skeuomorphism

18 results back to index

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

"The essence of good design is picking the metaphor that informs expectations." 8.3.3. Skeuomorphic Design Here’s the next big problem with metaphors and design. There’s a certain concept called skeuomorphic design. The word skeuomorphic means “a shadow of its former self.” It’s form as a shadow. What it means is when you create elements in design that give you references or hints of some previous form. For example, a classic example, in the first iteration of iPads, the iOS software had a lot of skeuomorphic design. If you opened your contact database, it was bound in leather. That leather had stitching.

…

When you’re playing a card game on your computer and it has fake felt under the cards, that’s because it’s trying to draw out the metaphor of a casino by introducing this design element. Skeuomorphic design is extremely powerful. It’s also extremely dangerous. If you don’t use it correctly, again, it creates different expectations as to what is going to happen next. In bitcoin, we have a lot of skeuomorphic design. My favorite and most hated form of skeuomorphic design is the picture you will see in every single article written about bitcoin: a pile of gold coins with a letter B on them, usually the Casascius coin designed by Mike Caldwell, but possibly some other rendering of that.

…

, Bitcoin, the Zombie of Currencies, The Dangers of Automobiles, Electricity, and Bitcoin, Primates and Moneycriticism, The Dangers of Automobiles, Electricity, and Bitcoincriticisms, Infrastructure for Horses, Infrastructure for Natural Gascrowdfunding, Building Blocks of Bitcoincultural hallucination, Characteristics of Moneycurrency, Valuing Currencies by Usechoice, Born into Currency community, Choosing Currencies and Communities creation, Currency as a Means of Expression evolution, Currencies Evolve expression, Currency as a Means of Expression index, Index Currency paradigm, Born into Currency sovereignty, Currency Creates Sovereignty value, Valuing Currencies by Use zero-sum game, Born into Currency Currencyas an application, Currency as an App meta-politics, Choosing Currencies and Communities D data, From Voice to Data decentralization, Communications Expanding While Access to Banking Is Declining, New Architecture, New Access, Network-Centric Money decentralized, Open Innovation and Opt-In Systems design, Negative Outcomes by Design, Not Intent, Smart vs. Dumb Networks disruptive tech, Designing for Innovation metaphors, Bitcoin and Design purpose, ATM Experience skeuomorphic, Skeuomorphic Design user experience, Bitcoin ATM Experience disruptarian, Banking: Liberator to Limiterdisruptive tech, Designing for Innovationdumb, Smart vs. Dumb Networks E economic activities, Primates and Money economic inclusion, Communications Expanding While Access to Banking Is Declining economics, Tragedy of the Commons electricity, Infrastructure for Natural Gas, From Natural Gas to Electricity elements, Bitcoin’s Atomic Structure email, Multiple Currencies Coexist, Alt Groups Will Destroy the Internet email attachments, Email and Email Attachments Will Destroy the Internet Ether, Choosing Currencies and Communities ethereum, Currency as a Language evolution, Currencies Evolve expression, Currency as a Means of Expression F fees, Bitcoin, the Invention, There Are No Spam Transactions in Bitcoin, Open Innovation and Opt-In Systems, Fee Optimization and Scaling, Spam Transactions, Legitimate Transactions, Illegitimate Transactions festival, Festival of the Commons festival of the commons, Dumb Networks, Innovation, and the Festival of the Commons financial exclusion, Dreaming of Totalitarian Control over All Financial Transactions financial inclusion, Predicting the Future for consumers, Open Innovation and Opt-In Systems freedom, Communications Expanding While Access to Banking Is Declining, Censorship of Financial Transactions, Bitcoin, the Zombie of Currencies, Banking Privilege and Surveillance G game theory, Open Innovation and Opt-In Systems geopolitics, Communications Expanding While Access to Banking Is Declining global, Money of the People, Solving Payment Problems global culture, Communications Expanding While Access to Banking Is Declining grand arc, Grand Arc of Technology H HD wallets, Festival of the Commons 2012-2014 hierarchy, Banking: Liberator to Limiter honeypot, Attacks Build Resistance I identity, Dreaming of Totalitarian