Whole Earth Review

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pages: 339 words: 57,031

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

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

But, says Kelly, “The minute I saw the [new] prototype I knew it was going to work.”10 For Kelly, Wired marked a logical extension of the work he had been doing at the Whole Earth Review and that others had been doing at Mondo 2000. Both of those publications had begun to merge lifestyle issues and technology, but always with the low-rent production values of underground periodicals. Finally, Kelly thought, here was a magazine that would get the attention that the Whole Earth Review and Mondo had both deserved. Kelly signed on as executive editor, and in June of 1992 he joined Rossetto, Metcalfe, and Wilkinson on the board of the newly formed Wired Ventures.

The proper role of government in this new environment, many argued, was to pull back, to deregulate the technology industries that were ostensibly leading the transformation, and, while they were at it, business in general. Proponents of this view included telecommunications executives, hightech stock analysts, and right-wing politicians. Kevin Kelly, a former editor of the quarterly Whole Earth Review, which had grown out of the original Catalog, helped to bring them all to the pages of Wired. As the magazine’s executive editor, he argued that the world was a series of interlocking information systems, all of which were working to corrode the bureaucracies of the industrial era. To Kelly and the other creators of Wired, the suddenly public Internet appeared to be both the infrastructure and the symbol of the new economic era.

Once there, Kelly heard about an upcoming software industry gathering and decided to attend in the hope of meeting Stewart Brand. At the conference, Kelly pitched Brand the notion of producing an Essential Whole Earth Catalog, with Kelly himself as editor. Brand was noncommittal. He had liked Kelly’s work on Walking Journal and his contributions to the Whole Earth Review, but he already had his hands full with his software-related projects. Soon after the conference, though, Brand replaced Richard Dalton as editor [ 132 ] Chapter 4 of the Software Review with Art Kleiner, and, logging on to EIES, offered Kleiner’s editorship of CoEvolution Quarterly to Kelly—by e-mail.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

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

The geeky rebels had their PGP fingerprints written on the foreheads of the masks.32 The same year, in the summer of 1993, Kelly published a long story about the crypto anarchists in the anniversary issue of the Whole Earth Review, guest-edited by its founder, Stewart Brand. Earlier that year, Mosaic 1.0 had been released, the world’s first browser that could display graphics and text on the same page. The software, distributed for free, brought the web to life with color and images. Traffic exploded. The Whole Earth Review pointed out that the blooming network made encryption ever more necessary. By November 1992, when Mondo first mentioned the list, it had about a hundred members, including journalists and even a few people with .mil addresses.

“And phenomena like group drug-taking and rock-and-roll concerts and this sort of thing,” he said, “these are simply cultural anticipations of this coming age of electronic-pooling-of-identity.”70 McKenna had been heavily influenced by Stewart Brand’s philosophy, the Whole Earth Catalog’s infatuation with Wiener and Ashby, and later even edited one issue of the Whole Earth Review. McKenna pointed out that this global condition of “informational oneness” had become possible through the “advent of more advanced cybernetic systems and more advanced psychedelic drugs.”71 To the Amazon-traveling ethnobotanist, the very technology that began its evolution in air defense research—and was then refined in the Cold War—didn’t clash with the wholesome peace and oneness of the psychedelic subculture at all.

Everything was text, and command based. Thus, denizens of the WELL had to learn to use a clunky system that often broke down. At first the WELL remained a curious and somewhat freakish phenomenon, experienced in low resolution, in rounded, thick glass, and visibly flickering. Brand advertised the new platform a few times in the Whole Earth Review. His instinct was to offer free accounts to reporters, to spread the word faster. By 1986, the online community had grown to about five hundred.78 Six years later, the number was about six thousand. The WELL was perhaps the first proper online social network with general appeal. It had all the upsides and downsides that come with social media: it was addictive, it was entertaining, it was riveting, and it could be a waste of time.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

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

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

(Sales of the UK edition were almost nonexistent.) It was left to Paul Hawken, the Point Foundation’s financial officer, to break the news to the Review editors that their publication would be folded into the CoEvolution Quarterly to create the newly combined publication that Art Kleiner had named the Whole Earth Review. Kevin Kelly, who was editing the Quarterly, was put in charge of editing the two publications together into a strange mixture that pleased neither audience. The coup de grâce, however, was delivered by Richard Dalton, who had served as editor of the first two issues of the Review and then handed the job off to Kleiner.

(Concepts such as FAQ, flame, sock puppet, and spam all emerged from Usenet.)[21] Indeed, the culture that blossomed on the WELL was something of a throwback. Despite its state-of-the-art minicomputer, so-called WELL beings seemed to believe that the medium was as much a step backward toward the nineteenth-century literary salon as a step forward into the future. ‘‘People used to write letters all the time,’’ Howard Rheingold, a Whole Earth Review editor and a key member of the WELL community, told the New York Times. ‘‘Now we do again. It’s not for everybody. It’s for people who enjoy communicating through the written word.’’[22] Moreover, the community that sustained the WELL was not entirely online; rather, it became a creative hybrid, with lots of face-to-face socializing in which Brand frequently participated.

It would also give him an early and unique window into the online threat of fake identities and unverifiable and untraceable assertions that would come to haunt the entire world. Nevertheless, even though he grew troubled early on and relatively quickly moved on from the electronic community he had created, Brand would remain publicly optimistic. Although the first issue of the combined Whole Earth Review was titled “Computers as Poison,” Brand was outwardly sanguine: “Computers suppress our animal presence,” he told an SF Focus interviewer. “When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.”[23] Just a few years later he would realize how naive he had been. * * * Shortly after he arrived in Sausalito, Kevin Kelly read Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a book that portrayed three generations of “white hat” computer hackers (the good guys) ranging from the young programmers at MIT’s AI Lab decades earlier, through the Homebrew Computer Club, to the then new world of video game design.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

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

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

The reference to the Whole Earth Catalog may have been unconscious, but by the time Cory was in his late teens, he was sold on the cyberpunk politics that Brand, Barlow and the rest of them were putting out through the Whole Earth’s new instantiation, the Whole Earth Review. “My friend, Karl Levesque, who I first met at Grindstone, was running an anarchist book store and he would send me magazines that had been returned for credit. And one day he sent me the Whole Earth Review issue called ‘Is the Body Obsolete?’, with William Gibson’s articles and Hans Moravec and all these other people making the connection between cyberculture and counterculture. I must have been 16.

Speaking to camera, and with only slightly more hair than he has today, Stewart Brand explains how he sees the hackers at Marin County: They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant, and I think more effective in pushing the culture around now in good ways than almost any group I can think of. Later, in a report in the Catalog spin-off the Whole Earth Review he would call them “the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the US constitution”. In this report there’s also a transcript of some of conversations that took place in Marin County away from the cameras. The talk about code freedom still clearly dominates.

Rolling Stone, December 7. http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html. ———. 1974. “History – Demise Party etc.” Whole Earth Catalog, October. http://wholeearth.com/issue/1180/article/321/history.-.demise.party.etc. ———. 1985. “Keep Designing: How the Information Economy is Being Created and Shaped by the Hacker Ethic.” Whole Earth Review, May. Brandeis, Louis. 1913. “What Publicity Can Do.” Harpers Weekly. Burns, John F. 2010. “WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety.” The New York Times, October 23. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html. Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, July. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/3881/.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

“Our education system was used to make industrial workers out of agricultural workers. It is no longer adequate,” Howard Rheingold told us. Rheingold, sixty-seven, is the former editor of Whole Earth Review. Founded in 1985, Whole Earth Review was a countercultural publication evolving out of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and rooted in “that old American tradition of self-reliance,” Rheingold shared, “building on that misfit streak started by Emerson.” In Rheingold’s perspective, Whole Earth Review was all about sharing tools and ideas to get people to take more control over their lives. “There was this hope that you didn’t have to depend on distant institutions—government, business, religious organizations—to shape your life.”

