James Bridle

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Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence by James Bridle

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, experimental subject, factory automation, fake news, friendly AI, gig economy, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, James Bridle, James Webb Space Telescope, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, music of the spheres, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, recommendation engine, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, speech recognition, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, techno-determinism, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, UNCLOS, undersea cable, urban planning, Von Neumann architecture, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

James Bridle * * * WAYS OF BEING Beyond Human Intelligence Contents List of Illustrations Introduction: More than Human 1 Thinking Otherwise 2 Wood Wide Webs 3 The Thicket of Life 4 Seeing Like a Planet 5 Talking to Strangers 6 Non-Binary Machines 7 Getting Random 8 Solidarity 9 The Internet of Animals Conclusion: Down on the Metal Farm Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements Index About the Author James Bridle is a writer and artist. Their writing on art, politics, culture and technology has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Observer, Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, Frieze, Domus, and ICON.

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What about Ass Rights? What about Worm Rights? What about Germ Rights? What about Plant Rights? – Moondog ‘Enough about Human Rights’, from the album H’art Songs by Moondog, 1978 List of Illustrations 1. Visualizations of a neural network’s way of seeing. Image: James Bridle. 2. Autonomous Trap 001, Mount Parnassus, 2017. Image: James Bridle. 3. Illustration from Benjamin B. Beck, ‘A Study of Problem Solving by Gibbons’, Behaviour, 28 (1/2), 1967, p. 95 Reproduced with permission from Brill. 4. Portrait of Jenny, the first orang-utan at London Zoo. Printed by W. Clerk, High Holborn, in December 1837.

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O. 305–6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 180 Woese, Carl 103–5 Wolff, Christian 228 wolves 149, 286–90, 294, 297 Wonder, Stevie 66 Wood Wide Web 80–82 Wyoming Migration Initiative 298–9, 299 Yamuna River 266 Yao (people) 144–6, 165 Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y) 290–91, 294, 297, 300 Ymittos 67 yo-he-ho theory 147 Yunkaporta, Tyson 172 Zakynthos 3–4 Zen Buddhism 233 zoos 48, 97, 250 Bronx Zoo 29–41, 263–5 Chicago Zoo 32 escapes from 253–5 London Zoo 35–6 National Zoological Park (Washington DC) 38 San Diego Zoo 253, 279 argument for abolition 1–350 THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING Find us online and join the conversation Follow us on Twitter twitter.com/penguinukbooks Like us on Facebook facebook.com/penguinbooks Share the love on Instagram instagram.com/penguinukbooks Watch our authors on YouTube youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin Penguin books to your Pinterest pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Listen to audiobook clips at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover your next read at penguin.co.uk PENGUIN BOOKS UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia New Zealand | India | South Africa Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com. First published by Allen Lane in 2022 Copyright © James Bridle, 2022 The moral right of the author has been asserted Cover design by Matthew Young after James Bridle’s own Rorschmap Satellite image from the United States Geological Survey on Unsplash ISBN: 978-0-141-99427-7 This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

., ‘Achievement of Sustained Net Plasma Heating in a Fusion Experiment with the Optometrist Algorithm’, Nature Scientific Reports 7 (2017), nature.com. 28.Albert van Helden and Thomas Hankins, eds, Osiris, Volume 9: Instruments, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 5Complexity 1.Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, Les Lèvres Nues 6 (1955), available at library.nothingness.org. 2.James Bridle, The Nor, essay series, 2014–15, available at shorttermmemoryloss.com. 3.Jame Bridle, ‘All Cameras are Police Cameras’, The Nor, November 2014. 4.James Bridle, ‘Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum’, The Nor, December 2014. 5.Christopher Steiner, ‘Wall Street’s Speed War’, Forbes, September 9, 2010, forbes.com. 6.Kevin Fitchard, ‘Wall Street gains an edge by trading over microwaves’, GigaOM, February 10, 2012, gigaom.com. 7.Luis A.