Control over All Financial Transactions, Banking Privilege and Surveillance incentives, Open Innovation and Opt-In Systems inclusion, Money of the People, Banks for Everyone, Including 6.5 Billion People in a Global Economy, Banking Privilege and Surveillance incremental tech, Designing for Innovation index, Index Currency infrastructure inversion, Infrastructure Inversion, From Horses to Vehicles banking, From Banking to Bitcoin data, From Voice to Data electricity, From Natural Gas to Electricity paved roads, From Horses to Vehicles innovation, Recognizing Innovation, Open Innovation and Opt-In Systemsadoption, Infrastructure for Natural Gas asking permission, New Architecture, New Access automobiles, The Dangers of Automobiles, Electricity, and Bitcoin, New Technologies, Riding on Old Infrastructure banking, New Architecture, New Access, Open Innovation and Opt-In Systems, Festival of the Commons, Banking Privilege and Surveillance byob (be your own bank), Including 6.5 Billion People in a Global Economy cameras, Incumbent Reactions to Innovation competition, Infrastructure for Human Voices creativity, Building Blocks of Lego credit cards, Paper to Plastic crime, The Dangers of Automobiles, Electricity, and Bitcoin criticism, The Dangers of Automobiles, Electricity, and Bitcoin criticisms, Infrastructure for Horses, Infrastructure for Natural Gas disruptive tech, Designing for Innovation economic activities, Primates and Money electricity, Infrastructure for Natural Gas for consumers, Open Innovation and Opt-In Systems HD wallets, Festival of the Commons 2012-2014 incremental tech, Designing for Innovation infrastructure inversion, From Horses to Vehicles internet, UX and Society interstitial, Interstitial Innovation investment, Festival of the Commons 2012-2014 Linux, Incumbent Reactions to Innovation makers, Recognizing Innovation mash-up, Interstitial Innovation media, Infrastructure for Natural Gas modem, Infrastructure for Human Voices MP3, Incumbent Reactions to Innovation multisignature, Festival of the Commons 2012-2014 new medium, Separating the Medium and the Message open, Incumbent Reactions to Innovation paper money, Precious Metals to Paper permission, The Smart Network - Phones permissionless, Neutrality, Criminals, and Bitcoin, New Architecture, New Access, Bitcoin’s Dumb Network regulation, Predicting the Future tools for, Building Blocks of Creativity wallet, Fee Optimization and Scaling international finance, Money of the Peopleinternet, Bitcoin, the Invention, Neutrality, Criminals, and Bitcoin, New Architecture, New Access, The Dumb Network - Internet, UX and Society, Usenet Will Destroy the Internetprinting press, Authority by Production interstitial, Interstitial Innovationinvestment, Festival of the Commons 2012-2014 K keys, Master-Slave Architecture, Wallets aren’t wallets permission, Wallets aren’t wallets L language, How Old Is Money?

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

The original Macintosh desktop computer, for example, was conceived as a skeuomorphic version of an office desktop as seen from above. Because everybody knew how the items on a traditional desk were used in the physical world, that knowledge could be implicitly transferred to its digital counterpart. More recently, however, Apple had heard loud criticisms concerning its use of “tacky” skeuomorphic elements. According to some, visual references to obsolescent office furniture and audio equipment were beginning to look dated and out of place. Forstall, after Jobs’s death, was reportedly Apple’s major champion of skeuomorphic design, which put him in the line of fire not only in the eyes of external critics but from some within Apple too.

…

A key contention concerned Forstall’s fondness for skeuomorphic design; that is, graphic interfaces that resemble real-world objects. Apple’s user-interface conventions under Forstall tended to look like their real-life counterparts. Virtual wooden shelves were used to display eBooks in the iBookstore app; Apple’s Podcast app looked like a reel-to-reel tape recorder; iOS’s multiplayer gaming service, Game Center, was styled like a Vegas casino table. Faux leather and wood-grain patterns had found their way into many of Apple’s most popular apps. Such skeuomorphic design allows neophyte users to be immediately familiar with an unfamiliar device, operating on the assumption that nothing is simpler than an interface that works exactly like objects do in the real world.

