Mitch Kapor

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pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

In The Internet Is Not the Answer, I wrote about a four-story private club in downtown San Francisco, called the Battery, that, in spite of its boasts of inclusivity and openness, is actually a nauseatingly exclusive gentleman’s-style retreat for a tech elite of mostly rich white young men. The four-story reinvented building over the Bay in downtown Oakland is everything that the Battery claims to be, but isn’t. Created by Mitch Kapor—the founder of the software giant Lotus, which was acquired in 1995 by IBM for $3.5 billion—and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, a longtime tech activist and reformer, it is part venture capital firm, part nonprofit hub for tech activists, part resource for local students and aspiring businesspeople, and part inclusive community center, restaurant, and café.

IT IS TIME TO ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND FIGHT FOR WHO WE ARE proclaimed the quote from Harris. Inside the Kapor Center, that fight is raging. Kapor Capital is hosting a hackathon for tech start-ups focused on the creation of jobs for the underprivileged. The theater in the basement of the new building is full of young tech entrepreneurs and Kapor management, including Mitch Kapor, Ben Jealous, Freada Kapor Klein, and their latest partner, the venture capitalist Ellen Pao, who in 2015 fought a high-profile gender-discrimination suit against the Silicon Valley blue-chip firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. By the way, that’s the firm that was cofounded by the late Tom Perkins, the notoriously insensitive billionaire tech investor who, in a 2014 letter to the Wall Street Journal, explicitly compared progressives to Nazis.

In February 2017, after a female former Uber engineer wrote a widely read blog post exposing the systemic sexism and sexual harassment at the company, Kapor Klein with her husband, Mitch, even penned an “Open Letter to the Uber Board and Investors,” which went viral on the internet, about what they called the “toxic” culture of the rideshare start-up.24 And after revelations about 500 Startups CEO Dave McClure’s systematic sexual harassment of female entrepreneurs, Mitch Kapor—a limited partner in one of the 500 Startups investment funds—publicly stated his intention to ask for his money back from the fund.25 “Tech must change,” the influential TechCrunch journalist Josh Constine wrote about the corrosive culture at Uber, “and more people like the Kapors must stand up for that change.”26 Kapor Klein, who never seems to appear in public without her dog Dudley, tells me that she grew up in Los Angeles in an activist family and went to UC Berkeley in the early countercultural seventies.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Barlow later wrote: “I’ve been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls, police custody while on acid, and Harlem after midnight, but no one had ever put the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment.” Even so, Barlow continued to say he was more worried about the government restricting or monitoring computers than he was about the punks. He met the two hackers for Chinese food, reaffirming his belief that they were not the main enemy. Then he convinced Boston software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, inventor of the modern electronic spreadsheet, and libertarian engineer John Gilmore to join him in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Gilmore would soon host the Cypherpunks mailing list, which would be home to the most public-spirited cryptographers of the next two decades, along with hackers, assorted freethinkers, and the probable inventor of Bitcoin.)

Before most Americans had heard of Silicon Valley, the Route 128 band around Boston was sprouting computer and software companies stocked with graduates from local educational institutions, including Harvard and, especially, its Cambridge rival, MIT. Politicians called it the Massachusetts Miracle. Cambridge itself played host to many innovative technology companies, including two that employed members of cDc and their close collaborators. The better known was Lotus Development Corporation, begun in 1982 by engineer Mitch Kapor. Though Lotus made its first program for Apple computers, it scored a runaway hit with Lotus 1-2-3, the first electronic spreadsheet with graphics. The app worked with early versions of Microsoft operating systems running on IBM personal computers, and it gave many people the first compelling reason to buy a PC.

The son of a General Electric engineer, Wysopal attended a Catholic high school on the North Shore outside Boston, then went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which ranked in quality behind only MIT and CalTech in many computer degrees. At RPI he hosted a hacking bulletin board that attracted some from the Legion of Doom, but he didn’t get in much trouble himself. Returning to the Boston area in 1987, Wysopal got a coveted job at Mitch Kapor’s Lotus Development and stayed focused on that. But a few years later, he started hunting for bulletin boards again, landing at the Works and Hassick’s hard-core hacking bulletin board Black Crawling Systems. A few months later, Hassick invited Wysopal to the L0pht as well. Now including John, Hassick, Golgo13, Dan, Grand, and Wysopal, the L0pht crew would go “trashing,” diving in dumpsters outside phone company central offices or corporate buildings.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

The contracts were drawn that summer, to be executed in October, when Bidzos would go to Lotus’s new headquarters on the Charles River in Cambridge, and he and Mitch Kapor would both sign the contract. But when the RSA contingent arrived that day they sensed a profound disarray at Lotus. Sitting in the waiting room, Bidzos reached for a copy of the Wall Street Journal. On the front page was one of its trademark ink-pen portraits—of Mitch Kapor. It accompanied a story that said that Kapor was resigning from Lotus to pursue those ever-compelling personal goals. Essentially, the former transcendental meditation teacher had grown intolerant of the business world’s soul-battering minutiae, and he was following his muse out the door.

He felt that IBM itself would eventually get into the business of writing software for that world, but in the meantime there was a total vacuum—one that he hoped to fill with a program of his own design. That was Notes, and he founded Iris Associates to produce the program. But he spent much of 1982 unsuccessfully seeking start-up funding. In early 1983, he set out to pitch his vision to Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, which had recently released a spreadsheet called 1-2-3 that immediately supplanted VisiCalc as the industry gold standard. Kapor’s main concern was finding a master software wizard to write Symphony, a multifunction program for Lotus, one that melded a spreadsheet, word processor, and database.

In 1984, though, the appearance of an early implementation of RSA in a computer hobbyist magazine was a symbol of public key’s status: although the advance had made a lot of noise in the academic community, no one had seriously considered using it in a software product. But Notes needed something like it. In a memo Ozzie wrote about security issues, he identified the problem that his groupware product faced, both in protecting privacy and establishing authenticity: Mitch Kapor wants to send mail to Jim Manzi [Lotus’s second-in-command] about some (perhaps sensitive) subject. Mitch sends it to Jim. First, although this mail SAYS that it is from Mitch, has some hacker on the network “faked” the message and put it into Jim’s mailbox? How can he be sure that this mail is really from Mitch?


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

“If I went to my board and said I want to buy this company for $150 million and I’ve got ten days to do it . . . they would have looked at me like I was crazy,” Severino marveled. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94 CHAPTER SIX: PLANNERS AND IMPROVISERS Frank Rose, “Mitch Kapor and the Lotus Factor,” Esquire, Dec. 1984, 358, classic.esquire.com/article/1984/12/1/mitch-kapor-and-the-lotus-factor. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 The story that follows about GO is distilled from Kaplan’s memoir. All facts and quotations come from Kaplan’s account unless otherwise noted. See Jerry Kaplan, Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure (repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1996).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31 Kapor, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32 O’Dell, interview by the author, June 2, 2018. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33 Kapor, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34 Mitch Kapor, “Oral History of Mitch Kapor,” interview by Bill Aspray, Computer History Museum, Nov. 19, 2004, 12. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35 Kapor to Ben Rosen, reproduced in full in William A. Sahlman, “Lotus Development Corporation,” Harvard Business School case study, 1985, 13–14. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36 Kapor, author interview.

From this privileged vantage point, Valentine could see which sorts of innovative networking technology Cisco might want to acquire. As a result, Sequoia backed a series of startups that it sold profitably to the mother ship. The partnership’s reputation swelled, and Silicon Valley flourished. Chapter Six Planners and Improvisers One day in 1987, an entrepreneur named Mitch Kapor was sitting in his private jet, flying from Boston to San Francisco. “Bear with me,” he told his guest, a software engineer called Jerry Kaplan. He took out a portable Compaq 286 from his luggage. It was about the size of a small sewing machine. “I’ve got to update my notes,” Kapor said, peering at handfuls of yellow stickies and ripped notebook pages that he fished out of his pockets.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

The same year, Rosen took a bet on a young software developer in Boston, who was building programs for the PC platform. There were plenty of software entrepreneurs trying to do the same thing those days, but Rosen sensed something was different about this one. His name was Mitch Kapor, and his company was called Lotus Development Corporation. Tech had been blowing Mitch Kapor’s mind ever since he’d picked up a copy of Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib soon after graduating from college in the early 1970s. It wasn’t the programming that drew him in—by his own admission, he was only an “ok” programmer—but something largely unappreciated at the time: software design.

In 1985 came the most famous of the early BBSs: The WELL, or Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, started by Stewart Brand and his merry band of hackers up in Marin County. The WELL’s fame came from the Silicon Valley celebrities who made it their first online hangout, including Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, journalist Steven Levy, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, and of course Brand himself. The bland Ohioans running CompuServe (now owned by even blander tax preparer H&R Block) couldn’t compete with The WELL’s glamour and dash. The WELL’s pedigree was decidedly countercultural, as it hired a clutch of its founding staff from the legendary Tennessee commune The Farm, and devoted considerable discussion-thread and file-swapping bandwidth to the Dead.

“Mighty Microsoft Breeds Fear, Envy,” blared PC Week. Business Month called the company “The Silicon Bully.” Around the cubicles of competitor tech companies, engineers grimly referred to Gates’s company as “The Death Star.” The destructive swath that Microsoft cut through the software industry, Lotus’ Mitch Kapor concluded darkly, had turned early-1990s Silicon Valley into “the Kingdom of the Dead.”30 THE NETWORK IS THE COMPUTER As Bill Gates trained his big guns on Silicon Valley, Scott McNealy was spoiling for a fight. McNealy was one of four graduate students who had come together in 1982 to found Sun Microsystems, a company whose hockey-stick growth showed Silicon Valley how much market potential lay beyond the PC.


pages: 398 words: 86,023

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

Michael Davis, Tim Shell, Terry Foote. Thanks to Wikimedia Foun- Ac know ledg ments_x dation board members Florence Devouard, Angela Beesley, and Michael Snow for discussions and insights. Smart folks who provided insight on the community and wikis included Re-becca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Benjamin Mako Hill, Sunir Shah, Mitch Kapor, Jason Calacanis, Ross Mayfield, and Joseph Reagle. Conversations with non-Wikipedia-related people Lokman Tsui, Sasa Vucinic, Paul Denlinger, and Kaiser Kuo helped me crystallize my thoughts. While the subtitle of the book refers to Wikipedians affectionately as “nobodies,” those who gave special insight on the community were real somebodies: James Forrester, Austin Hair, Phoebe Ayers, Naoko Kizu, Revi Soekatno, Evan Prodromou, Mark Pellegrini, Kelly Martin, Kat Walsh, Greg Maxwell, Isaac Mao, Shizhao, Titan Deng, Mingli Yuan, Filip Maljkovic, Kurt Jansson, Arne Klempert, Mathias Schindler, Nina Gerlach, Samuel Klein, and Ray Saintonge.

In a matter of months, what was chatter in a bar became Wikimania, a conference done on a shoestring budget. What could be more wiki than sharing sleeping accommodations with strangers at a youth hostel? But it wasn’t just Wikipedians who came to this ad hoc, volunteer-organized summit. Corporations sent employees to see how Wikipedia operated. Internet pioneers came to observe what was happening. Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, made the trip on his own time. He had to come see in person what he considered the most exciting project on the Internet. Press from all around Europe came to interview the minions who participated in the event. Inspired by the Wikipedia model, veteran journalist Danny Schechter showed up with a camera crew to make a Wikimentary about the commu- The_Wiki_Phenomenon_9 nity—a short video documentary that would be put on the Internet for anyone to alter and edit.

., 123 Johnson, Mark, 46 Hooper, Horace Everett, 16 Johnson, Samuel, 70 “How to Destroy Wikipedia” (The Johnson, Steven, 82, 96, 97 Cunctator), 172 Jordan, Ryan (Essjay), 194–200 HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), “Jumping the shark” article, 118 53–54, 144, 221 http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), 53 httpd (http daemon), 56 Kapor, Mitch, 8 Huntsville, Ala., 18 Karsai, Istvan, 82 Hust, Christoph, 40 Kazakh Wikipedia, 155–57 HyperCard, 47–51, 54–56 Keegan, Brian, 65 hyperlinks (hypertext), 47, 48, 50, 54–55, Kennedy, John F., 10, 191 115 Kennedy, Robert F., 10, 191 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Kennisnet, 191 53–54, 144, 221 KeyStroke, 128 Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http), 53 kill files, 86–87 Kinsley, Michael, 205–8 “Know It All, The” (Schiff), 196 IBM, 11, 56 Korean language, 141–42, 144 Ibou, 158 Kovitz, Ben, 43–45, 60, 61, 62 iCommons, 157 Kropotkin, Peter, 173 Ifcher, Ruth, 37, 39, 40, 211 Kuro5hin, 189 India, 159 Indonesian language, 136 “Infinite monkey theorem” article, 118 Lakoff, George, 46–47 Intel, 50 Lane, G.


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

., A Natural History of the Seashore (HarperCollins, 2004) Himanen, Pekka, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (Secker & Warburg, 2001) Homer-Dixon, Thomas, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilisation, (Souvenir Press Ltd, 2007) Hyde, Lewis (1979), The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006) InterAcademy Council, Inventing a Better Future (Amsterdam: IAC, 2004) Illich, Ivan, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973) Illich, Ivan, Energy and Equity (Calder & Boyars, 1974) Illich, Ivan, Limits to Medicine (Marion Boyars, 2002) Illich, Ivan, Deschooling Society (Marion Boyars, 2004) Isaacs, William, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together (Currency, 1999) Israel, Paul, Edison: A Life of Invention (John Wiley, 1998) Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage, 1992) Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture (New York University Press, 2006) Jenkins, Henry, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (New York University Press, 2006) Jensen, Mallory, ‘Emerging Alternatives: A Brief History of Weblogs’, 2003. Available from http://www.cjr.org/ issues/2003/5/blog-jensen.asp Joyce, Patrick, The Rule of Freedom (Verso, 2003) Kapor, Mitch, blog.kapor.com Kapor, Mitch, ‘Does the Open Source Model Apply Beyond Software?’, http://blogs.osafoundation.org/ mitch/000815.html, January 2005 Kelley, Tom, The Art of Innovation (Doubleday, 2001) Kerstetter, Jim, ‘The Linux Uprising’, BusinessWeek, 3 March 2003 Kochan, Thomas A. and Paul Osterman, The Mutual Gains Enterprise (Boston, MA: HBS Press, 1994) Kotro, Tanja, Hobbyist Knowing in Product Development (University of Art and Design, Helsinki, 2005) Kuhn, Thomas.

Available from http://www.nber.org/papers/w7600 20 Robert Wright, Nonzero (Abacus, 2001) 21 Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark, Design Rules (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2000) Chapter 4 1 Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2006) 2 Mitch Kapor, blog.kapor.com 3 Henry Chesbrough, Wim Vanhaverbeke and Joel West (Eds), Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (Oxford University Press, 2006) 4 John Hartley, ‘Culture Business and the Value Chain of Meaning’, The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption – A Symposium (Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology Publications, 2002), pp. 39–46 5 http://www.blizzard.com/inblizz/profile.shtml 6 Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nicholas Yee, Eric Nickell and Robert J.


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

VisiCalc, existing as it did in the intangible world of bits and bytes, was almost certainly ineligible.57 Accordingly, Bricklin had pushed on without a patent—which meant he had no retort to the many “Visiclones” and “Calcalikes” that joined the fray in the years after VisiCalc’s debut.58 The final insult was the appearance, in 1984, of a PC spreadsheet called Lotus 1-2-3. It had been developed by Mitch Kapor, one of Fylstra’s ex-employees, who had listened as Bricklin reeled off what he considered to be VisiCalc’s biggest failings.59 Kapor’s program was responsive where VisiCalc stuttered and let users draw graphs and charts at the click of a button. It ate VisiCalc’s lunch. Amid the ongoing feud between Bricklin, Frankston, and Fylstra, VisiCalc sales dropped 85 percent in less than a year.60 Finally, in 1985, Kapor’s company bought Software Arts for peanuts and took VisiCalc off the shelves.61 The saga of VisiCalc’s stunning rise and fractious fall has become practically an oral tradition.

For a flavor of that foment, consider that Apple’s co-founders, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, met at HP during that company’s push into calculators. The Steves’ early microcomputers, the Apple and Apple II, helped spark the home-computer revolution, which in turn gave Dan Bricklin the opportunity to perfect the first computerized spreadsheet. Mitch Kapor, who had worked for Bricklin’s publisher, stole the spreadsheet crown with his own program, Lotus 1-2-3, and with it gave the IBM PC one of its first killer apps. That PC, of course, was powered by an Intel CPU—a chip made by the same company whose deal with Busicom, a Japanese calculator manufacturer, had saved the American firm and paved the way for the founding of Silicon Valley.

“The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley.” Esquire, 1983. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12149389/robert-noyce-tom-wolfe/. interviews and personal accounts Aspray, William. “Interview with Tadashi Sasaki.” IEEE History Center, May 25, 1994. http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Tadashi_Sasaki. ———. “Oral History of Mitch Kapor.” Mountain View, CA: Computer History Museum, November 19, 2004. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102657943. Baldwin, Frank Stephen. “An Interview with the Father of the Calculating Machine.” Monroe Calculating Machine Company, 1919. Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and Paul Ceruzzi.


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Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

One group that frequented Wired’s pages, and one that would later come to mainstream prominence, was the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).101 Founded in San Francisco in 1990 by three millionaires who hung out on Stewart Brand’s The Well messaging board, EFF got its start lobbying for the budding Internet service provider industry.102 In 1993, EFF cofounder Mitch Kapor wrote an article for Wired that laid out his and EFF’s position on the future Internet: “Private, not public… life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community.”103 Wired backed up EFF’s privatized vision, giving the organization space in the magazine to expound its views, while providing fawning coverage of the group’s activities.

Instead, they pushed for an early version of “net neutrality”—a market-driven self-regulation scheme that would enforce a level playing field among competing Internet service providers. Resolving this conflict was the first real lobbying effort by the newly created Electronic Frontier Foundation. Despite the market power of national carriers like IBM-MCI’s ANS to restrict competition, EFF wanted the government to stay out of any overt regulation of the industry. Mitch Kapor, cofounder of EFF, testified before Congress to push for a self-regulatory scheme: “To avoid government involvement, Kapor suggested the use of binding agreements between the commercial backbone networks to interconnect.” Ibid. 63. PSINET offered another example of the NSFNET privatization process.

Ignoring their policies for welfare cutbacks, the magazine is instead mesmerized by their enthusiasm for the libertarian possibilities offered by new information technologies,” wrote Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in their influential 1995 essay, “The Californian Ideology.” Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute Magazine, September 1995, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology. 102. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by Lotus Notes creator Mitch Kapor, cattle rancher and Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow, and early Sun Microsystems employee John Gilmore. It started out with a vague mission: to defend people’s civil liberties on the Internet and to “find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s” in the digital era. From its first days, EFF had deep pockets and featured an impressive roster: Stewart Brand and Apple’s Steve Wozniak were board members, while press outreach was conducted by Cathy Cook, who had done public relations for Steve Jobs.


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No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

Today, some of the world’s most celebrated philanthropists, from Gates to George Soros, earned billions through business tactics that have compounded financial instability, eroded labour protections, and entrenched global economic inequalities. In Gates’s case, Microsoft’s business practices have been deemed illegal in a number of anti-trust legal suits in the US and Europe. Mitch Kapor, the billionaire co-founder of Lotus Software and a long-time business rival of Gates throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has emphasized this point. As he stated to me: ‘It’s incontestable that under Gates’s leadership Microsoft exercised its monopoly power to unfairly stifle competition. This was the main finding of fact in the US Department of Justice anti-trust case against Microsoft.

Of these three main channels, the Gates Foundation does engage in the third approach: it has a number of PRIs, including a financial stake in biotechnology companies trying to find innovative solutions to healthcare burdens. But when it comes to the first two criteria, the foundation is seen as a laggard. Mitch Kapor, the billionaire founder of Lotus software, expressed to me his surprise and dismay at Gates’s intransigency on the topic of ethical investing: ‘The Gates Foundation manages its endowment along conventional lines, i.e., it does not pay attention to mission or impact. I recently spoke to Bill about this and he spoke about this fact as though it were out of his hands and that he didn’t have the ability to change the approach to investment’.