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New Dark Age New Dark Age Technology and the End of the Future James Bridle First published by Verso 2018 © James Bridle 2018 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-547-1 ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-549-5 (UK EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-550-1 (US EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Sabon by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY For Navine Contents 1.Chasm 2.Computation 3.Climate 4.Calculation 5.Complexity 6.Cognition 7.Complicity 8.Conspiracy 9.Concurrency 10.Cloud Acknowledgements Notes Index 1 Chasm ‘If only technology could invent some way of getting in touch with you in an emergency,’ said my computer, repeatedly.

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At the other end of the journey was another unmarked data centre facility: seven acres of server space distinguishable only by a fluttering Union Jack, and by the fact that if you linger too long on the road in front of it, you will be harassed by security guards. This is the Euronext Data Center, the European outpost of the New York Stock Exchange, whose operations are likewise obscure and virtual. Photograph: James Bridle. LD4 Data Center, Slough. Photograph: James Bridle. NYSE Euronext Data Center, Basildon. Connecting these two locations is an almost invisible line of microwave transmissions: narrow beams of information that bounce from dish to dish and tower to tower, carrying financial information of almost unimaginable value at close to the speed of light.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

John Naughton, ‘Extremism pays. That’s why Silicon Valley isn’t shutting it down’, Guardian, 18 March 2018. 11. As former Google engineer Guillaume Chaslot put it . . . Paul Lewis, ‘“Fiction is outperforming reality”: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth’, Guardian, 2 February 2018. 12. The artist James Bridle has written . . . James Bridle, ‘Something is wrong on the internet’, Medium, 6 November 2017. 13. . . . it reflected data coming from . . . Tracy McVeigh, ‘Amazon acts to halt sales of “Keep Calm and Rape” T-shirts’, Guardian, 2 March 2013; Colin Lecher, ‘“Keep Calm And Rape”, Plus 5 More Awful/Offensive/Hilarious Algorithm-Created Shirts’, Popular Science, 6 March 2013. 14.

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Rather, the platforms, by their nature, are magnetically drawn to drama, whether political or personal. The user becomes, in China Miéville’s term, a ‘dramaphage’. The content agnosticism of computational capitalism has political valences, but the algorithm’s effects go well beyond political content. The artist James Bridle has written of the surprisingly outré and noir YouTube content for kids, which involves erotic or violent content: Peppa Pig eating her daddy or drinking bleach, for example.12 This material was created to meet a demand identified by the algorithms – in other words, it reflected data coming from users: searches, likes, clicks and watch time.13 In this respect, it was not unlike the algorithm-driven merchandise of previous years: t-shirts with such slogans as ‘Keep Calm and Rape a Lot’, ‘Kiss Me I’m Abusive’ and ‘I Heart Boiling Girls’.

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Hayley Tsukayama, ‘Teens spend nearly nine hours every day consuming media’, Washington Post, 9 November 2015. 12. And the number of us checking our phones . . . Deloitte, ‘Global mobile consumer trends’, 2nd edition, 2017 <www2.deloitte.com>. 13. . . . violent, eroticized, animated fantasies aimed at children . . . James Bridle, ‘Something is wrong on the internet’, Medium.com, 6 November 2017. 14. This is the ‘modern calculating machine’ . . . Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” ’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 2006, p. 45. On the cybernetic origins of Lacan’s thinking here, see Lydia H.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook before It Breaks Democracy?” New Yorker, September 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. 32. James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. 33. James Bridle, New Dark Age (New York: Verso, 2018), 230. 34. Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, “On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles,” New York Times, June 3, 2019, at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/world/americas/youtube-pedophiles.html. 35.

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YouTube’s ordinary content review processes can in principle improve over time to catch these videos more quickly. Some algorithmically generated content, however, raises another level of concern. Given the rise of automated remixes online, innocent cartoon characters like Peppa Pig may be chatting with friends in one video, then brandishing knives and guns in a “satire” auto-played right after. As artist James Bridle has observed, this goes beyond ordinary anxieties about decency. What is worrying about the Peppa videos, Bridle argues, “is how the obvious parodies and even the shadier knock-offs interact with the legions of algorithmic content producers until it is completely impossible to know what is going on”—be it artistic creativity, satire, cruelty, or perverse efforts to introduce small children to violent or sexualized content.32 A context of no-context commingles all these forms, fraternizing incompatibles.