…

On the other side of the calculation, Jony’s overhaul of iOS was consistent with his approach to hardware. Jony’s hardware has always been about bare, utilitarian minimalism. He disdains decoration—as he says, every tiny screw is there for a reason—and his goal is to make design disappear. In contrast, skeuomorphism is about making software look like something it isn’t, like a roulette table or a yellow legal pad, and decoration is essential. Skeuomorphic software is the opposite of Jony’s minimalist hardware. One strips away everything that isn’t necessary; the other puts it back in. This paradox within Apple ended with iOS 7. With the ornamentation taken out, Jony’s software was in sync with his hardware, stripped to their essentials.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

In an interview with the New Yorker, designer Jonathan Ive said that he placed the knob slightly off-center to make it “strangely familiar.” If he had centered it, users would have expected it to perform its original function; had he removed it, the watch wouldn’t have looked enough like a watch.5 Skeuomorphs temper the new with the familiar. Our smartphones are packed with skeuomorphs. To place a call, we touch an icon of an old phone handset with an extruded earpiece and mouthpiece – a profile that departed the technology landscape long ago. The camera on your smartphone plays an audio file of a shutter sound, even though digital cameras don’t have mechanical shutters.

…

Our creations may look largely like what’s come before, but they morph. Too much predictability and we tune out; too much surprise and we become disoriented. As we’ll see in the coming chapters, creativity lives in that tension. The exploration/exploitation tradeoff also explains why our world is so densely populated with skeuomorphs: features that imitate the design of what has come before. Consider that when the iPad was introduced it featured a “wooden” bookshelf with “books” on it – and the programmers went to great lengths to make the “pages” turn when you swiped your finger. Why not simply redefine a book for the digital era?

…

George Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte In digital pixilation, the dots are so small you normally don’t see them. This covert fracturing is the innovation that gives rise to our whole digital universe. The idea of pixilation – breaking a whole into tiny parts – has a long history. When we “cc” an email, we are employing a skeuomorph from the analog age: carbon copy. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an author would clone a document by first placing a sheet of black or blue carbonic paper between two sheets of plain paper; then, by writing or typing on the top sheet, dry ink or pigment would be transferred to the lower one, creating a duplicate.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Think back to your first iPhone (or perhaps, your first six). From 2007 to 2013, Apple’s operating system was highly skeuomorphic—its iBooks application showed digital versions of books on a digital bookshelf, its notes app was designed to look like a physical yellow pad of paper, its calendar had simulated stitching, and its games center was intended to resemble a felt table. With iOS 7, Apple ditched these legacy design principles for those native to the mobile era. It was during Apple’s skeuomorphic era that many of today’s leading consumer digital companies were founded. Companies such as Instagram, Snap, and Slack reimagined what digital communications would be—not using IP to call a landline (Skype) nor text (BlackBerry Messenger), but to reinvent how we communicate, why, and what about.

…

The amount of data that must be read, written, synchronized (more on this below), and rendered to create and sustain this experience is not just unprecedented—it is far beyond anything possible today. However, the literal version of Stephenson’s Metaverse may not even be desirable. He imagined individuals waking up in the Metaverse inside their virtual homes, then walking or taking a train to a virtual bar. While skeuomorphism† often has utility, “The Street” as a single unifying layer for everything in the virtual world likely does not. Most participants in the Metaverse would rather teleport from destination to destination. Fortunately, it is far easier to manage the persistence of a user’s data (i.e., what they own and have done) across various worlds and over time, rather than the persistence of every user’s most minute contributions to a planet-sized world.

