Twitter Arab Spring

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The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moises Naim

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deskilling, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, intangible asset, intermodal, invisible hand, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megacity, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The Internet and other tools are undeniably transforming politics, activism, business, and, of course, power. But too often, this fundamental role is exaggerated and misunderstood. New information technologies are tools—and to have an impact, tools need users, who in turn need goals, direction, and motivation. Facebook, Twitter, and text messages were fundamental in empowering the protesters in the Arab Spring. But the protesters and the circumstances that motivated them to take to the streets are driven by circumstances at home and abroad that have nothing to do with the new information tools at their disposal. Millions of people participated in the demonstrations that brought down Hosni Mubarak in Egypt—but at its peak, the Facebook page credited with helping to spur protests there had only 350,000 members.

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Indeed, a recent study of Twitter traffic during the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings found that more than 75 percent of people who clicked on embedded Twitter links related to those struggles were from outside the Arab world.17 Another study, by the US Institute of Peace, which also examined patterns of Twitter use during the Arab Spring, concluded that new media “did not appear to play a significant role in either in-country collective action or regional diffusion” of the uprising.18 First and foremost among the drivers of protest was the demographic reality of young people in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria—people who are healthier and better-educated than ever before but also unemployed and deeply frustrated.

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Some giant corporations or institutions prove vulnerable to nimble new competitors; others seem to ward them off as if swatting flies. It will never be possible to predict every shift in power. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the eruption of the Arab Spring, the decline of erstwhile newspaper giants like the Washington Post, and the sudden emergence of Twitter as an information provider attest to the impossibility of knowing what power shifts await around the corner. THE IMPORTANCE OF BARRIERS TO POWER Although predicting specific power shifts is a fool’s errand, understanding the trends that alter either the distribution of power or its very nature is not.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

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

Ressa, “The Internet and New Media: Tools for Countering Extremism and Building Community Resilience,” May 1, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1142/9781908977540_0010. 7.Much has been written and said about this. See, e.g., William Saletan, “Springtime for Twitter: Is the Internet Driving the Revolutions of the Arab Spring?,” Slate, July 18, 2011, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/07/springtime_for_twitter.html; and D. Hill, “Op-Ed: The Arab Spring Is Not the Facebook Revolution,” Ottawa Citizen, November 16, 2011. 8.Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” 1964, https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf. 9.Suw Charman Anderson, “The Role of Dopamine in Social Media,” ComputerWeekly.Com, November 26, 2009. 10.Jack Fuller, What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism (London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 46. 11.Suzanne Choney, “Facebook Use Can Lower Grades by 20%, Study Says,” NBC News, September 7, 2010, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39038581. 12.This rolled out in the United States to select users in August 2015.

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In the workshop, I spoke about the possibilities I saw in the internet: the cataclysmic way it was changing the way we thought and acted.6 At that point, I saw only the positives for democracy. With my keynote presentation, I took the students to the Middle East and North Africa—Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Libya—which had just experienced the Arab Spring that year. In the West, those revolutions had triggered a debate about whether Facebook and Twitter had spawned them.7 But regardless of where the academics came down on the question, clearly the internet, and social media specifically, had been a critical factor in igniting long-standing grievances, breaking down people’s fears, enhancing their courage, and fast-tracking protests that might otherwise have taken months and years to organize.

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

And why we seem to define ourselves as much by what we hate as by what we love. 1 If Facebook ever gets tired of that minimalist f and wants a new logo, I suggest, on a blue background: two white people arguing about what another white person said about Africa. 2 It would be interesting to see if residents of countries where stoning is still used as a real-world punishment take as much joy in the digital version. 3 In Australia these tags are outfitted with transponders that notify local beachgoers when a shark is nearby. The tags communicate to us … via Twitter. 4 And, as they do online, the users even had “handles.” 5 The Arab Spring, for example, was Twitter’s debut as a tool of global importance, and the service has also facilitated protests in Guatemala, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. 10. Tall for an Asian 11. Ever Fallen in Love? 12. Know Your Place 13. Our Brand Could Be Your Life 14. Breadcrumbs 10.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

And yet as development economists we are also keenly aware that the most remarkable fact about the last forty years is the pace of change, good and bad. The fall of communism, the rise of China, the halving and then halving again of world poverty, the explosion of inequality, the upsurge and downswing in HIV, the huge drop in infant mortality, the spread of the personal computer and the cell phone, Amazon and Alibaba, Facebook and Twitter, the Arab Spring, the spread of authoritarian nationalism and looming environmental catastrophes—we have seen them all in the last four decades. In the late 1970s, when Abhijit was taking baby steps toward becoming an economist, the Soviet Union still commanded respect, India was figuring out how to be more like it, the extreme left worshipped China, the Chinese worshipped Mao, Reagan and Thatcher were just beginning their assault on the modern welfare state, and 40 percent of the world population was in dire poverty.