., 63 Song, Stephen, 99 South America, 127 Southwest Airlines, 84–85 space, 144–50 space flight, 148–49 space tourism, 31 Spain, recession in, 64–65 Spotify, 96, 97, 124 Sprigman, Christopher, 85 Stark, Kio, 22–23, 142 Steam, 215 steam engine technology, 88 steel industry, 88–89 Stein, Gertrude, 213 Stephens, Dale, 22–23, 139–42, 143 Stonyfield, 201 Stop Online Piracy Act, 113 streaming technology, 96 Structural Genomics Consortium, 101 Stuckert, Taylor, 67–70 Student (magazine), 31 Sullivan, Tim, 184 Swartz, Aaron, 113–14, 115 Sweden, 145, 156 Teach, Edward (“Blackbeard”), 121 TED, 201 telecom industry, 78 ten-thousand-year clock, 150–51 terrorists, 124 Texas, 58–59, 150 Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 59 Thai Flood Hacks, 34–35 Thailand, 34 Thessaloniki, Greece, 162 Thoreau, Henry, 185 3-D printing robots, 149 Tornabell, Robert, 65 Torvalds, Linus, 37 Toyota, 78, 85 trade: cost of, piracy and, 17 of counterfeit goods, 81 pirates’ disruption of, 121 Trade Secrets (Ben-Atar), 79 Trevithick, Richard, 89–90 Troyer, Marlin, 6, 8 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 148 tuberculosis, 128 Tumblr, 34, 186 Twain, Mark, 80 Tweakers, 98 Twitter, 83 UAW Local, 40, 600 Ulysses (Joyce), 213 UnCollege, 22, 140 United Auto Worker, 40 United Kingdom, 66, 107, 163 United Nations, 17 United States: adoption industry in, 21 automobile consumption in, 41–42 camel farmers in, 3, 4, 6, 9, 74 camel milk industry in, 5–7, 8, 72, 74–75 community building in, 67–72 history of camels in, 72–73 hustling in, 67 industrial period copying of, 79 raw milk in, 6, 7 “Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The” (Poe), 147 unschooling movement, 139–42 Urban eXperiment (The UX), 19, 125–27, 214 Valve, 215, 217 Venturing Out, 62, 64 Verdin, Zach, 185–86 Vergne, Jean-Phillippe, 94 Vermeulen, Angelo, 144–47, 149, 216–17 Verne, Jules, 143, 148, 149 Vietnam, 165 Village Telco, 99 Villains of All Nations (Rediker), 121 violence, 129–36 as health issue, 130, 131, 133–34, 136 punishment as solution for, 129, 130 understanding and perception of, 130–31, 133–34 violence interruptors, 131–32, 135 Virgin (record store), 31 Virgin Records, 31, 64 Visa, 85 Walden Pond, 185 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 87 Wall Street Journal, 36 Wang Chuanfu, 79 Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan), 77 Watson, James, 86 Watt, James, 89 Weiler, Lance, 32–34 Weinreich, Andrew, 103–5 Wells, H. G., 148 We-Think (Leadbeater), 89 What’s Mine Is Yours (Botsman and Rogers), 65 Where Good Ideas Come From (Johnson), 98 Whitby, England, 107 “white hat” hacking, 108–9 Whole Earth Catalog, 141 Whole Earth Review, 141–42 Whole Foods, 9 Wilkins, Maurice, 86 Wilmington, Ohio, 67–70 Wimdu, 83 Wired, 83, 84 Wisdom Hackers, 220 Woodroof, Ron, 8 Woolf, Arthur, 89–90 World Bank, 17 World Economic Forum, 163 World Health Organization (WHO), 129, 136 World Trade Organization (WTO), 95, 154–55 World War II, 145 WPP, 158 Wright, Helena, 21, 143 Yes Lab, 155 Yes Men, 153–55, 214 York, University of, 108 YouGov, 66 Youthstream Media Networks, 104 YouTube, 83, 152 ZICO, 184 Zimbabwe, 188 Zipcar, 65, 124 Zuckerberg, Mark, 104, 122–23 Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2015 by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.


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

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

Sitting in front of our computers with our hearts racing and tears in our eyes, in Tokyo and Sacramento and Austin, we read about Lillie's croup, her tracheostomy, the days and nights at Massachusetts General Hospital, and now the vigil over Lillie's breathing and the watchful attention to the mechanical apparatus that kept her alive. It went on for days. Weeks. Lillie recovered, and relieved our anxieties about her vocal capabilities after all that time with a hole in her throat by saying the most extraordinary things, duly reported online by Jay. Later, writing in Whole Earth Review, Jay described the experience: Before this time, my computer screen had never been a place to go for solace. Far from it. But there it was. Those nights sitting up late with my daughter, I'd go to my computer, dial up the WELL, and ramble. I wrote about what was happening that night or that year.

The Whole Earth Catalog originally emerged from the Haight-Ashbury counterculture as Stewart Brand's way of providing access to tools and ideas to all the communards who were exploring alternate ways of life in the forests of Mendocino or the high deserts outside Santa Fe. The Whole Earth Catalogs and the magazines they spawned--Co-Evolution Quarterly and its successor, Whole Earth Review--seem to have outlived the counterculture itself, since the magazine and catalogs still exist after twenty-five years. One of Whole Earth's gurus, Buckminster Fuller, was fond of using the analogy of the tiprudder--the small rudder on very big ships that is used to control the larger, main rudder.

The tiprudder people who steer the movements and disciplines that steer society--the editors and engineers, scientists and science-fiction writers, freelance programmers and permaculture evangelists, grassroots political activists and congressional aides--continued to need new tools and ideas, even though they were no longer a counterculture but part of the mainstream. These cultural experimenters continued to feed Co-Evolution Quarterly and then Whole Earth Review through decades when magazines died by the thousands. Even the idea that you could publish books on the West Coast was a revolution when it happened; in 1992, when Publishers Weekly ran an article on the history of West Coast publishing, it started with the Whole Earth Catalog. The first Whole Earth Catalog was the first idealistic enterprise from the counterculture, besides music, that earned the cultural legitimation of financial success.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

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

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

To everyone mentioned in this book and the many more I wish I’d been able to mention: thank you for giving me my life. Acknowledgments Some passages of the present work are adapted from my contributions to John Brockman’s edge.org or my anthologies of science writing. Other passages are adapted from my works originally published in the Whole Earth Review or the New York Times. My wife, Lena, not only supported and put up with me while I wrote this book, but I am astonished at the strength and brilliance she displayed during a period when she was battling cancer. Thank you! Thanks to Maureen Dowd for correspondence that inspired some passages.

Hope he turns out to be wrong about that. Anyway, another definition: * * * Forty-fourth VR Definition: The term you might have used in the 1980s if you were partial to those weirdos at VPL Research. * * * Moniker on the Loose Long after the events chronicled in this book, the fall 1999 edition of the Whole Earth Review included my piece about the widespread use of the term “virtual reality” at that time to mean many things. Here are some lightly edited excerpts: Decades ago, I called a type of computer-user interface technology “virtual reality.” Two qualities, social and somatic, together created something quite different from a solitary virtual world.

They were researchers who would eventually become part of the HIT Lab of University of Washington, an early VR research department started by Tom Furness, a VR pioneer who had previously worked on military simulators. Introduction 1.   This is the first of dozens of numbered definitions of VR dispersed in this book. 2.   An example of my 1980s usage of the term “mixed reality” is found in “Virtual Reality: An Interview with Jaron Lanier” (Kevin Kelly, Adam Heilbrun, and Barbara Stacks, Whole Earth Review. Fall 1989, no. 64, p. 108[12]). Chapter 2 1.   I have no sympathy for the recent campaign to demote Pluto to prominent Kuiper Belt object instead of planet. Its weird orbit out there is an inspiration to every kid who doesn’t fit in. Are we not full-fledged planets? Will you only accept us if we conform?