…

Some believe that the only way to provide the computing resources needed for the Metaverse is through a decentralized network of individually owned—and compensated—servers and devices. But I’m getting ahead of myself. * After Epic Games sued Apple in August 2020, Apple removed Fortnite from its App Store, thereby making it impossible for users to play the game on iOS devices. † “Skeuomorphism” refers to a technique used in graphical design in which interfaces are designed to mimic their real-world counterparts. For example, the iPhone’s first “Notes” app involved typing on yellow paper with red lines, just like the common notepad. ‡ This is often referred to as a “persistent” connection, but in the interest of differentiating it from the persistence of a virtual world, I’ll use the term “continuous” here

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Thus, while Facebook worked as a metaphor for Kenyan ideas about knowledge and society, the metaphor failed to explain what the internet could be and how it worked. There is another breakdown in metaphor that we can watch from our own phones, one created by Apple. Throughout the mid-2000s, the company was lambasted in the design community for its skeuomorphs, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “an element of a graphic user interface which mimics a physical object.” These had started out usefully, but over the decades reached a pointless level of detail. At one time, it was important for a file “folder” to indeed look like a folder, so that you knew it did the same thing.

…

By the mid-2000s the details had gotten baroque. To know how the calendar worked, you didn’t need the calendar on every Mac to look as if it had been bound by stitched leather; to know that you could buy books via the iBooks app, there didn’t need to be digital shelves, made of digitally rendered wood. The design community’s bias against skeuomorphism had descended from the Bauhaus, which, at the dawn of modern design, declared a break with tradition by decrying decorative flourishes meant to link the new world with the old—for example, the Art Nouveau metalwork of the Paris Métro entrance, where copper was fashioned to look like ornate vines.

…

De los Reyes happened to return to work at a decisive moment for Microsoft. Satya Nadella was about to be appointed CEO, which lit a fuse that snaked through the company’s machinery. Among the first changes to happen was that Albert Shum, who’d become famous inside Microsoft for leading the ambitious, brazenly “flat” and pointedly non-skeuomorphic design of Windows Mobile, was appointed to head up design for nearly all of Microsoft. Shum must have scratched his head, pondering what “design at Microsoft” even meant. After all, this was a company with 130,000 employees, countless product groups, and enough internal feuding to exhaust the Hatfields and Mc-Coys.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Some expertspoint out that you can type faster on different keyboard layouts.38 So, if we ditched QWERTY, we would be able to type faster and a common activity would become marginally faster and easier. But even though typewriters are now just curios and the jamming of the keys a distant memory, QWERTY persists because users learn to type using it and because consumers expect it. Technologists call things like the QWERTY layout skeuomorphs: design features that persist even though they reflect a technical constraint or feature that is now redundant, like the rivets on jeans or the floppy disk “Save” icon on a computer. If something as trivial and as obviously arbitrary as the layout of a keyboard can become stuck, how much more must this be true of deeply embedded, culturally cherished norms and rules?

…

But it is more costly than good institutions; we should not forget that British economic growth in the glory days of the Industrial Revolution (the nineteenth century) was around 0.3 percent per year—low compared with the United States and Germany, which were in a position to learn from Britain’s gambles and put better institutions in place from the start. In short, when we survey the institutional landscape at a time of economic change, we should not be surprised to encounter hangovers, skeuomorphs, and relics. Unpredictability When information is absent or missing, exchange will have unpredictable consequences. Richard Nelson made the point that institutions are the product of evolution, not design. Individual policies or rules may be designed, but as soon as you combine rules, laws, and norms into a functioning institution, they take on emergent properties that are hard to predict.