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy by Robert Peters

Airbnb, bounce rate, business climate, citizen journalism, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital map, fake it until you make it, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, pull request, revision control, ride hailing / ride sharing, search engine result page, sharing economy, Skype, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, turn-by-turn navigation, Twitter Arab Spring, ubercab

For this reason, Twitter seems to readily turn members into citizen journalists during news events and natural disasters. This lends an unusual degree of social relevance to the community that has made it even more acceptable in the eyes of mainstream culture. For instance, much of the information that reached the west from the Arab Spring democracy movement (2010-2013) did so via Twitter. Much of Twitter’s success stems from the sweet spot of having found a perfect product idea for the time that paired exceptional built-in virality with high social relevance. Couple that with ease of use, and growth was all but guaranteed. Instagram The online photo and video-sharing social network Instagram launched in October 2010 and gained 100,000 users in one week.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

They envisioned a borderless world in which citizens, buoyed by technology, could expose and thereby rectify structural problems. Their enthusiasm extended to social media corporations, which were often credited for a successful demonstration instead of the actual protesters. In the West, Iran’s 2009 uprising was deemed a “Twitter Revolution” and the Arab Spring was called a “Facebook Revolution.” Western conceptions of success led to the hardship of protesters on the ground being played down. The potential threat of their corporate supporters was also poorly discerned. Social media corporations that would grow into powerful surveillance monopolies presented themselves in the early 2010s as fellow underdogs in the broader struggle against the system.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Crash Every city contains the DNA of its own destruction—some existing fissure that, under pressure, can erupt into conflict or cascade into collapse. Smart technologies are already fueling conflict between factions in divided cities. The extent of the role played by social media in the 2011 urban uprisings of the Arab Spring has been hotly debated. But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were a mere sideshow to the torrent of text messages that turned angry crowds into smart mobs, as they have done numerous times since 2001, when they summoned some 700,000 Filipinos to protests against corrupt President Joseph Estrada. These wireless channels, which provide what is for all intents and purposes a rudimentary form of telepathic communication, were so important that at the height of the Egyptian uprising authorities lobotomized Cairo by ordering a shutdown of the nation’s cellular networks.

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., 36 structural design, innovations in, 19–30 Stuxnet, 266–69 suburbia, 101, 143 Sunlight Foundation, 238 supply-chain management, 77 surveillance, 270–76 private systems of, 275 Surveillance Camera Players, protest theater of, 13 Switzerland, 87 Symantec, 268 systems analysis: dynamics techniques in, 77, 81, 86 engineering in, 77 urban modelling in, 84–86, 88–90 Tabulating Machine Company, 61–62 Tallinn, 245 Taylor, Robert, 260 TCP (Transmission Protocol), 266 TCP/IP, 110 Teach for America, 238 TechCrunch, 151 technology: city-funded projects for, 243 disasters of, 256–58 innovation in, 107–10 overstandardization of, 249–51 repurposing of, 119–20 scaling of, 165, 201, 232, 243, 249, 313–14 as a tool of empowerment, 117–20 technology industry: limited urban understanding of, 224, 247–48 rhetoric of, 107, 278, 288, 317 “walled gardens” of, 123 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), 67 Tel Aviv, 233 telecom bubble, 44 Telecom Italia, 137, 161 telecommunications industry, 109–11 obstruction by, 197–98 telecommuting, 6 telegraph: city administration changed through, 5 as first urban digital communication network, 42 as fourth utility, 44 history of, 42–44, 254 industrial management changed through, 5 police use of, 5 in railroad operations, 5 Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske, 38 telemetry, 150 telephone: early history of, 5 evolution since 1970s of, 35–37 historical role in social networks, 160–61 TelePresence videoconferencing systems, 46, 49 Teoría General de la Urbanización (General Theory of Urbanization) (Cerdà), 43–44 terrorism, 270–71 Tesla, Nicola, 56 Thinking About the Unthinkable (Kahn), 277 Thomas, Martyn, 265 Tidepools, 293 Tivadar, Puskás, 254 Tokyo, Shibuya Crossing at, 34–35 Tolva, John, 64–65, 208–11, 294 To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (Howard), 94 “topsight,” 70, 72, 87 Torrone, Phillip, 137–39 Total Information Awareness (TIA), 270–72 Toughbook, 127 traffic engineers, 100–101 traffic jams: impact on cities, 99–103 prediction of, 7 Trendnet, 275 Triumph of the City (Glaeser), 160 Turner, Ted, 116 Twitter, 135, 151, 154–55, 240 in Arab Spring, 12 in Moldovan “Revolution,” 169, 171 in Spain’s anti-austerity protests, 161–62, 218 Uber, 232 ubicomp (ubiquitous computing), 113 “u-chip,” 23 “u-cities,” 26 Ullman, Ellen, 256 uncertainty principle, 88 Union Square Ventures, 154 United Nations: in declaration on Internet access, 288 demographic predictions of, 1–2 Foundation of, 278 Global Pulse project of, 181–84, 191 Millennium Development Goals of, 175 Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative at, 163 University College (London), 85 urban dynamics, 82–83, 89 Urban Dynamics (Forrester), 76–78, 82, 86 urban expressways, 101–2 “urban informatics,” systems to process signals as, 32 “urban information architecture,” management and business of, 32 urbanism, sustainable, 83 urbanization: digital technology intersection with, 4 problems of, 8, 162 Urban Land Institute, 30 urban planning, 77–92, 311–16 with computer modelling, 81, 295–98 cybernetics in, 84 “data enthusiasm” in, 315 grassroots organizing in, 8–9, 102–5, 235 impact of cars in, 98–106 innovative potential of, 9–11, 305–6 lattice vs.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