., 15, 55, 71 Gates, Melinda: and investing in primary and secondary education, 116; and philanthropy, 146, 159, 245; and polio eradication, 159; and small schools, 134, 136; and speaking out for contraception use, 22; and talk at the World Health Assembly, 244; and taxes paid by Gates Foundation, 85; and TED talk on non-profits, 227; as trustee of Gates Foundation, 8, 174 Gates Foundation: activities of, 23, 24, 101, 199; and affordable medicines, 24, 193; and agriculture, 21, 207, 209, 216, 217; and Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, 217, 222; and Cargill partnership, 216; and Coca-Cola, 26–7, 222, 227–9; and Common Core, 137; and connections to Goldman Sachs, 215–6; and contributions to American Legislative Exchange Council, 132; and contributions to World Health Organization, 8, 224; and costly vaccines, 160–1; criticisms of, 21–8, 135, 136–7, 146–7; and donations to teachers’ unions, 137; and donations to US Chamber of Commerce, 137; as a donor to the Foundation for Excellence in Education, 133; as a donor to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, 193; and education, 7, 27–8, 122, 132–47; and empowering regional organizations, 177; and emulation of Microsoft’s strategies, 143; and exclusion of scientists from low-income countries, 176; and experimental medical trials, 153; and fight against AIDS, 193; and fighting malaria, 7, 153; and financial concerns, 192; and funding for an electronic database of students, 133–4; and funding for global health programmes, 153, 154; and funding of HPV vaccine trials in India, 161, 169, 229; and funding of journalism, 26; and funding the Measure of Effective Teaching study, 140–1; funding priorities of, 175–6, 244; and Gates’s fortune, 9, 85; and giving money to states, 139–4; and Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, 177; and Goldman Sachs, 209–10; and grants to countries and universities in developing regions, 175, 244–5; and grants to Ogilvy and ABC News, 84, 202–3; and grants to organizations in high-income countries, 175–6; and grants to organizations in US, 175, 178; and grants to Vodacom, 82, 84, 85, 203; and grant to TechnoServe, 227–8; history of, 116–7; and HIV/AIDS, 7, 196; and holdings in oil companies, 21; and impact on India’s health policies, 169–70; importance of, 21, 28; and improving sanitation, 153; and International Red Cross-Ghana, 177, 178; and investment in Berkshire Hathaway, 173; and investment in biotechnology companies, 175; and investment in small schools, 134, 145; investment problems of, 244; and lack of accountability, 146–7, 215, 240–1; and lack of grants for researchers outside Europe and North America, 21–2; as largest philanthropic supporter of US primary and secondary education, 122; and Learning Communities, 135; and letter by Gates on education, 121–2; and media efforts, 202, 205; and mission related investing, 175; money of, 22, 25, 31, 117; and Monsanto, 27, 206, 209–10, 218, 221, 229; and multinational partners, 19, 82, 85; and national immunization programmes, 160–1; and News Corp, 133; and NewSchools Venture Fund, 142; and opposition to Harvard’s proposal for HIV treatment, 192; and participation in Alliance for a Green Revolution, 218; and partnership with Broad Foundation, 139; and partnerships with exploitative companies, 172–3; and partnership with Rockefeller Foundation, 217; personnel system of, 142–4; and philanthrocapitalism, 7; and philanthropy, 147, 183; and polio efforts, 156, 157; power of, 230; and primary and secondary for-profit schools, 9; and private charter schools, 118; and programme-related investment, 175; public profile of, 154; and public shaming of teachers, 144–5; and research of PATH in India, 166; and research on non-communicable diseases, 223; as a results-driven organization, 145–6; and sales of shares of McDonalds, 174; and scientific research, 197; and shaping of global health field, 27–8, 153, 169–70; and shares in Berkshire Hathaway, 215, 228; and shares in Monsanto, 216; and solutionism, 240; and spending on global health issues, 149, 153, 175, 178; and stake in Coca-Cola, 173, 174; and stake in GEO Group, 173; and stake in McDonalds, 173; and Stand for Children, 142; and standardized testing, 134, 145; and support of contraception, 102; and tax-deductible grants, 27, 85; tax exemptions for, 228; and teacher effectiveness, 134; and teacher performance linked to standardized test scores, 145; and teachers’ remuneration, 118, 134; top-down approach of, 136–7; and treatment for HIV, 194; and trials of genetically modified bananas, 228; trustees of, 8, 174, 215; and US public education, 21, 22, 118, 121–2, 170; and value-added modelling, 140, 142; and withdrawal of money for small schools, 134 Gates Library Foundation, 116–7 Germany, 154, 240 Ghana: and Accra, 1–3, 5, 150; and Coalition of NGOs, 176–7; feelings about Gates Foundation in, 21; free public healthcare in, 170–1; gold, diamond and oil wealth of, 2, 3; and government development of water delivery services, 177; health burdens in, 2; and health experts working for foreign NGOs, 170–1; immunization in, 5; inequality in, 2, 3; and International Red Cross-Ghana, 177; and loan requirements from the IMF and World Bank, 170; middle-income status of, 2, 3; outbreak of cholera in, 2; and polio, 5 Goldhaber, Dan, 126–7 Goldman Sachs: and creation of the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index, 212; and exemption from position limits in market, 212–4; and Gates Foundation, 209, 216; and investment in by Buffett, 215; and market distortions, 243 Google, 64, 83, 242 Gore, Al, 63, 188–9 government: and accountability, 102; aid and welfare programmes of, 146; and big government, 236; and Coleman Report on schools, 126–7; and corporations exploitation of trade treaties, 101; and decline in state funds, 98; and donor-advised funds, 231–3; and education reform, 139–40; and funding of for-profit schools, 131; and funds for K12 company, 130; and idea of a single land tax, 115; and India’s eradication of polio, 155–6; as instrumental in Google’s success and in discovery of molecular antibodies, 83; and intervention, 60, 242; and investment in private companies, 83; and military might, 51; and money available for spending on social programmes, 230, 243; and national immunization programmes, 160–1; and need for regulation, 93–4; and non-profit sector, 241; and oversight of private foundations, 233; as a partner with philanthropic institutions, 70–1; and patents, 179; and pressure to contribute to global health, 154; and privatization of social services, 113–4; and requirements for pharmaceutical companies, 105; and separation of church and state, 237; and solutionism, 240; and state planning, 239–40; and subsidies for energy, pharmaceutical and agriculture sectors, 203; and subsidies for microfinance, 83–4; and tax structures favourable to philanthropists, 241; and trade tariffs, 49–51; and US Department of Education, 139, 141; and US railroad contracts, 113, 115 government aid: and dependency theory, 39; and effects on developing countries, 38–9, 105; and social duty, 110; and tied aid, 105 Grameen Bank, 7, 77, 78 Green, Michael, 6, 7, 8, 111 Green Revolution: and Africa, 218, 223; and agricultural techniques, 223; and displacement of people from the countryside, 217; ecological implications of, 217; failures of, 240; in India and Latin America, 217, 240; and new, high-yield crop varieties, 217; and Norman Borlaug, 218 Guggenheim, Davis, 125–8 Hamied, Yusuf, 190, 191 Hanauer, Nick, 108, 109 Harper, Diane, 163–4 Hartigan, Pamela, 66–7 Harvard School of Public Health, 151, 152 Hayek, Friedrich, 60, 90, 91, 235–9, 240, 241 Healy, David, 104–5 Henderson, Donald, 155, 157, 158, 159 Hitler, Adolf, 57, 58 HIV/AIDS: in Africa, 192–3, 223; deadliness of, 157; and HIV research, 191–2; and International Aids Society meeting, 194, 195; and money spent by Gates Foundation, 149, 193; and President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 153–4; prevention of, 192; and price of HIV drugs, 189, 190–1, 193; and proposal calling for rich countries to procure and distribute HIV drugs, 191; treatment of, 153–4, 188, 190–6; and UN’s AIDS agency, 191 Hohn, Chris, 99–101 Homestead Plant, 10–11, 43–4, 69 Hoover, Herbert, 109, 110 Hyman, Steven, 101, 102 India: anti-fertility programmes in, 152; and Cipla, 190; and clinical trials for drugs, 168–9; and compulsory licenses for medicines, 201; and food issues, 217; Green Revolution in, 217; and HPV vaccine trials involving girls, 161–2, 229; and Khanna study of contraception, 151–3, 240–1; and lawsuits against Coal India, 100–1; and legislation regarding clinical trials, 169; and microcredit loans, 78–9; and Ministry of Health, 151; and Monsanto seeds and fertilizers, 217, 218; and need for large families, 152; and neglecting immunization, 159; Nestlé’s involvement in, 96; pharmaceutical sector in, 179; and polio, 155–6, 158, 159; public interest litigation petitions for, 164; and report on ethics violations of PATH, 167; rise of wealth in, 17; and suicide rates of farmers, 218; and Vinoba Bhave, 72 Institute of Economic Affairs, 238 International Monetary Fund: and austerity measures for poor nations, 171–2; and conditional lending, 203; and Ghana, 170; and oil and inflation crises, 171; and preservation of western banks, 172; and tax avoidance, 204–5 Jackson, Thomas Penfield, 185 Jenkins, Garry, 98, 105, 106 Jesani, Amar, 164–7 Kane, Thomas, 138, 144 Kapor, Mitch, 9, 175 Kaufman, Frederick, 212, 213, 214 Kellard, Neil, 214 Klonsky, Michael, 135, 170 Koch brothers, 21, 23, 24, 198 Kraft, 225, 227 Kramer, Mark: and charity, 15; and corporate donors, 95–6; as founder of Kramer Capital Management, 89; and leaving Center for Effective Philanthropy, 89–90; and notion of shared value, 94, 96, 97; and praise for General Electric, 97; theories of, 98 League of Nations Health Organization, 150 Lesotho, 195, 196 Levine, David, 199, 200 Love, James, 26, 188, 190–1, 200–1 Madoff, Ray, 17, 229, 231–2 Mandeville, Bernard: and essays on charity, 91–2; and The Fable of the Bees, 90–1, 93; and laissez-faire ideology, 90, 91, 93; and need for government regulation, 93, 94; and promotion of public good through individual enrichment, 16, 90; and selfishness, 92, 94 Martin, Roger, 69, 77 Masters, Michael, 213, 214 Mauss, Marcel, 19, 36–7 Mayo Clinic, 96–7 Mazzucato, Mariana, 83 McCambridge, Ruth, 71–2 McCoy, David, 21–2 McDonald’s, 173, 174, 225 McKee, Martin, 174, 224 Médicins Sans Frontières, 153, 190 Mellon, Andrew, 110, 111 Merck, 161, 163–4, 187 microfinance: and access to bank credit, 77–8; and benefits to investors in wealthy nations, 80–1; and BRAC, 67, 68; as brainchild of Muhammad Yunus, 77; and cases of Bolivia, Morocco, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Bosnia, 78; and effect on poverty, 78–81; and impact investing, 80–1; and interest rates, 79, 84; and subsidies from philanthropic foundations and government, 83–4 Microsoft: anti-trust suits against, 9; and article on ‘Microsoft’s Lost Decade’, 143; beginnings of, 181, 186; and Bill Gates, 23, 107, 116, 183, 186, 192; and Bill Gates as founder, 23, 107, 116; and blacklist of journalists, 183–4; business practices of, 9, 183–6; and Coca-Cola, 222; and Common Core material, 137; and compulsory licenses, 202; and fines for abuse of monopoly position in European market, 185; and for-profit schooling, 133; as industry powerhouse, 182; and intellectual property rights, 186; and Internet Explorer browser, 184, 185; as a member of ALEC’s Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force, 132; as a monopoly power, 185; and patent privileges, 206; and Paul Allen, 181; products of, 246; and response to European Commission’s ruling, 185–6; and rise of the internet, 183; and settlements with the US Dept. of Justice and US states, 185; and stack ranking in personnel system, 143–4; and Windows, 183, 184, 185 Milken, Michael, 64, 130 mining industry, 33–4 Monsanto: and 2011 Oxfam report, 209; and Africa, 206, 216–22; and bioengineered corn causing cancer, 220; and case involving Brazilian farmers, 221; and contracts with farmers about reusing and selling of seeds, 219–21; and control of seed genetics, 219; environmental record of, 220; and establishment of Intellectual Property Committee, 187; fertilizers of, 21, 217; and fight against research on products of, 219; and Gates Foundation, 27, 209, 216, 218, 222, 229; legal challenges to, 221; and Round-up weed killer, 220; and sales of genetically modified BT corn, 218; and seed genetics, 208, 219; seeds of, 21, 217–9, 221; and suits against small farmers, 206; and US Department of Justice, 220; and Water Efficient Maize for Africa project, 218–9 Mont Pelerin Society, 60, 61, 236–8, 243 Morozov, Evgeny, 240, 242 Moss, Diana, 219–220 Moyo, Dambisa, 38, 39, 205 Mulgan, Geoff, 72, 73 Nestlé, 96–7, 209, 225, 226–7 Nigeria, 155, 158, 159 No Child Left Behind: and annual testing, 119; and Arne Duncan’s policies, 139; and cheating scandals, 119–21, 240; and contributions to school failure, 119; and establishment of goals to improve student outcomes, 119; and expanded federal role in education, 118–9; Gates’s support of, 121–2; and school curriculum, 121; and school funding, 119, 240 Noguchi, Hideyo, 5, 150–1 Oakeshott, Michael, 238–40 Obama, Barack, 26, 129, 139 Obama Administration: and Arne Duncan, 139; and health issues, 26; and Michelle Obama’s childhood obesity programmes, 225; and No Child Left Behind, 121; and poverty, 129; and Race to the Top, 139, 144 oil industry, 53, 59–60, 173 Olivieri, Nancy, 103–5 Orbinski, James, 153 Osberg, Sally, 69, 77 Page, Greg, 210, 212 Paine, Thomas, 200 Pakistan, 155–9 Pangestu, Tikki, 223–4 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, 177–8 Pasteur Institute, 4–5 Paul, Ron, 200, 243 Pearson, 133, 137, 138 Pepsico, 226–7 Pew, J.


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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

The headline streamed across a full page, in one-and-aquarter-inch hot pink type; underneath it, a little dotted arrow directed the reader to turn the page. There, filling the next two pages, stood the eight principals of the EFF, including Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, Stewart Brand, and Esther Dyson. Across the image ran a single line of text, drawn from the article: “The EFF does something that Mitch Kapor has wanted to do for three decades—‘find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s.’” Never mind that only one of the assembled group—Brand—had actually been a Prankster. To Quittner and his editors, the analogy was clear: “Older and wiser now, they’re on the road again, without the bus and the acid, but dispensing many similar-sounding bromides: Turn on, jack in, get Wired [ 219 ] connected.”

You know things have rather jumped the groove when potential suspects must explain to law enforcers the nature of their alleged perpetrations.82 Soon after Baxter left, Barlow posted an account of his visit on the WELL, as an early draft of what would ultimately become the essay in which he first described cyberspace as an electronic frontier: “Crime and Puzzlement.” Barlow’s account stirred up a hornet’s nest on the WELL. Some members even accused Barlow of serving as an FBI informant by attempting to educate Agent Baxter. One WELL member who read Barlow’s story was Mitch Kapor, who had founded Lotus Development Corporation, an early and highly successful software company. He had also coauthored Lotus 1-2-3, an extremely popular spreadsheet program. Some years earlier he had sold the company for tens of millions of dollars and had become something of a traveling computer pundit, writing on the WELL and elsewhere about intellectual property, software design, and civil liberties.

Pei, 178 Industry Standard, 207 information: economic paradox of, 136 –37; free dissemination of, 137 Information Processing Techniques Office, 108 Information Superhighway, 219 information system, material world imagined as, 15 information theory: and American art, 268n13; of Claude Shannon, 265n43; and microbiology, 43 – 44 Information Week, 131 Innis, Harold, 52, 269n21 Institute for Advanced Study, 185 Intel, 212 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, 24 interdisciplinary migration, 58 International Federation for Advanced Study (IFAS), 61 Internet, 247; growth of, 160, 214; as infrastructure and symbol of new economic era, 7; as the New Millennium, 232 –36; privatization of backbone, 213; as symbol of a post-Fordist economic order, 202; utopian claims surrounding the emergence of the, 1–3, 33 Internet stocks, 214, 232 Inuit, 53 IT-290, 60 Jackson, Charles, 211 Jennings, Lois, 70 Jerome, Judson, 32 Jobs, Steve, 133, 138 Johnson, Lyndon, 26 Joselit, David, 46 journalism, shaping of public perceptions, 253 Joy, Bill, 220 juxtaposition, 84 Kahn, Herman, 130, 181, 186, 197 Kahn, Lloyd, 94, 95, 97 Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, 76, 271n9 Kapor, Mitch, 171–72, 218 Kaprow, Allan, 46, 48, 58, 67 Katz, Bruce, 211, 277n1 Kay, Alan, 111–13, 117, 177, 246 Kay, Lily, 44 Kelly, Kevin, 3, 16, 131–32; account of “vivisystems,” 200; commercial sphere as a site of social change, 202 –3; “computational metaphor,” 216; concept of “hive mind,” 201, 202, 204; doctrine of cyberevolutionism, 204; editorial model, 195; editor of Signal, 196; editor of Whole Earth Review, 177, 195 –96; as executive director of Wired, 7, 206, 209, 212, 217; and first Hackers’ Conference, 195; forum on hacking on the WELL, 168 –70; and Gilder, 223; and hacking community, 135; Internet as symbol of post-Fordist economy, 202; longing to return to an egalitarian world, 248; as network entrepreneur, 194 –99; “New Rules for the New Economy,” 15, 234 –35; Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization, 176, 195, 199 –206; response to 1987 conference on artificial life, 199; review of Electric Word, 211; underplayed the work of embodied labor, 204; and the WELL, 148; on WELL design goals, 143 Keniston, Kenneth, 31; The Young Radicals, 261– 62 Kennedy, Alison (aka Queen Mu), 163 Kennedy, John F., 229, 271n10 Kent State University killings, 98, 118 Kepler’s bookstore, 70 Kerouac, Jack, 62 Kerr, Clark, 11, 12 Kesey, Ken: and geodesic dome, 94; leadership of Merry Pranksters, 63, 65, 67; and LSD, 61, 63; notion of Acid Test, 65; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 59 – 60, 64; rejection of agonistic politics, 64; subject of CIA experimental drug protocols, 60 – 61; and the Supplement, 81; and Trips Festival, 66; at Vietnam Day in 1965, 98 Keyworth, George, 222; “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” 228 –30 Kleiner, Art, 131, 132, 135, 185 Kline, David, 287n37 Korzybski, Alfred, 62 Kravitz, Henry, 211 Kubrick, Stanley, 186 Kuhr, Barbara, 211, 285n2 Lama Foundation, 75, 76, 94, 97, 109, 119 Lampson, Butler, 111 Langton, Christopher, 198 Language Technology (magazine), 211 Lanier, Jaron, 163, 165, 172, 195 laser printer, 111 Index Last Whole Earth Catalog, 70, 81, 98, 112, 118 Learning Conferences, 181– 84 Leary, Timothy, 51, 163, 164, 165 legitimacy exchange, 25 –26, 84, 85, 88, 95, 250 Lehr, Stan, 210 Levy, Steven, 137, 139, 195; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 132 –35 Leyden, Peter, 233 –34 Libertarianism, 210, 249, 259, 287n49 Libre commune, 81, 94, 96, 109 Licklider, Joseph C.


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Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

We will explore the advantages of generating new data in the next chapter and focus on other advantages right now. Dan Bricklin, the spreadsheet inventor, created enormous value, but he is not a rich person. Where did the spreadsheet value go? On the wealth rankings, imitators such as Lotus 1-2-3 founder Mitch Kapor or Microsoft’s Bill Gates certainly far outstripped Bricklin, but even they were appropriating a small fraction of the spreadsheet’s value. Instead, the value went to users, to the businesses that deployed spreadsheets to make billions of better decisions. No matter what Lotus or Microsoft did, their users owned the decisions that the spreadsheets were improving.

See also work flows AI’s impact on, 3 bias in ads for, 195–198 decision making as central to, 73–74 division of labor in, 53–69 elimination of human, 98–102, 210–212 hiring and, 58, 93–94, 98, 100 income inequality and, 19, 212–214 loss of skills and, 192–193 mining automation and, 112–114 redesigning, 141–151 in training AI, 96–97 Jobs, Steve, 133, 155 joke recommendations, 117 judges, bail-granting decisions by, 56–58 judgment, 18, 78–81 cognitive costs of, 87–88 in decision making, 74, 75–76 in drug discovery, 136 in fraud detection, 84–87 hard-coding, 90–91 job redesign and, 173–174 in medical imaging, 148 predicting, 95–102 preferences and, 88–90 judgment in reward function engineering, 92–94 task analysis and, 134–138 training AI, 96–97 value of, 83–94, 161–162 Jurvetson, Steve, 8 Kahn, Lisa, 58 Kahneman, Daniel, 55–56, 209–210 Kapor, Mitch, 163 Kasporov, Garry, 63 Katz, Lawrence, 214 Ke Jie, 8 Kindred, 145, 223 KindredSort, 145 Kiva, 105, 143–145 knowledge, 76–78 loss of, 77–78, 192–193 known knowns, 58, 59 known unknowns, 58, 59–60, 99 Kurzweil, Ray, 221 labor, strategy and, 171–174. See also jobs “Lady Lovelace’s Objection,” 13 Lambrecht, Anja, 196 language translation, 25–27, 107–108 laws of robotics, 115 learning -by-using, 182–183 in the cloud vs. on the ground, 188–189, 202 experience and, 191 in-house and on-the-job, 185 language translation, 26–27 pathways to, 182–184 privacy and data for, 189–190 reinforcement, 13, 145, 183–184 by simulation, 187–188 strategy for, 179–194 supervised, 183 trade-offs in performance and, 181–182 when to deploy and, 184–187 Lederman, Mara, 168–169 Lee, Kai-Fu, 219 Lee Se-dol, 8 legal documents, redacting, 53–54, 68 legal issues, 115–117 Lewis, Michael, 56 Li, Danielle, 58 liability, 117, 195–198 lighting, cost of, 11 London cabbies, 76–78 Lovelace, Ada, 12, 13 Lyft, 88–89 Lytvyn, Max, 96 machine learning, 18 adversarial, 187–188 churn prediction and, 32–36 complexity and, 103–110 from data, 45–47 feedback for, 46–47 flexibility in, 36 judgment and, 83 one-shot, 60 regression compared with, 32–35 statistics and prediction and, 37–40 techniques, 8–9 transformation of prediction by, 37–40 Mailmobile, 103 management AI’s impact on, 3 by exception, 67–68 Mastercard, 25 mathematics, made cheap by computers, 12, 14 Mazda, 124 MBA programs, student recruitment for, 127–129, 133–139 McAfee, Andrew, 91 Mejdal, Sig, 161 Microsoft, 9–10, 176, 180, 202–204, 215, 217 Tay chatbot, 204–205 mining, automation in, 112–114 Misra, Sanjog, 93–94 mobile-first strategy, 179–180 Mobileye, 15 modeling, 99, 100–102 Moneyball (Lewis), 56, 161–162 monitoring of predictions, 66–67 multivariate regression, 33–34 music, digital, 12, 61 Musk, Elon, 209, 210, 221 Mutual Benefit Life, 124–125 Napster, 61 NASA, 14 National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), 222–223 navigation apps, 77–78, 88–90, 106 Netscape, 9–10 neural networks, 13 New Economy, 10 New York City Fire Department, 197 New York Times, 8, 218 Nordhaus, William, 11 Norvig, Peter, 180 Nosko, Chris, 199 Novak, Sharon, 169–170 Numenta, 223 Nymi, 201 Oakland Athletics, 56, 161–162 Obama, Barack, 217–218 objectives, identifying, 139 object recognition, 7, 28–29 Olympics, Rio, 114–115 omitted variables, 62 one-shot learning, 60 On Intelligence (Hawkins), 39 Open AI, 210 optimization, search engine, 64 oracles, 23 organizational structure, 161–162 Osborne, Michael, 149 Otto, 157–158 outcomes in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 job redesign and, 142 outsourcing, 169–170, 171 Page, Larry, 179 Paravisini, Daniel, 66–67 pattern recognition, 145–147 Pavlov, Ivan, 183 payoff calculations, 78–81 in drug discovery, 136 judgment in, 87–88 Pell, Barney, 2 performance, trade-offs between learning and, 181–182, 187 performance reviews, 172–173 photography digital, 14 sports, automation of, 114–115 Pichai, Sundar, 179–180 Piketty, Thomas, 213 Pilbara, Australia, mining in, 112–114 policy, 3, 210 power calculations, 48 prediction, 23–30 about the present, 23–24 behavior affected by, 23 bias in, 34–35 complements to, 15 consequences of cheap, 29 credit card fraud prevention and, 24–25 in decision making, 74–76, 134–138 definition of, 13, 24 by exception, 67–68 human strengths in, 60 human weaknesses in, 54–58 improvements in, 25–29 as intelligence, 2–3, 29, 31–41 in language translation, 25–27 machine weaknesses in, 58–65 made cheap, 13–15 selling, 176–177 techniques, 13 unanticipated correlations and, 36–37 of what a human would do, 95–102 predictive text, 130 preferences, 88–90, 96–97, 98 selling consumer, 176–177 presidential elections, 59 prices effects of reduced AI, 9–11 human judgment in, 100 sales causality and, 63–64 for ZipRecruiter, 93–94 privacy issues, 19, 49, 98 China and, 219–220 country differences in, 219–221 data collection, 189–190 probabilistic programming, 38, 40 processes.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Ann Winblad, who was then working as a Wall Street technology analyst and would later become a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist, came by and Kaplan pitched her on the changing state of the computing world. “I know someone you need to meet,” she told him. That someone turned out to be Mitch Kapor, the founder and chief executive of Lotus Development Corporation, the publisher of the 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. Kapor came by and Kaplan pitched him on his AI-for-the masses vision. The Lotus founder was enthusiastic about the idea: “I’ve got money, why don’t you propose a product you want to build for me,” he said.

Gruber’s idea was to build a “corporate memory,” a system that would weave together all the documents that made a modern organization function, making them easy to structure and recall. It was reminiscent of Engelbart’s original oN-Line System, but was modernized to take advantage of the power of Berner-Lee’s invention. Lotus Notes had been an earlier effort by Ray Ozzie, then a young software designer working on a contract basis for Mitch Kapor at Lotus, but it was stuck in the proprietary world of corporate enterprise software. Now the Internet and new Web standards made it possible to build something with far greater scope. With another AI researcher, Peter Friedland, and former DARPA program manager Craig Wier, Gruber founded Intraspect in 1996 in Los Altos and became the chief technology officer.

., 95, 178, 260–265 Intellicorp, 128 intelligence augmentation (IA) versus AI, 159–194 agent-based interfaces and, 187–194 autonomous cars and, 24, 62 ethical issues of, 332–341, 342–344 Gerald (digital light field), 271 Google founding and, 184–187 human-computer interaction, 11–18 human-in-the-loop debates, 158–165, 167–169, 335 IA, defined, xii, 5–7, 31, 115, 141 McCarthy’s and Engelbart’s work compared, 165–167 paradoxical relationship between, xii–xiii Searle and, 179, 180–182 Siri and, 12–13, 31, 190, 193–194, 282 social construction of technology concept, xvii Winograd’s changed views about, 170–178, 171, 182–187 intelligent cruise control, 43 intelligent elevator, 215 International Federation of Robotics (IFR), 87 Internet advent of, 7 ARPAnet as precursor to, 164, 196 Internet of Things, xv, 193 neural network advancement and, 151 photographic film industry and, 83–84 search engine optimization, 86 “Third Industrial Revolution,” 88, 89 Web 2.0, 295 World Wide Web development, 140, 288–290 Interval Research Corporation, 213, 267, 268 Intraspect, 292–295 Intuitive Surgical, 271 iRobot, 203 Jennings, Ken, 225, 226 Jobs, Steve, 13, 35, 112, 131, 194, 214, 241, 281–282, 320–323 Johns Hopkins University, 145 Johnson, Lyndon B., 73 Joshi, Aravind Krishna, 132 Joy, Bill, 336, 343 Kaplan, Jerry, 27, 131–141 Kapor, Mitch, 140, 292 Kay, Alan, 7–8, 115, 120, 198–199, 306–310, 339–341 Kelley, David, 186 Kelly, Kevin, 17 Keynes, John Maynard, 74, 76, 326–327 Kittlaus, Dag, 310–323 Kiva Systems, 97–98, 206 knowledge acquisition problem, 287 knowledge-based systems, 285 knowledge engineering, 113, 128 Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (Stanford), 133–134 Knowledge Navigator, 188, 300, 304, 305–310, 317, 318 Kodak, 83–84 Koller, Daphne, 265 Komisar, Randy, 341 Konolige, Kurt, 268–269 Kuffner, James, 43 Kurzweil, Ray, 84–85, 116, 119, 154, 208, 336 labor force, 65–94 aging of, 93–94, 327 autonomous cars and, 25, 61–62 Brooks on, 204–208 Brynjolfsson and McAfee on, 79–80, 82–83 cybernation revolution, 73–74 deskilling of, 80–82 economic change and, 77–79, 83–84 for elder care, 236–237, 245, 327–332 growth of, xv, 10, 80–81, 326–327 Industrial Perception robots and, 241–244, 269–270 lights-out factories and, 65–68, 66, 90, 104, 206 Moravec on, 122–123 recession of 2008 and, 77–78, 325 Rifkin on automation and, 76–77 Shockley on, 97 singularity hypothesis and, 9–10, 84–94 technological unemployment, 16–18, 76–77, 104, 211 technology and displacement of, 16–18 unions and, 325–326 Wiener on, 8, 68–76 Labor-Science-Education Association, 70, 73 Lamond, Pierre, 129–130 lane-keeping software, 49, 51 language and speech recognition. see also Siri (Apple) chatbot technology, 221–225, 304 early neural network research, 146–148 Eliza, 14, 113, 172–174, 221 Hearsay-II, 282–283 natural language work by Kaplan, 135 semantic autocomplete, 284 semantic understanding, 156 Shakey and, 2 SHRDLU, 132, 170–172, 174–178 Siri’s development and, 12–13, 15, 280 (see also Siri [Apple]) software agents, 193 Lanier, Jaron, 82–83 Leach, Edmund, 90 LeCun, Yann, 148–152, 151, 156–158 Lederberg, Joshua, 113 Legg, Shane, 337–338 Leonard, John, 55 Lerner, Sandy, 134 Levandowski, Anthony, 45 Levy, Frank, 10 Lexus, 57 Licklider, J.


pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

In 1987, May’s fellow techno-libertarian Phil Salin came to him with an idea Salin had been turning over in his mind for years: a market for selling information. He would call it AMIX, the American Information Exchange. Long before eBay, Salin imagined an ethereal version of that auction system, where users could pay for answers to their queries or offer up packets of knowledge to the highest bidder. In later years, big-name technologists like Mitch Kapor and Esther Dyson would advise Salin on the project. But May says he immediately pointed out a fundamental flaw in his friend’s vision. AMIX, he told Salin, would inevitably become a black market for stolen knowledge. “Someone asks if anyone knows how to solve the charge buildup problem during ion implant of n-type wafers,” May posits.