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

We must recognize this if we are to understand and choose what we become as a result of what we have made.14 I was reminded of another VR researcher when I started rethinking pervasive computing: Warren Robinett, a soft-spoken fellow with a touch of a southern drawl who proposed that head-mounted displays could be used to extend human senses instead of immerse them in an artificial environment. Robinett had designed the software for NASA’s VR prototypes. One evening in 1991, when I was visiting the University of North Carolina VR lab in Chapel Hill, Robinett asked, “What if you could use VR to see things that are normally beyond human perception?” At that time I was editor of the Whole Earth Review, so I commissioned Robinett to write an article. While I was researching smart mobs, I was surprised to find Robinett’s article cited as one of the first descriptions of what is now known as “augmented reality.”15 Robinett proposed connecting the head-mounted display to a microscope, telescope, or a video camera equipped with gear that could make infrared, ultraviolet, or radio frequencies visible.

Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century.” 12. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Summit, 1991). 13. Myron Krueger, Artificial Reality (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1983). 14. Myron Krueger, “Responsive Environments,” NCC Proceedings, 1977, 422433. 15. Warren Robinett, “Electronic Expansion of Human Perception,” Whole Earth Review, Fall 1991, 1621. 16. Alex Pentland, “The Dance of Bits and Atoms,” <http://www.white.media.mit.edu/people/sandy/profile.html> (2 February 2002). 17. Ivan E. Sutherland, “The Ultimate Display,” Proceedings of IFIPS Congress 2 May 1965, 506508. 18. Alex P. Pentland, “Smart Rooms,” Scientific American 274 (April 1996): 6876, <http://www.sciam.com/0496issue/0496pentland.html> (11 December 2001). 19.

Cameron Barrett, “Online Community Technologies and Concepts,” Cam-world. com, December 2001, <http://www.camworld.com/essays/communities.html > (9 February 2002). 3. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993). 4. Howard Rheingold, “Virtual Communities,” Whole Earth Review 61 (Winter 1988): 14. 5. David Goldberg et al., “Using Collaborative Filtering to Weave an Information Tapestry,” Communications of the ACM 35 (December 1992): 6170. 6. Usenet FAQ Archive, <ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/> (9 February 2002). 7. Paul Resnick et al., “GroupLens: An Open Architecture for Collaborative Filtering of Netnews,” Proceedings of ACM 1994 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 1994, 175186, <http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/ cscw94/> (9 February 2002). 8.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

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

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

This group would spin this mythology through the 1980s and 1990s, helping obfuscate the military origins of computer and networking technologies by dressing them up in the language of 1960s acid-dropping counterculture. In this rebranded world, computers were the new communes: a digital frontier where the creation of a better world was still possible. In the parlance of today’s Silicon Valley, Brand “pivoted.” He transformed the Whole Earth Catalog into the Whole Earth Software Catalog and Whole Earth Review—magazines billed as “tools and ideas for the computer age.” He also launched the Good Business Network, a corporate consulting company that applied his counterculture public relations strategies to problems faced by clients such as Shell Oil, Morgan Stanley, Bechtel, and DARPA.31 He also organized an influential computer conference that brought together leading computer engineers and journalists.32 It was called, simply, “Hackers’ Conference” and was held in Marin County in 1984.

He wore a black-and-white plaid shirt under a sheepskin vest and waxed lyrical about the rebellious nature of those gathered there in Marin.34 “They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant and I think more effective in pushing the culture around in good ways than almost any group I can think of.” Off camera, he took to the pages of his Whole Earth Review to further expound on the rebel nature of computer programmers. “I think hackers—innovative, irreverent computer programmers—are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote in an introduction to a photo spread of the 1984 Hackers’ Conference.

“Bio… Stewart Brand,” The Long Now Foundation, http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Bio.html. 32. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 135. 33. Michael Schrage, “Hacking Away at the Future,” Washington Post, November 18, 1984. 34. Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age (Arlington, VA: PBS, 1985), short film. 35. Stewart Brand, “Keep Designing,” Whole Earth Review, May 1985. 36. “The advertisements appeared after a Harris poll, the I.R.S. had begun testing the use of computerized life-style information, such as the types of cars people own, to track down errant taxpayers, while an F.B.I. advisory committee had recommended that the bureau computer system include data on people who, though not charged with wrongdoing, associate with drug traffickers.”


pages: 371 words: 93,570

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Out in Sausalito, the same Bay Area techno-idealism that had galvanized Community Memory and Resource One a decade previous gave birth to The WELL, a BBS for West Coast intellectuals. It was a joint venture between Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist with a computer-conferencing company, and Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Review. Brand was known as a connector—the counterculture had been browsing the Whole Earth Catalog for solar ovens, composting toilets, and radical books for nearly a generation—and a scribe of disruptive technologies. “All software does is manage symbols,” he wrote in 1984. BBS had a reputation as a realm of nerdy fiefdoms, but The WELL was different.

For her master’s thesis, she combined the do-it-yourself ethos of punk with the emerging possibilities of desktop publishing, producing an electronic magazine, Cyber Rag, on floppy disk. With color-printed labels Krazy Glued onto each disk, Cyber Rag looked the part of a punk rock fanzine. Loaded onto a consumer Mac, Jaime’s stories came to life with images pilfered from the Village Voice, the Whole Earth Review, Mondo 2000, and Newsweek collaged together on-screen as though they’d been xeroxed by hand. Cyber Rag was programmed in Apple HyperCard, with graphics drawn in MacPaint. Along with her animations, she added edgy interactive games (in one, you chase Manuel Noriega around Panama), hacker how-tos, and catty musings about hippies, sneaking into computer trade shows, and cyberspace.

., 60 Web: use of word, 153 see also World Wide Web Web sites and pages, 131, 135, 153, 154, 184, 186 life spans of, 170 for women, see women’s Web see also World Wide Web WELL, The, 132–35, 140, 149, 153, 179–80, 205–6, 209 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 16 Wescoff, Marlyn, 39, 43, 48, 49 Westheimer, Ellen, 114 WHOIS, 119–20 Whole Earth Catalog, 100, 132 Whole Earth Review, 132, 183 Wilcox, Patricia (Pat Crowther), 84–94, 110 William the Conqueror, 155 Wired, 138, 194, 206 women, 4–5 computers as viewed by, 229 men posing as, 143–44, 179 and software vs. hardware, 51–52 women, working, 23–24 black, 24 wage discrimination and, 23, 77, 78 women.com, 205, 214–21 Women in Telecommunications (WIT), 141–42, 144, 205 Women’s Internet History Project, 143 Women’space, 239 women’s Web, 131, 216, 221, 223, 233 advertising and, 214–16, 218, 219, 221 iVillage, 214, 216–21 women.com, 205, 214–21 Women’s WIRE, 205–15 Women’s WIRE, 205–15 Woods, Don, 90 Word, 188–95, 201–3, 205, 214, 215 Works Progress Administration, 25 World War I, 24 World War II, 24, 25, 28–29, 31, 32, 34–37, 40, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53–55 atomic bomb in, 36 Pearl Harbor attack, 27–29, 32 World Wide Web, 102, 131, 152, 154, 159, 165, 168–72, 177, 203, 204, 222 browsers for, see browsers commercialization of, 204–5, 217, 241; see also advertising conferences on, 170, 173 early true believers and, 187–88, 196, 197, 202 hypertext and, 168–70, 201 links on, 168–70, 201 Microcosm viewer for, 172–73 number of women on, 214 search engines for, 115, 154 Semantic Web and, 174 see also Internet; Web sites and pages Xerox, 161 Xerox PARC, 162–66, 210 Y2K, 71, 194 Yankelovich, Nicole, 162 Zapata Corporation, 194, 201 Zeroes + Ones (Plant), 238 About the Author CLAIRE L.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