At the same time, only roughly one-quarter of the developing world was online by the end of 2011 : that is, there is a still a huge percentage of the population yet to be connected there, and connect they will. Some of the fastest growth rates in social media usage are in the Middle East and North Africa, no doubt inspired by the prominent role played by Facebook, Twitter, et cetera during the Arab Spring. According to the Arab Social Media Report series, which counts users of social media in the Arab World, the number of Facebook users nearly tripled in one year, from 16 million in June 2011 to 45 million by June 2012. Egypt alone constitutes one-quarter of all Facebook users in the region, and Arabic is the fastest-growing language used to communicate on Twitter.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

First, it would abstain from the highly emotional and polemical discussions over what “the Net” or even “social media” do to our brains, freedom, and dictators. This post-Internet approach is much more interested in the world of trash bins and parking meters in our mundane everyday lives than in the role of Twitter in the Arab Spring—and not because it’s parochial in outlook but because it doesn’t believe in the power of such ambitious and ambiguous questions. The role of Twitter’s algorithms in highlighting the #Jan25 hash tag, which brought some global attention to the cause of the protesters in Tahrir Square, on the other hand, is fair game.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

Oldenburg also points out how third places have been essential to forming the kinds of large, loose-knit social groups that are the core of new social movements, such as the agora in ancient Greek democracy, taverns around the American Revolution, and coffeeshops during the Age of Enlightenment, which parallels how Twitter was used for the Arab Spring or the Black Lives Matter protests. You can’t fit enough dissenters in your living room to make a revolution out of close ties alone: you need the larger, looser network of a third place. Third places have been hacked into existence from the very early stages of using computers to talk with each other.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

But while Washington was struggling to understand how to go on the offense against groups that were using social media as a way to organize attacks, Silicon Valley was still unable or unwilling to face the extent of the problem. For years the world’s most brilliant technologists convinced themselves that once they connected the world, a truer, global democracy would emerge. They rejoiced when Twitter and WhatsApp made the Arab Spring possible, and were convinced they had built the weapon that would tear down autocrats and beget new, more transparent democracies. But over time a harsher truth has emerged. Those same networks became ISIS’s most potent tool. They were exploited by Russian trolls and the political targeteers at Cambridge Analytica to manipulate voters.

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

Closer analysis showed that only a small percentage of Iranians used Twitter (many tweets on the alleged election fraud originated from westerners), and that early coverage of the events instead “revealed intense Western longing for a world where information technology is the liberator rather than the oppressor.” Similar early characterizations by journalists and politicians highlighted the important role of Facebook and Twitter in the 2011 Arab Spring (protests throughout the Arab world that led to the overthrow of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt) and the 2011 international Occupy Movement (sit-in demonstrations against political and economic inequality and concentrated corporate power that began with an Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park).

The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data by Michael P. Lynch

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Mechanical Turk, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, Firefox, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, Internet of things, John von Neumann, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patient HM, prediction markets, RFID, sharing economy, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Over and above its inadvertent hilarity, this reminds us that the Internet is a revolutionary tool partly because it allows people to look for the truth on their own—independently of what governments, the scientific establishment or their own mother think is true. Perhaps the most striking example of this was the Arab Spring. As is now well documented, social media—specifically Twitter—not only allowed protesters to effectively organize, it gave them a way to let the world know about what was happening in their countries—countries that were ruthless in squashing regular media outlets. Since then, Twitter activism has only increased, and protest movements around the world use it to get their message out and to speak truth to power.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Now the Web encompassed everything from academic authors lobbying for open access to amateur pornographers uploading homemade smut to the website YouPorn. It was Project Gutenberg, and Eldritch Press, and a million tart gossip blogs, and a billion uninformed website comments. It was Tunisians and Egyptians using Twitter to coordinate protests during the Arab Spring; it was Tunisians and Egyptians using Facebook to waste time at work. Decentralized by design, the Web was a tool that rapidly animated and disseminated ideas good, bad, and between. That most people seemed only to use it for banter and ephemera was no demerit; the medium’s discursiveness was a sign of its strength.

The 99.998271% by Simon Wood

banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, equal pay for equal work, Julian Assange, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Steve Jobs, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

With this in mind, the websites 23 of the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Association were the best bets for accurate information as they both report to the UN and maintenance of credibility is more important to them than any ideological or profit concern. Is there a way to organize and harness the flow of accurate information from real experts to ordinary people directly? Mass social media like Twitter and Facebook have already proven their value to democracy as seen in the recent Arab Spring uprisings in which these media tools were used tactically by oppressed populations. Such was the threat to the establishments that attempts were even made to block these sites. There is no doubt that organized social media accessible to all is now the single biggest nightmare for every oppressor on the planet.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

But, in turn, several of the SHAC hactivists were convicted for various crimes, including Internet stalking and using their websites to incite violence. But no one should think that hactivism is solely antibusiness. Recently, private firms have grown more involved in various hacktivist endeavors. For example, during the 2011 “Arab Spring” popular uprisings, firms like Google, Twitter, and Skype provided technical support to protesters and various workarounds to the government Internet censorship. When the Egyptian government tried to shut down Internet access during the mass protests, the firms provided a service called “Speak to Tweet,” whereby voicemail messages left by phone were converted to text tweets and downloadable audio files, so that news could still get out.

