyone want to bet against Apple or Tesla or Amazon or Zoom or Shopify? What other stock are you going to buy?

Even the "retail" is plenty of well-off people. While most of the media coverage focuses on laid-off college-aged kids and uses the term "mom and pop" investors (is that even okay in 2021?), I can promise you plenty of friends in tech (who often make a lot more than friends in finance nowadays [Haha, sorry -Can]) and doctors are sending me $GME or $AMC gain porn. The already wealthy are having a laugh, catalyzed by r/WSB. I mean, the world's richest man joined in oh the fun. Can we please stop making this about the "little guy" vs. "Wall Street"?

Professional Money is on both sides of the trade. There are very openly 'hedge funds and professional money managers' on both sides of all these trades, not just on the short side. They’re openly talking about it. A famous Silicon Valley billionaire who runs a hedge fund went on CNBC to openly talk about profiting from a $GME long position and donating the proceeds to the Barstool fund (naturally, the only logical result from this timeline). It's one example, but it's some pros are long, some are short.

For larger asset managers who are only able/willing to access Bitcoin through traditional venues (i.e., derivatives, equity markets), the market size is even smaller.

And while the gold market trumps Bitcoin in size, the same is true for gold, which is a fraction of the size of US equities.

That is why to me Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future that I could put an amount of money in that I wouldn’t mind losing about 80% of.

In fact I assume that better ones will come along and displace this one because that is the way the evolution of everything works—i.e., new ways of doing things and new things always have and always will replace old ways of doing things and old things. Since the way Bitcoin works is fixed, it won’t be able to evolve and I presume that a better alternative will be invented and pass it by. I see that as a risk.

It seems to me that Bitcoin has succeeded in crossing the line from being a highly speculative idea that could well not be around in short order to probably being around and probably having some value in the future. The big questions to me are what can it realistically be used for and what amount of demand will it have. Since the supply is known, one has to estimate the demand to estimate its price.

Your only other option is to retreat to a shadowy network of private spaces defended by blocks, restricted feeds, secret-group gatekeeping boundaries, and subscribers-only paywalls.

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict.

Moore divided tech markets into five parts

Drucker’s emphasis on the autonomy of knowledge workers made sense, as there was no obvious way to deconstruct the efforts required by newly important mid-century jobs—like corporate research and development or advertisement copywriting—into assembly-line-style sequences of optimized steps. But Drucker was also influenced by the politics of the Cold War. He viewed creativity and innovation as key to staying ahead of the Soviets. Citing the invention of the atomic bomb, he argued that scientific work of such complexity and ambiguity could not have been managed using the heavy-handed techniques of the industrial age, which he likened to the centralized planning of the Soviet economy. Future industries, he suggested, would need to operate in “local” and “decentralized” ways.

Age is another factor which the physicists particularly worry about. They always are saying that you have got to do it when you are young or you will never do it. Einstein did things very early, and all the quantum mechanic fellows were disgustingly young when they did their best work. Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists do what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don't do good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics and literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don't know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect.

By focusing on the structured, rational testing of hypotheses through experiments—day science—this description leaves out night science, as François Jacob called it. Night science is where we explore the unstructured realm of possible hypotheses, of ideas not yet fully fleshed out. In day science, we falsify hypotheses and observe which are left standing; in night science, we create them.

Jobs shook his head. ''But then you meet the girl, and she says, 'Let me see what's on your iPod.' You pull out a tape player, and she walks away.'' This was an unanticipated, and surprisingly persuasive, response. That's thinking long-term, I said. ''No,'' said Steve Jobs. ''That's being an optimist.''

''We don't underestimate people,'' Jobs said later in the interview. ''We really did believe that people would want something this good, that they'd see the value in it. And that rather than making a far inferior product for a hundred dollars less, giving people the product that they want and that will serve them for years, even though it's a little pricier. People are smart; they figure these things out.''

What these shows all have in common is their placidity—there’s little in the way of conflict or tension—and their reliance on B-roll, the footage that filmmakers intersperse with their main shots to smooth transitions between cuts. There often seems to be more B-roll than A, however. Viewers can select from footage of beef getting sliced, shelves being filled, or walks through foreign cities.

The in-group is the tribe you want to join and signal your affiliation to. The out-group is everyone else – people you want to distance yourself from.

In every signaling scenario there are two possible target audiences: An in-group and an out-group.

The military strategist John Boyd once said that we can either “be somebody” or “do something.” Subscription products nudge their customers to embrace the former: Rather than doing something — making purchases and moving on — customers “become somebody” specific, like loyal Amazon Prime customers.

Subscription products take this a step further: They try to establish a relationship whose seriality means it is no longer transactional but emotional, a part of customers’ lives.

Any normal person would have given up already. They’d been funding the company with credit cards. They had a binder full of credit cards they’d maxed out. Investors didn’t think much of the idea. One investor they met in a cafe walked out in the middle of meeting with them. They thought he was going to the bathroom, but he never came back. “He didn’t even finish his smoothie,” Brian said.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

overview effect