QA402.M425 2008 003--dc22 2008035211 Chelsea Green Publishing Company Post Office Box 428 White River Junction, VT 05001 (802) 295-6300 www.chelseagreen.com Part of this work has been adapted from an article originally published under the title “Whole Earth Models and Systems” in Coevolution Quarterly (Summer 1982). An early version of Chapter 6 appeared as “Places to Intervene in a System” in Whole Earth Review (Winter 1997) and later as an expanded paper published by the Sustainability Institute. Chapter 7, “Living in a World of Systems,” was originally published as “Dancing with Systems” in Whole Earth Review (Winter 2001). FOR DANA (1941–2001) and for all those who would learn from her Contents A Note from the Author A Note from the Editor Introduction: The Systems Lens Part One: System Structure and Behavior ONE.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Barlow wrote that governments “have no sovereignty where we gather,” and declared cyberspace “to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”24 Notably, Barlow did not share the same disdain for the corporations that flocked to the internet and shaped it to serve their bottom lines. The EFF became influential in the debates about internet legislation through the 1990s, but even more important was Wired magazine. Kevin Kelly, its founding executive editor, previously served as editor of the Whole Earth Review and imbued the publication with a similar ethos. Louis Rossetto, one of the magazine’s founders, “saw the digital revolution as an extension of a long-standing, if not widely acknowledged, American libertarian tradition,” and under Kelly’s direction, writers “utilized the computational metaphors and universal rhetoric of cybernetics to depict New Right politicians, telecommunications CEOs, information pundits, and members of … Whole Earth–connected organizations as a single, leading edge of countercultural revolution.”25 As a result, Wired’s pages served as a meeting place for the tech industry and the socially conservative Republicans who shared their desire for an internet free of government control or regulation.

., 191 Uber Air, 153–4, 155, 157, 159 Uber Copter, 155–6 Uber Eats, 184–5 Uber Elevate, 152, 154, 159 unemployment rate, 95–6 unions, for taxi drivers, 101–2 United Kingdom (UK) docked bikeshare system in, 170–1 ecommerce in, 193 University of Technology Sydney, 75 University Paris-East, 169–70 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 27–8 Untokening collective, 218 Urban Challenge, 120 urban renewal strategy, 26 Urry, John, 32–3, 143 US Air Force, 50 US Department of Defense, 50 US-Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement (1986), 45 US National Labor Relations Act, 102 VaMoRs, 119 Vansintjan, Aaron, 222 Vasquez, Rafaela, 132, 135 Vélib’ bikeshare system, 210 venture capitalists, 186–7, 199 vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (VTOL/eVTOL), 152–5, 157, 158 Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (Le Guin), 202 Vietnam War, 39, 40, 43, 49 VoiceOver, 175 Volkswagen, 77, 78, 129–30 Volocopter, 152 Volvo XC90 SUVs, 134–5 Walker, Jarrett, 59, 142–3, 181–2 walking, as means of transportation, 12, 191 Washington, DC, ride-hailing services in, 99 Waterfront Toronto, 228–9, 230, 231 Waymo, 133, 138, 186 web 2.0, 57 WeWork, 181, 182–3 white people, mortgages and, 29 Who Killed the Electric Car? (documentary), 69 Whole Earth Catalog, 42–3, 52 Whole Earth community, 53–4 Whole Earth Review, 53 Wilt, James, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?, 217 Wired (magazine), 53, 54 Wolfe, Tom, 40–1 women, bicycles and, 13 World’s Fair, 1–2, 5, 118 world War II, 38–9 Wylie, Bianca, 230 Yahoo!, 55 Yee, Norman, 178 Yelp, 172 Yom Kippur War, 203 zoning policies, 29 Zukin, Sharon, 27, 200 Zysman, John, 182


pages: 134 words: 22,616

Cool Tools in the Kitchen by Kevin Kelly, Steven Leckart

Community Supported Agriculture, crowdsourcing, Hacker Conference 1984, Kevin Kelly, new economy, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

He writes the occasional review, oversees the design and editorial direction of the website, and is working on a print book version of Cool Tools. A Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, Kevin co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. From 1984-1990, he was the publisher/editor of the Whole Earth Review. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He is the author of New Rules for the New Economy, Out of Control and, most recently, What Technology Wants. Contents * * * Preface * * * This is a curated collection of the best cool tools for the Kitchen.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Ever since then, investigative journalists have been nosing around for hints and clues leading to the next ripening scandal, or the next sensational story. It is certainly tenable that advertisers and politically connected publishers wield undue influence over various periodicals, from time to time. For this reason some cutting-edge publications, notably Consumer Reports and Whole Earth Review, refuse advertising in order to safeguard their vaunted reputation for credibility. Nevertheless, such meddling can be counterproductive. In a competitive environment, the chief effect will be to drive the best reporters away to other journals, where freedom of inquiry is the common culture.

After all, a flamer isnʼt really different from the motorist who cut you off last week, nearly causing an accident, flipping an obscene gesture and laughing at your frustration, safe behind a mask of anonymity. Driven by rancorous behavior he witnessed in the Netʼs early days, Stewart Brand, cofounder of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review magazine, realized there would be no peace as long as nastiness could find shelter behind false identities. Brand lobbied successfully to have anonymity strictly forbidden on the pioneering Internet service the Well. True, there are disadvantages to this rule, and I do feel there should remain places where anonymous postings are possible, especially for whistle-blowers reporting crimes.

In this illustration from popular culture we see how the two conflicting attitudes described in chapter 5 remain at war to this day. 123 For more on the concept of memes see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. A more recent and detailed treatment provided by Aaron Lynch in Thought Contagion (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 124 ... a solid moral grounding and some common sense ... Quote by Howard Rheingold, Whole Earth Review, Winter 1994, 95. 125 ... flip side of living in tribes is living in the world ... in the kosmos ... Private communication to the author by Stefan Jones, Oracle Corporation computer scientist. 125 ... some wise elite should hold sway over what others see ... Another idea liked by both intolerant rightists and intolerant leftists is the notion that humanity is meant to live in “tribes,” and that attempts to mix or melt cultural and ethnic boundaries are both futile and unfair.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

There are many reasons for this, which will be explored further in the next chapter. It’s worth discussing one more aspect of machine intelligence that has been explored extensively in fiction, but which originates in an essay from the late twentieth century. In 1993, mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge wrote an article for the Whole Earth Review proposing that continuing exponential growth in computing power would ultimately result in recursively self-improving computers rapidly giving rise to a superintelligence. He called this event the “Singularity” because of its supposed similarity to a physical singularity—or black hole.8 Proponents of the concept maintain that as with a physical singularity, conditions would be so severely different beyond its horizon that it’s impossible to predict what the world would be like afterward.

See unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) uncanny valley definition of, 96–98 and out of place emotions, 102–104 psychological response, eliminating, 107 reasons for, 98–102 and xenophobic behavior, 105 Unilever, 69–70 universal language of reasoning, 36 University of California, San Diego, 114–115 University of Denver, 112 University of Duisburg-Essen, 89 University of Tel Aviv, 166 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 130 Urban Dictionary, 197 US Patent and Trademark Office, 76 US Patriot Act, 145 Usenet, 210 user interfaces, 52–53 V vasopressin, 186, 196 Velveteen Rabbit, 199 ventromedial profrontal cortex (vmPFC), 34, 248 Vibease, 188 Victor of Aveyron, 257 video compression system, 43 Vinge, Vernor, 239 visual expression detection, 120–121 VocalIQ, 75 voice recognition, 5 volition, 250–251 volitional control and communication of brain states, 128 von Economo neurons (VENs), 20 W Wall Street Journal, 120, 144–145 Wallach, Wendell, 223 Watson, IBM (DeepQA/IBM Cognitive), 233 Watson, Jill, 120–121 We (Zamyatin), 229 web scrapers, 141 “What is an Emotion?” (James), 17–18 Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 95–96 Whole Earth Review, 239 Wiesner, Jerome, 52 Woolf, Virginia, 223 World Economic Forum (2016), 88 World Tournament of Emo-Poker, 63 X X Lab, Google, 197–198 xenophobia, 105, 170, 234 Y Yale study (2012), 115 Yale University’s Center for Bioethics, 223 Yangyang, 87 Yudkowsky, Eliezer, 262 Z Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 229 Zemeckis, Robert, 95–96 Zeno, 113–114


pages: 345 words: 105,722

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

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

Out came the Whole Earth Software Catalog of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie-dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present company included. Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers Conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new possibilities of digital counterculture. CoEvolution Quarterlyfolded its teepee, replaced by Whole Earth Software Review and eventually by Whole Earth Review (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard Rheingold). 1985 saw the birth of the "WELL"—the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link." The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system. As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning, and remained one.

Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would "fund, conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate that the Secret Service has exercised prior restraint on publications, limited free speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional." "Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer networking channels, and also printed in the Whole Earth Review. The sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike from the ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak (perhaps a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered to match any funds Kapor offered the Foundation. John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately offered his own extensive financial and personal support.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Well, how many people? “Oh, there’s only going to be two thousand.” All right, we’ll give ten people demos. And they are like, “No. We have to have at least…” It was just constant pressure and arguments. I mostly remember being beleaguered by that scene. Howard Rheingold: Cyberthon happened because the Whole Earth Review wanted to have an event around virtual reality. There was no money, and we wanted to have all this stuff happening that would take two or three days. And Kevin, who is a genius at this stuff, said, “Well, why don’t you just have it around the clock for twenty-four hours?” Kevin Kelly: We ran it from noon Saturday to noon Sunday.

Jef Raskin’s “king of France” quote is from Michael Moritz’s The Return to the Little Kingdom. The quotes from Mike Murray, Joanna Hoffman, and Andy Cunningham are from a panel discussion held at the Computer History Museum in 2004: “The Macintosh Marketing Story: Fact and Fiction, 20 Years Later.” Burrell Smith’s quote is from the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. Lee Clow’s quotes are from a video interview by Ann-Christine Diaz, published in 2012 by Advertising Age: “The Art of the Super Bowl Ad: Lee Clow on How Apple’s ‘1984’ Almost Didn’t Happen—The Real Story on Why the Spot Only Aired Once.” Ridley Scott’s quotes are from an Apple promotional video that was distributed to Apple dealers in 1984.

What Information Wants Ted Nelson’s quote is in Michael Schrage’s November 1984 Washington Post story on the first Hackers Conference. Bill Atkinson’s quotes are from an August 2012 Berkeley Cybersalon event on the creation and legacy of Hypercard. Doug Carlson’s, Robert Woodhead’s, and Steve Wozniak’s quotes from the Hackers Conference are as reported in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link Ram Dass’s quotes are from two Seva Foundation videos: “Ram Dass Talks About Neem Karoli Baba, Larry Brilliant, Service, and the Birth of Seva Foundation” and “An Evening with Ram Dass: Seva Foundation Benefit 1985.” Reality Check Mitch Altman’s quotes here and elsewhere are from the Hackertrips video blog post on YouTube: “An Interview with Mitch Altman.”


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

It may be the long-awaited breakthrough in wearables: both the enabler and the visible symbol of a lifestyle in which performance is continuously monitored and plumbed for its insights into further improvements. Nobody has embraced this conception of instrumented living more fervently than a loose global network of enthusiasts called the Quantified Self, whose slogan is “self-knowledge through numbers.”2 Founded by Wired editor Gary Wolf and Whole Earth Review veteran Kevin Kelly in 2007, the Quantified Self currently boasts a hundred or so local chapters, and an online forum where members discuss and rate the devices mobilized in their self-measurement efforts. (It can be difficult to disentangle this broader movement from a California company of the same name also founded by Wolf and Kelly, which mounts conferences dedicated to proselytizing for the practice of self-measurement.)

See Google Siemens, 52–4, 56 Silk Road exchange, 131 Silver, David, 265 Simone, Nina, 261 Sipilä, Juha, 204 Sirer, Emin Gün, 178 Siri virtual assistant, 39 Situationism, 64, 190 Slock.it, 156, 170, 175–6 slow jam (music genre), 221 Slum– and Shackdwellers International, 169 smart city, 33, 48, 52, 52, 55, 59 smart contracts, 115, 147, 150, 153–7, 163, 166, 168, 170, 172, 306 smart home, 33, 36, 38, 46, 48 smartphone, 3, 8–33, 38, 49, 64, 67, 72, 77, 133, 137, 273, 285–6, 313 as “network organ,” 27–9 as platform for augmented reality, 67, 72 as platform for financial transactions, 133, 137 environmental implications of, 18–19 incompleteness at time of purchase, 17 teardown of, 14–16 ubiquity of, 313 smart property, 149–53 Smith, Zachary, 103, 105 Snæfellsjökull glacier, 83 Snaptrends, 227–8, 231, 254 Sobibor, 61 social credit, 285, 311 social dividend, 204 social media, 26, 192, 227–8, 276, 286 Sociometric Solutions, 197 Solanas, Valerie, 191 South Sea Company, the, 165 Soylent nutrient slurry, 35 SpatialKey, 227 Spielberg, Steven, 227 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 311 Srnicek, Nick, 88, 90–1, 111, 190, 203, 205, 303 Stacks, 275, 277, 280–1, 283–6, 292–5, 299, 313–14 Stanford Dogs Dataset, 219 Stanford University, 283 startups, 13, 118, 137, 145–6, 280–2, 286 Stavrides, Stavros, 173 Sterling, Bruce, 275 Stolpersteine, 72, 74 Stratasys, 103–4, 108 Summers, Larry, 201 Super Sad True Love Story (Shteyngart), 246 Superstudio, 191 supervised learning, 216 SWaCH wastepickers’ collective, 98–9 Swedish death metal (music genre), 221 SweepTheStreets, 170 Szabo, Nick, 150, 303, 306 Target (retail chain), 196 Taylor, Frederick, 35 Taylor, Simon, 160 technolibertarians, 140, 150, 283 Tencent, 285 Tešanovic, Jasmina, 62 Tesla, 166, 193, 222–5, 243, 254, 264, 270, 285 Autopilot feature, 222–5, 243, 254, 256, 270 Model S, 222–4 Model X, 222 operating system 7.0, 222 tetrapods, 301–7 Theatro, 196–7 Theory of Self–Reproducing Automata (Neumann), 86 “Theses on Feuerbach” (Marx), 305 Thiel, Peter, 148 Thingiverse, 103, 105 Tide laundry detergent, 46–47 Topography of Terror, Berlin museum, 70 touchscreen, 15–16, 38, 43, 194 travel-to-crime, 231 Tual, Stephan, 170 Twitter, 51, 137, 268 Uber, 4, 40, 41, 193, 245, 270, 276, 285, 293 driverless cars, 193, 270 Ultimaker 3D printer, 88, 101, 104, 295 United States Constitution, 230, 235 universal basic income, UBI, 203–5, 288, 292, 294 universal constructor, 86 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 91 University College London, 85 unnecessariat, 181, 206, 297 unsupervised deep learning, 220 Urban Dynamics (Forrester), 56 Utrecht, 204 value network, 264 van Rijn, Rembrandt Harmenszoon, 262 Vélib, 2 Velvet Underground, the, 228 Venezuelan bolívar, 122 Venmo, 41 Verlan, 311 Virginia Company, the, 165 virtual assistants, 38, 41–2, 286 virtual reality, 65, 82–3, 275, 296 Visa, 120, 136, 159 Vitality, 36 Vkontakte, 241 von Furstenberg, Diane, 84 von Neumann, John, 86 “wake word,” interface command, 41 Washington State, 192 Waterloo University, 148 Watt, James, 104 Wendy’s, 197 Wernick, Miles, 233 Westegren, Tim, 220 Western Union, 120 WhatsApp, 281 Whole Earth Review (magazine), 34 WiFi, 11, 17, 25, 46, 66 Wiggins, Shayla, 63–5 WikiLeaks, 120, 137 Williams, Alex, 190, 203 Williams, Raymond, 315 Wilson, Cody, 108, 111 Winograd Schema, 270 The Wire (TV series), 54 Wired (magazine), 34 Wolf, Gary, 34 World Bank, 133 World Economic Forum, 194 Yahoo, 219 yamato–damashii, 267 Yaskawa Motoman MH24 industrial robot, 266 yuan (currency), 135 Zamfir, Vlad, 177 Zen Buddhism, 34, 284 ZeroBlock application, 131 The Zero Marginal Cost Society (Rifkin), 88, 205