…

., 58 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 39 segmentation, market, 223 Selden, George, 2 Sena, Vania, 133 Sever, Can, 155, 178 Shadbolt, Nigel, 146 shareholder value management, 158–62 Sheer, Lia, 160–61 Shiller, Robert, 36–37 Shleifer, Andrei, 156 Shockley, William, 204 short-termism, 159, 161–62 Sichel, Dan, 42, 45 signalling, human capital, 233–34 Simon, Hermann, 57 Skelton, David, 202 skeuomorphs, 106–7 Smith, James, 179 Smith, Noah, 236 Southwood, Ben, 138 special interests, capture by, 130 specificity, 104–6 spillovers, 52–53, 113, 121–36, 134f, 158–62, 269n48 Srivastava, Anup, 157 stagnation, 4, 23–26, 24f, 26f, 67–70, 68f state capacity, 16, 143–46, 240, 244, 245f, 247, 249–53 State We’re In, The (Hutton), 41 status, inequality of, 28 Stoker, Gerry, 29 street votes, 197–98 suitcase, wheelie, 123–24 Summers, Lawrence, 33, 163 sunkenness, 114, 115t, 116, 181 synergies, 53–54, 68–69, 114, 158–62, 269n48 Syverson, Chad, 243 Tabarrok, Alex, 133 Tabarrok curve, 133–34, 134f Taylor, Mark Zachary, 144, 256 Taylor, Tim, 268n24 tech-governance fit, 105 technical debt, 12 technocrats, 193–96 technological approach, 87 technological change, 99–104 technology, 39, 42–43, 68–69, 128–30 technopopulism, 257 Theranos, 80 Thicke, Robert, 131–32 Thiel, Peter, 35, 137, 141, 258 Timmis, Jonathan, 217 Tobin’s Q, 25–26, 26f, 264n13 total factor productivity (TFP), 43, 45, 67–68, 68f, 69–70, 264n31, 265n3 transactions costs, 95, 266n8 transport infrastructure, 188–89, 199–200 Tranter, Justin, 132, 270n19 Trump, Donald, 7, 202, 258 trust, 92–93, 99 uncertainty, 88, 265n49 unemployment/inflation trade-off, 166 unpredictability, 108–10 vaccines, 22, 43 value-based management, 158–62 value investing, 155–58 van Bavel, Bas, 111, 242 van Zandt, David, 101, 268n24, 268n31 VC.

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

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

(More on this in the concluding chapter.) In the meantime, instead of new forms and behaviors, as platform information becomes more physical, its initial accomplishments may to “roboticize” machines, processes, techniques, behaviors, and systems as we already find them. The results are not unlike skeuomorphic interface designs where digital icons are made to resemble everyday objects and so allegorize how human Users (and designers) understand their machine's functions to work. It will take some time for platform robotics to invent new infrastructural systems that are unique to how its capacities can be designed instead of merely automating what already exists.

…

A fantastic transubstantiation takes place for which visual signs and images no longer simply represent other things in the world, but become themselves tactile technologies that, when activated, cause a real event to occur correspondent with the semantic content of that sign/image. A picture of a bomb is merely a representation, whereas a button with a picture of a bomb on it that causes remote explosions is weaponized skeuomorphism. Put in more technical terms, the GUI is a visualization of a machinic network and of the outcomes that it claims to mediate; the formation of its interfaciality is an arc of translation from a set of possibilities into a visual instrument. Between the machine and what it can do and the representations of that potential are translations, and however arbitrary or integral each may be, they are necessary for our comprehension of any network we might encounter.