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Sarah Schwarz, “YouTube Accused of Targeting Children with Ads, Violating Federal Privacy Law,” Education Week: Digital Education (blog), April 13, 2018, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2018/04/youtube_targeted_ads_coppa_complaint.html; John Montgallo, “Android App Tracking Improperly Follows Children, Study,” QR Code Press, April 18, 2018, http://www.qrcodepress.com/android-app-tracking-improperly-follows-children-study/8534453/. 39. James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, November 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. 40. Nick Statt, “YouTube Will Reportedly Release a Kids’ App Curated by Humans,” Verge, April 6, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/6/17208532/youtube-kids-non-algorithmic-version-whitelisted-conspiracy-theories. 41.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Algorithmic power “does not confront ‘subjects’ as moral agents (avoiding to question them about their preferences and intentions, about the reasons and motivations of their actions) but attunes their future informational and physical environment according to the predictions contained in the statistical body.”63 While the empiricism of this irresistible control still remains hypothetical, as in the ZunZuneo example of chapter 2, I want to emphasize the yet-completeness of such a theorization. Online we recognize ourselves not necessarily as unique subjects or “moral agents” but as entities who can be reflexive in ways that might not come in the form of direct, bare-knuckled recalcitrance. Figure 3.2. A screenshot from James Bridle’s Citizen-Ex. In the case of jus algoritmi, we encounter reflexivity in the fact that we know it exists. The datafied subject relation that assigns ‘foreigner’ and ‘citizen’ might seem hidden from us as a secret interpretation of our metadata. But the 2013 Snowden leaks alert us to the possibility, and underlying logic, of how this kind of algorithmic ‘citizenship’ works.

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Accordingly, we recognize that any interpretation, from state power to metaphysical claims to identity, orders our lives in inconsistent ways. In this formative disconnection, we can feel the space between one’s citizenship and one’s ‘citizenship.’ For instance, upon learning that the NSA valued Internet metadata to ascertain users’ ‘foreignness,’ UK artist James Bridle and others developed a browser add-on called Citizen-Ex that, following my earlier work on jus algoritmi’s logic, made users aware of NSA surveillance through a “just-in-time,” artistic interpretation of their quantitative ‘citizenship’ (figure 3.2).64 The fact that one’s Citizen-Ex ‘citizenship’ is more than likely distinct from one’s formal citizenship alerts us to our reflexivity and thus conditions how we experience the multiplicities of our algorithmic identities.

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Franklin, Control, 9. 62. Antoinette Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviourism versus Due Process,” in Privacy, Due Process, and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja de Vries (London: Routledge, 2013), 157. 63. Ibid. 64. James Bridle, “Citizen-Ex,” 2015, https://citizen-ex.com. 65. Marissa Moorman, “Can an Algorithm Be Racist?,” Africa Is a Country (blog), September 29, 2014, http://africasacountry.com. 66. Ibid. 67. This point is admittedly confounded by the dominance of Brazilian Portuguese, which uses “você” as the default second-person subject. 68.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

Wikipedia’s process, Weinberger points out, is a part of its product, arguably an indispensable part. Whereas the authority of traditional publishing relies on expertise—trust us because our authors are vetted by our experience, their credentials, or the marketplace—conversational media gains authority by revealing its mechanics. James Bridle, a British writer, artist, and publisher, made this point neatly when he took the entire text of every edit of Wikipedia’s much-disputed entry on the Iraq War during a five-year period and printed it as a set of twelve hardcover books. At nearly seven thousand pages, it was as long as an encyclopedia itself.