pages: 331 words: 47,993

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

artificial general intelligence, brain emulation, deep learning, Elon Musk, Extropian, heat death of the universe, hive mind, life extension, megastructure, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons

“Improbable Life: An Unappealing but Plausible Scenario for Life’s Origin on Earth,” video of lecture given at Harvard University, https://youtube/Bt6n6Tu1beg. UNESCO/COMEST. 2005. “The Precautionary Principle,” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001395/139578e.pdf. Vinge, V. 1993. “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Whole Earth Review, Winter. Wiley, Keith. 2014. “Response to Susan Schneider’s ‘The Philosophy of “Her,’ ” H+ Magazine, March 26, http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/03/26/response-to-susan-schneiders-the-philosophy-of-her/. Zimmer, Carl. 2010. “Sizing Up Consciousness By Its Bits,” New York Times, September 20. INDEX Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Vetter “System and method for generating unique secure values for digitally signing documents” (2000). Vernor Vinge, PhD, is former Professor of Mathematics, University of California San Diego. He authored A Fire Upon the Deep (Tor, 1993, 2011); “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (Whole Earth Review, 1993); and True Names … and Other Dangers (Baen Book, 1987). Natasha Vita-More, PhD, is Professor of Design University of Advancing Technology, ­co-founder, Institute for Transhumanism, chairman of Humanity+, and co-editor of The Transhumanist Reader. She authored “Epoch of Plasticity” (Metaverse Creativity 1, 2010); and “Aesthetics of the Radically Enhanced Human” (Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 8, 2003).

Various (2003) “The Transhumanist FAQ: v 2.1.” World Transhumanist Association. http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/. Verdoux, Philippe (2009) “Transhumanism, Progress and the Future.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 20/2 (December), pp. 49–69. Vinge, Vernor (1993) “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Whole Earth Review (Winter). Vita-More, Natasha (1983) “Transhuman Manifesto.” http://www.transhumanist.biz/transhumanmanifesto.htm. Vita-More, Natasha (1992) “Transhumanist Arts Statement.” Revised 2002. http://www.transhumanist.biz/transhumanistartsmanifesto.htm. Further Reading Bell, T. W. and Murashige, K.H. (1999) “Who Owns Your Genes?”

More, Max (2009) “Singularity and Surge Scenarios.” http://strategicphilosophy.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-fast-will-future-arrive-how-will.html (accessed October 30, 2011). Sandberg, Anders and Bostrom, Nick (2008) Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap. Technical Report #2008-3. Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University. Vinge, Vernor (1993) “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.” Whole Earth Review (Winter). Walter, Henrik (2001) The Neurophilosophy of Free Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wegner, Daniel (2002) The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Yudkowsky, E. (2008) “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.” In Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, eds., Global Catastrophic Risks.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

according to Strange and Brown, Stanton’s treatise on religion, The Women’s Bible, ignited intense protests from the church and apparently proved so controversial that “many of [her] strongest supporters, including the national american Women Suffrage association condemned it as heretical” “The Bicycle, Women’s rights, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” 620. roberta J. park also comments on Stanton’s controversial, anti-religious perspective in “‘all the Freedom of the Boy’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, nineteenth-Century architect of Women’s rights,” International Journal of the History of Sport 18, no. 1 (2001): 22. Strange and Brown, “The Bicycle, Women’s rights, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” 621. For example, see Jacquie phelan, “liberation noted from an Old Crank,” Whole Earth Review, no. 86 (1995), 56–57; Ethan Clark and Shelley lynn Jackson, The Chainbreaker Bike Book (Bloomington, in: Microcosm publishing, 2008); Greta Snider, Mudflap (San Francisco; self-published zine); Gear Up! Dames on Frames, nos. 1–3 (Minneapolis: self-published zine). While recent feminist support for bicycling has fortunately transcended Stanton and anthony’s racist thinking, there are virtually no feminist cyclists (women or men) who offer a critique of their views on race, much less a substan tive reflection on how white privilege afforded first-wave feminists the opportunity to enjoy public mobility through the bicycle.

“Women and the Wheel: The Bicycle’s impact on Women.” in Cycle History 7: Proceedings of the 7th International Cycle History Conference, Buffalo, NY, USA, 4–6 September 1996, edited by rob van der plas, 112–133. San Francisco: van der plas publications, 1997. phelan, Jacquie. “Golden Testicle award.” Women’s Mountain Bike and Tea Society (WOMBATS), October 26, 1994. available at www.wombats.org/jacquie5.html. ———. “liberation noted from an Old Crank.” Whole Earth Review, no. 86 (1995): 56–57. philpott, Julia. “Women and nonmotorized Transport: Connection in africa between Transportation and Economic Development.” Transportation Research Record, no. 1441 (1994): 39–43. “a photo-Tricycle.” Scientific American 53, no. 12 (1885): 178. pinder, David. “Commentary-Writing Cities against the Grain.” 25, no. 8 (2004): 792–795. ———.”in Defence of Utopian Urbanism: imagining Cities after the ‘End of Utopia.’”


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

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

What if his sister accidentally on purpose stuck his disk in the microwave? How's he going to play? This was a widespread concern among teenage boys all over the country. It was perhaps their first conscious political stand. Even if they didn't know it, they were following a basic truth identified by Whole Earth Review founder Stewart Brand: Information wants to be free. To liberate it, these kids became "warez" dudes, amateur software pirates who put their collective ingenuity together. They traded tips for breaking lame copy protections. They even wrote little lockpicking programs, like Kwik Copy, that could copy a disk protected by measly Error 23.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

This dictum is attributed to Stewart Brand, who wrote that “[o]n the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” See Whole Earth Review, May 1985, p. 49. 11. Many hackers believe that commercial software products are less carefully crafted and therefore more prone to exploits. Perhaps the most infamous example of such an exploit, one which critiques software’s growing commercialization, is the “BackOrifice” software application created by the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow.


Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

Computer scientist and author Vernor Vinge coined the term “singularity” to describe this; a singularity, in mathematics, is the point towards which an exponential curve tends. At the singularity, the rate of change of technology becomes infinite; we can’t predict what lies beyond it. In a frightening essay on the taxonomy of artificial intelligence, published in Whole Earth Review in 1994, Vinge pointed out that if it is possible to create an artificial intelligence (specifically a conscious software construct) equivalent to a human mind, then it is possible to create one that is faster than a human mind—just run it on a faster computer. Such a weakly superhuman AI can design ever-faster hardware for itself, amplifying its own capabilities.


pages: 361 words: 83,886

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

—LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW * * * * * * * * * * * * " Western industrialists will learn more about competing with Japan from this book than from all the how-to books that have proliferated since Japan Inc. became a popular ogre." —Joseph F. Engelberger (Father of the industrial robot) * * * * * * * * * * * * "The robots are coming, and they are Japanese." —WHOLE EARTH REVIEW * * * * * * * * * * * * "One of the best Sci-Tech books of 1988" ‘LIBRARY JOURNAL Contents On the New 2010 Digital Version Preface PART ONE Introducing the Robot Kingdom and the Robot 1 The Robot Kingdom 2 What Is a Robot? PART TWO Before Industrial Robots: A State of Mind 3 The First Japanese Robot 4 Robots of the Imagination 5 The Toy Robot Kingdom PART THREE After Industrial Robots: Building the Kingdom 6 Japan Manufactures the Industrial Robot 7 An Empire of Yellow Robots 8 The Man—Machine Interface 9 Robots and the Wealth of Nations PART FOUR Beyond Industrial Robots 10 Religion and Robots 11 Six Legs, Four Legs, Two Legs, or None?