How to Fix Copyright by William Patry

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, barriers to entry, big-box store, borderless world, bread and circuses, business cycle, business intelligence, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lone genius, means of production, moral panic, new economy, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, search costs, semantic web, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

This expansion came as a result of changes in the larger online news environment, and includes the integration of video, images, and social media. As a result of these changes and the vast expansion of individuals becoming both participants and reporters in critical events (think of the 2011 “Arab Spring” and the role played by Facebook and Twitter), consumers demand more news and faster. News organizations have to respond to these changes or be left behind. There are two ways to get to a news company’s website. The first way is for the news company to make its site attractive so that people come there as a destination site, and then stay there.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative, born in 2005, aimed to disrupt education “for all kids—especially those in developing nations” by means of a one-hundred-dollar laptop.24 A few years later, antiregime protests in Iran were dubbed as the “Twitter Revolution” in the press, and academics would credit Facebook for mobilising activists and coordinating protests during the Arab Spring uprisings.25 The internet and social media seemed like unmitigated goods, with any downsides so minor as to be barely worth consideration. As for the upsides, the sky was the limit—after all, technology and games had already helped win the US presidency.

…

“Annan Presents Prototype $100 Laptop at World Summit on Information Society,” MIT News, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 16, 2005, https://news.mit.edu/2005/laptop-1116. 25. “Iran and the ‘Twitter Revolution,’” PEJ New Media Index, Pew Research Center, June 25, 2009, www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2009/06/25/iran-and-twitter-revolution; Catherine O’Donnell, “New Study Quantifies Use of Social Media in Arab Spring,” UW News, University of Washington, September 12, 2011, www.washington.edu/news/2011/09/12/new-study-quantifies-use-of-social-media-in-arab-spring. 26. Jose Antonio Vargas, “Obama Raised Half a Billion Online,” The Clickocracy, Washington Post, November 20, 2008, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/11/20/obama_raised_half_a_billion_on.html. 27.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World by Catie Marron

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, do-ocracy, fixed-gear, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, plutocrats, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning

“Replies between like-minded individuals strengthen group identity whereas replies between different-minded individuals reinforce ingroup and outgroup affiliation,” Yardi and boyd observed. In early 2013, a group of computer scientists based at the Qatar Computer Research Institute in Doha studied how Twitter was affecting political debate in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.† After collecting seventeen million tweets dispatched between the summers of 2012 and 2013, they concluded that the different “Islamist” or “secular” groups were often polarized—but still bumped into each other online, as a result of hashtags. What was really interesting was that the level of polarization seen on Twitter tended to foreshadow what was happening in the “real” world: When political fighting broke out on the streets, it went hand in hand with growing fragmentation of the Twitter debate.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

Ibrahim Saleh “WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring: The Twists and Turns of Media, Culture, and Power,” Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 237. 6. WikiLeaks, “Cable: 09TUNIS516-a,” wikileaks.org, last accessed June 5, 2014, available at https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/ 09TUNIS516_a.html. 7. John Pollock, “How Egyptian and Tunisian youth hacked the Arab Spring,” technologyreview.com, Aug. 23, 2011. 8. See twitter.com/TAKRIZ, last accessed June 5, 2014. 9. “Tunisia suicide protester Mohammed Bouazizi dies,” bbc.com, Jan. 5, 2011. 10. “Thousands of Tunisia lawyers strike,” aljazeera.com, Jan. 6, 2011. 11. Tarek Amara, “Tunisian government says two killed in clashes,” reuters.com, Jan. 9, 2011. 12.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Zeynep Tufekci and David Talbot, “A Leading Voice of the Egyptian Revolution Says Social Media Failed to Sustain the Movement and Talks about What Comes Next,” MIT Technology Review, April 16, 2016, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601241/remaking-social-media-for-the-next-revolution/. 28. Mahmoud Salem, “You Can’t Stop the Signal,” World Policy Journal 31, no. 3 (2014): 34–40. Also see Marc Lynch, “Twitter Devolutions: How Social Media Is Hurting the Arab Spring,” Foreign Policy 7 (2013). 29. McAdam, “Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency.” Chapter 4. Movement Cultures 1. Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012), and “The Indignant Citizen: Anti-Austerity Movements in Southern Europe and the Anti-Oligarchic Reclaiming of Citizenship,” Social Movement Studies 16, no. 1 (2017): 36–50. 2.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

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

On Ask.fm, another recruiter answered questions about his favourite desert, his beard, life in the battle. Images circulated of jihadists cuddling kittens, eating Snickers, playing video games, beheading their enemies.38 Five years after the Iranian Green Movement and three years after the ‘Arab Spring’ birthed such a brief reprise of cyber-utopianism, here was a ‘Twitter revolution’ that was actually in the middle of taking power. Here was a makeshift theocratic state, of all things, assembled with the logic of the swarm, occupying and keeping public space. Here was a right-wing, networked social movement, a reactionary guerrilla campaign, a band of mercenary adventurers, a brand, a hashtag, which had fully mastered the idiom of the platforms.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