“If you’re going to take all of humanity and put them in the same social space where they don’t have clothes and buildings, or anything to show who they are, they don’t have property, they don’t have jurisdictional boundaries, they don’t have law maybe . . . it could be the biggest thing since the capture of fire.” The Internet represented another “renegotiation of power,” he argued, one just as dangerous to the status quo as Gutenberg’s invention had been. For the next twenty-five years, he and fellow cyberlibertarians like John Gilmore and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor would spend much of their lives and enormous sums of money fighting the governments and corporations that would seek to neuter or restrain that new “social space.” Birgitta Jónsdóttir was in the audience. And it was one tossed-off idea near the end of Barlow’s speech that lodged in her mind.

helicopter airstrike footage from, 28–29, 34, 43, 168, 311 megaleak of Manning from, 2, 14–15, 175, 295 security in, 37–39 Ivanov, Vassil, 234 Johnson, Lyndon, 22, 25 Jones, Rich, 316–17 Jónsdóttir, Birgitta on the Architect, 287 and Assange, 257–58 background of, 226–27, 246–52 at Chaos Communication Camp, 273 and Collateral Murder video, 258 and IMMI legislation, 228, 236, 240, 255 investigation of, 266–67 and OpenLeaks, 279, 282 and WikiLeaks, 296, 321 Kapor, Mitch, 255 Karlung, Jon, 237–38 Karn, Phil, 86–87 Kaupthing Bank, 256 Kehler, Randy, 26 Kenyan leaks, 165 Kissinger, Henry, 17–18, 24, 40 Lamo, Adrian and Appelbaum, 167, 168 background of, 29–30, 32–34 Manning informed on by, 31–32, 40, 42–43, 46, 142, 168 Manning’s conversations with, 34, 37–39, 42–43 on Manning’s imprisonment, 30–31 Laurie, Ben, 131, 157 Leaks.org, 127 Leavy, Penny, 213–14 Leigh, David, 305, 307 Lewman, Andrew, 140 Libya, 137, 138 Liddy, G.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE LAUNCH A Dent in the Universe The “1984” ad Real Artists Ship The high point of the October 1983 Apple sales conference in Hawaii was a skit based on a TV show called The Dating Game. Jobs played emcee, and his three contestants, whom he had convinced to fly to Hawaii, were Bill Gates and two other software executives, Mitch Kapor and Fred Gibbons. As the show’s jingly theme song played, the three took their stools. Gates, looking like a high school sophomore, got wild applause from the 750 Apple salesmen when he said, “During 1984, Microsoft expects to get half of its revenues from software for the Macintosh.” Jobs, clean-shaven and bouncy, gave a toothy smile and asked if he thought that the Macintosh’s new operating system would become one of the industry’s new standards.

Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The invitation read, “There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me celebrate mine.” One table featured software moguls, including Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor. Another had old friends such as Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a woman dressed in a tuxedo. Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith had rented tuxes and wore floppy tennis shoes, which made it all the more memorable when they danced to the Strauss waltzes played by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Jobs said it could, and it was. Years later Jobs would make such staircases a feature at Apple’s signature stores. The Computer During the early months of NeXT, Jobs and Dan’l Lewin went on the road, often accompanied by a few colleagues, to visit campuses and solicit opinions. At Harvard they met with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of Lotus software, over dinner at Harvest restaurant. When Kapor began slathering butter on his bread, Jobs asked him, “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Kapor responded, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay away from the subject of your personality.”


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Developers could gather in someone’s garage and live on pizza and soda as they wrote software and games or prototyped devices and hardware.41 These were generally ideas that could not get investment capital because they depended on consumer demand that didn’t exist yet. Two kids and a decent computer didn’t really need capital to build the next big thing. And while their inventions changed the culture, the companies created by Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Bill Gates, and Mitch Kapor made millionaires out of their founders and first employees. Sure, there were a few friends and industry insiders who had thrown in a little seed money and reaped real rewards, but the process was opaque to the vast majority of the investment community, who were generally shut out of all this until shares became public.

., 229 Circuit City, 90 Citizens United case, 72 Claritas, 32 click workers, 50 climate change, 135, 227–28, 237 coin of the realm, 128–29 collaboration as corporate strategy, 106–7 colonialism, 71–72 commons, 215–23 co-owned networks and, 220–23 history of, 215–16 projects inspired by, 217–18 successful, elements of, 216–17 tragedy of, 215–16 worker-owned collectives and, 219–20 competencies, of corporations, 79–80 Connect+Develop, 107 Consumer Electronics Show, 19 Consumer Reports,33 contracting with small and medium-sized enterprises, 112 cooperative currencies, 160–65 favor banks, 161 LETS (Local Exchange Trading System), 163–65 time dollar systems, 161–63 co-owned networks, 220–23 corporations, 68–82 acquisition of startups, growth through, 78 amplifying effect of, 70, 73 Big Shift and, 76 cash holdings of, 76, 77–78 competency of, 79–80 cost reduction, growth through, 79–80 decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs), 149–50 Deloitte’s study of return on assets (ROA) of, 76–77 distributive alternative to platform monopolies, 93–97 evaluation of, 69–74 extractive nature of, 71–72, 73, 74, 75, 80–82 growth targets, meeting, 68–69 income inequality and, 81–82 limits to corporate model, 75–76, 80–82 managerial and financial methods to deliver growth by, 77–79 monopolies (See monopolies) obsolescence created by, 70–71, 73 offshoring and, 78–79 personhood of, 72, 73–74, 90, 91 recoding of, 93–97, 125–26 repatriation and, 80 retrieval of values of empire and, 71–72, 73 as steady-state enterprises, 97–123 Costco, 74 cost reduction, and corporate growth, 79–80 Couchsurfing.com, 46 crashes of 1929, 99 of 2007, 133–34 biotech crash, of 1987, 6 flash crash, 180 Creative Commons, 215 creative destruction, 83–87 credit, 132–33 credit-card companies, 143–44 crowdfunding, 38–39, 198–201 crowdsharing apps, 45–49 crowdsourcing platforms, 49–50 Crusades, 16 Cumbrian Pounds, 156 Curitiba, Brazil modified LETS program, 164–65 Daly, Herman, 184 data big, 39–44 getting paid for our own, 44–45 “likes” economy and, 32, 34–36 in pre-digital era, 40 Datalogix, 32 da Vinci, Leonardo, 236 debt, 152–54 decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs), 149–50 deflation, 169 Dell, 115–16 Dell, Michael, 115–16 Deloitte Center for the Edge, 76–77 destructive destruction, 100 Detroit Dollars, 156 digital distributism, 224–39 artisanal era mechanisms and values retrieved by, 233–34 developing distributive businesses, 237–38 digital industrialism compared, 226 digital technology and, 230–31 historical ideals of distributism, 228–30 leftism, distinguished, 231 Pope Francis’s encyclical espousing distributed approach to land, labor and capital, 227–28 Renaissance era values, rebirth of, 235–37 subsidiarity and, 231–32 sustainable prosperity as goal of, 226–27 digital economy, 7–11 big data and, 39–44 destabilizing form of digitally accelerated capitalism, creation of, 9–10 digital marketplace, development of, 24–30 digital transaction networks and, 140–51 disproportionate relationship between capital and value in, 9 distributism and, 224–39 externalizing cost of replacing employees in, 14–15 industrialism and, 13–16, 23–24, 44, 53–54, 93, 101–2, 201, 214, 226 industrial society, distinguished, 11 “likes” and similar metrics, economy of, 30–39 platform monopolies and, 82–93, 101 digital industrialism, 13–16, 23–24, 101–2, 201 digital distributism compared, 226 diminishing returns of, 93 externalizing costs and, 14–15 growth agenda and, 14–15, 23–24 human data as commodity under, 44 income disparity and, 53–54 labor and land pushed to unbound extremes by, 214 “likes” economy and, 33 reducing bottom line as means of creating illusion of growth and, 14 digital marketplace, 24–30 early stages of e-commerce, 25–26 highly centralized sales platforms of, 29 initial treatment of Internet as commons, 25 “long tail” of widespread digital access and, 26 positive reinforcement feedback loop and, 28 power-law dynamics and, 26–29 removal of humans from selection process in, 28 digital transaction networks, 140–51 Bitcoin, 143–49, 150–51, 152 blockchains and, 144–51 central authorities, dependence on, 142 decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs) and, 149–50 PayPal, 140–41 theft and, 142 direct public offerings (DPOs), 205–6 discount brokerages, 176–78 diversification, 208, 211 dividends, 113–14, 208–10 dividend traps, 113 Dorsey, Jack, 191–92 Draw Something, 192, 193 Drexler, Mickey, 116 dual transformation, 108–9 dumbwaiter effect, 19 Dutch East India Company, 71, 89, 131 eBay, 16, 26, 29, 45, 140 education industry, 95–97 Eisenhower administration, 52–53, 63, 75 Elberse, Anita, 28 employee-owned companies, 116–18 Enron, 133, 171n Eroski, 220 eSignal, 178 EthicalBay, 221 E*Trade, 176, 177 Etsy, 16, 26, 30 expense reduction, and corporate growth, 78–79 Facebook, 4, 31, 83, 93, 96, 201 data gathering and sales by, 41, 44 innovation by acquisition of startups, 78 IPO of, 192–93, 195 psychological experiments conducted on users by, 32–33 factors of production, 212–14 Fairmondo, 221 Family Assistance Plan, 63 family businesses, 103–4, 231–32 FarmVille, 192 favor banks, 161 Febreze Set & Refresh, 108 Federal Reserve, 137–38 feedback loop, and positive reinforcement, 28 Ferriss, Tim, 201 feudalism, 17 financial services industry, 131–33, 171–73, 175 Fisher, Irving, 158 flash crash, 180 flexible purpose corporations, 119–20 flow, investing in, 208–10 Forbes,88, 173, 174 40-hour workweek, reduction of, 58–60 401(k) plans, 171–74 Francis, Pope, 227, 228, 234 Free, Libre, Open Knowledge (FLOK) program, 217–18 Free (Anderson), 33 free money theory, local currencies based on, 156–59 barter exchanges, 159 during Great Depression, 158–59 self-help cooperatives, 159 stamp scrip, 158–59 tax anticipation scrip, 159 Wörgls, 157–58 frenzy, 98–99 Fried, Jason, 59 Friedman, Milton, 64 Friendster, 31 Frito-Lay, 80 front running, 180–81 Fulfillment by Amazon, 89 Fureai Kippu (Caring Relationship Tickets), 162 Future of Work initiative, 56n Gallo, Riso, 103–4 Gap, 116 Gates, Bill, 186 General Electric, 132 General Public License (GPL) for software, 216 Gesell, Silvio, 157 GI Bill, 99 Gimein, Mark, 147 Gini coefficient of income inequality, 81–82, 92 global warming, 135, 227–28, 237 GM, 80 Goldman Sachs, 133, 195 gold standard, 139 Google, 8, 48, 78, 83, 90–91, 93, 141, 218 acquisitions by, 191 business model of, 37 data sales by, 37, 44 innovation by acquisition of startups, 78 IPO of, 194–95 protests against, 1–3, 5, 98–99 grain receipts, 128 great decoupling, 53 Great Depression, 137, 158–59 Great Exhibition, 1851, 19 Greenspan, Alan, 132–33 growth, 1–11 bazaars, and economic expansion in late Middle Ages, 16–18 central currency and, 126, 129–31, 133–36 digital industrialism, growth agenda of, 14–15, 23–24 highly centralized e-commerce platforms and, 29 startups, hypergrowth expected of, 187–91 as trap (See growth trap) growth trap, 4–5, 68–123 central currency as core mechanism of, 133–34 corporations as program and, 68–82 platform monopolies and, 82–93, 101 recoding corporate model and, 93–97 steady-state enterprises and, 98–123 guaranteed minimum income programs, 62–65 guaranteed minimum wage public jobs, 65–66 guilds, 17 Hagel, John, 76–77 Hardin, Garrett, 215–16 Harvard Business Review,108–9 Heiferman, Scott, 196–97 Henry VIII, King, 215, 229 Hewlett-Packard UK, 112 high-frequency trading (HFT), 179–80 Hilton, 115 Hobby Lobby case, 72 Hoffman, Reid, 61 Holland, Addie Rose, 205–6 holograms, 235 Homeport New Orleans, 121 housing industry, 135 Huffington, Arianna, 34, 35, 201 Huffington Post, 34, 201 human role in economy, 13–67 aristocracy’s efforts to control peasant economy, 17–18 bazaars and, 16–18 big data and, 39–44 chartered monopolies and, 18 decreasing employment and, 30–39 digital marketplace, impact of, 24–30 industrialism and, 13–16, 18–24, 44 “likes” economy and, 30–39 reevaluation of employment and adopting policies to decrease it and, 54–67 sharing economy and, 44–54 Hurwitz, Charles, 117 IBM, 90–91, 112 inclusive capitalism, 111–12 income disparity corporate model and, 81–82 digital technology as accelerating, 53–54 Gini coefficient of, 81–82, 92 growth trap and, 4 power-law dynamics and, 27–28, 30 public service options for reducing, 65–66 IndieGogo, 30, 199 individual retirement accounts (IRAs), 171 industrial farming, 134–35 industrialism, 18–24 branding and, 20 digital, 13–16, 23–24, 44, 53–54, 93, 101–2, 201, 214, 226 disempowerment of workers and, 18–19 human connection between producer and consumer, loss of, 19–20 isolation of human consumers from one another and, 20–21 mass marketing and, 19–20 mass media and, 20–21 purpose of, 18–19, 22 value system of, 18–19 inflation, 169 Instagram, 31 Intercontinental Exchange, 182 interest, 129–31 investors/investing, 70, 72, 168–223 algorithmic trading and, 179–84 bounded, 210–15 commons model for running businesses and, 215–23 crowdfunding and, 198–201 derivative finance, volume of, 182 digital technology and, 169–70, 175–84 direct public offerings (DPOs) and, 205–6 discount brokerages and, 176–78 diversification and, 208, 211 dividends and, 208–10 flow, investing in, 208–10 high-frequency trading (HFT) and, 179–80 in low-interest rate environment, 169–70 microfinancing platforms and, 202–4 platform cooperatives and, 220–23 poor performance of do-it-yourself traders and, 177–78 retirement savings and, 170–75 startups and, 184–205 ventureless capital and, 196–205 irruption, 98 i-traffic, 196 iTunes, 27, 29, 34, 89 J. Crew, 116 Jay Z, 36 Jefferson, Thomas, 19 Jenkins, George W., 117 Jobs, Steve, 186 J.P. Morgan, 142 Kapor, Mitch, 186 Kickstarter, 38, 198–99, 200, 201 King, Larry, 25 Kiva, 202–3 Klein, Naomi, 135 Known, 96–97 Kodak, 83, 98 labor, 212–14 Lacy, Sarah, 197 land, 212–14 Lanier, Jason, 44–45, 58 La’Zooz, 222 Leary, Timothy, 25 Lefsetz, Bob, 34 leftism, 231 Lending Club, 202–3, 204 Leo XIII, Pope, 228–29, 230 Lerner, Jaime, 164, 165 Lessig, Lawrence, 199, 215 LETS (Local Exchange Trading System), 163–65 Lietaer, Bernard, 139, 208 Life, Inc.


pages: 323 words: 92,135

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

Cost was the main barrier and would remain the barrier for nearly 20 years. But when elasticity kicked in, computers became cheaper than rooms of humans. Augmenting often meant replacing, or helping those who remained. With Engelbart’s map, an entire industry came along and created highly profitable intellectual property. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Michael Dell and Mitch Kapor—these guys are heroes too, but perhaps they are just implementers of someone else’s vision. More power and riches to them, of course, but Doug Engelbart laid out the future of the personal computer, and now it’s history. I was intrigued. I marched over to Doug’s house a few weeks later to talk about a broken fence, but I was really intent on discovering his secret to scale.

See intellectual property IPOs, 3, 60, 97, 212–16, 248, 293 iron industry, 52–53, 55–57, 59, 125 IRR (internal rate of return), 170–71 Island, 207, 288 Janus, 229 Japan, 134, 175, 204, 257, 259–60, 261 consumer economy and, 68 economic output of, 234 U.S. debt and, 257 yen crisis, 162–65, 168, 292 Japanese Fair Trade Commission, 160 Java (programming language), 151 J-curve, 264–66 JetBlue, 292 job market, 241–45, 246, 261 305 Jobs, Steve, 118, 119, 121, 128 Johns-Manville, 236 Johnson & Johnson, 236 joint-stock companies, 92–93 Jones, Alfred Winslow, 10 JP Morgan, 11, 49, 144, 209 junk bonds, 11 Kapor, Mitch, 121 Karlgaard, Rich, 195 Kay, John, 64 Kaye, William, 9–13, 48, 153 Kessler, Kurt, 245 Kessler, Nancy, 117–18, 193, 194–95, 288 Kilby, Jack, 101 Kittler, Fred, 1–4, 6, 14–17, 29–31, 33–36, 47, 49, 60–62, 73–76, 81–82, 91, 96, 97, 104, 106–7, 138–43, 164, 167, 169, 172, 175, 203, 205, 206, 209–16, 219, 223–26, 246, 288, 295, 296 hedge fund partnership, 144, 151–52 Kleiner Perkins, 195, 197 Kleinrock, Leonard, 183, 184–86, 191 knowledge workers, 121–23 Korea, 1, 3, 134, 208, 234, 259–60 Kotick, Bobby, 50 Kramlich, Dick, 144, 194, 195, 197 labor costs.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

McAfee and Brynjolfsson note that “economics of network effects are central to understanding business success in the digital world,” and they use the example of WhatsApp to illustrate network effects. They explain that as WhatsApp became more popular, users of regular text messages (SMS) felt left out and increasingly turned to the app: “As more and more of them did this, the network effects grew stronger. Computer pioneer Mitch Kapor observed that ‘architecture is politics.’ With platforms, it’s also economics.”29 But the idea that, for platforms, architecture can be economics might not be a good thing. As these platforms grow in size and become the “go-to spot” for everything from furniture assembly to taxis to hotel rooms, we run the risk of creating monopolies.

See workplace injuries instability, 37–38 Instacart, 41, 172, 190, 207 Instant Book service, 170 Institute for Policy Studies, 195 insurance coverage, 184; Airbnb and, 45–46, 131; Postmates and, 110–11; TaskRabbit and, 114; Uber and, 145 insurance requirements, 2, 46, 111, 114, 145, 167, 222–23n64 interaction-free key transfers, 34, 34fig. 3, 35fig. 4 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 184–85, 199–201box 1, 205–6 International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, 71 Internet stalking, 36 investments: as barrier, 42–43; capital for, 19–20; high capital-barriers, 166–68; returns on, 40; security for, 20 IRS (Internal Revenue Service), 184–85, 199–201box 1, 205–6 Jacobs, Irv, 178 Jefferson, Thomas, 31 The Jobless Future (Aronowitz & DiFazio), 37 The Jungle (Sinclair), 93, 177 Juno/Gett, 190–91, 233n72 just-in-time scheduling, 176, 179, 180 Kahn, Bonnie Menes, 32 Kalanick, Travis, 49–50, 73, 78 Kalleberg, Arne, 183 Kamel, Fawzi, 78 Kapor, Mitch, 17 Kasinitz, Phil, 220n21 Kasselman, Lane, 184 Katz, Lawrence F., 7 Kelly, Jeff, 180 Kerr, Dara, 77 KeyCafes, 34 Kitchensurfing: overview, 4, 7, 21, 22, 23; background on, 57–60; bathroom restrictions, 87–88; business use of, 228n14; closure of, 164, 222n62, 231n6 (ch.7); as on-demand economy company, 27; entrepreneurship and, 161–64; escrow services, 229n6; high skill-barrier, 42–43, 166–68; income level, 60; marketing, 160; participant recruitment and methodology, 42–43, 57; pivots, 57, 222n62; promises of, 25; recruitment, 158–59; response rates, 81, 160; safety issues, 113–14; Secret Diner program, 59, 95–97; sexual harassment, 117–18, 121–22, 123–27.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

CHAPTER 2 THE SOUL OF AGENDA [1968—2001] One Thursday morning, a dozen or so members of the Chandler development team gathered for the weekly staff meeting in the big conference room on the fifth floor of 543 Howard Street in San Francisco. Laptops opened up and locked on to WiFi signals, coffee cups steamed, dogs roamed, and people chatted. Then, with no fanfare, Mitch Kapor poked his head through the double doors and said, “Here’s someone you know.” He led in an oddly familiar-looking tall man in a blue suit who stood stiffly for a moment while the chatter subsided. Then the visitor spoke. “I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States.” The only jaws that didn’t drop were the dogs’.

Although Gore might have gotten the tense wrong—Chandler wasn’t actually changing the world (not yet, anyway)—he got the aspiration right. Chandler was indeed fueled by world-changing dreams. But it began more modestly, with a small irritation, an everyday annoyance—an itch. Back in 2001, a Microsoft Exchange server sat in a closet just outside Mitch Kapor’s office in downtown San Francisco. The closet was hardly where Kapor wanted to spend his time, but as the first responder when there were problems with Exchange, that was where he frequently found himself at the start of the new millennium, often at odd hours. Kapor’s wife, Freada Kapor Klein, ran a small nonprofit organization from the same office suite, and staff members used Microsoft’s software to share calendars as well as to manage email.

In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it—but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can’t have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge.” In the spring of 2001, Mitch Kapor established the Open Source Applications Foundation as a nonprofit organization and hired its first employees. He needed, as he later put it, some “people with good pairs of hands” to begin exploring ideas. He hired two young programmers, Morgen Sagen and Al Cho, who had worked together at the dot-com flameout Excite@Home.


Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, Gary Kildall, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, popular electronics, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, thinkpad, traveling salesman

It was like we were on completely different timetables. They didn’t understand how fast we had to respond.” In the midst of all the confusion that the infighting created, IBM wound up ignoring one of the greatest opportunities that ever crossed its doorstep. Although only a handful of people know it, even inside IBM, in the sum m er of 1982, Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Devel­ opm ent, practically begged IBM to take exclusive marketing rights to his Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. If IBM had gone for that, it would have collected billions of dollars of revenue over the years from the spread­ sheet. More im portant, 1-2-3 would have filled in the only missing piece in IB M ’s strategy in those days.

W hen Sevin talked to Rosen, Sevin said he had a friend who didn’t m easure up to their criteria but who was probably worth a shot, anyway. Rosen said it was funny Sevin should say that because he, too, had a friend like that. The two agreed to trust their instincts about their friends, so they put up much of the money for Canion and Compaq. (Rosen’s friend did just as well for Sevin-Rosen. He was Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus.) Sevin discarded Canion’s idea for an add-in card, so Canion and some of his engineers drew another idea on a napkin at the restaurant where they were dining. The idea was pretty simple: It was an IBMcompatible PC with a handle on it. But the idea for a portable com puter was also powerful.