…

In this recursion, the semiotic and instrumental loop is closed, and so these images of assemblage that are also machines to make those assemblages are a third-order interface design. Within the broader history of images, these diagrammatic tools are innovative in that they not only provide a convincing and concise minimal diagram of far-flung processes; they actually do what they represent (see the above reference to “weaponized skeuomorphism”). Conversely within the history of interfaces, which would include fences, levers, latches, knobs, switches, handles, buttons, and plugs, these interfaces rely on visual representations of the effects on the menu. For this reason, the ideological reductiveness of the interfacial image is more than a conceptual problem; it is also how systems enforce themselves, one against another.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Hansen, “How Apple Is Organized for Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation; Tony Fadell, “For the record, I fully believe . . .,” Twitter, October 23, 2000, https://twitter.com/tfadell/status/1319556633312268288. Steve Jobs had championed: Klaus Göttling, “Skeumorphism Is Dead, Long Live Skeumorphism,” Interaction Design Foundation, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/skeuomorphism-is-dead-long-live-skeuomorphism. Apple’s heads of operations: St. Regis Lobby description provided by the hotel via email at author’s request. Ive wanted to bring: Erica Blust, “Apple Creative Director Alan Dye ’97 to Speak Oct. 20,” Syracuse University, https://news.syr.edu/blog/2010/10/18/alan-dye/; “Alan Dye,” Design Matters with Debbie Millman (podcast), June 1, 2007, https://www.designmattersmedia.com/podcast/2007/Alan-Dye; “Bad Boys of Design III,” Design Matters with Debbie Millman (podcast), May 5, 2006, https://www.designmattersmedia.com/podcast/2006/Bad-Boys-of-Design-III; Debbie millman, “Adobe & AIGA SF Presents Design Matters Live w Alan Dye,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

…

IN ADVANCE OF THE CHANGE, Ive arranged to grant an exclusive interview for an article in the Telegraph by his close friend Stephen Fry. The British actor and writer, a self-professed Apple fanboy, penned a glowing profile that described his friend Ive as a “wonder boy” whom Cook had empowered to free Apple’s software from its skeuomorphic past in favor of a “brighter, clearer set of exquisitely designed images.” “Cook quite clearly adores Jony,” Fry wrote, “not just as the goose who continues to lay his golden eggs (solid gold in the case of the Apple Designer Watch), but as a colleague and a person. Everyone does. It is impossible not to get delightedly caught up in the earnest halting way he expresses his highly focused passion.”

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

“You felt like you were touching a piece of paper, and it was scrolling under your fingers.” That natural physicality extended to the design of the apps. “There was a lot of work that went into mimicking physical and familiar things that people were already used to interacting with,” he says. And that’s where the iPhone’s infamous skeuomorphism—the designing of digital objects to resemble versions of real ones—came in. “Early on, skeuomorphism was one of the things that made it so that people actually understood how to use an iPhone when they picked it up—there were already physical things in their life that they could model their interactions after, and that gave them clues as to how to use the device,” Ganatra says.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Nature, 410 (6827). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/35068645. 120 “encoded implicitly in the genome”: Lynn Helena Caporale. (2003) “Natural Selection and the Emergence of a Mutation Phenotype: An Update of the Evolutionary Synthesis Considering Mechanisms That Affect Genomic Variation.” Annual Review of Microbiology, 57 (1). 121 from the same starting point: (2009) “Skeuomorph.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skeuomorph&oldid=340233294. 122 “the embodiment of contingency”: Stephen Jay Gould. (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and Nature of History. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 320. 123 The Triad of Evolution: Inspired by Stephen Jay Gould. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

The whole point of the efficiency is so that we can enjoy more of what we love. No, this isn’t a complete list of exceptions, simply an acknowledgment that, like any rule, there are exceptions. The real power of “the best interface is no interface” is as a call to action. As a philosophy. It’s not about flat design or skeuomorphic. Web or mobile. This is about aiming for the best outcome of NoUI. One that doesn’t distract us or try to get us addicted, something that embraces the way we live and aims to make it better quietly and elegantly. For technology to become embedded in the fabric of our lives instead of a distraction away from what really matters.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

Vast international audiences were horrified to see the details of the brutality: how the man’s shirt rose to expose a pale strip of his stomach (another punctum) as he was pulled along the floor, his shrieking refusal, the blood on his face. What would once have gone unseen by all but a hundred people is made globally visible. Old walls are indeed coming down; each click of our pocket cameras, skeuomorphically added to smartphone shutters, is the sound of a key turning in a door. The Forked Image Cut to Dundas, Ontario, 1990, a year since the garden party. Our new home on a suburban estate has mutton-coloured siding. I passed much of that first Canadian summer deciding whether to be Master Splinter or April O’Neil in my imaginary games of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman

airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

The brand is the personality and message that a company wants to convey to its target audience. It’s a lot like your personal style: the clothes and jewelry and hairstyle you choose to wear when you go out into the world. Design is more about the usability and functionality of a product. Along with most every other tech designer in the early 2000s, I loved a design style known as skeuomorphism. This is where digital interfaces mimic their real-world counterparts, down to their textures, drop shadows, and reflective effects. Early Apple products relied heavily on this style; their on/off switches looked like real-world knobs, their calculator buttons seemed to have beveled edges, and so on.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