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

THINKING WITH TECHNOLOGY commuting a little less: www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/how-america-stopped-commuting.html. attendance at movie theaters: www.slashfilm.com/box-office-attendance-hits-lowest-level-five-years. Vernor Vinge: V. Vinge (1993). “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Whole Earth Review, Winter. Ray Kurzweil: R. Kurzweil (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Books. Nick Bostrom: N. Bostrom (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ian Tattersall: As told to Dan Falk in the online magazine eon: http://eon.co/magazine/science/was-human-evolution-inevitable-or-a-matter-of-luck.


pages: 357 words: 100,718

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

Drinkwater, P Wagoner, and M. Sarrantonio, "Legume-Based Cropping Systems Have Reduced Carbon and Nitrogen Losses," Nature 396 (November 19, 1998): 262. 25. FoodReview No. 24-1. (Washington, DC : Food and Rural Economics Division, US Department of Agriculture, July 2001) 26. See D. H. Meadows, "Poor Monsanto," in Whole Earth Review, Summer 1999, 104. 27. Sandra Postel, Gretchen C. Daily, and Paul R. Ehrlich, "Human Appropriation of Renewable Fresh Water," Science 271 (February 9 1996):785-788. This publication is the source for all the numbers that go into figure 3-5. 28. The total capacity of human-made reservoirs is about 5,500 cubic kilometers, but only a bit more than half of that is actually available as sustainable flow. 29.


pages: 387 words: 105,250

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

bread and circuses, carbon footprint, clean water, commons-based peer production, failed state, impulse control, machine translation, megaproject, negative equity, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, semantic web, sexual politics, social software, space junk, starchitect, stem cell, supervolcano, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR BRUCE STERLING is the author of ten novels, three of which were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. The Difference Engine, co-written with William Gibson, was a national bestseller. He has also published four short-story collections and three nonfiction books. He has written for many magazines, including Newsweek, Fortune, Time, Whole Earth Review, and Wired, where he was a longtime contributing editor. He has won two Hugo Awards and was a finalist for the 2007 Nebula for Best Novella. He lives in Austin, Texas, with frequent side jaunts to Turin, Italy; Los Angeles; Belgrade; and Amsterdam. The Caryatids is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

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

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

Several universities, a few startups, as well as the U.S. military had comparable prototypes, some with slightly different approaches for creating the phenomenon. I felt I had seen the future during my plunge into his microcosmos and wanted as many of my friends and fellow pundits as possible to experience what I had. With the help of the magazine I was then editing (Whole Earth Review), we organized the first public demo of every VR rig that existed in the fall of 1990. For 24 hours, from Saturday noon to Sunday noon, anyone who bought a ticket could stand in line to try out as many of the two dozen or so VR prototypes as they could. In the wee hours of the night I saw the psychedelic champion Tim Leary compare VR to LSD.


pages: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright,‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.” Spoken at the first Hackers’ Conference, and printed in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. It later turned up in his book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987 “ All historians understand that they must never, ever talk about the future. Their discipline requires that they deal in facts, and the future doesn’t have any yet. A solid theory of history might be able to embrace the future, but all such theories have been discredited.Thus historians do not offer, and are seldom invited, to take part in shaping public policy.


The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The idea was formally developed at a charrette, or design workshop, held at the University of Washington in the Spring of 1988. The documents were subsequently published under the title, The Pedestrian Pocket Book, edited by Mr. Kelbaugh. Solomon, "Fixing Suburbia," Peter Calthorpe, et aI. , The Pedestrian Pocket Book, p. 29. Peter Calthorpe, "The Post-Suburban Metropolis," Whole Earth Review, Winter 1991. Hiss, The Experience of Place, p. 214. 2 8 0 _ Bibliography Alexander, Christopher. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Alexander, Christopher; Ishikawa, Sara; Silverstein, Murry; et al. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable. Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of New Urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Cities Redefined,” an article in the Whole Earth Review. Since then, New Urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design, and regionalism. It drew one of its major ideas from a squatter community. There are a lot more ideas where that one came from. For instance, shopping areas could be more like the lanes in squatter cities, with a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables.


pages: 400 words: 129,320

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer, Jim Mason

agricultural Revolution, air freight, biodiversity loss, clean water, collective bargaining, dumpster diving, food miles, Garrett Hardin, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, means of production, rent control, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Whole Earth Review

Ball, "Agricultural Influences on Carbon Emissions and Sequestration: A Review of Evidence and the Emerging Trading Options," Centre for Environment and Society Occasional Paper 2001-03, University of Essex, 2001. 33 Andy Jones, Eating Oil, Sustain & Elm Farm Research Centre, London, 2001, Case Study 2. www.sustainweb.org/chain-fm-eat.asp. 34 Alison Smith, et al, The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development, ED50254, Issue 7, July 200S, p. 74. 35 Email from Carlo Petrini to Brian Halweil, cited in Brian Halweil, Eat Here, p. 161. CHAPTER 11 1 Diana Friedman, "The Del Cabo project; a Mexican collective exports organic produce to the U.S.A.," Whole Earth Review, Spring 1989. www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1S10/is_n62/ ai_7422469; Don Lotter, "The Del Cabo Cooperative of Southern Baja keeps 300 farm families busy growing organic crops for export," New Farm, July 20, 2004, www.newfarm.org/ international/pan-am _don/j uly04/. 2 United Nations Human Development Report, 2005, p. 24. http://hdr.undp.org/reports/ global/2005/pdf/HDR05_chapter_1.pdf 3 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2000 (Oxford University Press, New York, 2000), p. 30; Human Development Report 2001 (Oxford University Press, New York, 2001), pp. 9-12, p. 22; and World Bank, World Development Report 2000/2001, Overview, p. 3, www.worldbank.org/poverty/wdrpoverty/report/overview.pdf, for the other figures.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

James Pethokoukis, “McCain or Obama: Who’s Pro-Growth?” US News & World Report, June 2, 2008 (usnews.com/blogs/capital-commerce/2008/06/02/mccain-or-obama-whos-pro-growth.html). 21. Donella Meadows, The Global Citizen (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1991), p. 4. 22. Donella Meadows, “Places to Intervene in a System,” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1997 (wholeearth.com/issue/2091/article/27/ places.to.intervene.in.a.system). 23. Ibid. 24. Interview with Jeffrey Morris, May 2009. A Word About Words 1. Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, Confronting Consumption (Boston: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 45–50. 2. James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 170. 3.