See Microsoft XT computers, 68, 135-36 ICL Company, 4 Imlav, John, 231 InfoWorld. 82, 88, 368 Intel Company, 34, 36, 37, 71, 72, 73, 75, 103, 111, 119,'120, 122, 124, 125-31, 143, 149, 207, 236, 317, 349, 369 80386 chip, 120-25, 129-31, 142, 146, 236 Intelligent Electronics, 247 Investors Daily, 338 Japanese companies, 5, 60, 61, 129, 132, 133, 170, 203, 207, 236, 242, 243, 253, 256, 326, 342, 343-44, 345, 348, 353-54 Javers, Ron, 302 Jobs, Steve, 4, 19, 32, 60, 78, 86-87, 148, 184-85 Johnson & Johnson, 354 Joy, Bill, 203 Kahn, Philippe, 118 Kalis, Dave, 354 Kaplan, Jerry, 319-22, 324 Kapor, Mitch, 77-79, 145, 320 Katzenbach, Nicholas, 54, 58, 154, 198 Kaypro Company, 4, 36 Keams, David, 51 Kfoury, Ed, 105-6 Khosla, Vinod, 203 Kilbv, Jack, 125, 126 Kildall, Gary, 18, 41 King, Sue, 324 Kirk, Charles, 49 Kleder, John Dean, 363-64 Kleiner Perkins, 77 Kodak Company, 5 Kowal, Charles, 365 Kuehler, Jack, 176, 183-84, 186, 198, 199, 200, 201, 206-9, 232, 234, 236, 240, 242-43, 245, 257, 259, 260-61, 262, 273, 289-92, 293295, 297, 298, 309-10, 315, 344, 346, 370 LaBant, Bob, 275, 276-77 Lally, Jim, 77-78 Lance, Bert, 54 Lautenbach, Dan, 165 Lautenbach, Ned, 165, 166, 222-25, 229 Lautenbach, Terrv, 164-66, 183, 222, 223, 273, 274, 275 Lawten, Bob, 253-56 Learson, Vin, 51, 54 LeGrande, Doug, 283-84 Letwin, Gordon, 73, 103, 186 Levenson, Marc, 342-45 Liddle, Dave, 189, 193, 310 Lillie, Ray, 359-60 Lotus Development, 142, 145, 189, 228, 240, 320 1-2-3 software, 36, 39, 77-78 Low, Paul, 344 Lowe, Bill, 2, 8, 18-19, 21-23, 26, 27, 29, 36, 79, 81-83, 84-85, 88-91, 93, 99, 104-5, 106, 111-13, 114-16, 118, 119, 121-22, 124-25, 131, 132, 135, 136-40, 142-43, 149-50, 152, 168, 171, 183, 213, 223, 227, 237 INDEX Lucente, Angelo, 166 Lucente, Ed, 132, 161-64, 166, 167-68 McCarthy, Jud, 254-55 McCracken, Bill, 330 MacDonald, James F., 1.56 McKenna, Regis, 293-94 McKinsey consulting, 351 McNealy, Scott, 203-4, 316 Management Science America, 231 Mandresh, Dan, 256 Mann, Marvin, 306, 309 Manzi, Jim, 189, 194, 240 Maples, Mike, 186-87 Markell, Bob, 94-95, 96, 114-16 Markkula, Mike, 148 Martin, Hal, 26 Martinson, Jay, 114 MCA Company, 251 Metaphor software, 189, 310 Metcalfe, Bob, 368 Micrografx Company, 279-80 Microsoft, 4, 5, 68, 71, 73, 77, 82-83, 143, 152, 203, 223, 228, 310, 312, 316, 319-20, 331, 349, 369, 370, 371.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Ozzie tired of minicomputer maker Data General, and was eager to enter the booming business of microcomputer software. He joined Software Arts, makers of the hottest software application at the time, a revolutionary spreadsheet called VisiCalc, where he was involved in developing a version for the IBM PC. In the meantime, Jonathan Sachs had left Data General to team up with a local software entrepreneur, Mitch Kapor, to create a new spreadsheet they were calling 1-2-3. The company they formed was called Lotus Development Corporation. Lotus 1-2-3 enjoyed explosive success in the IBM PC marketplace, and the company was riding high. Sachs kept contacting Ozzie to join the team (“Come to Lotus, come to Lotus…we need more good people,” Ozzie recalls him saying).

Ozzie wanted to take the ideas he had seen work so well on PLATO—tools for team collaboration and productivity—and bring them to the workplace, where it was abundantly clear by the mid-1980s that workplaces everywhere were going to be filled with networked PCs. There was an opportunity to address a software product void that few even knew was coming. Sachs continued to pester Ozzie, urging him to come meet Mitch Kapor and at least hear him out. So he did, first meeting him at a computer convention where Lotus 1-2-3 was the hit of the show. He told Kapor, “I wanna do this thing, I know you wanna do spreadsheets, but I can’t come to work here because I really wanna do this other thing.” He told Kapor he and Halvorsen had tried doing Microcosm but had gotten nowhere with venture capitalists, which was frustrating, and now he wasn’t sure how he was going to get VC money for his new idea.

Insinga; Mike Jacobs; Bryna Lee Jacobson; Greg Janusz; Eugene Jarecki; Gloria Jarecki; Henry Jarecki; Bob Johansen; Chris Johnson; James Johnson; Jeff Johnson; Keith Johnson; Lee Johnson; Mark A. Johnson; Roger Johnson; Douglas W. Jones; Jeremy Jones; Steve Jones; Richard Jorgensen; Ted Kaehler; Dennis Kane; Samuel Kaplan; Mitch Kapor; Goran Karlsson; Kent Karraker; Aaron Karsh; Milton Katz; Luke Kaven; Len Kawell; Alan Kay; Greg Kearsley; B Keefe; Mark Kehrli; Andrew Keller; Elaine Keller; David Kibbey; Dick Kibitt; Kaywin Kidd; Tom Kiester; Rayburn Killion; Greg Kirkpatrick; Ron Klass; Paul Kohlmiller; Nathaniel Kohn; Christopher Kolar; Rob Kolstad; Paul Koning; D.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Whatever its logical flaws, Barlow’s thinking became influential in shaping the idea of “online rights” as somehow distinct from those in the physical world, a concept that lacks much real legal support. In 1990, Barlow had started the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the activist John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, who had designed the early PC program Lotus 1-2-3 and founded the Lotus Development Corporation. The organization was founded to defend civil liberties online, it works to protect privacy and free speech, and it maintains more independence from big technology companies than most other online advocacy groups.

Associated Press International Piracy Watch List Internet:      advertising on, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3n, 10.4n      browsers for, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3      consumer use of, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 5.1, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 8.2, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2      download licenses for, 3.1, 4.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3      economic impact of, itr.1, itr.2, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3      European, itr.1, itr.2, 2.1, 3.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1      free content on, itr.1, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1      future trends for      government regulation of, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3      ideology of, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10.1      legislation on, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 10.1      neutrality of, 4.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5      online locker services (file-hosting) for, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 8.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3      piracy on, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3      as Web 2.0, 1.1, 10.1 Internet at Liberty 2010 conference Internet protocol (IP) addresses, 2.1, 8.1, 10.1, 10.2 Internet service providers (ISPs), 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.5, 9.6, 9.7, 9.8, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 iPads, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 6.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 iPhones, 5.1, 6.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 iPods, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 10.1 Ipsos MORI Ireland, 3.1, 9.1 Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) iTunes Store, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, itr.5, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 2.10, 2.11, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10.1 Jobs, Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 6.1, 10.1, 10.2 journalism, 4.1, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2 Journalism Online Justice Department, U.S., 6.1, 9.1 Justin.tv, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 Kapor, Mitch Kasi, Srinandan, 2.1, 4.1 Kavanagh, Willie Kazaa, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 10.1 Keaton, Buster, 3.1, 3.2 Kelly, Kevin, 2.1, 2.2 Kenswil, Lawrence Kid Rock Kilar, Jason, 5.1, 5.2 Kindle, 6.1, 6.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy Knobel, Marc KODA Kortchmar, Danny Kraus, Joe Labovitz, Craig Lanier, Jaron LaserDisc “Lazy Sunday” sketch, itr.1, itr.2, 1.1 Leahy, Patrick, 1.1, 10.1, 10.2 Led Zeppelin, 2.1, 3.1 Lehman, Bruce, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.1, 2.2, 10.1 Leno, Jay Lessig, Lawrence, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2 Levinsohn, Peter, 5.1, 5.2, 7.1 libraries, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 6.1, 6.2 Library Copyright Alliance, 1.1, 1.2 Library of Alexandria, 6.1, 6.2 libreka!


pages: 370 words: 105,085

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

The Mozilla engineers decided to address the cross-platform problem with their own invention called XUL. So far, I'm impressed. Mozilla finally got to the point where it tastes like real food. Even my favorite bugaboo, Alt+Space N to minimize a window, works in Mozilla; it took them long enough, but they did it. Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus and created 123, decided for his next application to go with something called wxWindows and wxPython for cross-platform support.9 __________ 9. See blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/000007.html. Which is better: XUL, Eclipse's SWT, or wxWindows? I don't know. They are all such huge worlds that I couldn't really evaluate them and tell.

See questions introduction in interviews investment in business strategies–2nd, 3rd IP transmissions–2nd iPod–2nd ISP email forwarding IT consulting IBM in rise and fall of–2nd rules and procedures for–2nd Ivatury, Uday J J2ME Java for cell phones–2nd in computer science courses for cross-platform applications–2nd in open source economics–2nd JavaScript Jini white paper Jobs, Steve Joel Test for better code–2nd bug databases–2nd bug fixes–2nd builds in one step daily builds–2nd hallway usability testing interviews–2nd results of–2nd source control–2nd specs–2nd testers tools–2nd up-to-date schedules using working conditions–2nd Junglee service Juno email product used at lock-in strategies management strategies–2nd marketing strategies–2nd K Kahn, Philippe Kapor, Mitch known bugs, fixing Kohn, Alfie–2nd Kwatinetz, Andrew L Land Grab model–2nd languages in crash reports selecting–2nd laptops for interruption minimization latency in networks Law of Leaky Abstraction lazy programmers myth LCD screens, color leaders, looking for leaky abstractions–2nd libraries abstraction in in binary form linkers for licensing PC–DOS operating system line–drawing characters linkers–2nd Linux, 2nd API calls in cost of device drivers for–2nd vs.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia, Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are a bit further from the collectivist nirvana than appears from the outside. While millions of writers contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory, observed, “Inside every working anarchy, there’s an old-boy network.” This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from a small degree of hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the internet, Facebook, or democracy are intended to serve as an arena for producing goods and delivering services.

See also virtual reality Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 254 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 189 internet blindness to evolution of, 15–22 commercialization of, 17–18 and consumer attention, 177–78 and copying digital data, 62 creation of content on, 19, 21–22 demographics for users of, 23 and digital socialism, 137 early expectations for, 15–16 early worries about, 23 and emergence of the holos, 293–94 hyperlinked architecture of, 18–19, 21, 146–47 inevitable aspects of, 3 nascent stage of, 26–27 and participation of users, 22–23 as public commons, 122 self-policing culture of, 21 and sharing economy, 144 view of humanity from, 20 See also content creation; web internet of things, 175, 251, 283, 287 interpretation, 69 invention and inventiveness, 275 iPads, 155, 223, 224 iPhones, 123 Iron Man (2008), 222 It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), 201 iTunes, 123, 266 Jefferson, Thomas, 207–8 just-in-time purchasing, 64–65 Kahle, Brewster, 96–97 Kaliouby, Rana el, 220 Kapor, Mitch, 151 Kasparov, Garry, 41 Keeley, Larry, 148 Kickstarter, 156–57 Kindle, 254 Kiva, 159 Lanier, Jaron, 213–14, 215, 219, 234 law and legal systems AI applications in field of, 55 books of, 88, 90 and clouds, 130 code compared to, 88 and creative remixing, 208 and surveillance systems, 207 Leary, Tim, 214 Li, Fei-Fei, 203 libertarianism, 271 libraries Library of Everything, 165, 166–67, 190 and printed books, 100–101 public libraries, 86 and tracking technology, 254 universal library, 96–99, 101, 102 lifelogging, 105–6, 207, 246–50 lifestreaming, 244–51 light field projection, 216–17 LinkedIn, 32, 169 Linux operating system, 141, 143, 151, 273 liquidity, 66–67, 73–77, 88, 93.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

“Digital technology is … erasing the legal jurisdictions of the physical world and replacing them with the unbounded and perhaps permanently lawless waves of cyberspace,” he wrote in Wired, going on to endorse a concept he credited to Brand that would become the battle cry for their fellow techno-libertarians: “information wants to be free”.22 Just as he evangelised the freedom enabled by the internet, Barlow attacked the forces that sought to rein it in, like the US National Security Agency, which, he presciently argued, “meticulously observes almost every activity undertaken and continuously prevents most who inhabit its domain from drawing any blinds against such observation”.23 In 1990, Barlow recruited Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, two tech moguls who got rich in the first Silicon Valley boom, and founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),24 an organisation dedicated to “defending civil liberties in the digital world”.25 The three were soon joined by a host of Valley luminaries, and major corporate players, including Microsoft and HP, became donors.

