If on a winter’s night a whippet I want to share a quote with you that I think about a lot. It’s from a book… Read More »McKinley Valentine (and Italo Calvino) on how reading changes the past
“Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.” Gospel of Matthew Where does Sauron… Read More »Villainy: Things Fall Apart
In short This book – about the origins of the internet – comes highly recommended by lots of people, and is really excellent. Longer I… Read More »Technology (9): The Dream Machine
How’s this for an MVP? Wikipedia has: Bill Gates was a student at Harvard University and Paul Allen worked for Honeywell in Boston when they saw the Altair computer on the cover of Popular Electronics.… Read More »Microsoft’s first MVP: BASIC for the Altair 8800
I met a colleague – also a good friend – in person for the first time in two years yesterday. We exchanged unexceptional greetings and… Read More »We didn’t say “Long Time no see.”
A complex social system… really is made up of a set of complex and interconnected forces that both affect each other and the things that… Read More »Rob Ricigliano on the murky unpredictability of complex systems
This extract is from one of the best interviews with Kevin Kelly I’ve heard, on David Perell’s The North Star podcast. It covers a lot… Read More »Technology (8): Kevin Kelly on finding jobs for infant technologies
I was a clipboard person… for registering people to vote. And one of the things you learn when you do this is that you’re actually… Read More »Margo Aaron on Copywriting: Right Person, Right Copy
Does Not Compute These pairs have been on my mind recently. Some are ridiculous, others productive only in tension. Technology is killing us | Technology… Read More »Binary Oppositions
On the Hook Here’s the promised graph, explained below: Fishing for Complements Robert Solow (1987) pointed out that “a technological revolution, a drastic change in… Read More »Technology (7): Solow-ng (and thanks for all the fish) – Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson on intangibles and the Productivity J-Curve