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology (April 1968), http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0353.html (accessed December 11, 2009). 67 “A virtual community is a group of people”: Howard Rheingold, “Virtual Communities—Exchanging Ideas Through Computer Bulletin Boards,” Whole Earth Review (Winter 1987), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n57/ai_6203867/ (accessed November 15, 2009). 67 Two Internet sociologists, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison: danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, And Scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2007), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html (accessed November 15, 2009). 69 Nonetheless, by 1999 sixdegrees had reached: Details about sixdegrees from interview and email followup with Andrew Weinreich, 2009. 74 But, according to Stealing MySpace: Julia Angwin, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (New York: Random House, 2009), 52. 76 In 2003, Angwin notes, the percentage of Americans: Ibid. 77 Buyukkokten himself once bragged: Luke O’Brien, “Poking Facebook,” 02138 Magazine (November 2007), www.02138mag.com/magazine/article/1724.html (accessed November 28, 2009). 80 Previously they’d won a gold medal: Ibid. 83 The civil lawsuit filed on behalf of the three alleges: ConnectU, Inc. v.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

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

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

., “Passage of an Iron Rod Through the Head,” Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 11, May 1999, pp. 281–83, www.­neuro.­psychiatryonline.­org/­cgi/­content/­full/­11/­2/­281. 12 “It is not impossible to build a human brain”: Jonathan Fildes, “Artificial Brain ‘10 Years Away,’ ” BBC News, July 22, 2009, http:­/­/­news.­bbc.­co.­uk/­2/­hi/­8164060.­stm. 13 “It’s not a question of years”: Jason Palmer, “Simulated Brain Closer to Thought,” BBC News, April 22, 2009, http:­/­/­news.­bbc.­co.­uk/­2/­hi/­sci/­tech/­8012496.­stm. 14 “This is a Hubble Telescope of the mind … it’s inevitable”: Douglas Fox, “IBM Reveals the Biggest Artificial Brain of All Time,” Popular Mechanics, December 18, 2009, www.­popularmechanics.­com/­technology/­engineering/­extreme-­machines/­4337190. 15 “After we solve this”: Sally Adee, “Reverse Engineering the Brain,” IEEE Spectrum, June 2008, http:­/­/­spectrum.­ieee.­org/­biomedical/­ethics/­reverse-­engineering-­the-­brain/­0. 16 “Within thirty years”: Vernor Vinge, “What Is the Singularity?” paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993, http:­/­/­mindstalk.­net/­vinge/­vinge-­sing.­html. 17 “I’d be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened”: Tom Abate, “Smarter Than Thou? Stanford Conference Ponders a Brave New World with Machines More Powerful Than Their Creators,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2006, http:­/­/­articles.­sfgate.­com/­2006–­05–­12/­business/­17293318_­1_­ray-­kurzweil-­machines-­artificial-­intelligence. 18 “If you could blow the brain up”: Kurzweil, p. 376. 19 Philosopher David Chalmers has even catalogued: http:­/­/­consc.­net/­mindpapers.­com. 20 “life may seem pointless if we are fated”: Sheffield, p. 38. 21 “One conversation centered”: Kurzweil, p. 10. 22 “It’s not going to be an invasion”: Abate, San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2006. 23 “intelligent design for the IQ 140 people”: Brian O’Keefe, “The Smartest (or the Nuttiest) Futurist on Earth,” Fortune, May 2, 2007, http:­/­/­money.­cnn.­com/­magazines/­fortune/­fortune_­archive/­2007/­05/­14/­100008848/­. 24 “It’s as if you took a lot of good food”: Greg Ross, “An Interview with Douglas R.


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The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1985. Van Heijenoort, Jean, ed. From Frege to Gödel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Vigne, V “Technological Singularity” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993. von Neumann, John. The Computer and the Brain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958. Waddington, C. H. The Strategy of the Genes. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957. Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. _________.


pages: 566 words: 151,193

Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, clean water, disinformation, Flynn Effect, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, ocean acidification, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review

Brody, “Farmers Exposed to a Pollutant Face Medical Study…,” New York Times, August 12, 1976, C-20; “PBB Michigan Contamination Continues,” Guardian, May 4, 1977, 2; Associated Press, “Michigan Study Indicates 97% Have Traces of PBB,” Washington Post, December 31, 1981. 62. Ibid. 63. Cited in Regenstein, America the Poisoned, 341. 64. Longgood, The Darkening Land, 132–34. 65. Whole Earth Review 48, Fall 1985, p. 51. 66. National Cancer Institute, Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results: Incidence and Mortality Data, 1973–1977, monograph 57, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Health, June 1981), 4. 67. Regenstein, America the Poisoned, 74. 68.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“Manitoba’s Kor Ecologic Debuts Hybrid Urbee,” Canadian Manufacturing, November 2, 2012, http://www.canadianmanufacturing.com/designengineering/news/manitobas-kor-ecologic -debuts-hybrid-urbee-11992 (accessed November 1, 2013). 31. Stewart Brand and Matt Herron, “Keep Designing—How the Information Economy Is Being Created and Shaped by the Hacker Ethic,” Whole Earth Review (May, 1985): 44. 32. Deborah Desrochers-Jacques, “Green Energy Use Jumps in Germany,” Der Spiegel, August 30, 2011, http://www.spiegel.de/international/crossing-the-20-percent-mark-green-energy-use -jumps-in-germany-a-783314.html (accessed August 7, 2013); Berlin and Niebull, “Germany’s Energy Transformation: Eneriewende,” Economist, July 28, 2012, http://www.economist.com /node/21559667 (accessed October 1, 2013). 33.


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The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

., Science and Ultimate Reality (Cambridge University Press, 2003) David Deutsch, ‘Quantum Theory of Probability and Decisions’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A455 (1999) David Deutsch, ‘The Structure of the Multiverse’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A458 (2002) Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (BBC Publications, 1965) Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All (Allen Lane, 1998) Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007) Bryan Magee, Popper (Fontana, 1973) Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’ Plato, Euthyphro Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World (Routledge, 1995) Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides (Routledge, 1998) Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2000) Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers (Basic Books, 2001) Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, 59, 236 (October 1950) Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (Faber, 2002) Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’, Whole Earth Review, winter 1993 *The term was coined by the philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson. *This terminology differs slightly from that of Dawkins. Anything that is copied, for whatever reason, he calls a replicator. What I call a replicator he calls an ‘active replicator’. *These are not the ‘parallel universes’ of the quantum multiverse, which I shall describe in Chapter 11.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

., “Invention as a Combinatorial Process: Evidence from U.S. Patents,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 12 (2015): 20150272. 5. R. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005). 6. V. Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” Whole Earth Review (1993). 7. This is quoted by the great mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in a eulogy to von Neumann following his death in 1957: “Tribute to John von Neumann,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 5(3), part 2 (1958): 64. 8. C. McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).


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

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

Looking inside, he realized he was staring into another world; the kids were totally enveloped by the blinking lights and beeping of their primitive plywood arcade games. “I could see the physical intensity of their postures, how rapt the kids inside were,” he later recounted during an interview with Whole Earth Review. He felt he could see the “photons coming off the screens into the kids’ eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game.” Sure, it was only Pac-Man or Space Invaders, but these machines transported the players to another dimension. As Gibson said, “These kids clearly believed in the space games projected.


The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

Real Goods Institute offers year-round classes in Strawbale Construction, Sustainable Building and Eco Design, Solar Electric Systems, Country Property and Homestead Development, Home Retrofitting for Energy Efficiency, Do-It-Yourself Hydro Systems, and Developing Your Own Water Systems, from Financing to Finishing Your New House. Call Real Goods at 1-800-762-7325. Whole Earth Review offers abundant information on housing, 1-415-332-1716. Green, Solar, and Off-the-Grid Housing Books Green Shift by John Farmer (Oxford, England: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996) Written by a British architect, the book discusses historical and current attempts at balancing human housing needs with environmental concerns.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

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

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

Beau Cronin of O’Reilly Media has proposed a drinking game: “take a shot every time you find a news article or blog post that describes a new AI system as working or thinking ‘like the brain’ ” (http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/05/it-works-like-the-brain-so.html), and he maintains a pinboard of stories making such claims (https://pinboard.in/u:beaucronin/t:like-the-brain/#). 18. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee. 19. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1993. See also Ray Kurzweil, “Accelerating Intelligence,” http://www.kurzweilai.net/. 20. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, Mar. 1960. 21. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 7. 22. Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer.” 23.