., 111 Cuba, 237 Cultural Revolution, 8, 23, 24, 48, 176, 205; Xinjing avoidance, 133 ‘cyber-sovereignty’, China doctrine, 8, 234, 237–8, 242, 250 Cyberspace Administration of China, 181 Da Cankao, 35–6, 79, 91, 93, 97; back issues, 100; defeat of, 92; first issue, 39 Dalai Lama, 84–5, 87, 160, 206, 309; office hacked, 162 Darfur, 291 Deibert, Ron, 159–60 Delta Airlines, 309 Democracy Forum, 65, 66 Democratic National Committee, Russian hacking of, 192 Demos/Relcom, Russia, 252–3, 255–6 Deng Xiaoping, 21–4, 47, 89; martial law declaration, 37 Dharamsala, 85–8, 160, 163, 276; internet, 84, 160 ‘digital divide’, 222 Dilshat Perhat, 150 Ding, James, 30–1 DIT, Broadcasting Board of Governors, 108 Diyarim.com, 150–1, 157 Djibouti naval base, 289 domain name system (DNS), 220 Dorsey, Jack, 111 dot.com bubble, first, 84 Dourado, Eli, 228–32 Dow Chemical, 170 Dow Jones, 81 Downey, Brandon, 314 Dreazen, Yochi, 110 DropBox, 276 Drummond, David, 61–2, 171 Dunhuang, 154 Durov, Pavel, 259–63, 265–6, 268–9, 272; Dubai exile, 270; flight, 267 Dynamic Internet Technology, 104, 106–7; Broadcasting Board of Governors, 108 DynaWeb, 101–2; Foundation, 106 Dzungaria, 136 ‘East Turkestan’, 136, 149; question of, 152 Eastern Buddhas Study Falun Dafa Association, 97 Education Computer Resource Centre, India, 86 Egypt, 230–1; Twitter, 264 Eiffel Tower, website crash, 2 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 244–6 elite, Chinese, 90, 117 email address grabbing, 35 encryption, 268–9 Epoch Times, 96–8 Epstein, Helen, 297 Ethiopia, 10, 289, 304 EU (European Union), WSIS stance, 223 Eudora, 88 Eximbank, 288 Facebook, 18, 242, 264, 282, 286, 297, 301, 303, 312–13, 317; banned, 183; censoring by, 314; Firewall blocked, 259, 278; Internet.org, 291 ‘fake news’ panic, 311, 314 Falun Gong, 9, 28, 45–6, 49, 59, 62, 91, 96, 102, 107–8, 112, 118; anti- campaign, 48, 58; blocking of, 99; China mass detentions, 54; community, 103; CRQS withdrawal, 51; members self-immolating, 56; -neoconservatives link, 98; North America shift, 96–7; online censorship, 55; origins, 47 Research Society, 54 FalunDafa.org, 97 Fang Binxing, 249–50 FBI (US Federal Bureau of Investigations), 186, 190–1 FDC (Forum for Democratic Change, 294–6, 300 Ferzat, Ali, 209 filters, border, 29 financial crash 2008, 8, 289 FinFisher, 293, 294 FireChat, 19 FireEye, 192 foreign media coverage, importance of, 255 France, Rwanda Hutu aid, 291 Freedom House, 104 FreeGate, 95–6, 103, 105, 107–9, 110, 112–13; successful, 104; user-friendly, 102 FreeNet China, 99, 101; 2001 launched, 100 freetibet.org, 163 Friedman, Tom, 90, 246 Friendster, 260 Friends of Tibet, 308 FSB, Russia, 265–6, 269 Fuyou Street, Beijing, 45 Gaddafi, Muammar, 290 Gallagher, Ryan, 314 Gamma Group, 293 Gang of Eight, USSR, 254–5 Gauthier, Ursula, 199 George Mason University, 228 Geshe Sopa, 84 Ghost Remote Administration Tool (Gh0st Rat), 162–3; hackers, 164 Gilmore, John, 244 Github, DDos attack, 1–4, 310 global governance, cycles of, 236 Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC), 102, 110; funding boom, 109; projects, 112 Global Internet Inc, 106 Global Times, 172 GoAgent, 5, 6 Golden Shield project, 26–7, 91 Goldsmith, Jack, 30, 219, 243 gongfu, Chinese martial art, 48 Google, 64, 113; 2002 blocked, 91, 2006 China attitude, 115, 2009 accusations, 167, censorship compliance, 118, censorship reversal, 172, China ‘foreignness’ accusation, 125, China blocked, 166, China brand, 117, China cultural errors, 126, China operating, 116, China strategy, 119, Chinese-language search engine, 62, Congressional hearing, 120, 124, cultural mistakes, 125; Dragonfly, 314, Google China, 61, 62, 165, 246; Google Drive, 162; hacked, 168, Schrage accusation, 121, shareholder critique, 168, US criticism, 173, US media criticism, 115 Google.cn search engine, 117 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 75, 173, 252, 255–6; KGB detained, 253 Gordon, Richard, 176 Gore, Al, 31 government commentators employed, 213 Grateful Dead, 244 Great Cannon, China cyber weapon, 3–4 ‘Great Firewall’, 5, 8, 9, 26–7, 29, 43, 46, 58, 66, 71, 90, 92, 99, 101, 107, 112, 117, 159, 199, 207, 242, 311; Cisco help, 116; costs of fighting it, 106; export of, 10; Google brief ejection, 124; international spreading of, 310; keywords detection, 28; Kremlin copy, 260; Uganda import, 287; upgrading of, 92; US components, 30 Great Hall of the People, 23 Great Leap Forward, 8, 138; Xinjiang avoidance, 133 Great Wall, historical, 25 GreatFire.org, 3–4 ‘Green Dam Youth Escort’, 27, 98 Greenwald, Glenn, 268 Group of 77, 237 Gu Ge, name error, 125 see also NoGuGe Guangdong, 143, 201 Guangxi, 78 Guangzhou, 29 Gulf of Aden, 289 Guo Wengui, 92 Guomindang, 49 Guonei Dongtai Qingyang, 79 Haig, Dan, 83–4, 86–8, 160 Hainan, Lingshui: signals intelligence, 164; servers in, 163 ‘Harmony’ CCP-speak, 72 Harris, Rachel, 151 Harvard, 71, 74, 91; Law, 244 HBGary Federal, 185–6; hack, 188 He Guoqiang, 171 He Zuoxiu, 49 Hefei, anti-corruption case, 280 Hinton, Carma, 176 Hitchens, Christopher, 49 Hoglund, Greg, 186 Holder, Eric, 189 Holdstock, Nick, 137, 149 home routers, 217 Hong Kong: Admiralty, 18; Broadband, 155; Chinese University, 217; Civic Square, 15; independence discussions, 20; Internet Exchange, 217–18; parliamentary elections, 19; Science Park, 200; 2014 effect, 19; Umbrella Movement, 255 Horowitz, Michael, 107, 109 hosts.txt file, 219 HP corporation, 245 Hsu, Stephen, 108 Hu Jintao, 184 Hu Qiheng, 234 Hu Yaobang, 21 Huai Jinping, 234 Huang Cuilian, 145 Huang Shike, arrest of, 280 Huang, Alan, 102 Huawei, 251, 288; military ties, 235; Uganda censorship profits, 304 Hudson Institute, 107 Human Rights in China, New York, 76 Human Rights Watch, 147, 234 Hvistendahl, Mara, 281 IBM Nazi Germany connection comparison, 119, 122–3 ICANN see Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Ilham, Jewher, 141, 195–8 images, censorship challenges, 208 India, blackouts, 87 Indiana University, 195–6 Infocom, 222; prosecution of, 223 Inner Mongolia massacre, 133 Instagram, 309, 316 intellectuals, anti-qigong, 49 International Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, 30 International Criminal Court, 299 international telecommunications, access as human right, 232 internet: access points, 28; Africa blackouts, 10; China war on, 6; Chinese characters, 31; construction control, 156; content providers government registration, 72; founders, 219; governance, 225, 228; intergovernmental control, 223; unwritten rules, 72; US control conflict, 222; utopianism, 245; workings of, 155 Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, 219, 222 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), 221–5, 228, 230, 256; China influence, 234; China pushing, 237 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), 234 Internet Explorer browser, 169 Internet Governance Forum, 224 Internet Society of China, 234–5 IP server connection, 28, 155; addresses workings of, 154; numbers, 219 Iran, 111; Green revolution, 311; social networking blocking, 111; 2009 election protests, 110, 112, 246 Iraq: US invasion of 2003, 223; Uyghur fighters, 199 ‘iron rice bowl’ jobs, 47 Isa, Aziz, 151 Islamic State, 199; internet use, 9; Paris attacks, 269 Islamists, 195 Israeli intelligence, 190 Jacobs, Justin, 137 Jiang Qing, 133 Jiang Zemin, 32, 78, 90–1, 184 Jiangsu province, 74 Jiao Guobiao, dismissal of, 95 Jilin, China, 47–8 Jobs, Steve, 117, 259 Jones, Roy, 307–9 Kadeer, Rebiya, China riots blame, 152 Kaifu Lee, 116–17, 124–6, 165–6, 171–2; government fights, 167; Making a World of Difference, 118 Kalathil, Shanthi, 236 Kang Xiaoguang, 54 Kapor, Mitch, 244 Kaspersky Labs, Moscow, 192 keywords, 184; Chinese language filtering, 208; detection, 28 KGB/FSB (USSR/Russia), 256–7, 265–6, 269 Kirillovich, Vladimir, 249 Kiselyov, Dmitry, 247 Kissinger, Henry, 108 Kleinwächter, Wolfgang, 223 Kot, Edward, 264–5 Kramer, Terry, 228–9, 232–3 Kremlin, deep packet inspection, 266 Kristof, Nick, 46 Krumholtz, Jack, 122–3 Kryuchkov, Vladimir, 253 Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, 252, 256, 261 LAN protocols, 241 Lantos, Tom, 122 Leach, Jim, 120; censorship accusation, 121 Leavy, Penny, 186 Leo Technology, Urumqi-based, 200 letter substitutions, 107 Leung Chun-ying, 19 Leviev, Lev, 267 Levy, Stephen, 118 Lhasa, 85 Li Chang, 54 Li Changchun, 165–6, 171 Li Dongxiao, 178 Li Gang, 5 Li Hongkuan, 35–6, 38–9, 79, 91–3, 99 Li Hongzhi, 47–50, 53–6, 96–7, 99, 103; books banned, 46; teachings of, 52; USA move, 51 Li Keqiang, 240 Li Peng, 26, 42; martial law declaration, 21 Li Yuanlong, 95; son’s arrest, 96 Li Zhi, 148 Li, Robin, 124–6, 172 Lin Hai, 39 Link, Parry, 73 Liu Xiaobo, 66, 198 LiveJournal, DDoS attack, 264 Lo, Kenneth, 217–18 Lockheed Martin, 187 Lokodo, Simon, 304 love bug, 161 Lu, Phus, 5–6 Lu Wei, 78, 80–1, 207, 237, 242, 249, 312; downfall of, 313; promotion, 181; rise of, 79 Luo Fuhe, 77 Ma Zhaoxu, 173 Ma, Jack, 67 Ma, Pony, 280 MacArthur Genius Grant, 76 MacKinnon, Rebecca, Consent of the Networked, 72 Mail.ru, 267 Makanim.com, 149 Makerere University, 295, 300 Malofeev, Konstantin, 248–51 malware, 162; specialised, 163 Mandiant, malware, 186, 188–90 Manitsme, malware family, 188 Manning, Chelsea, 229; defence fund, 186 Mao Zedong, 184, 240; Anti-Rightist campaigns, 205; death of, 23; Great Leap Forward, 89 Marczak, Bill, 3 Marriott Global Reservations Sales and Customer Care Centre, 307–8; China apology, 309; Chinese language website, 308 Martínez, Antonio García, 317 mass mailings, 103 May Fourth Movement, 176 McLaughlin, Andrew, 117 Medvedev, Dmitry, 263 melamine, contaminated, 204 Messi, Lionel, 278 Micek, Peter, 236 Microsoft, 115–16, 119, 245 Millward, James, 133, 137 Minghui.org, 97 Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 235–6 Minzu Iniversity, 134 Mirilashvili, Vyacheslav, 260, 267 MIT Media Lab, 243 mobile payments, 279 Moma, Google intranet, targeted, 169 Mong Kok, camp, 19 Montreal, 85 Morozov, Evgeny, 110 Mountain View Google HQ, 116, 169 Mugabe, Robert, 285, 290 Murong Xuecun, 205 Museveni, Yoweri, 285, 287, 292–3, 296–8, 300, 301–3, 305; Kampala opposition, 286; 2016 swearing in, 299 Museveni, Janet, 286 MySpace, 260 Nagaraja, Shishir, 162 Nairobi, Chinese language signs, 288 Namubiru, Lydia, 305 Nanfang Daily, 64 Nanjing, 36; University, 212 Nasa, Goddard Space Flight Center, 99 National Endowment for Democracy, 92, 108 National Reconciliation Day, 158 nationalism, Chinese, 8 Navalny, Alexei, 263–5 Negroponte, Nicholas, 243 Network Solutions, 220–1 New Tang Dynasty Television, 97 Newland, Jesse, 2 Ng, Jason Q., 183 Nigeria, 232 Noah, Trevor, 302 NoGuGe.com, 126 non-aggression, cyber pact, 251 Northrop Grumman, 170 Nossik, Anton, 257, 262 Nur Bekri, 146, 148 Nureli, 157 Nyanzi, Stella, 286–7, 303, 305; imprisoned, 301–2; Stella, persecution of, 300 Obama, Barack, 157, 165, 191, 228, 246; ‘pivot to Asia’, 192 Obote, Milton, 292; overthrow of, 285 Occupy movement, 9 Office of Personnel Management (OPM), 190, Chinese hacked, 191 “Operation Fungua Macho”, 293 Ownby, David, 55, 98 Page, Larry, 116, 168, 171 Palmer, David, 50 Palmer, Mark, 107–9 Pan Shiyi, 180–2 Pan Yiheng, 177 Panama Papers, 251 ‘patriotic hackers’,161 peer-to-peer software, Chinese, 101 Pegasus, early email software, 86 Pentagon, the, 161 perestroika, 75 Perhat, Dilshat, 157 Pfeifle, Mark, 110 Philippines, 161; China boycotts call, 77 Piccuta, Dan, 165–6 Pirate Bay, file-sharing website, 185 PLA (Chinese People’s Liberation Army), 22, 37, 132, 240, 242, 251, 312; Third Technical Department, 164; US indictment, 189 pornography, 91, 105–6 Postel, John, 219, 221–2, 228; ‘benevolent dictator’, 220 Press, Larry, 254–5 Prophet Muhammed, image forbidden, 209 proxies: sharing of, 102; use of, 101 ‘public opinion channellers’, 214 ‘public order’, CCP-speak, 72 Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet, 64 Public Security Bureau, 149 Putin, Vladimir, 228, 247, 249, 251, 257, 262–6; internet concern, 261 qigong, 55; enthusiasm for, 47; groups, 50 masters’ absurd claims, 49; opinion shift against, 48 Qin Yongmin, 42 Qin Zhihui, arrest, 182 Qing Gang, 35 QQ, 182, 277 Qzone, 182, 278 Radio Free Asia, 106, 147, 248, 311 Rajagopalan, Megha, 199 Rand Corporation, 192 Razak, Najib, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 248 Rebel Pepper, 212, 215 Red Guards, 133 Reincarnation Party, 209 Relcom see Demos/Relcom Ren Zhengfei, 251 RenRen, 182 Reporters Without Borders, 64 Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan), 288 Reuters, 80–1 RFA, 108; 1994 launch, 107 riots, Urumqi, 148 ‘River Elegy’, TV programme, 20 Robinson, Michael, 30–2 Roldugin, Sergei, 251 root authority, 201 rootkit.com, 186, 188 Rosenberg, Jonathan, 117 Roskomnadzor, 266, 269, 270 Ross, Alec, 264 Rossiya Segodnya, 247–8 RSA, hacked, 187 RT, TV station, 247, 311 Runet, 257, 270 Russian Federation, 10, 237; early years of, 256; FAPSI, 257; firewall urgency of, 251; internet blacklist, 266; internet use surge, 257; liberal internet era, 262; Libertarian Party, 272 nationalised internet, 231; Safe Internet Forum, 248; 2012 election protests, 251 Sadikejiang Kaze, killing of, 146 Safe Internet League, 249–50 Safe Web, Triangle Boy, 108 Sakharov, Andrei, 270 Salkin.com, 157 Samdup, Thubten, 85–6, 160 Saudi Arabia, 230 Saulsbury, Brendan, 190 Schmidt, Eric, 116, 124, 127, 168; China strategy support, 126; Google outvoted, 171 Schneider, Rick, 87 Schrage, Elliot, 120–4 ‘secret backdoors’, 162 Seldon, Tenzin, 170 self-censorship, Google justification, 120 self-immolation, 58 SenseTime, 200 Sha Tin New Town, Hong Kong, 217 Shambaugh, David, 233 Shanghai, 29; Cooperation Organisation, 251; Cyberspace Administration, 308; European Jews haven, 205; Expo 2010, 180; police computer security, 35 Shaoguan incident see Xuri Toy factory Shchyogolev, Igor, 248, 250 Shen Yun, performance group, 97 Shenzhen, 143; public security bureau, surveillance division, 72–3 Shi Caidong, 51–3 Shi Tao, 64–5 67, 76, 116, 119; prison sentence, 66 Sichuan province, 201 Siemens BS2000 mainframe computer, 24 Signal, encryption app, 268 Silicon Valley, 1; biggest companies, 59; private enterprise victory, 7 Silk Road, dark web, 100 Sima Nan, 49 Sina Weibo, 182–3, 278; censors at, 75 Sino-Soviet split, 288 Sither, Lobsang Gyatso, 276–7, 283 Smirnov, Sergei, 266 Smith, Chris, 115 Smith, Craig, 90, 309 Snapchat, 260 Snowden, Edward, 190, 268, 269; revelations of, 313 Sobel, David, 245 social media, companies, 7 Soldatov, Alexey, 256, 261 solidarity: surveillance attention, 74; threat of, 10 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 5 Song Zheng, 235 South China Sea: Chinese ambitions, 192; international court ruling, 77 spammers, trading among, 39 ‘spear-phishing’, 159, 187 ‘spiritual pollution’, 35 Sprint, 30–1 St Petersburg: briefcase bomb 2017, 269; State University, 260 Stanford Research Institute, 220 State Commission of Machine Industry, 24 Steve Jackson Games, 245 Stevens, John Paul, 245 Students for a Free Tibet, 170 Stuxnet virus, 190 Sudan, 230, 290 Sullivan, Andrew, 110 Sulzberger Jr, Arthur Ochs, 89–90 supremacist ideology, Han, 133 Surkov, Vladislav, 262–3 Sweden, 232 Symantec, 108, 170 Syria, Uyghur fighters, 199 System of Operative Search Measures, Russia, 257 Taiwan see Republic of China Tanzania, 288; Tan–Zam railway line, 287 Tarim Basin, 136 Tarnoff, Ben, 317 tear gas, 18 tech giants, collaboration accusation, 119 techno-libertarians, 243, 246 Telegram app, 268, 272; banned, 269; blocked, 270 Tencent, 182, 235, 279, 281–2; data hoovering, 280; leg up, 278; WeChat, 277; Weibo, 278 The Atlantic, 110 The Gate of Heavenly Peace, subtitled version, 176 The New Republic, 110 The New York Times, 3, 89–90, 100, 111, 179, 211, 223, 257 The People’s Daily, 21, 79, 172, 178, 246 The Wall Street Journal, 110, 309 The Washington Post, 57, 110, 302 Third World Academy of Sciences, 24 Tian, David, 99 Tian, Edward, 30–1 Tiananmen Square, 9, 21, 25, 46, 62, 99, 175; anger, 38; crackdown, 89, 107; massacre, 22, 26, 3, 208; massacre 20th anniversary, 166; Mothers, 65; movement, 20, 76; Papers, 100; protests, 78; self-immolation, 56–7; Tianjin protest, 52–4 Tibet, 83–4, 98, 106, 138, 149, 210; Action Institute, 274, 276; Computer Resource Centre, 86, 161; diaspora battling cyberspies, 276; Freedom Movement fund for, 163; Institute of the Performing Arts, 85; PLA victory, 85; Youth Congress, 85 Tohti, Ilham, 132, 134, 140–1, 143, 150, 152, 158, 195, 199; detention, 157; father killing, 133; harassment experience, 135; trial of, 131, US exile, 140 Tor Browser, 100, 102 Touré, Hamadoun, 228, 231, 236 traffic spikes, websites, 2 Trivedi, Aseem, 209 trolls: Badiucao attacks, 211; pro-China government, 92, 212 Trump, Donald, 192 Tsai Ing-wen, 212 Tsang, Donald, 15 Tunis Agreement 2005, 237 Tunisia, 9; Facebook, 264 Turnbull, Malcolm, 203 Tusiime, Samson, 295–6, 304; arrest of, 300 Twitter, 111, 207, 211, 246, 296–7, 303, 307, 309, 311–12; banned, 183; blocked, 27; ‘Revolution’, 110 UAE (United Arab Emirates), 230 Uganda: Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence, 293; Communications Commission, 303–4; Computer Misuse Act, 300; fake wireless hotspots, 294; security services, China learning, 295, 303; Special Investigations Unit, 300; Telecom, 304; Trojan horse viruses, 294; Twitter, 300; 2016 election, 296–8; ‘walk to work’ protests, 292 UgandaDecides, hashtag, 297 UglyGorilla, 187–8 UK (United Kingdom), 232 Ukraine, 250 Ulhaque, Zulkiflee Anwar (Zunar), 209 UltraSurf, 102, 105, 107–10, 112; programming, 106; successful, 104 Umbrella Movement/generation, 16, 19–20 United Nations, 10, 313; ‘cyber-sovereignty’, concept of, 224; ITU, 225, 227–32, 236; ITRs, 225, 233; WSIS, 222 Unit 61398, 190–1; indictment of, 189 United Arab Emirates, 230 United Russia party 2011 rally, 263 University of British Columbia, 309 University of California, Berkeley, 30 University of Edinburgh, 99 University of Helsinki, 253 University of Southern California, 220–1 University of Toronto, 159; Citizen Lab, 3–4 university servers, 35 URLs: blocking of, 29; proxies, 102–3 Urumqi, 132, 136, 153–4, 201; -Beijing link, 156; Han revenge attacks, 149; internet cut-off, 151; People’s Intermediate Court, 131; police attack, 148; proxies, 102–3; riots, 183; student protest, 146–7 USA: Chinese Embassy protests, 98; -China relationship, 112; Commerce Department, 222; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 219; Google Congressional hearing, 122; House Subcommittee on Human Rights, 115; imperialism internet use, 112; National Security Agency, 170, 244, 268, 293, 313; Republican Party, 244; Senate Sub-Committee on Human Rights, 108; State Department, 22, 81, 109–11, 166, 298 UseNet, 253 Usmanov, Alisher, 261, 267 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics): dissolution of, 256; 1990s internet start, 252 Uyghurs, Chinese language forums, 157, dangerous vagabonds characterised, 132; discrimination against, 138–9, 152; doppa headgear, 132; internet, 143, 150; pervasive unemployment, 134; stereotyping of, 140; terrorism label, 140; Uyghur Online, 131, 135, 139, 151, 157; websites control, 149 Villeneuve, Nart, 159–60, 162–3 VIP Reference, 35 virtual private networks (VPNs), 9, 103, 113, 157, 299; apps, 297; users, 28 VKontakte (VK), 259–60, 262, 267; customer support, 265; groups, 270; user base growth, 261 Voice of America, 106–8, 248, 311 Voice of China, 287 Voice of Russia, 247 “Walk to Work” protests, 294 Walton, Greg, 160–3, 276 Wang Baodong, 109 Wang Dong, 188–9 Wang Lequan, 152 Wang Liming, 209, 210 Wang Yongping, 178 Wang Youcai, 42 Wang Yunfeng, 24, 25 Wang Zhiwen, 54 Wang, Jack, 188 ‘War on Terror’, 290 WCITLeaks, 229–31, 233, 236 Weaver, Nicholas, 3 WeChat (Weixin), 207, 242, 277–8, 281–3; censorship challenge, 268; monopoly of, 278; payments system, 279–80 Weibo, 46, 177–9, 181, 184, 206–7, 210, 268, 277; failure, 215; ingenuity of, 182; microbloggers use, 180; muzzling of, 214; public offering, 182; surveillance sidestep attempts, 208; Weiboscope, 77 Weigel, Moira, 317 Weir, Bob, 244 Wen Jiabao, 79–80 Wenhui Daily, 173 Wenzhou train crash, 177, 179; internet revealed, 178 Westinghouse, 187 Wexler, Robert, 123 WhatsApp, 16, 268, 278, 296, 303, 316 Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, 244 WikiLeaks, 104, 185–6, 315–16 Wikipedia, specific pages blocked, 27 Wired, 84, 106, 243–4 World Bank, 24 World Conference on International Telecommunications, 227; Leaks see above World Internet Conference 2015, 241 World Uyghur Congress, 152 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 234 WSIS 10, 237; US victory, 224 WTO (World Trade Organization), 80–1; China joining, 42, 91–2 Wu, Dandan, 125 Wu, Tim, 30, 219, 241, 243 wumao, 212 wumaodang, recruited students, 213 Wuyi, Zhejiang province, 310 Wuzhen, 239–40 Xabnam.com, 157 Xi Jinping, 81, 181, 191, 203, 207, 238–40, 281, 312; internet clampdown, 78 Xia, Bill, 99–100, 102–3, 107, 112 Xiao Qiang, 76, 21 Xi’an, Shaanxi province, 154 Xinhua, 56–7, 64, 77, 78, 156, 181; commercial offerings, 80; Hong Kong bureau, 79; journalists’ watchdog role, 79; official line, 148 Xinjiang Autonomous Region, 107, 131–2, 135, 140, 148, 156, 195, 199, 210, 280; Beijing terrorism lens, 152; famine avoidance, 138; internet access, 156; internet blackout, 153; new policies of control, 200; Qing Empire, 137; Shanshan county, 201; University, 150 Xu Hong, 39 Xu Wendi, 42 Xue, Charles, 180, 181 Xuri Toy Factory/Shaoguan incident, 143, 146; footage of, 151; Uyghur workers, 144–5 Yahoo, 115, 119, 170; arrest responsibility, 116; China subsidiary, 63–4, 67; informer role criticised, 66 Yanayev, Gennady, 253 Yang Jisheng, 20 Yang, Jerry, 66–7 Yanukovych, Viktor, 267 Yeltsin, Boris, 75, 254–5, 257; resignation, 261 YouTube, 167, 246, 274, 303, 314, 316; blocked, 183 Yu Jie, China’s Best Actor, 80 Yu Wanli, 173–4, 246 Yuan Zengxin, 138 Zambia, 304 Zara, 309 Zhang Zhenhuan, 49 Zhang Jianchuan, 235 Zhang, Shawn, 309 Zhao Houlin, 236–7 Zhao Jing, 36 Zhao Ziyang, 80, 889; house arrest, 21–2 Zhongnanhai complex, 45; 1999 protest, 46, 52–3, 55 Zhou Yongkang, 171 Zhu Rongji, 53 Zhu, Julie, 62 Zhuan Falun, 50; text banned, 52 Zimbabwe, 10, 290, 304 Zorn, Werner, 24–5 ZTE, 288 Zuckerberg, Mark, 260, 312 Zed is a platform for marginalised voices across the globe.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

Up until that point, the internet had been a collection of flickering letters, numbers, and characters. Mosaic displayed images, inspiring Glaser to go one step further and give the mute collection of words and pictures a voice. He used stock proceeds from his decade at Microsoft and money raised from investors like Lotus founder Mitch Kapor to finance a startup to deliver voice across the web, “because at the bit rates we’re talking about here, doing polyphonic audio in a way that would be at all aesthetically pleasing would seem a challenge,” Glaser said. His company launched the RealAudio Player in April 1995 with a broadcast of National Public Radio’s morning and evening news programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered and updates from ABC News.

., 186 Jaman, 27 James, LeBron, 113 Janedis, John, 231 Jassy, Andy, ix, 242–43, 301 Jaws, 15 Jazz Singer, The, 30 Jefferson, Thomas, 28 Jenkins, Patty, 284, 305 “Jerry Maguire manifesto,” 150 Jobs, Laurene Powell, 99 Jobs, Steve, ix, 7, 79–81, 99–100, 103, 173, 178, 180, 314 Johansson, Scarlett, 276–77 Johnson, Dwayne “the Rock,” 264 Joker, 263, 283 Jonas, Joe, 113 Jones, Jasmine Cephas, 290 Jonze, Spike, 247 Jordan, Michael B., 266 Joshua, Anthony, 135 JPMorgan Chase, 112 Jumanji, 182 Jurassic Park, 24, 248 Justified, 174 Kaling, Mindy, 6–7 Kapor, Mitch, 22 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, x, xviii, 114, 290 Quibi, xviii, xix, 107–19, 187–88, 190, 191–95, 290 Kavanaugh, Brett, xiv Keane, Glen, 235 Keaton, Diane, 295 Keeping Up with the Kardashians, 202 Keitel, Harvey, 11 Kendrick, Anna, 109, 114, 243, 250, 251 Kerkorian, Kirk, 298–99 Kerman, Piper, 56 Kessler, Thomas, 20–21 Key, Keegan-Michael, 2 Khan, Nick, 142 Kidman, Nicole, 282 Kilar, Jason, x, 146–48, 150–51, 254–56, 281–85, 287, 289, 303–4, 313–14 Kilar, Maureen, 147 Killers of the Flower Moon, 260, 310 Kimmel, Jimmy, 191 Kisseloff, Jeff, 21 Kissing Booth, The, 264 Kohan, Jenji, 56 Kornhaber, Spencer, 190 Kotb, Hoda, 258–59 Kozmo, 52 Krakowski, Jane, 104 Kubitz, Andy, 88 Kubrick, Stanley, 286 Laipply, Judson, 143 La La Land, 313 Lanzone, Jim, 51, 236 Lars and the Real Girl, 222 Lasseter, John, 273 Last Ship, The, 85–86 Last Waltz, The, 24 Late Night, 265 Lauer, Matt, 9 Lava Bear Films, 41 Law & Order, 146, 204, 248 Lawrence, Ernest, 38 Lawson, Mark, 105 Lear, Norman, 36–37, 140 Leder, Mimi, 10 Lee, Jennifer, 278–79 Lee, Miky, 112 Lee, Spike, 11, 264, 294 Leftovers, The, 10, 222 Legally Blonde, 308 Legendary Entertainment, 72, 286 Legg, Jeremy, x, 216–17, 250 LEK Consulting, 171 Leon, Richard J., 63–64 Leonard, Franklin, 316 Leto, Jared, 288 Letterman, David, 31 Levinsohn, Gary, 52 Levinsohn, Peter, 99 Levinson, Barry, 52 Levy, David, 134, 217 Lewis, Juliette, 182 Lil Yachty, 113 Lilyhammer, 55–56, 75 Lincoln Center, xv–xvi, 6–7 Lion King, The, 109, 167, 168, 170, 175, 223, 273, 275 Lionsgate, 5, 25, 49, 56, 131 Little America, 185–86 Little Fires Everywhere, 152 Little Mermaid, The, 109, 235, 278 Little Things, The, 288 Little Voice, 103, 223 Liu, Simu, 277 Lizzo, 245 Loeb, Daniel, 280 Lonergan, Kenneth, 294 Longoria, Eva, 79 Loomis, Alfred Lee, 38 Lopez, Jennifer, 113 Los Angeles Lakers, 109 Los Angeles Plays Itself, 30 Lost, 80, 82, 222 Lotus, 22 Lotz, Amanda D., 138–39 Loup Ventures, 191 Lourd, Bryan, 276, 305–6 Lovato, Demi, 113 Love Is Blind, 237 Love Life, 250, 251 Lucas, George, 278 Lucasfilm, 82, 89, 278 Luce, Henry, 155 Luna, Diego, 167–68 Lunden, Joan, 7 Lupin, 233 Luther, 252 Ma, Yo-Yo, xv McCarthy, Christine, 175–76 McCord, Patty, x, 40, 42 McGrath, Katie, 223 McGregor, Ewan, 243, 278 McKellen, Ian, 170 Mackie, Anthony, 186 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, 153 Madison Square Garden, 66 Mad Men, 88, 140, 296 Madrone Capital Partners, 112 Mag Rack, 122 Maker, Jacob, 20 Maker Studios, 91, 92 Malek, Rami, 288 Malone, John, 66, 307 Maltese Falcon, The, 308 Manchester by the Sea, 264, 294–95 Mandalorian, The, 168, 175, 223, 242, 251, 252, 278, 280 Man in the High Castle, The, 295, 296 MapQuest, 71 Marriage Story, 15 Martin, Steve, 195 Marvel, 50, 82, 92, 95, 137, 159, 168, 170, 173, 266, 272, 274, 277, 279 Marvelous Mrs.


pages: 345 words: 105,722

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it." It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to make the world safe for democracy. He certainly is not trying to make it safe for anarchists or utopians—least of all for computer intruders or electronic rip-off artists. What he really hopes to do is make the world safe for future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized, small-scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today. Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare combination of visionary intensity with a strong practical streak.

The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier business program, had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked diligently for them for six months, got tired of California, and went back to Boston where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc group had made the critical error of bringing in "professional management." "That drove them into the ground," Kapor says. "Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I muse. Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus ... we BOUGHT it." "Oh. You BOUGHT it?" "Yeah." "Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?" Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!" Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself or his industry.

May 7,8,9. USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau conduct "Operation Sundevil" raids in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case. June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation; Barlow publishes CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT manifesto. July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning. 1991 February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C. March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco. May 1. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson, and others file suit against members of Chicago Task Force.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

If the app’s developers had decided to make their creation easily interoperable with established SMS networks, users of these networks would have switched over to WhatsApp for cost reasons only, if at all. As the app grew in popularity, however, SMS users increasingly felt left out, so they became more likely to turn their backs on the old messaging technology in favor of the new one. And as more and more of them did this, the network effects grew stronger. Computer pioneer Mitch Kapor observed that “architecture is politics.” With platforms, it’s also economics. From Servers to Songs, Platforms Proliferate Platform economics, Moore’s law, and combinatorial innovation continue to produce developments that take industries and their incumbents by surprise. As the e-commerce giant Amazon grew, it found that each systems integration project—each effort, for example, to connect a database of customers to an application that let them track the shipment status of their order—was a lot of work, even though the company had undertaken similar projects before.

(TV show), 17 Jeppesen, Lars Bo, 259 Jobs, Steve curation of iPhone platform, 165 Dropbox acquisition offer, 162 and iPhone apps, 151–53, 157, 163 joint-stock company, 320 journalism, See newspapers Joyce, James, 178 judges, parole granted by, 39–40 judgment, human as complement to computer power, 35 in decision-making loop, 53–56 flaws in, 37–42 and justification, 45 “superforecasters” and, 60–61 System 1/System 2 reasoning, 35–46 justification, 45 Kadakia, Payal, 178, 179, 184 Kaggle, 261 Kahneman, Daniel, 35–36, 43, 44, 56, 325 Kalanick, Travis, 200 Kapor, Mitch, 142 Katz, Michael, 141n Kaushik, Avinash, 45 Kay, Alan, 61 Kazaa, 144 Kehoe, Patrick J., 21 Keirstead, Karl, 143 kernel, 240 Keynes, John Maynard, 278–79, 287, 309–10 Khosla, Vinod, 94 Kickstarter, 262 “killer app,” 157 Kim, Pauline, 40–41 Kimberley Process, 289–90 kinases, 116–17 kitchen, automated, 94 Kiva Systems, 103 Klein, Gary, 56 knowledge access to, in second machine age, 18 markets and, 332 prediction markets and, 238 knowledge differentials, See information asymmetries Kodak, 131, 132 Kohavi, Ronny, 45, 51 Kohl’s, 62–63 Koike, Makoto, 79–80 Komatsu, 99 Koum, Jan, 140 Krawisz, Daniel, 304 Kurzweil, Ray, 308 Lakhani, Karim, 252–55, 259 landline telecommunications, 134–35 land title registry, 291 language learning styles, 67–69 Lasker, Edward, 2 Lawee, David, 166 law of one price, 156 Lea, Ed, 170 leadership, geeky, 244–45, 248–49 lead users, 265 LeCun, Yann, 73, 80, 121 ledger, See blockchain Legg, Shane, 71 Lehman, Bastian, 184 Lei Jun, 203 Leimkuhler, John F., 182 “lemons,” 207 Lending Club, 263 level 5 autonomy, 82 leveraging of assets, O2O platforms for, 196–97 Levinovitz, Alan, 3 Levinson, Art, 152 libraries, 229–32 Library of Congress, 231 links, 233 Linq, 290–91 Linux, 240–45, 248, 249, 260 liquidity and network effects, 206 O2O platforms as engines of, 192–96 Livermore, Shaw, 22–23 locking in users, 217 lodging; See also Airbnb differences between Airbnb and hotels, 222–23 Priceline and, 223–24 “Logic Theorist” program, 69 Long, Tim, 204 Los Angeles, California hotel occupancy rates, 221–22 Postmates in, 185 Uber’s effect on taxi service, 201 LTE networks, 96 Luca, Michael, 209n Lyft, 186, 201, 208, 218 Ma, Jack, 7 machine age, See second machine age machine intelligence mind as counterpart to, 15 superiority to System 1 reasoning, 38–41 machine learning, 66–86; See also artificial intelligence AlphaGo and, 73 back-office work and, 82–83 early attempts, 67–74 in Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, 48–51 O2O business data and, 194 statistical pattern recognition and, 72–74 machine(s); See also artificial intelligence; robotics; standard partnership and business process reengineering, 32–33 and creativity, 110–19 defined, 14 human connection in digitized world, 122–24 human judgment and, 34–45 new mind-machine partnership, 46–62 and uniquely human domains, 110–26 Mad Men (TV drama), 48 Madrigal, Alexis, 295–96 magazines ad revenue (late 1990s), 130 ad revenue (2013), 132–33 new content platforms’ effect on revenue, 139 MakerBot, 273 maker movement, 271–72 Makhijani, Vish, 324–25 malls, 131, 134 Malone, Tom, 311, 313 management/managers continued importance of, 320–23 and economics of the firm, 309 as portion of US workforce, 321 in post-standard partnership world, 323–26 manufacturing electricity’s effect on, 19–24 robotics in, 102 transition from molds to 3D printing, 104–7 Manyika, James, 332 Manzi, Jim, 62–63 Marchant, Jo, 66n Marcus, Gary, 5, 71 marginal costs bundling and, 147 of computer storage, 136 of digital copies, 136, 137 of perishing inventory, 180, 181 of platforms, 137 of platforms vs. products, 147, 220 and Uber’s market value, 219 marginal utility, 258–59 “Market for ‘Lemons,’ The” (Akerlof), 207 market research, 13–14, 261–63 market(s) centrally planned economies vs., 235–37 companies and, 309–11 costs inherent in, 310–11 as crowd, 235–39 information asymmetries and, 206–7 prediction markets, 237–39 production costs vs. coordination costs, 313–14 Markowitz, Henry, 268 Marshall, Matt, 62 Martin, Andrew, 40–41 Marx, Karl, 279 Masaka, Makoto, 79–80 “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search” (Nature article), 4 Maugham, Somerset, 110 Mazzella, Frédéric, 190 McCarthy, John, 67 McClatchy Company, 132 McDonald’s, 92 McElheren, Kristina, 42 McKinsey Global Institute, 332 Mechanical Turk, 260 Medallion Fund, 267 medical devices crowd-designed, 272–75 3D printing and, 106 medical diagnosis, 123–24 Meehl, Paul, 41–42, 53–54, 56, 81 MegaBLAST, 253, 254 Menger, Carl, 25 Men’s Fitness, 132 Merton, Robert K., 189 Metallica, 144 Microsoft core capabilities, 15 machine learning, 79 proprietary software, 240 as stack, 295 Windows Phone platform, 167–68 Microsoft Research, 84 Milgrom, Paul, 315n milking systems, 101 Mims, Christopher, 325 mind, human as counterpart to machine intelligence, 15 undetected biases in, 42–45 Minsky, Marvin, 73, 113 Mitchell, Alan, 11, 12 MIT Media Lab, 272 mobile telephones, 129–30, 134–35 Mocan, Naci, 40 molds, 104–5 Moley Robotics, 94 Momentum Machines, 94 Moody’s, 134 Moore, John, 315 Moore’s law, 308 and Cambrian Explosion of robotics, 97–98 defined, 35 neural networks and, 75 System 2 reasoning and, 46 and 3D printing, 107 Morozov, Evgeny, 297 Mt.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

How We Settled into a Seed for the Future Virtual Rights, but Not Virtual Economic Rights In 1990, I was invited to a lunch at a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District to consider cofounding a new organization to fight for cyber rights. Chuck, VPL’s prime hacker, and I went up and met Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, and Barlow. The three of them eventually moved forward, founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But I held back. (Chuck was too busy coding to pay any of us much mind.) I didn’t say why at the time; wasn’t ready to state my doubts to these sweet friends. I support most of the cases the EFF takes on, but not the underlying philosophy.