The global spread of democracy signals not the liberation of the enlightened masses from elite domination but the manipulation of the masses by dark forces operating behind the scenes. His efforts have been abetted by radically changing perceptions of the role of social media in politics. If, in the initial euphoric days of the Arab Spring, social media were seen as ‘liberation technologies’103 and Facebook, Google and Twitter were signs of the coming democratic future of the world, these same social media are now universally associated with post-truth fragmentation, polarization and the coming end of democracy. Post-communist Russia illustrates how a handful of politically unaccountable and self-enriching rulers have, despite internal rivalries, managed to stay atop the country’s fragmented society without resorting to historically significant levels of mass violence.

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

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

See also cognition conversational thinkers, 11 Thomas, Dorothy, 58–60 Thomas, Douglas, 195 Thordarson, Kami, 176–78, 181 thoughtcasting, 222 Threadless, 169 3-D design, 111–13 benefits of, 112–13 3-D printers, 111–13 3-D scans, 113 Tiananmen Square rebellion, 271 Timehop, 39, 140 time-lapse video, 99–100 tip-of-the-tongue, 115–16 TiVo, 96 Topalov, Veselin, 3–4 TotalRecall, 19–23, 26 transactive memory, 124–31 benefits of, 128 collaborative inhibition, 131 human/machine collaboration, 126–31, 138–44 of married couples, 124–26, 134 Trivedi, Aseem, 275–76 Tufekci, Zeynep, 214, 258, 267 Tufte, Edward, 93 tummeling, 79–80 Tunisia, Arab Spring, 257 Twain, Mark, 224 Twenge, Jean, 221 Twiddler, 138 Twitter. See also social networks and ambient awareness, 210–44 characters limit, benefits of, 76 hashtag, development of, 65–66 learning digital etiquette on, 188 politics, exposure to, 262–63 size of following and retweets, 234–35 writing on, daily volume, 47 Two Sigma phenomenon, 177 Usenet, 149 Ushahidi, 62–63, 265–66 U.S.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

fossil fuels for making power: Mitchell (2011) and Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). “filled with passengers”: Fox-Penner (2014), xiii. to bring down governments: Most famously, ordinary Egyptians and Tunisians used Facebook and Twitter to help coordinate their respective versions of the Arab Spring in 2011. “don’t want power lines.”: Chris Kahn and Eric Tucker, “Easy Fix Eludes Power Outage Problems in U.S.,” Yahoo! Finance, July 4, 2012, http://finance.yahoo.com/news/easy-fix-eludes-power-outage-problems-us-220940392.html. “and out come fuels”: David Rotman, “Praying for an Energy Miracle,” MIT Technology Review, February 22, 2011, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/422836/praying-for-an-energy-miracle/.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

As messages moved from one user to another, more than a million people arrived in downtown Manila to object to congresspeople’s complicity in Estrada’s corruption and crimes. After the capital was brought to a standstill, the legislators reversed their decision, and Estrada was impeached. Less than a decade later, it was social media’s turn. Facebook and Twitter were used by protesters during the Arab Spring, helping to topple long-ruling autocrats Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. One of the leaders of the Egyptian protests and a computer engineer at Google, Wael Ghonim, summarized both the mood among some of the protesters and the optimism in the tech world when he said in an interview: “I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him, actually.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Gates was on the National Security Council in 1979 when, in his view, the United States had pulled the rug out from under the shah, with the expectation that a democratic revolution would follow. The result instead was the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, U.S. diplomats held hostage for 444 days, and the implacably hostile Islamic Republic. The more junior advisers around the president vigorously disagreed. They were caught up by the excitement of the Arab Spring and felt an affinity for the Facebook and Twitter generation. Sure of the power and sweep of Obama’s oratory, they urged the president to not hesitate in pushing Mubarak aside. They told Obama that he should be “on the right side of history.” “But how can anyone know which is the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ side of history,” Gates later wrote, “when nearly all revolutions, begun with hope and idealism, culminate in repression and bloodshed?

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

If public officials are engaging in repression in a local city, you can use Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to get the news out immediately. Individual citizens can serve as reporters. They can expose misconduct, corruption, or suffering—and increase the likelihood that something will be done about it. During the Arab Spring, one Egyptian protester tweeted, “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.”3 Social media publicize developments in real time, and they let the world know what is happening. Sometimes Facebook and Twitter are the best places to look if you want to know about some disaster, discovery, or coup.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Opposition movements have hit the streets determined to avoid the power structures and abuses that hierarchies bring, and to immunize themselves against the mistakes of the twentieth-century left. The values, voices and morals of the networked generation were so obvious in these revolts that, from the Spanish indignados to the Arab Spring, the media at first believed they had been caused by Facebook and Twitter. Then, in 2013–14, revolts broke out in some of the most iconic developing economies: Turkey, Brazil, India, Ukraine and Hong Kong. Millions took to the streets, again with the networked generation in the lead – but now their grievances went to the heart of what is broken in modern capitalism.