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The Wikipedia Foundation’s own study of Wikipedia’s accuracy is here: Imogen Casebourne, Chris Davies, Michelle Fernandes, and Naomi Norman, “Assessing the Accuracy and Quality of Wikipedia Entries Compared to Popular Online Encyclopedias,” Wikipedia Foundation, August 1, 2012, accessed March 22, 2103, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EPIC_Oxford_report.pdf. as the author David Weinberger points out: David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 140–47. “This is historiography”: James Bridle, “On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography,” booktwo.org, September 6, 2010, accessed March 22, 2013, booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/. “typographical fixity” of paper: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 113.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

On YouTube’s main site this clip had tens of millions of views. A YouTube director told the newspaper that less than “.005 percent” of videos in the Kids app in the last thirty days were flagged as inappropriate, calling them “the extreme needle in the haystack.” But the earth had shaken. And two days later, an avalanche hit. James Bridle, a British author who wrote about drones and warfare, had turned their attention to kids. Bridle published a very long entry on the blogging site Medium with a catchy title, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet.” Bridle’s writing was crisp and detailed, but their visuals told enough of a story.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT on “startling” videos: Sapna Maheshwari, “On YouTube Kids, Startling Videos Slip Past Filters,” The New York Times, November 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube-kids-paw-patrol.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT on the blogging site Medium: James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, November 6, 2017, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Article title: Mark Bridge and Alexi Mostrous, “Child Abuse on YouTube,” The Times, November 18, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/child-abuse-on-youtube-q3x9zfkch.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Cecily Burt, “Film traces destruction of Emeryville shellmound,” East Bay Times, August 17, 2016: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2005/06/03/film-traces-destruction-of-emeryville-shellmound/. 17. Coalition to Save the West Berkeley Shellmound & Village Site, “An Ohlone Vision for the Land,” Shellmound—Ohlone Heritage Site and Sacred Grounds: https://shellmound.org/learn-more/ohlone-vision/. 18. James Bridle, “Something is wrong on the internet,” Medium, November 6, 2017: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. 19. Paul Lewis, “‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia,” The Guardian, October 6, 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia. 20.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

And finally, Sinan Aral’s The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt (New York: Currency, 2020) details some of the dangers but remains a favorable view of the giant, providing the possibility of redemption. 43.Naughton, “The Goal Is to Automate Us.” 44.James Bridle, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff Review—We Are the Pawns,” Guardian, February 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review. 45.Shoshana Zuboff wants the market in our behavioral data, like the slave trade, abolished.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), pp. 2–3. 7. Ibid., p. vi. 8. Ibid., p. 215. 9. Ayn Rand, Fountainhead, p. 11. PART THREE: THE NAME OF THE GAME CHAPTER 13 1. Personal conversation, November 22, 2017. 2. James Bridle, “Known Unknowns,” Harper’s, July 2018. 3. “Rise of the Machines,” The Economist, May 22, 2017. 4. “On Welsh Corgis, Computer Vision, and the Power of Deep Learning,” microsoft.com, July 14, 2014. 5. Andrew Roberts, “Elon Musk Says to Forget North Korea Because Artificial Intelligence Is the Real Threat to Humanity,” uproxx.com, August 12, 2017. 6.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Lisa Napoli, “As If in a Seller’s Dream, the Bags Fly Out of the Studio,” New York Times, December 7, 2004. 20. Ibid. 21. Gary Wolf, “Tim Ferriss Wants to Hack Your Body,” Wired, December 2010. 22. By 2007, 43 percent of email users said the first thing they do when they wake is check for new messages. AOL study cited in “Email Statistics,” at http://powerprodirect.com. 23. James Bridle, “The New Aesthetic: Waving at the Machines,” talk delivered at Web Directions South, Sydney, Australia, December 5, 2011, http://booktwo.org/notebook/waving-at-machines. 24. Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass,” New York, October 14, 2007. 25.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