VR and avatar and robots doing work of as source of value specialness of working with real Human Use of Human Beings, The (Wiener) Huxley, Aldous Hyneman, Jamie hypercubes hypertext hypnosis IBM Iconic Mathematics (Bricken) icons icosahedrons idealism II Cybernetic Frontiers (Brand) illusions improvisation Inception (film) India industrial applications infinity, perception of information biasing of “free” vs. traceable to origin Information Age inner life input Inside Out (film) interactive screen technology interactivity Internet Gore and extremism on flaws in design of interpreters inversion inversion of human body investigative journalists invisible hand iPhone Ito, Teiji Izadi, Shahram Jackson, Michael Jacobson, Linda Japan Jaws (film) jazz Jeopardy (TV show) jobs Jobs, Steve Johnson, Lyndon B. Joy, Bill juggling Kalman filter Kapor, Mitch karate Kay, Alan Kelly, Kevin Kemp, Jack Khan, Ali Akbar Kickstarter Kim, David Kim, Scott Kinect Kinect Hacks King, Stephen kitchen design Klein Bottle Knitting Factory Knuth, Don Kollin, Joel Kotik, Gordy Krueger, Myron Kuiper Belt Kurzweil, Ray Kyoto Prize LaBerge, Stephen Langer, Susanne language translation Lanier, Ellery (father) death of death of Lilly and dome and mysticism and PhD studies and science writing and teaching career and Lanier, first wife divorce from Lanier, Lena Lanier, Lilibell (daughter,) Lanier, Lilly (mother) death of laser procedure on retina lasers Lasko, Ann latency Lawnmower Man, The (film) Learning Company Leary, Timothy Lectiones Mathematicae LEEP Lennon, John Lennon, Sean Leonard, Brett Levitt, David Levy, Steven libertarians licensing light pen lightweight optics limerence links, one- vs. two-way Linn, Roger LISP Lissajous patterns “Little Albert” experiment lobster avatar Los Alamos Los Angeles LSD Lucas, George lucid dreaming Lumière brothers Macedonians machine learning “Machine Stops, The” (Forster) machine vision Macintosh computers operating system MacIntyre, Blair Macromedia Macromind magazine stands magic magical thinking magicians magic window magnetic fields malware Manchurian Candidate, The (film) Mandala mapping marijuana markets Mars Marxism mass media Mateevitsi, Victor mathematics video games and Mathews, Max Matrix films Matsushita Mattel MAX design tool MAX visual programming tool McDowall, Ian McFerrin, Bobby McGreevy, Mike McGrew, Dale McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan ramp McMillen, Keith MDMA (Ecstasy) measurement medicine.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Responsible for foreign exchange trading, among other things. Currently CEO of GlobalOp. Ray Iwanowski: Former co-head of Quantitative Strategies and Global Alpha hedge fund at Goldman Sachs. Bob Jones: Former head of the Quantitative Equity group and Global Equity Opportunities hedge fund at Goldman Sachs. Mitch Kapor: Founder of first commercially available spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3 (the precursor to Excel). Business partner of Eric Rosenfeld. John Maynard Keynes: British economist who first mentioned ideas of quantitative easing. Alex Kirk: Managing Director and global head of high-yield and leveraged loans at Lehman Brothers during financial crisis.

The pair used this data to build an econometric model to predict the winning margin on NFL games, then bet on games. The model worked during the two-year project; then both researchers moved on to other things. Many recruits had interesting backgrounds independent of their financial experience. Eric Rosenfeld and fellow MIT student Mitch Kapor created a regression program at MIT to help Eric with his PhD dissertation. They eventually called the program VisiPlot and sold it alongside the first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc. They sold the rights to a software company for about $1.2 million. Rosenfeld went on to teach at Harvard Business School, while Kapor went on to work for that software company.

Italian swap and government zero curve Italian swap spread Italy, debt burden of Iwanowski, Ray Japanese box trade Japanese swap spread Japanese warrant trade Jittery markets Johnson, James Jones, Bob J.P. Morgan: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and leverage of LTCM and Washington Mutual and JWM Partners, LLC: collapse of deleveraging of Hilibrand and losses at market insanity and overview of Rosenfeld and Kabiller, David Kapor, Mitch Keynes, John Maynard Kirk, Alex Kohn, Donald Komansky, David Korean Development Bank (KDB) Krasker, William Kravis, Henry Krisnamacher, Arjun Kroner, Ken Kuwait Investment Authority Larson, Jeff Leach, Jim Leahy, Dick Lehman Brothers: business exposure capital markets division capital seeking by clearinghouses and client services division consequences of failure of consolidated balance sheet counterparties and distribution of investments of earnings announcement failure of Fed and final days of Global Real Estate Group guilt of as intermediary J.P.


From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

By the fall of 1983, about 350,000 copies had been sold. Allowing Sorcim to take the CP/M spreadsheet market was a strategic blunder on the part of VisiCalc’s producers. Their failure to capture the market for IBM-compatible PCs was fatal. That market was taken by the Lotus Development Corporation, founded in 1982 by Mitch Kapor.27 Kapor, rather like Steve Jobs, was an entrepreneur with a taste for Eastern philosophy. He had studied psychology at Yale in the 1970s and had been employed as a disc jockey, as a transcendental-meditation teacher, and as a computer programmer. As a programmer, he had worked on data analysis software.

., 67–69 Jacquard, 160 Japan, 10, 22, 86, 116, 166, 174, 273, 274, 280, 281, 300 Japanese videogame manufacturers, 284–288 Java, 11 J. D. Edwards, 172, 197 Jobs, Steve, 202, 216 Johnson, Franklin “Pitch,” 102 Johnson Systems, 182 Joint Computer Conference, 114 Jones, Fletcher, 33, 52, 53 JOVIAL, 46, 47 Kahn, Phillipe, 263 Kapor, Mitch, 216 Katch, David, 102 Kildall, Gary, 202, 206, 207, 217, 250, 264, 289, 290 Killer applications, 7, 212, 213, 285, 288, 291, 292 Kiplinger, 297 Knowledge Industry Publications, 27 Knowledge-Set, 289 Kolence, Ken, 102 Kriya Systems, 227 Kubie, Elmer, 24, 51, 52, 73 Kurtzig, Sandra, 24, 155 L systems, 5, 46, 74, 75 Laboratory for Electronics, 48, 49 Lanier, 160, 219, 254 Laser printer software, 236, 256, 261 Lautenberg, Frank, 62 Leading Edge Software, 219 LEASCO, 59 Lecht, Charles P., 58, 67, 69, 74 Legent, 168, 180, 185 Lesourne, J., 24 Lincoln Laboratory, 37, 39, 46, 67–69 Linear programming software, 112, 131 Linux, 11 Lockheed, 110 Logica, 77 London Airport Customs Entry System, 76 Look&Link, 253 Lotus Development Corporation, 8, 173, 180, 183, 210–212, 216, 228, 234, 236, 251–259, 263–265, 289, 305, 310 AmiPro, 259 1-2-3, 2, 7, 210–212, 216, 247, 252, 258, 289, 297, 306, 307 SmartSuite, 258 Symphony, 258 Lunar Lander, 272 Macintosh.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

He squeezed every last drop out of the corny Wild West comparison: “It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally terse . . . , hard to get around in, and up for grabs.”120 And it was time for action. In May 1990, just after returning from the rousing Austin conference, Barlow decided to establish the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He got crucial support from Mitch Kapor, a wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Their goal: “the extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace.”121 In the heady days of 1990, the frontier spirit was strong. A cyber gold rush was on. With Woodstock on their minds, Kelly and Brand from the Whole Earth Institute decided it was time for a similar type of mythical event.122 They called it Cyberthon.

., 104 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 306 Joint Staff, 303, 311–15 Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense (JTF-CND), 322, 327–28, 333, 337–39 Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 56 joysticks, 15 JTF-CND, See Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense Junger, Peter, 276 jungle warfare, 131–32 Junkers Ju 88 bomber, 16 Justice Department, US, 270, 327, 328 Kahn, Herman, 111–12 Kaiser Electronics, 204 Kapor, Mitch, 240 Karn, Phil, 276 Keegan, John, 10 Keizer, Gregg, 242, 243 Kelly, Kevin, 157, 165, 240, 262, 264, 267 Kennedy, Alison Bailey “Queen Mu,” 263 Kennedy, John F., 100, 131 key, 248 key distribution, 248 key escrow, 274, 275 Khrushchev, Nikita, 110 King, Martin Luther, 107 Kline, Nathan, 123–27 knights, 141 knowledge, cyberwar and, 303 Kocian, Dean, 202–3, 205 Koenig, Walter, 249 Kraus, Jürgen, 149–50 Kroft, Steve, 335–36 Kyl, John, 334 labor, cyborgs and, 153–54 “laboratory men,” 111–12 laboratory rats, 125–26 Lackey, Ryan, 287–91 Ladopoulos, Eli (Acid Phreak), 237, 239 land-based antiaircraft weapons, 29 Lanier, Jaron, 212–19, 221, 232, 243, 259 latency, 58–59 Law Enforcement Access Field (LEAF), 274, 275 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 329 learning, 57, 60, 172 learning machine, homeostat as, 62 Leary, Timothy and crypto anarchy, 292 and cyberspace, 221–25 and Cyberthon, 242 and personal computers, 187–89 and VR, 218–19 Lebkowsky, Jon, 193 Legion of Doom, 239 Lehr, Paul, 301 leisure, idleness vs., 107–8 Letters from America (BBC series), 93 level recorder, 23–24 Levy, Steven, 257, 262, 264 Leyland, Paul, 280 libertarianism, 258, 265, 267, 292 Licklider, J.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

State Department’s Alec Ross, one of the chief architects of Clinton’s Internet freedom policy, said that “the very existence of social networks is a net good.” But are social networks really goods to be treasured in themselves? After all, the mafia, prostitution and gambling rings, and youth gangs are social networks, too, but no one would claim that their existence in the physical world is a net good or that it shouldn’t be regulated. Ever since Mitch Kapor, one of the founding fathers of cyber-utopianism, proclaimed that “life in cyberspace seems to be shaping up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and a commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community” in 1993, many policymakers have been under the impression that the only networks to find homes online would be those promoting peace and prosperity.

State Department Iraq Iraq War Iron Curtain Islamic Punishment Act ISPs. See Internet Service Providers Israel Izvestiya Jackson, Michael Japan Javan Jefferson, Thomas Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) JIDF. See Jewish Internet Defense Force Jihad Jane Judt, Tony Kadeer, Rebiya Kadinsky, Wassily Kafka, Franz Kaiser Kuo Kalathil, Shanthi Kapor, Mitch Kaspersky, Yevgeny Kaspersky Lab Kaufman, Ted Keenan, Thomas Kennan, George Kennedy, John F. Kenya Keohane, Robert Kern, Holger Lutz Kerry, John Keyes, David Keyhole Keylogger Keyword filtering KGB Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Khouri, Rami Kierkegaard, Søren Kill-switch Kimmage, Daniel Kimmelman, Michael Klee, Paul Klein, Naomi Klosterman, Chuck Kohák, Erazim Kononenko, Maksim Kotkin, Stephen Krame, Ghaleb Kristof, Nicholas Krugman, Paul Lacan, Jacques Lake, Eli Lasswell, Harold Law enforcement Lawlessness Lazarsfeld, Paul Learn from Lei Feng (game) Lebedev, Artemy Lessig, Lawrence Lewis, James Li Qiaoming Li Xiaolin Liberation by facts theory Liberation by gadgets theory LinkedIn Lippmann, Walter Literature Liu Xiaobo Liu Zhengrong LiveJournal The Lives of Others (film) Logic The Logic of Failure (Dörner) Lolcats Luna, Riccardo Lynch, Marc MacKinnon, Rebecca Madison, Elliot Malkin, Michelle Mandelson, Peter Manhattan Project Mao Zedong Marconi, Guglielmo Marcuse, Herbert Marketing Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Brady) Marvin, Simon Marx, Karl Marx, Leo Marxism Masnick, Mike Massage Milk McAffee computer security firm McConnell, Mike McLaughlin, Andrew McLuhan, Marshall McNamara, Robert Mearsheimer, John Medvedev, Dmitry Meet the Press Megaphone Memorial (Russian NGO) Messina, Chris “FactoryJoe,” Metzl, Jamie Mexico Meyen, Michael Microchip Immune Deficiency Syndrome (MIDS) Microsoft Middle class Middle East MIDS.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

The firm’s initial $11-million stake was now worth billions of dollars, easily one of the greatest venture capital investments in Silicon Valley history. Now, Benchmark’s Uber shares were in serious jeopardy. Every new negative press story chipped away at Uber’s valuation, which tarnished Bill Gurley’s incredible play, and meant less money in the end for shareholders. Some investors were turning on the company publicly. Mitch Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, both early investors in Uber, had long been active in so-called “impact investing,” a socially conscious approach to capitalism. “We feel we have hit a dead end in trying to influence the company quietly from the inside.” the two wrote in a public blog post. “We are speaking out publicly, because we believe Uber’s investors and board will rightly be judged by their action or inaction.

Uber, 338–41 tries to rally shareholders, 301–2 Trump’s business advisory council and, 203, 204, 210–12, 221, 224, 254 Trump’s election and, 201–3 on Uber’s board, 79–80 at UCLA, 20–22 vision for Uber, 85 voting power of, 287 writes letter of apology to his employees, 265–66 Zimride and, 85–86 Kalanick, Travis Cordell, making of a founder, 16–25 Kamel, Fawzi, 237, 240, 308–10, 309n Kapor, Mitch, 284–85 Keitel, Harvey, 45 Kerry, John, 229 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 320 Khosrowshahi, Dara, 319–29, 331–34 Kim, Young Mi, 311n King, Gayle, 194 Klein, Freada Kapor, 284–85 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, 35, 38, 39, 40, 98, 184, 201 Klout, 93, 94 Knowles, Beyoncé, 7–8, 194 Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, 211 Kondaiah, M, 149 Kopelman, Josh, 293 Krafcik, John, 233 Krane, David, 98–101, 99n, 105–6, 283 Kuaidi Dache, 142 Kygo, 7 Lacy, Sarah, 119, 121, 128, 129–30, 150 Lake, Katrina, 285, 335 Larry King Live, 229 Lasky, Mitch, 294 Las Vegas, Nevada, 3, 4, 5–7, 8, 93, 113 Leathern, Rob, 28 Lehman Brothers, 132 Le Méridien hotel, 236 Levandowski, Anthony, 107–10, 180–85, 232–34, 233, 254–56, 260, 278, 333 Lin, Alfred, 92n LinkedIn, 74, 77, 117 Liu, Jean, 202, 258 Livefyre, 46 London, England, 84, 144 Los Angeles, California, 16–25, 84, 128, 144 Lowercase Capital, 288, 289, 293, 297–98 Lucini, Benedetta, 113–14 Lyft, 86n, 115, 132, 134, 137, 166, 177, 201, 211, 224, 248, 257–58 Kalanick’s attitude toward, 86–89, 119–20 Kalanick’s desire to merge with, 186–89 MacDonald, Andrew, 309 Maceo crime family, 66 Macintosh, 35, 37 Macromedia, 26 Maher, Bill, 229 Malaysia, 195 Mao Zedong, 201 Maris, Bill, 106 Martello, Wan-Ling, 276–77, 287 Match.com, 171–72 McCarran International Airport, 5 McCloskey, Melody, 49 McCue, Mike, 92n McKinsey, 132 Melbourne, Australia, 85 Menlo Ventures, 192, 288, 289, 297–98, 301–2 Merrill Lynch, 92, 332 Messina, Chris, 223 Metcalfe, Ben, 117 #MeToo movement, 241–42 Metropolitan Taxicab Commission, 117 Mexico, 172–74 Meza de la Cruz, Esteban, 173 Miami, Florida, 120 company-wide retreats in, 3, 4 Michael, Emil, 92n, 122, 143, 156–58, 162, 202, 226–27, 260, 262, 331, 337 celebrity recruitment and, 193–94, 227 firing of, 272–73 Michael, Emil (continued) gaffe at Waverly event, 127–29 Google and, 105–6 Gurley and, 125–26 Holzwarth and, 249–53 as Kalanick’s secret fundraising weapon, 92–99 Lyft and, 186 Michels, Oren, 193n Microsoft, 39, 69, 77, 115 Milan, Italy, 85, 113–14 Miller, Stephen, 207 MIT, 153 Modolo, Osvaldo Luis, Filho, 174 Mohrer, Josh, 84, 117–18, 130, 133–34, 156, 269 Morgan Stanley, 69 Motion Picture Association of America, 24, 28, 29 Mountain View, California, 105, 183 Mueller, Robert S., 168 Murdoch, Rupert, 295 Musk, Elon, 42, 54, 199 Napster, 21, 24 Nasdaq, 76 National Review, 229 NBC, 131 Nest, 98 Netscape, 35, 69, 69n Nevada, 110, 113 Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, 182 New Delhi, India, 149–50, 150 News Corp, 295 New York, 113, 115 New York, New York, 84, 113, 126–28, 130, 144–45 popularity of Uber in, 83, 143 success in, 147 Uber offices in, 117–18, 134, 195 New Yorker magazine, 229, 241 New York magazine, 200 New York Police Department (NYPD), 145 New York Taxi Workers Alliance, 206, 208 New York Times, xvii, xix, 24, 55, 131, 199, 202, 332n, 339–40.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Kurzweil himself believes, “It’s not going to be an invasion of intelligent machines coming over the horizon. We’re going to merge with this technology …. We’re going to put these intelligent devices in our bodies and brains to make us live longer and healthier.” Any idea as controversial as the singularity is bound to unleash a backlash. Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, says that the singularity is “intelligent design for the IQ 140 people …. This proposition that we’re heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it’s fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all the frantic arm-waving can’t obscure that fact for me.”

Intellectual capitalism, 7.­1, 8.­1 commodity capitalism, transition from developing nations and, 7.­1, 7.­2 digital divide and global leadership in job market and modifications of traditional capitalism International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), 5.­1, 5.­2 Internet, itr.­1, itr.­2, itr.­3, 1.­1, 1.­2, 7.­1, 7.­2 economic development and as instrument of democracy privacy concerns Type I civilization and Internet glasses and contact lenses, 1.­1, 1.­2 Invisibility technology Islamic terrorists Job market, 7.­1, 7.­2 Johnson, Les Johnson, Thomas Joy, Bill Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) Jurassic Park (movie) Justice system Kanekiyo, Kansuke Kant, Immanuel Kapor, Mitch Kardashev, Nikolai Kasparov, Gary Kay, Kendrick Keller, Helen Kelley, Shana Kennedy, Paul Kepler Mission telescope, 6.­1, 8.­1 Khan, A.­ Q.­ KISMET robot Klein, Richard, 3.­1, 3.­2 Krauss, Michael E.­ Kuekes, Philip Kurzweil, Ray Lagrange points LAGR (learning applied to ground robots), 2.­1, 2.­2 Languages Lanza, Robert, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3, 3.­4 Lapp, Ralph Laser enrichment of uranium Laser fusion, 5.­1, 5.­2 LaserMotive group Laser propulsion systems LCD displays LCROSS (lunar crater observation and sensing satellite) LeCun, Yann Lee Kuan Yew Leibniz, Gottfried Leno, Jay Leonardo da Vinci Lie detectors Life expectancy.


pages: 459 words: 140,010

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

The industry has changed, but for one player the change had come much earlier, and he decided he didn’t want to be a part of it any longer. The Electronic Frontier At the height of his power and influence at Lotus Development Corporation, Mitch Kapor walked away from it all. Lotus had grown large very quickly. The first venture capital arrived in 1982, Lotus 1-2-3 shipped in January 1983, and that year the company made $53 million in sales. By early 1986 some 1,300 people were working for Lotus. Working for Mitch Kapor. The growth was out of control, and it was overwhelming. Rather than feeling empowered by success, Kapor felt trapped by it. It occurred to him that he didn’t really like big companies, even when he was the boss.

That’s what the company did. It was perfectly logical. Kapor didn’t really fault it as a business decision. But what satisfaction was there in dumbing down your company? * * * Figure 94. Mitch Kapor Kapor went from teaching transcendental meditation to founding one of the most successful companies in personal computing’s boom days to defending individual rights in the information age. (Courtesy of Mitch Kapor) Lotus just wasn’t fun anymore. So Kapor resigned. He walked out the door and never looked back. This act left him with a question: what now? After having helped launch a revolution, what should he do with the rest of his life?

Among others, we are grateful to the following individuals: Scott Adams, Todd Agulnick, David Ahl, Alice Ahlgren, Bob Albrecht, Paul Allen, Dennis Allison, Bill Anderson, Bill Baker, Steve Ballmer, Rob Barnaby, John Barry, Allen Baum, John Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, Tim Berry, Ray Borrill, Stewart Brand, Dan Bricklin, Keith Britton, David Bunnell, Nolan Bushnell, Maggie Canon, David Carlick, Douglas Carlston, Mark Chamberlain, Hal Chamberlin, Roger Chapman, Alan Cooper, Sue Cooper, Ben Cooper, John Craig, Andy Cunningham, Eddie Curry, Steve Dompier, John Draper, John Dvorak, Doug Engelbart, Chris Espinosa, Gordon Eubanks, Ed Faber, Federico Faggin, Lee Felsenstein, Bill Fernandez, Todd Fischer, Richard Frank, Bob Frankston, Paul Franson, Nancy Freitas, Don French, Gordon French, Howard Fulmer, Dan Fylstra, Mark Garetz, Harry Garland, Jean-Louis Gassee, Bill Gates, Bill Godbout, John Goodenough, Chuck Grant, Wayne Green, Dick Heiser, Carl Helmers, Kent Hensheid, Andy Hertzfeld, Ted Hoff, Thom Hogan, Rod Holt, Randy Hyde, Peter Jennings, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, Philippe Kahn, Mitch Kapor, Vinod Khosla, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Kildall, Joe Killian, Dan Kottke, Barbara Krause, Tom Lafleur, Jaron Lanier, Phil Lemons, Phil Levine, Andrea Lewis, Bill Lohse, Mel Loveland, Scott Mace, Regis McKenna, Marla Markman, Mike Markkula, Bob Marsh, Patty McCracken, Dorothy McEwen, Patrick McGovern, Scott McNealy, Roger Melen, Seymour Merrin, Edward Metro, Vanessa Mickan, Jill Miller, Dick Miller, Michael Miller, Fred Moore, Gordon Moore, Lyall Morrill, George Morrow, Jeanne Morrow, Theodor Holm Nelson, Robert Noyce, Tom and Molly O’Neill, Terry Opdendyk, Adam Osborne, Chuck Peddle, Harvard Pennington, Joel Pitt, Fred “Chip” Poode, Frank and Susan Raab, Jeff Raikes, Janet Ramusack, Jef Raskin, Ed Roberts, Roy Robinson, Tom Rolander, Phil Roybal, Seymour Rubinstein, Sue Runfola, Chris Rutkowski, Paul Saffo, Art Salsberg, Wendell Sanders, Ed Sawicki, Joel Schwartz, John Sculley, Jon Shirley, John Shoch, Richard Shoup, Michael Shrayer, Bill Siler, Les Solomon, Deborah Stapleton, Alan Stein, Barney Stone, Don Tarbell, George Tate, Paul Terrell, Larry Tesler, Glenn Theodore, John Torode, Jack Tramiel, Bruce Van Natta, Jim Warren, Larry Weiss, Randy Wigginton, Margaret Wozniak, Steve Wozniak, Larry Yaeger, Greg Yob, and Pierluigi Zappacosta.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

Early in the process, the evangelists visited a fledgling Cambridge, Massachusetts, software outfit called Lotus Development Corporation. They were unimpressed with its new product, a spreadsheet called 1-2-3 (though better than its predecessors, it still used obscure commands and codes, stuck in the pre-Macintosh mold of computing), yet Apple's evangelists liked Lotus's founder Mitch Kapor, who greeted them by saying, ''I'd sell my mother to get a Mac." Apple later gave him a prototype without that stipulation, and Lotus began working on an ambitious project for the Mac called Jazz. By the time the Mac launched, Lotus had become the world's biggest personal computer software company, having established 1-2-3 as the essential application for the IBM Pc.