The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Even with heroic efforts to the contrary, digital information flows are difficult to stop— and knowledge and social coordination can be extremely powerful when it comes to standing up to despots. â•… But the corresponding backlash by authoritarian rulers, who also have learned a thing or two about digital communication, is undermining naïve predictions made across the Western world in the wake of the Arab Spring. Everyone seemed to think that it was only a matter of time before Twitter revolutions began toppling despots left and right. It was a return to the notion, initially articulated by Francis Fukuyama, that we had reached the democratic endpoint, the “End of History”4—but this time the end would be announced in 140 characters or fewer.

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

It turned everyone into a diarist, a philosopher, an activist—even if that activism was merely clicking a “like” button. Both Facebook and Twitter, a social platform originally designed for 140-word “microblog” status updates, became powerful mechanisms for political organizing and communication during the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements of 2011. Twitter swiftly gained a disproportionate number of African American users and “Black Twitter” became a powerful platform for both civic activism and cultural exchange; the most powerful racial justice movement of the century’s second decade, Black Lives Matter, began as a Twitter hashtag.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

“As designers, investors, commentators, we need to seriously ask ourselves whether some of these systems are legitimate and worthy,” Marc Andresseen tweeted in March 2014. “. . . not from an investment return point of view, but from an ethical and moral point of view.”47 Anonymous or not, the people formerly known as the audience are not only angry; some of them are also propagandists of terror and genocide. After the 2010–11 Arab Spring, many Internet evangelists—such as the Google executive and author of Revolution 2.0 Wael Ghonim—argued that social media networks like Facebook and Twitter were undermining the old autocracies in the Middle East and empowering the people. But as the Arab Spring has degenerated into brutal religious and ethnic civil wars in Syria and Iraq, and the reestablishment of military dictatorship in Ghonim’s own Egypt, social media has been leveraged in a much more corrosive way. “By a geopolitical fluke,” notes the Financial Times’ David Gardner, “the cold war ended just as technology developed unique power to encourage global tribes.”48 Twitter and Facebook are thus being used by both Sunni and Shiite radicals to spread their doctrinal message and find recruits in what the Financial Times calls “Jihad by social media.”49 In June 2014, for example, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) hijacked the soccer World Cup hashtags, used its Facebook accounts as “a death-threat generator,” and broadcast its atrocities on YouTube and Twitter, where it posted a video of a beheading with the message: “This is our ball.

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

In the first few weeks of protest in each country, the generation of people in the streets – and its leadership – was clearly not interested in the three major models of political Islam … Instead, these mostly cosmopolitan and younger generations of mobilizers felt disenfranchised by their political systems, saw vast losses in the poor management of national economies and development, and most importantly, a consistent and widely shared narrative of common grievances – a narrative which they learned about from each other and co-wrote on the digital spaces of political writing and venting on blogs, videos shared on Facebook and Twitter, and comment board discussions on international news sites like Al Jazeera and the BBC. The Arab Spring is historically unique because it is the first set of political upheavals in which all of these things [alienation from the state, consensus among the population in the protest, defence of the movement by the international public opinion] were digitally mediated … It is true that Facebook and Twitter did not cause revolutions, but it is silly to ignore the fact that the careful and strategic uses of digital media to network regional publics, along with international support networks, have empowered activists in new ways that have led to some of the largest protests this decade in Iran, the temporary lifting of the Egyptian blockade on Gaza, and the popular movements that ended the decades long rule of Mubarak and Ben Ali.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

., 112 Trump Entertainment Resorts, 2 Trumpbot overlord, 143–44 “trustworthiness” score, 102 truth, 116 content moderation, 225, 233–34, 244–48 in early newspapers, 28–29 fight over. See propaganda vs. virality, 119–20 Tufekci, Zeynep, 270 Tumblr, 194 Tunisia, 84–85, 213 Turkey, 90–95, 185 Twitter ability to incite violence, 201 activism, 86, 214–16 Arab Spring, 126 authenticity, 166 bin Laden operation, 53–55 Boston Marathon Bombing, 66 botnets, 139, 145–46 censorship, 231, 237, 239 content creation, 58, 247 Duterte, emoji for, 15 extremist groups, 170 fake accounts and news, 131, 142, 143–44 Flynn and, 81 GVA Dictator Alert, 75–76 honeypot, 115 Iranian election (2009), 84 Israel, 199 metadata, 57 Mexican cartels, 69–70 Mosul, attack of, 4–7 Mumbai massacre, 62 origin of, 1–2, 19, 219 profit, 243 regulation, 228–29, 230 Russia and, 111–14, 138–47 smartphones, 48–49 terrorism, 65, 149, 235–36 transparency reports, 232 Trump and, 15, 168–69, 173–74, 175 Turkish coup, 90–95 volunteers, 214 war in real time, 193, 194 Twitterbomb, 142 U Ukraine election safety, 264 flight MH17, 72, 73–74 internet army, 211 vs.