For the conversation, critiques, and cajoling, I am in their debt. At some point, I would like to host them all at once for a grand dinner. An incomplete invitation list must include Lida Abdul, Alisa Andrasek, Julieta Aranda, Armen Avanessian, Carla Azar, Juan Azulay, David Bergman, Ryan Bishop, Mike Bonifer, Alexi Bourbeau, James Bridle, Sheldon Brown, Anne Burdick, Jose Caballer, Ben Cerveny, Karl Chu, Peter Cowhey, Jordan Crandall, Kate Crawford, Sean Crowe, Teddy Cruz, Rene Daalder, Marc Davis, Joe Day, Manuel de Landa, Jessica D’Elena, Neil Denari, Robert Densworth, Ricardo Dominguez, Tim Durfee, Keller Easterling, Greg Edwards, Adam Eeuwens, Joel Ericson, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Numair Faraz, Conn Fishburn, Jane Fitzgerald, David Fore, Brady Forrest, Peter Frankfurt, Ming Fung, Vincent Gallo, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Ken Goldberg, Eugene Goreshter, Marcelyn Gow, Adam Greenfield, John R.

…

That heterogeneity may be another bulwark against totalitarianism, and it may also be a path toward another as yet undefined universal materialism, one that is no more or less totalitarian than the laws of mathematics. 76.  Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 77.  Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2013), 9. 78.  James Bridle, “Do You Know This Person?” Render Search, http://render-search.com/. 79.  Sarah Jaffe, “Silicon Valley's Gig Economy Is Not the Future of Work—It's Driving Down Wages,” Guardian, July 23, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/23/gig-economy-silicon-valley-taskrabbit-workers. 80. 

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

“earn a virtual reward”: Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 16, 2015. “We noticed recently”: Christopher Caldwell, “OkCupid’s Venal Experiment Was a Poisoned Arrow,” Financial Times, August 2–3, 2014. more than a third of Americans: James Bridle, “The Science of Seduction,” The Observer, February 9, 2014. Now they would be set: Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). “As the network power”: David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 34.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

single national database: Josh Hicks (18 Feb 2014), “Homeland Security wants to build national database using license plate scanners,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/02/18/homeland-security-wants-to-build-national-database-using-license-plate-scanners. Dan Froomkin (17 Mar 2014), “Reports of the death of a national license-plate tracking database have been greatly exaggerated,” Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/17/1756license-plate-tracking-database. In the UK, a similar government-run system: James Bridle (18 Dec 2013), “How Britain exported next-generation surveillance,” Medium, https://medium.com/matter-archive/how-britain-exported-next-generation-surveillance-d15b5801b79e. Jennifer Lynch and Peter Bibring (6 May 2013), “Automated license plate readers threaten our privacy,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/alpr.

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

The “aesthetic” aesthetic evolved in the late 2000s with the 2007 advent of Tumblr and other sites devoted to the posting of one’s own art, as well as aggregated images of art and fashion and photography. It’s used to describe a sense that social media posting is art—or can be art, if it’s “aesthetic” enough. (Not to be confused with, although perhaps related to, the “New Aesthetic” concept introduced by British artist and writer James Bridle in 2011 to describe the response to technology by artists working in the digital age.) “You can, like, post a picture of your cereal,” Sophia said, “but you have to make it aesthetic.” “Aesthetic” looks, aesthetically, like a manifestation of hipster style, as exemplified by Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, with a dose of Rookie and Real Simple magazines.

Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

* * * Return to beginning of chapter THANKS TOM MASTERS Thanks enormously to Mike Christie who lent me his home as a base for my research. Thanks also to Steve Fallon and Vesna Maric for all their excellent hard work carving up a city as immense as London with me. Thanks to Clifton Wilkinson in the London office for commissioning me again, and as always, to James Bridle whose love of all things London has always been infective. Thanks also to Tommy Moss, Gabriel Gatehouse, Stephen Dorling, Zeeba Carroll, Gray Jordan, Chris Mackay, Leila Rejali, Stephen Billington and Etienne Gilfillan for their company and help while researching this book. STEVE FALLON I frequently enter the Underground at Bethnal Green, where 173 people (over a third of them children) were killed during an air raid in March 1943, the highest loss of civilian life in a single incident in London during WWII.