Macintosh evangelist Guy Kawasaki came to realize that, with the exception of Microsoft, the key contributions to the still-languishing Mac software base would come not from already established companies but hungry start-ups excited by the possibilities of the friendly Mac interface. Apple was desperate for the Macintosh equivalent to VisiCalc, something so valuable that people would buy the computer solely to run it. It had high expectations for Lotus's product-after all, Lotus 1-2-3 had been the IBM PC's VisiCalc-but Lotus's Jazz turned out to be a dud. Mitch Kapor's charges had clumsily missed the point of Macintosh. In the Lotus view, Mac was a computer for beginners, for electronic dilettantes who still clung to a terror of technology. So Jazz was the equivalent of a grade school primer, an ensemble of crippled little applications that worked well together, but were only minimally useful.

I reactivated the potentially offending pieces of software, one by one, waiting until the problem reappeared. Finally, I thought the culprit was identified: a program called On Location that lived under the pull-down Apple menu on the left side of the screen. Published by ON Technology, a company founded by Mitch Kapor after he left Lotus, this was a searching program that could speedily riffle through all the files on a hard disk to find any given phrase or word. I called ON's customer support line and reached a technician who informed me that On Location was normally very sound. But a recent version of a popular program had caused some problems.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

The same year, 1996, that I worked at Freedom House, John Perry Barlow—a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead who been an early participant in the web—authored and posted online a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” writing, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Barlow—who with two like-minded digital pioneers, John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation—believed that the virtual worlds of cyberspace existed beyond the reach of any pedestrian earthly government. “Cyberspace does not lie within your borders,” he wrote. “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.

See also Quds Force Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), 1, 3, 5, 13, 23, 47, 57; branding, 15–16; Ferizi and, 27–29; hackers working for, 19; Hussain recruitment efforts for, 19–21; meeting with corporate representatives about, 373; motto, 15; online sympathizers, 372; propaganda arm, 14; shifts in tactics, 17–18; Twitter and, 371–372; utopian world promoted by, 15; videos produced by, 14–17 ITC, 195–196 ITSecTeam, 229, 230 ItsOKNoProblemBro DDoS toolkit, 225 Ivanov, Alexey, 281 Jabber Zeus, 285–286, 288–291 Javaphile, 110, 166 Jiang Zemin, 149 Jiao Tong, 183 Jo Myung-lae, 320 Jobs, Steve, 33, 79 Joffe, Rodney, 159 Johnson, Jeh, 367, 385 Joint Task Force-Computer Network Defense, 106 Joint Terrorism Task Force, 137 Jokra Trojan, 321 Jones, Sarah, 3 Joyce, Rob, 46, 50, 364, 387, 394 Joyce, Sean, 251 JPMorgan Chase, 38, 223, 349 Justice Department, 1, 4, 12, 47–48; antitrust guidance on threat information, 177; computer and telecommunications coordinators, 98; cybersecurity authority, 175–176; cybersecurity messages, 63; cybersecurity specialist development, 199–201; cybersecurity training program, 201; FBI relationship with, 172; hackers charged by, 62–63; hiring by, 73; intelligence and law enforcement division in, 126; ISIL in threat briefings at, 13; Morris Worm and, 93–94; Mueller career in, 136; terrorism authority, 176n. See also National Security Division; specific sections and offices JWICS, 160n Kahn, Robert, 84 Kamalian, Behrouz, 230 Kaminski, Pavel, 121 Kaplan, Fred, 160 Kapor, Mitch, 72 Kaspersky, 322 Keissar, Sina, 230 Kelihos botnet, 293–294, 299n Keller, Jared, 375 Kerr, Orin, 75–76 Kerry, John, 233, 373 keyloggers, 358 Keypoint Government Solutions, 359 KGB, hackers used by, 281 Khaker (magazine), 280, 302 Khamenei, Ali (Ayatollah), 234 Khan, Samir, 10 KHS.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

Thanks to Gary Cornell for being willing to do a different kind of book, and to the Apress team for working on a different kind of book. I’d like to thank many people for their willingness to make introductions: Jim Baum, Patrick Chung, Mark Coker, Jay Corscadden, Rael Dornfest, Jed Dorsheimer, Randy Farmer, Steve Frankel, Anand Gohel, Laurie Glass, James Hong, Mitch Kapor, Morgan Ley, Mike Palmer, Tom Palmer, Bryan Pearce, Andrew Pojani, Will Price, Ryan Singel, Langley Steinert, Chris Sacca, and Zak Stone. Thanks to Kate Courteau for creating cozy offices for me to work in; Lesley Hathaway for all her advice and support; Alaina and David Sloo for their many introductions; and Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Lynn Harris, Marc Hedlund, and Aaron Swartz, who read early chapters of the book.

One of the pioneers of the Internet, David Reed, worked for us. He would have worked at CompuServe instead of at Lotus, because it ended up, when things went down, Lotus bought us out. Thank you very much, Lotus! It was the right thing for them to do, business-wise. But also it was the right thing for them to do, and Mitch [Kapor] was very good about that, to save us from bankruptcy. It was just a few million bucks to take us out of our misery, to pay off our loans. But we weren’t able to run the business. It killed the deal; we weren’t able to sell the business while we were in a lawsuit. VisiCorp was in bad shape. Their legal fees were running about the losses they had every month.

It wasn’t until the third bank—we finally got one—that we did it with no personal guarantees. Livingston: How did Lotus end up buying you? Bricklin: At the last minute, when the company was about to go under, we found some people who were willing to buy the company, but they wanted me to spend a year working for them, and I was not happy about this at all. I ran into Mitch Kapor on an airplane, and we talked. That’s Monday. Friday night, Lotus bought our company—they bought the assets of the company. So finally we sold the company, and I’m out, with no strings attached. That was great. And 88 Founders at Work then we have to finally sell off all our stuff, because they did an asset deal.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

One such element was the subculture that had been created by a cultural upheaval ten years after the counterculture era--the personal computer (PC) revolution. 26-04-2012 21:42 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 11 de 27 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html "The personal computer revolutionaries were the counterculture," Brand reminded me when I asked him about the WELL's early cultural amalgam. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs had traveled to India in search of enlightenment; Lotus 1-2-3 designer and founder Mitch Kapor had been a transcendental meditation teacher. They were five to ten years younger than the hippies, but they came out of the zeitgeist of the 1960s, and embraced many of the ideas of personal liberation and iconoclasm championed by their slightly older brothers and sisters. The PC was to many of them a talisman of a new kind of war of liberation: when he hired him from Pepsi, Steve Jobs challenged John Sculley, "Do you want to sell sugared water to adolescents, or do you want to change the world?"

"The best way for Japan and other nations of the world to deal with the information age is to co-emulate other's civilizational components that each lacks and that seem to cope with the demands of this new phase of modernization," Aizu and Kumon wrote--which explains why I was invited to Oita in 1990, and why Barlow, Johansen, and 26-04-2012 21:45 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 17 de 25 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/7.html Johnson-Lenz were invited to join me there in 1993. Recent efforts to put this cultural co-emulation theory to the test have led to meetings between Kumon's GLOCOM Institute and Mitch Kapor of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to Izumi Aizu's continuing presence on the WELL, to GLOCOM jumping the political hurdles to become an Internet site, and to a stream of young Japanese CMC enthusiasts who make sure to visit those of us in the United States whom they met when we were their guests in Japan.

And most of the WELL population understood the difference between a kid out for a joyride on his modem and more serious cases of electronic thieves 26-04-2012 21:46 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 12 de 36 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/9.html or vandals. Then Harper's magazine offered WELL management a social experiment they couldn't refuse. The magazine's editors had invited John P. Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Cliff Stoll (author of The Cuckoo's Egg, a best-seller about the successful hunt for a KGB-sponsored ring of German hackers), Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly (one of the founders of the WELL), Dave Hughes, and a number of other cyberspace debaters from the WELL and beyond to meet in a private conference on the WELL with several of the young fellows who hack into other people's computer systems.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

Civilization, when Hillis began his work on the clock, had been around about that long already. We were, as he pictured it, at a midpoint on that twenty-thousand-year stretch of time. Hillis and the group of tinkerers, thinkers, and engineers who had backed the clock—people such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, spreadsheet inventor Mitch Kapor, and investor Esther Dyson—were planning on a project that would endure as close to eternity as they felt reasonable. The Clock of the Long Now, they called it. I remember pulling into Danny’s driveway in Encino one afternoon as he prepared to depart for the backcountry and being struck by the contrast between the lovely, inoffensive suburban blandness of Southern California and the tools he was taking with him to make an assault not merely on a mountain but on a whole conception of time.

He was waving the credentials of a man who had been living in the virtual cyber-neighborhood of Web connections from its very first days. He is as close to a native of the connected, fiber-optic, light-speed world as you can find. All the names supporting the clock smelled similarly of burning electrons: Jeff Bezos had built Amazon into a high-speed marketplace whose backbone is the Web itself. Another backer, Mitch Kapor, had cracked apart several centuries of slow accounting habits when, in 1983, he created Lotus 1-2-3, the first successful computer spreadsheet program. It helped executives to see and change their whole business one keystroke at a time—which they promptly did. Kapor’s software had been instrumental in moving finance to a really instant-by-instant sort of business—more or less the opposite of the “long time frame” the clock team was aiming to preserve.

They would use technology to manipulate our voting, our opinions, and our passions—just as they might coldly manipulate our options for a new liver or news or financial security. “One of the main reasons most computer software is so abysmal is that it’s not designed at all, but merely engineered,” the programmer and entrepreneur Mitch Kapor has written. “Implementers often place more emphasis on a program’s internal construction than on its external design.” This black-box temperament, the sense of efficacy as a final value for code, for internal design, for closed control, is a dangerous fit for the human business of freedom and politics.


pages: 189 words: 57,632

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Self-published, 26 August 2001) Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish qwerty.html) Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy — minus the editors (Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) Dedication For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore For the staff — past and present — of the Electronic Frontier Foundation For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Introduction by John Perry Barlow San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco Tuesday, April 1, 2008 "Content," huh? Ha!

There would be increasingly little free speech or any consequence, since free speech is not something anyone can own. Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, beginning with the wise folks who designed the Internet in the first place. Then there was something called the Electronic Frontier Foundation which I co-founded, along with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, back in 1990. Dedicated to the free exchange of useful information in cyberspace, it seemed at times that I had been right in suggesting then that practically every institution of the Industrial Period would try to crush, or at least own, the Internet. That's a lot of lawyers to have stacked against your cause.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

“I didn’t like the idea of Blogger being lost in the dotcom crash,” Bricklin said.75 After reading Williams’s forlorn post, he sent an email asking if there was anything he could do to help. They agreed to meet when Bricklin, who lived in Boston, came to an O’Reilly conference in San Francisco. Over sushi at a nearby restaurant, Bricklin told the tale of how, years earlier, when his own company was foundering, he had run into Mitch Kapor of Lotus. Though competitors, they shared a collaborative hacker ethic, so Kapor offered a deal that helped Bricklin stay personally solvent. Bricklin went on to found a company, Trellix, that made its own website publishing system. Paying forward Kapor’s band-of-hackers helpfulness to a semicompetitor, Bricklin worked out a deal for Trellix to license Blogger’s software for $40,000, thus keeping it alive.

, ref1, ref2 Jerry and David’s Guide to the Web, ref1 Jobs, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28 Apple partnership share of, ref1 Atari job of, ref1, ref2 audaciousness celebrated by, ref1 bitmapping praised by, ref1 Breakout work of, ref1, ref2 circuitboard sales plan of, ref1 creativity of, ref1 Gates’s dispute with, ref1 IBM PC studied by, ref1 ousted from Apple, ref1, ref2 paranoia of, ref1 personal computer idea of, ref1 Pixar headquarters designed by, ref1 Johnson, Clifton, ref1 Johnson, Edward “Ned,” III, ref1n Johnson, Lyndon, ref1 Johnson, Steven, ref1 junction transistor, ref1 patent for, ref1 Justin’s Links from the Underground, ref1 J. Walter Thompson advertising, ref1 Kahn, Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Internet created by, ref1 Kapor, Mitch, ref1 Kasparov, Garry, ref1, ref2 Kay, Alan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Dynabook proposed by, ref1, ref2 personal computers foreseen by, ref1, ref2, ref3 recruited to PARC, ref1 Kay, Michael, ref1 Kaypro, ref1 Kelly, John E., III, ref1, ref2 Kelly, Mervin, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Kelvin, Lord, ref1 Kennedy, John F., ref1, ref2 Kennedy, Robert, ref1 Kennedy, Ted, ref1 Kern County Land Co., ref1 Kesey, Ken, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Kilburn, Thomas, ref1 Kilby, Jack, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 calculator development and, ref1, ref2 Nobel Prize won by, ref1, ref2 resistor desinged by, ref1, ref2 solid circuit of, ref1 Kilby v.


Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michelle Slatalla, Joshua Quittner

dumpster diving, East Village, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, job automation, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, packet switching, ROLM, Stewart Brand, UUNET, Whole Earth Review

As he would later write about FBI agent Baxter, in a groundbreaking manifesto he called "Crime and Puzzlement": I... found in his straggles a framework for understanding a series of recent Secret Service raids on some young hackers I'd met in a Harper's magazine forum on computers and freedom. And it occurred to me that this might be the beginning of a great paroxysm of governmental confusion during which everyone's liberties would become at risk. Barlow posted his writings on the WELL, where they were read by Lotus 1-2-3 creator and zen millionaire Mitch Kapor. Kapor, who lives in Boston, was struck by Barlow's description of the FBI agent's visit to the ranch because Kapor coincidentally had been visited by an East Coast version of Agent Baxter. Kapor was also unnerved at the direction the world seemed to be taking. Obsessive about computers himself in his youth Kapor had driven from Boston to New Hampshire to avoid the sales tax that stood between him and his first Apple II Kapor empathized with the plight of Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and Scorpion.

And do you want to talk about intent? Do you want to make the argument that these were just poor scientists, and the world was their laboratory? Then try explaining Julio and John taking money from Morty. Try explaining that phone call where Julio said to Mark, "I would, like, crash everything. " The facts trouble Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, whose Electronic Frontier Foundation has been monitoring the progression of the MOD boys' case since the very beginning. They wonder whether the government has taken to picking on defenseless teenagers. One day in 1992, the EFF's staff lawyer (yes, there's a staff now, and an office in Cambridge) comes to New York City to investigate.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Central Park is free in the sense I mean; it gives value to the city that it centers. A jazz musician draws freely upon the chord sequence of a popular song to create a new improvisation, which, if popular, will itself be used by others. Scientists plotting an orbit of a spacecraft draw freely upon the equations developed by Kepler and Newton and modified by Einstein. Inventor Mitch Kapor drew freely upon the idea of a spreadsheet—VisiCalc—to build the first killer application for the IBM PC—Lotus 1-2-3. In all of these cases, the availability of a resource that remains outside the exclusive control of someone else—whether a government or a private individual—has been central to progress in science and the arts.

And how the Internet was designed intimately affected the freedoms and controls that it has enabled. The code of cyberspace—its architecture and the software and hardware that implement that architecture—regulates life in cyberspace generally. Its code is its law. Or, in the words of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cofounder Mitch Kapor, “Architecture is politics.”33 To the extent that people have thought about Kapor's slogan, they've done so in the context of individual rights and network architecture. Most think about how “architecture” or “software” or, more simply, “code” enables or restricts the things we think of as human rights—speech, or privacy, or the rights of access.

.: National Academy Press, 2000), 30. 31 Telephone interview with David P. Reed (February 7, 2001), who contributed to the early design of the Internet protocols—TCP/IP—while a graduate student at MIT. 32 As I describe in this paragraph, the importance of architecture to the character of the Internet was a theme of the early activism of Mitch Kapor. But the author who first focused the importance of architecture on the issues I describe in this book is Kevin Wer-bach. As Werbach wrote in Release 1.0: Architecture matters. For the most part, today's Net is open, decentralized and competitive. It fosters innovation because it is a standards-based general-purpose platform. . . .


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

On their return, they stopped at Spencer Hot Springs, one of Brand’s old haunts, where they coincidentally shared a plunge with several dozen Burning Man veterans. Afterward, Brand wrote that they had “Found The Place.” The next year they bought the abandoned property they had discovered on their expedition. Jay Walker; Bill Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems; and Mitch Kapor donated the money to buy 180 acres of virtually inaccessible mining land suitably populated with bristlecone pines. Safra’s contribution would be used to fund the first clock prototype and Myhrvold would underwrite a second model, a development project that would take until 2005. Ultimately, it would be Jeff Bezos who would offer the Long Now project the financial wherewithal to create a full-scale model of the clock.

That in turn brought in the lawyers, who pointed out that if the nonprofit Long Now Foundation became a bookie by taking a cut on the bets, the Internal Revenue Service would certainly frown on the idea. Eventually, Long Bets found its way around the legality issue by establishing a philanthropic fund to disburse the winnings. Despite its shortcomings, the project was launched after Jeff Bezos became its first backer. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil (a high-profile inventor who gained increasing recognition for his belief in the inevitability of the singularity) placed the first bet over the question of when a computer program would successfully pass the Turing test, an idea first proposed by the English mathematician Alan Turing to determine whether a computer could be programmed to exhibit such humanlike intelligence that an observer would be unable to distinguish its answers from those of an actual person.

He would begin with the old money families he knew well: “Richard Rockefeller and his sister Peggy, William Randolph Hearst III, Juan Enriquez, Jacob Safra, Richard Thierot, Nion McEvoy, Nicholas Negroponte, possibly the Duchess of Devonshire . . .” To that list he added his “new-money friends”: “Sir Richard Branson, Jeff & Mackenzie Bezos, Pierre and Pam Omidyar, Mitch Kapor, Nathan Myhrvold, Susie Tomkins Buell, Garrett Gruener, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, John Doerr, Steve Jobs.” In justifying his proposal, he noted that in 1982 he had decided that the world headed where the rich led it, and if they failed to lead, it went nowhere. In response he had run several seminars on Creative Philanthropy, trying to help a group—described as “Doughnuts”—of largely unhappy heirs to do something useful with their fortunes.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

When I asked people who participated how and why this happened, the overwhelming point of view was that legislators and regulators in Washington, D.C., simply weren’t paying attention. They didn’t understand the Internet’s power; it had no place in their landscape of power, and no familiar analogue existed that would make it easy to grasp. Mitch Kapor noted in an April 2012 interview, “Nobody in Washington DC took [the Internet] seriously, so it was allowed to happen. By the time anybody noticed, it had already won.”23 In effect, the Internet was released into the wild in a strong pro-business climate pushed by conservatives who wanted one big institution—government—to get out of free markets.

Noam Chomsky and others have argued that the United States has a long-standing tradition of using the Pentagon as a cover for massive government investment in strategically important industries. Calling something a defense expenditure makes it much more less vulnerable to political attack. 23. Mitch Kapor may not be a household name—but he should be. Many of you may remember Mitch alongside Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as one of the legends of the personal computer. He founded Lotus Development Corporation, an early software company, and pioneered applications for spreadsheets and graphics. He has gone on to have a leading role in a number of other important organizations, including as a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 24. https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html 25. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/internet200807 26.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

But the combination of technophilia and their long-standing critique of the state led cyberutopians into the neoliberal camp. These contradictions can be seen in the personal biographies of leading figures, such as Mitch Kapor, an early open-source advocate and cofounder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. By the 2000s, Kapor was one of the original investors in Uber. 17. Turner (2006, 230). He also discusses the 1996 Telecom Act. 18. The Bay Area is the original location for most early sharing platforms. Individuals we have identified as connectors are Mitch Kapor, a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mozilla, and Freada Klein Kapor, both key cyberculture figures who were also early Uber investors. 19.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

In the 1980s and ’90s, software development products were wrought with failure. Even at great software companies, the spiraling complexity, changing requirements, and large time scales of these projects doomed them. These challenges plagued organizations big and small, from startups to large enterprises. For example, accomplished software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus Development Corporation, which created Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Notes in the 1980s, funded an ambitious project in 2002, to build a next-generation collaboration software called Project Chandler. Six years later, after failing to deliver a product that remotely addressed the initial goals, the project was finally shut down.

And thank you to Rick Dalzell for your guidance in building the Twilio R&D organization, and for being a fantastic board member. To Marc Benioff, thank you for instilling in me the greater sense of purpose that companies should carry, and for showing me that we can build great companies while strengthening our community and society around us. Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor-Klein, thank you for investing in Twilio so early on, but more important, for helping me make diversity and inclusion key pillars of Twilio’s culture. To Albert Wenger, thank you for teaching me the practice of long-term thinking, and the value of maximizing future optionality.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

More than just selling companies, Super Founders share a bent toward building things and putting their backs into their ideas. Camp and Kalanick were both Super Founders. Before Uber, Camp founded StumbleUpon, the first web-discovery platform. It enabled users to find new web content with a single click and quickly attracted angel investors, including Brad O’Neill, Tim Ferriss, Ram Shriram, Ron Conway, and Mitch Kapor, along with venture capital firms like First Round Capital. Eventually, eBay acquired the company for $75 million. Camp stayed on as CEO after the acquisition and in 2009 bought the company back with some investors. Kalanick, who studied computer engineering and business economics at UCLA, dropped out in his senior year to work on Scour, a peer-to-peer content-sharing service that he founded with five other students.

Dozens of VCs and angel investors passed on the opportunity, citing the small market size—no one saw the ability to replace taxis, let alone expand that market, even though it seems obvious now—and the anticipated legal fight with city officials over taxi licenses, which seemed like a massive risk. Moreover, neither of the two founders had yet committed to working full-time; they had brought in a CEO to run the company. First Round Capital gave Uber its seed round on a valuation of $4 million, along with angel investors including Mitch Kapor, Cyan and Scott Banister, Chris Sacca, and Jason Calacanis. HOW LONG DID IT TAKE? Next we will look at how long it took for these companies to become unicorns. Based on my data, it took anywhere from one or two years from the first funding round (e.g., Allogene) to twelve years or more. The average is about five years.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

The conversation had lasted a mere five minutes, and virtually no one in the field of artificial intelligence took the claim seriously. Kurzweil nonetheless believes that a much more robust version of the test would indeed be a powerful indicator of true machine intelligence. In 2002, Kurzweil entered into a formal $20,000 bet with the software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor. The bet specifies a complex set of rules that include a three-judge panel and four contestants: the AI-powered chatbot along with three human foils.32 The bet will be decided in Kurzweil’s favor only if, by the end of the year 2029, a majority of the judges believe the AI system to be human after engaging in a two-hour, one-on-one conversation with each of the contestants.

Ford, Interview with David Ferrucci, in Architects of Intelligence, p. 414. 29. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Penguin Books, 2005. 30. Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Penguin Books, 2012. 31. Ford, Interview with Ray Kurzweil, in Architects of Intelligence, pp. 230–231. 32. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, “A wager on the Turing test: The rules,” Kurzweil AI Blog, April 9, 2002, www.kurzweilai.net/a-wager-on-the-turing-test-the-rules. 33. Sean Levinson, “A Google executive is taking 100 pills a day so he can live forever,” Elite Daily, April 15, 2015, www.elitedaily.com/news/world/google-executive-taking-pills-live-forever/1001270. 34.