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter by Susan Pinker

assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, facts on the ground, fixed-gear, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, indoor plumbing, intentional community, invisible hand, Kickstarter, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, Occupy movement, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), place-making, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, tontine, Tony Hsieh, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, Yogi Berra

And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.”31 Being There As we’ve seen, the process of social contagion begins with mimicry: sensing what other people are doing in real time and unconsciously doing it too. Like the chimps who “aped” their tree-signaling buddies, you have to be in close proximity for synchrony to happen. Online networks can mobilize people’s votes and political protests can spread via Twitter and Facebook, as was the case during the astounding transformations of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. But even if the images and invitations to participate were transmitted electronically, the protests happened face-to-face. Anyone who saw the mobs, the tent cities, and the riot police knows that the expression “You had to be there” still holds.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Mark Zuckerberg pivots to the social justice movements and marriages fostered by Facebook when asked about its role in enabling Russian election interference, the neo-Nazis gathering on Facebook groups, and the murders streamed on Facebook Live. While misinformation, menace, and calls to violence circulate among the hundreds of millions of videos viewed each day on Google’s YouTube, the company accepted plaudits for building “global community.”[13] Twitter publicly celebrated its role in linking activists during the pro-democracy Arab Spring protests and the nascent Black Lives Matter movement in the early 2010s while racist and misogynist attacks skyrocketed. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” former chief executive Dick Costolo wrote in an internal memo in 2015.[14] A year later, Charlie Warzel, then a senior tech writer for BuzzFeed, investigated Twitter’s abuse problem in an article titled “ ‘A Honeypot for Assholes’: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure to Stop Harassment.”[15] Several women and people of color had left the platform in 2016, amid torrents of abuse and threats, including Leslie Jones, then at Saturday Night Live.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

., 35, 55, 61, 123, 136, 141, 148, 188, 209, 216, 223, 265, 269 competitiveness investing and, 236–37, 244–45, 247–48 and elections of 2016, xi, 10–12, 16–17, 49, 58, 60, 67, 70, 153–54, 170 and elections of 2020, 84, 86 Huawei and, 120–22 Silicon Valley–Washington relations and, 170–71, 175 tweeting of, 17, 66, 170–71 U.S.–Chinese relations and, xii, 11, 33, 205 Trust and Safety Agency, 215, 250–51 Tufekci, Zeynep, 55 Tunisia, 37–38 Twain, Mark, 53–54 Twitter, xi, 6, 28, 49, 64, 68, 84, 128, 162, 172, 193, 201, 227 Arab Spring and, 37–38 deepfakes and, 138–39 digital citizenship strengthening and, 260, 262–64 digital Maginot lines and, 82–83 and elections of 2020, 85–87 fake news and, 17, 53, 55 information laundering and, 70–72 IRA disinformation and, 57–59 Silicon Valley–Washington relations and, 170–71, 174, 177, 251 tech role reimagining and, 251–52 Trump’s use of, 17, 66, 170–71 Ukraine, 12, 57, 65, 80 digital citizenship strengthening and, 259–60, 262 Russian invasion of, 27, 41–42, 141, 203 United Kingdom, xx, 21, 23, 32–33, 52–53, 57, 103–4, 113, 121, 155, 162, 183, 203, 205n, 214, 233, 248 Skripal case and, 72–75, 78 telecom infrastructure, 92–93, 107, 111 United Nations, 27, 39, 113–14, 148, 162 U.S.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Corrupt government leads to corrupt people which leads to poverty. Honest open government leads to honest open people, freedom and wealth. Ukraine’s revolution built around texting led to other revolutions. After the Orange Revolution, Facebook and Twitter were instrumental to the successful overthrowing of corrupt governments in Tunisia and Egypt, in the so-called Arab Spring. Freedom and openness are spreading through viral marketing. The countries of the world are all connected now, and they have been put on notice that they need to perform for their constituents or they may have a viral revolution on their hands.

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Even if more determined adversaries were prepared to mount substantial attacks, the result would likely be “mass disruption” rather than “mass destruction,” with inconvenience and disorientation more evident than terror and collapse.41 The use of social networking, such as Facebook and Twitter, during the early days of the Arab Spring of 2011 illustrated how swarming could leave governments uncertain about how to cope with a rapidly developing public opinion. Such tactics followed well-established principles from before the information age. Radical groups, especially during their early stages, were often based on loose networks of individuals.

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, Vestal Mcintyre

basic income, call centre, centre right, classic study, clean water, confounding variable, crowdsourcing, data science, demand response, drone strike, experimental economics, failed state, George Akerlof, Google Earth, guns versus butter model, HESCO bastion, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, Internet of things, iterative process, land reform, mandatory minimum, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, natural language processing, operational security, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, statistical model, the scientific method, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

“When cell phone coverage is present,” they wrote, “the likelihood of conflict occurrence is substantially higher than otherwise.”54 That finding seems consistent with findings from the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. Philip Howard and Muzammil Hussain collected qualitative evidence on the role of technology in the Arab Spring and concluded that “the Internet, mobile phones, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter made the difference this time. Using these technologies, people interested in democracy could build extensive networks, create social capital, and organize political action with a speed and on a scale never seen before. Thanks to these technologies, virtual networks materialized in the streets.”55 Perhaps the most conspicuous response to ICT-fueled collective action came on 27 January 2011, at the height of protests in Tahrir Square, Cairo, when President Hosni Mubarak gave an unprecedented order that all mobile providers suspend service.56 This was not a new tactic in the Middle East.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