The team created nine different sign-up processes but weren’t able to test which one worked best with users because they hadn’t launched. Head designer Rob Ryan designed a beautiful app that looked and acted just like a real-world wallet, mimicking the motions of pulling dollars out and handing them to a friend. But Clinkle sat and waited and never launched the app. Eventually, the design world shifted away from skeuomorphism—the design concept of creating digital products that look and feel like the real-world products they are mimicking—and Clinkle’s app looked odd and antiquated before it even launched. Clinkle employees were constantly told by Lucas and his brain trust that they were just a couple months away from launching to consumers.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Most fashion designers weren’t experienced with the kind of 3-D modeling tools that Nagra’s designers used. Their experience was in nondigital, fully physical environments. That’s where Evans came in: Nagra hired her as a consultant to help create the tools that designers would use. Throwing out Nagra’s existing austerely technical interface, Evans opted for a highly skeuomorphic system that used physical gestures and commands that mimicked those she’d used her entire life. Designers would put their fingers into the shape of scissors to cut and could virtually sew their clothes at high magnification, all using thimble rings for absolute AR positioning. Their collaboration saw them become close friends.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

They were already trying to disrupt a common, familiar action—cooking—so they didn’t need to complicate it even further by persuading customers to place mini spaceships in their kitchens. It’s easier to disrupt the norm by being familiar. Patterns in the physical world are powerful, and the best products tap into them. The early designs of Apple’s mobile operating system were notoriously “skeuomorphic,” which means they employed a design where an interface resembled its real-world counterpart. While many professional designers scoffed at Apple’s efforts to make its digital notepad look like its physical counterpart, stitched leather and all. But by doing so, Apple was able to reduce the cognitive friction experienced by its newest users.

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

Tony Fadell: Each thing was a mock-up of the real world, and you would interact with those things like you would interact with the real world. Steve Jarrett: You started at a picture of a desk and you could drag things around on the desk and you tap on things to open them. Tony Fadell: It was skeuomorphic—like file cabinets to put your things in, a desk to write on… Steve Jarrett: And then you could leave the desk and go into the hallway. And in the hallway there’d be doors. Michael Stern: You’d click and behind the doors were various rooms—like the game room, the media room, the library. In the library there would be all your books, all of your electronic books.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Though a redesign seems trivial, it was actually a massive deal. Times had changed; Instagram had become a global business. And the app was not just a way to share in a fun and vintage way but an important part of the way people expressed themselves. So it deserved a logo that discarded the realistic view, known in software as a skeuomorphic image, and went to something more abstract, a glyph of rectangles and circles that suggested a camera. Replacing the rainbow were warm color gradients that gave the logo a shimmery look. Because the change was so dramatic, Systrom was a little concerned when he showed it to Zuckerberg over one of their dinners.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Burning Man, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, false flag, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Future Shock, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, lifelogging, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, place-making, post-industrial society, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, the market place, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

You live in the foundation stones of a city of boundless spires, but you turn your face to the dust. Did you know that in 2014 two rats shared one mind over a wire three thousand miles long? Have you heard that a man in Japan can read your dreams from your head with a machine? No. You sit reading news that has nothing new in it, telling yourself that because you hold in your hand some glossy skeuomorphic lozenge you are technologically au fait, and that because you know where in the endless repetition of tribal politics and fairydust economics your world is, or have consumed many of those books published in pale cream jackets by university presses, you are somehow informed about what is important.