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Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

VisiCorp was effectively wiped out by the arrival of a competing product, Lotus 1-2-3. To create a software hit, one needed access either to big sources of venture capital or to a healthy revenue stream from an existing successful product. The story of the Lotus Development Corporation, which was formed by a thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur, Mitch Kapor, in 1982, illustrates the financial barriers that had to be overcome to establish a successful start-up in computer software. Kapor was a charismatic freelance software developer who had produced a couple of successful packages in 1979 for VisiCorp. He had originally received a royalty on sales from VisiCorp but decided to sell all the rights to his packages to the company for a single payment of $1.7 million.

POLITICS OF THE INTERNET As usage of the Internet greatly broadened with the advent of the World Wide Web, many journalists, politicians, and others have presented it as a transformative technology of freedom and democracy. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, formed in 1990 by Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, have emerged to defend individual Internet rights—with some such advocates from the political left and many others from the libertarian right. The broadening participation in user-created web content—the defining characteristic of Web 2.0—and the newfound mobile computing of smartphones not only fuel such framings of the Internet but also highlight it as a democratizing tool to help battle authoritarian regimes.

Technology and Culture 27, no. 1: 63–95. Parker, William N., ed. 1986. Economic History and the Modern Economist. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Parkhill, D. F. 1966. The Challenge of the Computer Utility. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Petre, Peter. 1985. “The Man Who Keeps the Bloom on Lotus” (profile of Mitch Kapor). Fortune, 10 June, pp. 92–100. Plugge, W. R., and M. N. Perry. 1961. “American Airlines’ ‘SABRE’ Electronic Reservations System.” Proceedings of the AFIPS 1961 Western Joint Computer Conference (pp. 592–601). Washington, DC: Spartan Books. Poole, Steven. 2000. Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames.


Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, General Magic , HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

“We don’t have any special hardware for it!” I blurted out, probably with a proud sneer in my voice. “In fact...” I was about to mention that we got it running on an Apple II, which had one-tenth the processing horsepower of a Macintosh, when Steve guessed what I was about to say. Bill Gates, Mitch Kapor, and Fred Gibbons: early third-party developers “Shut up!” he yelled as loud as he could, looking directly at me. He yelled it again, possibly trying to drown me out in case I kept on going. But I understood what he wanted and changed what I was going to say. “In fact, doing it in software is better anyway,” I concluded.

A special thanks is due to my editor, Allen Noren, who shepherded this novice author through the publishing process. Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Joyce McClure, for reminding me in May 2003 that I wanted to pursue my Folklore project. I’d also like to thank my earliest readers, who provided me with crucial advice and encouragement: Andrew Francis, Mitch Kapor, Chao Lam, Scott Rosenberg, and Nikolas Tanaka. Photo Credits Cover: The Mac team. Photo by Norman Seeff, courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. Flap: Andy Hertzfeld. ©Elisabeth Fall 5: Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, and Brian Howard. Courtesy of San Francisco Examiner Photograher Paul Glines 15: NERF BALL®. © 2004 Hasbro, Inc.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Brin and Page, who had met as PhD students in the computer science department at Stanford a few years before, had reportedly come up with an improved way to search the Web. The field was crowded with search companies, including Excite, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Alta Vista. But what had caught the attention of Accel partners Mitch Kapor and Jim Breyer were the well-placed endorsements of Google search by its early adopters, the engineers and software developers. “This thing Google is better than anything else,” Kapor and Breyer were told. “This is all we’re using.” Google was growing fast—getting more than ten thousand searches a day.

The second floor also served as Accel’s “incubator,” where a handful of promising entrepreneurs were given free office space to hatch or develop new business ideas. The third- and fourth-floor offices were for venture partners and general partners, including Jim Breyer, Peter Wagner, Bud Colligan, Bruce Golden, and Mitch Kapor. Co-founders Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz had offices on the fourth floor, where all the major deals took place. There the carpets and walls were white, the wood was a whitish blond, doors were of glass, paintings were modernist washes of color, and the tables were white marble. Theresia, thirty-one, did her best to engage Brin and Page, who were five years younger, by talking about Stanford, start-ups, and Accel, founded in 1983 by Patterson and Swartz.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

Another genius who failed to complete his university course (Harvard) was William Gates, who started a small company in 1975 and bought a computer operating system for $50,000; it became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS. In 1986 Microsoft raised over $60m by going public, and by 1990 it had thrown Apple and IBM into a defensive alliance: but Windows software had become so popular that a new version, DOS 5.0, sold a million copies in a month. There were other examples - Mitch Kapor, a former disk jockey and instructor in transcendental meditation (Lotus 1-2-3 in 1983, sales of nearly $700 million in 1990); Philippe Kahn, who came to Silicon Valley in 1983, used a clever ruse to persuade a trade magazine to accept an advertisement on credit, raised $150,000 of sales thereby, and set up Borland International, which, in 1991, was the third-largest supplier of personal computer software.

.: background and character and Brezhnev and China economic policy election as President Great Society on Kennedy reputation as Roosevelt’s manager use of Supreme Court Vice-President and Vietnam withdraws from re-election campaign Joliot-Curie, Irène Jones, Aubrey Jones, Jack Jones, Therese Jordan Joseph, Keith, Baron Juglar, Clement June Days uprising (1848) ‘junk bonds’ Kabul Kádár, János Kafka, Franz, Amerika Kahn, Philippe Kaldor, Nicholas, Baron Kaluga Kamchatka Kandahar Kang Sheng Kania, Stanisław Kapitsa, Piotr Kaplan, Karel Kapor, Mitch Karabük steel plant Karaganda Karajan, Herbert von Karasar, Hasan Ali Karmal, Babrak Karman, Tibor Karpacky, Kornel Kashmir Katowice Katyń massacre (1940) Kayseri Kazakhstan Kedourie, Elie Keep, John Kemal, Mustafa see Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal Kemp, Jack Kempner, Nan Kennan, George Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, John F.: ‘Alliance for Progress’ (plan for Latin America) appearance, background and character assassination and Bay of Pigs invasion and Berlin crisis of 1961 and Cuban crisis of 1962 economic policy election as President funeral Inaugural address and Macmillan New Frontier reputation and Roosevelt Vienna conference (1961) and Vietnam White House style Kennedy, John F., Jr Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy, Robert Kent State University shootings (1970) Kerr, Clark Keyder, Çağlar Keynes, John Maynard, 1st Baron: Galbraith and on government spending homosexuality hopes for German bombing on paper money and Roosevelt Keynesianism KGB: and coup of August 1991 and Cuban crisis of 1962 and dissidents and Gorbachev network of informers relationship with Party and revolutions of 1989 and war in Afghanistan and Western anti-missile demonstrations see also Cheka KHAD (Afghan secret police) Khanin, G.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

B 167 c08.indd 167 5/11/10 6:24:48 AM 168 fortunes of change (The combined haul from DreamWorks alone was $275,000.) In addition, sizable checks arrived from technology entrepreneurs: top executives at Google, including Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, gave a total of $175,000, while other technologists, for example, Lotus 12-3 designer Mitch Kapor and GeoCities founder David Bohnett, also contributed the maximum. California financiers gave generously as well, even as some absorbed staggering losses thanks to the meltdown on Wall Street. Those who gave the maximum $50,000 included mutual fund executive David Fisher, billionaire money manager Howard Marks, and venture capitalist Ellen Pao.

Steve Kirsch, who invented the optical mouse and founded the Web portal InfoSeek, has been among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party over the past decade. “People in Silicon Valley have been able to make a difference in the Democratic Party,” Kirsch said in describing the new alignment of tech money behind Democrats. Mitch Kapor, who made his fortune from the software program Lotus 1-2-3, has been funding a range of liberal groups for years. David Bohnett and Tim Gill, as mentioned earlier, have used their tech money to help create the modern gay rights movement. Andy Rappaport, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and electrical engineer by training, has been a major donor to CAP and other groups such as People for the American Way, as well as to many smaller organizations working to boost voter turnout.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Their attention is instead on how their choices in code design confine the possible options thereafter, for them and for less skilled computer users. Questions first brought up by progressive architects on how the cityscape affects the conduct of its inhabitants are rebounding in the computer underground. The issue at stake is best captured in the slogan of the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mitch Kapor: ‘Architecture is Politics’.25 It could be objected that ordinary users are prey to the design choices of hackers as much as to those of companies. Indeed, part of the attraction with being a hacker is to perceive oneself as an elite vis-à-vis ‘newbies’, ‘scriptkid-dies’ and ‘lamers’, some of the many names given to less experienced users.

But Bijker also concedes that an artefact is not infinitely malleable: “The relevant social groups have, in building up the technological frame, invested so much in the artefact that its meaning has become quite fixed—it cannot be changed easily, and it forms part of a hardened network of practices, theories, and social institutions. From this time on it may indeed happen that, naively spoken, an artefact ‘determines’ social development” (Bijker, 282). 25. The slogan of Mitch Kapor echoes Langdon Winner’s inquiry into the ‘politics of the artefact’. Winner’s famous example is the low bridges over the motorways going to Long Island, New York. Robert Moses, an influential city planner in New York for many decades, specified the height of the bridges so that buses would be unable to pass under them.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

More than most books, this one came from conversation. The main source was discussion among the members of the board of The Long Now Foundation, most of it via thousands of messages online, a few of them quoted in this volume. Danny Hillis, Peter Schwartz, Brian Eno, Doug Carlston, Kevin Kelly, Paul Saffo, Mitch Kapor, Esther Dyson, executive director Alexander Rose and new board member Roger Kennedy are the Clock/Library project. It is no accident that nearly all of them are also members of Global Business Network (GBN), whose eleven-year development of “the art of the long view” stimulated and framed much of what the Long Now is about.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Bureaucracies, Barlow argues in Crime and Puzzlement, will naturally over-react to poorly-understood “cyber-threats”, and in trying to do the job of parents regulating the behaviour of childish online trespassers, will crush the new-found freedom of the online sphere for the grown-ups, too. It was these experiences which contributed to Barlow’s decision to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the world’s first digital civil liberties organisation, along with EFF co-founders Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore. The EFF initially took on legal cases of hackers targeted by the FBI’s two-year crackdown on computer-related activities, Operation Sundevil, as well as academic researchers and entrepreneurs whose work attracted the attention of the authorities. But although so-called “impact litigation” remains a central part of the its operations to this day, as legislators began to ponder how to regulate the ’net, the EFF’s work quickly stretched beyond the courtroom and into the corridors of Washington DC.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Within the first year, new community members from around the world had already contributed new functionality, enhanced existing features, and even become engaged in the management and planning of the project itself. By creating an open community, the Mozilla project had become larger than any one company. In 2003, AOL and Mitch Kapor funded the launch of the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit that supported the work of this open source community. The Mozilla Foundation existed to ensure that the Internet would never become solely owned by companies. They had a profound sense of purpose—Internet for the people, by the people. The Mozilla Foundation was a movement first and an organization second.


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

The author welcomes comments, criticisms and corrections and can be contacted by email at: lightstunnel@yahoo.com. NOTES Introduction 1 Larry Page on AI at Google: Web: http://news.cnet.com/2100-11395_3-6160372.html video: http://news.cnet.com/1606-2_3-6160334.html?tag=mncol;txt 2 Kurtzweil has a $20,000 bet with Mitch Kapor that a computer will pass the “Turing Test” and thus exhibit human-like intelligence (see last section of the Appendix) by the year 2029. Web: http://www.longbets.org/1 Chapter 1: The Tunnel 3 US Census Bureau, 2004, web: http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/004214.html 4 Percentage of world’s population in poverty, see the graph based on World Bank data at http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats.


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

At a certain cost of computing power, when elasticity kicked in, computers had to be cheaper than rooms of humans. Augmenting often meant replacing, and helping those who remained. It also meant the creation of jobs elsewhere to create these tools. SOFTWARE AND NETWORKS 135 Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Michael Dell and Lotus spreadsheet founder Mitch Kapor - these guys are great implementers. More power and riches to them, of course, but Doug Engelbart laid out their future and that of the personal computer. Not much more needs to be said (that others haven’t already overwritten.) An entire industry followed Doug’s map to create high margin intellectual property.


pages: 218 words: 68,648

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

In the mid-2000s, computer networks became exponentially more powerful, and social media introduced the world to new data-mining vulnerabilities. By that time, many of the cypherpunks had created organizations that were fighting for libertarian policies in the courts and on the Internet. In Washington D.C., cypherpunk Mitch Kapor’s Electronic Frontier Foundation was battling AOL at the Federal Trade Commission, alleging AOL engaged in deceptive and unfair trade practices by disclosing the search queries of 650,000 users. In Silicon Valley, cypherpunk Bram Cohen’s peer-to-peer file sharing program, BitTorrent, had drawn blood from big telecom in 2006, after Comcast had throttled the BitTorrent service.


pages: 205 words: 71,872

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture

But the message Kalanick wanted to send—that Uber was a responsible company that was taking this seriously—was soon eclipsed by a long exposé in The New York Times, in which reporter Mike Isaac detailed Uber’s toxic, “Hobbesian” culture, covering everything from a manager’s assaulting an employee with a baseball bat to the harassment, assault, theft, and drug use that had occurred during the infamous “Vegas trip” that had delayed my on-site interview at Uber. In the wake of this report, two of Uber’s earliest investors—Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein—penned an open letter to Uber’s board and investors that was picked up by multiple media outlets; in the letter, they said that they had known about Uber’s culture for a long time and had been trying to quietly change it from the inside. Waymo, a Google subsidiary that was developing self-driving cars, sued Uber for patent infringement and trade secret theft, and a video leaked of Travis Kalanick berating an Uber driver.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

Drinking ayahuasca is like plugging into the umbilical cord of the planet. Realms that we don’t know how to navigate until people experiment, try. John Perry Barlow. He was such a cowboy—so cool and fun—you couldn’t resist that. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, because he didn’t want the government to run away with this new technology. He thought technology should be free. He was never afraid of speaking the truth or confronting “givens.” We would throw parties and bring these incredible people together: filmmakers, computer graphics people, politicians, musicians, hackers.


pages: 586 words: 186,548

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

We can understand enough of the semantics, for example to enable our Talk to Books application to come up with reasonable answers to questions, but it’s still not at human levels. Mitch Kapor and I have a long-range bet on this for $20,000, with the proceeds to go to the charity of the winner’s choice. I’m saying that an AI will pass the Turing test by 2029, whereas he’s saying no. MARTIN FORD: Would you agree that for the Turing test to be an effective test of intelligence, there probably shouldn’t be a time limit at all? Just tricking someone for 15 minutes seems like a gimmick. RAY KURZWEIL: Absolutely, and if you look at the rules that Mitch Kapor and I came up with, we gave a number of hours, and maybe even that’s not enough time.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

The problem isn’t a lack of compelling women of color to invest in; it’s a system in Silicon Valley that isn’t set up to develop, encourage and create pathways for blacks, Latinos or women. Don’t just take my word for it—listen to industry leaders interviewed for a USA Today story on the Valley’s lack of commitment to diversity. Jessica Guynn reports that “venture capitalists tell [Mitch Kapor] all the time that they are ‘color blind’ when funding companies. He’s not sure they are ready to let go of a deeply rooted sense that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy.”2 Hiles goes on to discuss the exclusionary practices of Silicon Valley, challenging the notion that merit and opportunity go to the smartest people prepared to innovate.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

This is bad both for the system, because it evolves more slowly, and for the institutions themselves, which struggle to innovate. Consider, too, that the fissures in the network along Route 128 both contributed to insularity, and were exacerbated by it. This was a dangerous synergy. The more people retreated into their silos, the more they perceived new ideas not as opportunities but as threats. Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp., talks of a ‘bizarre’ meeting with Ken Olsen, the CEO of DEC, where the latter seemed incapable of grasping the significance of personal computers. Kapor said: Some of my most sobering moments . . . were seeing how those guys weren’t getting it, and were dooming themselves.


pages: 278 words: 83,468

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

I would like to thank Mike Maples and Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate), Steve Anderson (Baseline), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), Ron Conway (SV Angel), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC). As you can imagine, this book involved a tremendous amount of feedback, iteration, and testing. I received invaluable, in-depth early feedback from Laura Crescimano, Lee Hoffman, Professor Tom Eisenmann, and Sacha Judd. Thanks also to Mitch Kapor, Scott Cook, Shawn Fanning, Mark Graban, Jennifer Carolan, Manuel Rosso, Tim O’Reilly, and Reid Hoffman for their suggestions, feedback, and support. I owe a special note of thanks to Ruth Kaplan and Ira Fay for their wisdom and friendship. Throughout the process of writing the book, I had the benefit of a custom-built testing platform to run split-test experiments on everything from cover design to subtitles to actual bits of the book (you can see the results of these experiments at http://lean.st).


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Oakland is a gritty, working-class city. It’s also an African American city. For a long time black people were the biggest ethnic group in Oakland, and while demographics have shifted recently, African Americans still represent about a quarter of the population. By setting up shop here in Oakland, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, the husband-and-wife team behind Kapor Capital, were sending a message—they were not part of that other world. Unlike those big venture capital firms over on Sand Hill Road, the Kapors are not trying to make as much money as possible by any means necessary. Instead, they have a social mission.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

This book was greatly enhanced by interviews I conducted with Manuel De Landa, Richard Rogers, Deborah Gordon, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Oliver Selfridge, Will Wright, David Jefferson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Rik Heywood, Mitch Resnick, Steven Pinker, Eric Zimmerman, Nate Oostendorp, Brewster Kahle, Andrew Shapiro, and Douglas Rushkoff. I recall more than a few casual conversations that also had an impact, primarily ones that involved David Shenk, Ruthie Rogers, Roo Rogers, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly, Annie Keating, Nicholas Butterworth, Kim Hawkins, Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Frank Rich, Denise Caruso, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Penny Lewis, John Brockman, Rufus Griscom, Jay Haynes, Betsey Schmidt, Stephen Green, Esther Dyson, and my students at NYU’s ITP program, where Red Burns generously invited me to teach a graduate seminar on emergent software.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Turing was carefully imprecise in setting the rules for his test, and significant literature has been devoted to the subtleties of establishing the exact procedures for determining how to assess when the Turing test has been passed.218 In 2002 I negotiated the rules for a Turing-test wager with Mitch Kapor on the Long Now Web site.219 The question underlying our twenty-thousand-dollar bet, the proceeds of which go to the charity of the winner's choice, was, "Will the Turing test be passed by a machine by 2029?" I said yes, and Kapor said no. It took us months of dialogue to arrive at the intricate rules to implement our wager.

Hofstadter, "A Coffeehouse Conversation on the Turing Test," May 1981, included in Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 80–102, http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0318.html. 219. Ray Kurzweil, "Why I Think I Will Win," and Mitch Kapor, "Why I Think I Will Win," rules: http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0373.html; Kapor: http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0412.html; Kurzweil: http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0374.html; Kurzweil "final word": http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

Consumers bought the IBM PC with confidence, and in 1982, software developers began turning out applications to run on it. Each new customer, and each new application, added to the IBM PC's strength as a potential de facto standard for the industry. Soon most of the new and best software, such as Lotus 1-2-3, was being written for it. Mitch Kapor, with Jonathan Sachs, created 1-2-3 and revolutionized spreadsheets. The original inventors of the electronic spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, deserve immense credit for their product, VisiCalc, but 1-2-3 made it obsolete. Mitch is a fascinating person whose eclectic background—in his case as a disc jockey and transcendental meditation instructor—is typical of that of the best software designers.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

When they finally dropped a hint, Sacca immediately bit. He knew both Camp and Kalanick well enough to sense that together they could accomplish something special, and he wrote a three-hundred-thousand-dollar check almost on the spot. “This is the one I got really fucking right,” Sacca says. Others were similarly impulsive. Mitch Kapor, creator of the early 1990s productivity tool Lotus Notes, was furious at himself for asking for his money back from the failed podcasting company Odeo right before it morphed into Twitter. So he was aggressively pursuing all leads. “I’m in,” he said to Camp, whom he had backed in StumbleUpon. “If you don’t let me into the deal I’ll kill you.”


The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, centre right, computer age, disinformation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, power law, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, telemarketer

I know because I've driven from my home to visit their nearby offices in Sausalito, California. It's not a big operation, but it's become a trendy Internet club, frequented by a close-knit community of upscale ex-hippy libertarians, liberals, Greatful Dead fans, technophiles, and journalists. The cognoscenti have e-mail addresses there, people like Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, and the privacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Markoff, too, has a Well address. "Technical support, please," I ask. In a few seconds a friendly young man picks up the line. "Hi, how can I help you?" "Somebody's reading my e-mail," I tell the technical support person.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Such network effects make it harder, though not impossible, for competitors to break into a market. In the 1980s and 1990s, Microsoft won not only the operating system war, but also the productivity software war. It competed with – and beat – several companies producing everyday office tools. Lotus Development Corporation was founded in 1982 by Mitch Kapor, the man who, three years earlier, had invented the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc. Lotus produced more spreadsheet applications, like 1-2-3, which was the dominant office staple through the 1980s and much of the 1990s. They also made an exotic spreadsheet program called Improv, which I was partial to, as well as Ami Pro, the word processor on which I typed up my undergraduate thesis on the Cuban missile crisis.


pages: 398 words: 120,801

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, airport security, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, citizen journalism, Firefox, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, mail merge, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Bayes, web of trust, zero day

Thanks, guys. &&& Acknowledgments This book owes a tremendous debt to many writers, friends, mentors, and heroes who made it possible. For the hackers and cypherpunks: Bunnie Huang, Seth Schoen, Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Gweeds, Natalie Jeremijenko, Emmanuel Goldstein, Aaron Swartz For the heroes: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Larry Lessig, Shari Steele, Cindy Cohn, Fred von Lohmann, Jamie Boyle, George Orwell, Abbie Hoffman, Joe Trippi, Bruce Schneier, Ross Dowson, Harry Kopyto, Tim O'Reilly For the writers: Bruce Sterling, Kathe Koja, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Pat York, Annalee Newitz, Dan Gillmor, Daniel Pinkwater, Kevin Pouslen, Wendy Grossman, Jay Lake, Ben Rosenbaum For the friends: Fiona Romeo, Quinn Norton, Danny O'Brien, Jon Gilbert, danah boyd, Zak Hanna, Emily Hurson, Grad Conn, John Henson, Amanda Foubister, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Karl Levesque, Kate Miles, Neil and Tara-Lee Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, Ken Snider For the mentors: Judy Merril, Roz and Gord Doctorow, Harriet Wolff, Jim Kelly, Damon Knight, Scott Edelman Thank you all for giving me the tools to think and write about these ideas. &&&$ Creative Commons Creative Commons Legal Code Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES.


Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology) by Geoffrey C. Bowker

affirmative action, business process, classic study, corporate governance, Drosophila, government statistician, information retrieval, loose coupling, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Occam's razor, QWERTY keyboard, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, sexual politics, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, William of Occam

The toughest prob­ lems in information systems design are increasingly those concerned with modeling cooperation across heterogeneous worlds, of modeling articulation work and multiplicity. If we do not learn to do so, we face the risk of a franchised, dully standardized infrastructure ("500 chan­ nels and nothing on," in the words of Mitch Kapor from the Electronic Frontier Foundation) or of an Orwellian nightmare of surveillance. Feminism and race-critical theory offer traditions of reflective de­ naturalization, of a politics of simultaneity and contradiction intuited by the term cyborg. Long ago feminists began with the maxim that the personal is political and that each woman's experience has a primacy we must all learn to afford.


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

Through a public UNIX system in California known as The Well, we helped spread the story to even more people. The mass media actually picked up on it. I think that’s when I first saw the power of the Net in action. Emails came pouring in, scores of people wanted to know what they could do, and the word spread throughout the globe. Among those who expressed a desire to help were Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow. They saw these events as a reason to start a new group that would help protect people from this kind of injustice. And so, the seeds for the Electronic Frontier Foundation were planted. 94192c13.qxd 6/3/08 3:34 PM Page 493 Hackers and the Law For Your Protection (Spring, 1990) A year ago, we told the stories of Kevin Mitnick and Herbert Zinn, two hackers who had been sent to prison.

It would be nice if there was substantially less of this to report for our next issue. What is the EFF? (Summer, 1990) One of the results of our public outcry over the hacker raids this spring has been the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Founded by computer industry giants Mitch Kapor and Steve Wozniak along with writer John Barlow, the EFF 501 94192c13.qxd 6/3/08 3:34 PM Page 502 502 Chapter 13 sought to put an end to raids on publishers, bulletin board operators, and all of the others that have been caught up in recent events. The EFF founders, prior to the organization’s actual birth this summer, had said they would provide financial support to those affected by unjust Secret Service raids.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Michael O'Malley from Yale University Press deserves special thanks for helping me decide to write the book that I really wanted to write, not something else, and then stay the course. [pg 10] 4 This book has been more than a decade in the making. Its roots go back to 1993-1994: long nights of conversations, as only graduate students can have, with Niva Elkin Koren about democracy in cyberspace; a series of formative conversations with Mitch Kapor; a couple of madly imaginative sessions with Charlie Nesson; and a moment of true understanding with Eben Moglen. Equally central from around that time, but at an angle, were a paper under Terry Fisher's guidance on nineteenth-century homesteading and the radical republicans, and a series of classes and papers with Frank Michelman, Duncan Kennedy, Mort Horwitz, Roberto Unger, and the late David Charny, which led me to think quite fundamentally about the role of property and economic organization in the construction of human freedom.