It is hard to envision the democratic transitions that occurred in sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s absent the power of the images of the crumbling Berlin Wall that echoed around the world. Similarly, the timing of protests against autocratic regimes during the Arab Spring was driven by television stations like Al Jazeera and by Twitter and Facebook as much as by domestic causes. By the early twenty-first century, democracy has become truly globalized. Unfortunately, many of the mechanisms for the transmission of institutions across borders were much less gentle: through conquest, occupation, and often the physical enslavement or elimination of indigenous populations.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

TMZ ran the story of Michael Jackson’s death before anyone else because they were willing to publish the story based on less evidence than CNN or The New York Times. In that particular case, they turned out to be right, but it doesn’t always work out that way. During fast-breaking news events, like the Arab Spring, journalists aren’t always on site. Reports from regular citizens hit the Web through Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. These can be reliable sources of information, especially when considered as a collection of observations. Nonprofessional journalists—citizens who are swept up in a crisis—provide timely, firsthand accounts of events. But they don’t always distinguish in their reports what they’ve perceived firsthand from what they’ve simply heard through rumor or innuendo.

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

You have Bitmessage – a decentralized system of sending and receiving emails without Google or Hotmail or whoever your email service provider might be having access to your messages. Nobody can read them, except the people you send them to. You have Twister – like Twitter, but peer-to-peer and with no central body. It’s a much safer way to organize an Arab Spring or indulge in the kind of free speech that can get you into trouble. You can register ownership of financial assets and have contracts verified on a block chain. This has all sorts of implications for Wall Street, the City and the huge business models of share registrars and brokers.

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World by Srdja Popovic, Matthew Miller

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, British Empire, corporate governance, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Rosa Parks, Twitter Arab Spring, urban planning, urban sprawl

And while today we’re fortunate enough to have at our disposal amazing technologies that make it easy for anyone to hop right into the activist lifestyle—things like cellular phones, social networks, and omnipresent cameras—it’s important to remember that plenty of movements existed before those tools were even dreamed of, and plenty of causes that relied too heavily on technology have failed miserably. If you Google “Facebook and Twitter revolutions” you will see how the media have covered the last few years of protests—ranging from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street—as if contemporary activism is just some new feature on a smartphone or a cool app to be downloaded. That’s why people like Turkey’s prime minister feel comfortable going on television and telling his people that the marches in the streets of Istanbul are little more than a ash mob organized through Twitter.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

In Syria, mobile-phone and internet subscriptions continued to grow throughout the civil war, confirmation that in times of crisis people want more information.22 When the president of Turkey, Recep Erdoǧan, shut down his country’s Twitter networks in 2014, he drove up public interest in learning how to use Twitter to get around state interference. When the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, shut down his country’s internet during the Arab Spring, he drove more Egyptians into the streets of Cairo and ultimately lost his job. The global spread of cellphone towers and wifiaccess points has been rapid. By 2015 there were almost 100,000 towers, a thousand cellular network companies, and well over a million wifiaccess points.23 When closed countries do open up, information-deprived communities clamor for internet access.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Shifts of these magnitudes often bring incredible opportunities, jarring sociological adjustment and, on many occasions, even violence. The Internet, social media and smartphones brought us email, selfies, hashtags and YouTube, but they also brought us the Arab Spring, ISIS propaganda, Wikileaks, NSA’s PRISM programme and the global Occupy movement. Social media gave us Facebook and Twitter and arguably propelled Barak Obama to the presidency in 2008, but it has also allowed some of the most hateful and racist vilification in recent history to find a home. It has created cyberbullying that has left numerous victims in its wake and has exposed intimate details of both famous personalities and secret government agencies.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

., 75–76 Thought experiments failing company, 31 future learning machine, 54 Law of Amplification, 48–49 technology prediction, 52–53 Singer’s drowning child and variation, 212–213 wealth versus wisdom, 170–171 Toms Shoes, 84–87, 242(nn28,29,30) Transactional relationships, mentorship versus, 203–204 Transparency, governmental, 31–32. See also Democracy Tuggun, Isaac, 127–132, 215 Tunisia: Arab Spring, 32–33, 36–37, 62 Tunstall, Tricia, 270(n2), 273(n3) Turkle, Sherry, 40 Twenge, Jean, 262(n33) Twitter, 35–36, 51. See also Social media UNICEF, 193–194 Unilever Corporation, 83 Unintended consequences, 23, 55–56, 231(n27) United States American Revolution, 35, 232(n45) compassionate class, 189 creative class, 186 credit and debt, 60–61 digital divide, 9–10, 47–49 educational technology, x, 9–14, 114–121 electricity usage, 230(n16) entrepreneurial spirit, 177–178 inequality, x–xi, 47–49, 116–118 Internet censorship and spying, 52 modernization, 266–267(n11) racial and gender equality, 63–64 role model for developing countries, 215–216 women’s status, 178 United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 86, 272(n12) Universal suffrage, 63 Untouchables, India’s, 64 Urban migration, 268(n21) Uruguay: One Laptop Per Child, 8 Usury, 58.