Minecraft

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pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

In September 2012, the United Nations Settlements Program announced the launch of “block by block”, an initiative designed to encourage people to re-imagine 300 run-down public spaces across the globe using Minecraft; its first area of focus being the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. This project is something that Lisa is particularly interested in. She was trained as a designer in Taipei but wasn’t able to find any meaningful work. The UN initiative has suggested a means for her and her friends to start to use Minecraft to develop and pitch ideas for urban renewal back in Taiwan – something her network of Minecraft co-creators had started to explore. In October 2013, Minecraft received what might be the ultimate accolade. It was affectionately parodied in the American TV programme South Park.

Lisa was at the front desk, and when I asked her if she knew anyone who played Minecraft, her face lit up. Lisa is a hip 31-year-old from Taiwan. Like a lot of young Asian women travelling in Australia, she is wearing coloured lenses, so her eyes are a strange opaque dark blue. She has what Taiwanese call a “Loli” look – a mash-up of supermodel, princess and punkette. So she certainly doesn’t fit my stereotype of an online gamer – traditionally male, adolescent, or in a suspended state of adolescence, and either obsessed with dungeons and dragons or blowing things to pieces. But then calling Minecraft ”a game” doesn’t really do it justice. Minecraft is what in gaming terms is known as an “open world” or “sandbox”, a concept that couldn’t be more different in mindset to the high-octane and often mindless shoot-’em-up kind of games.

In 2009, Markus Persson, or “Notch” as he is known in the developer community, was working as a software developer in Stockholm. Minecraft started life as a side project he did in his spare time. Software development is pretty taxing on the brain, and Notch was also active on many online communities, so Minecraft had to be fitted in with a lot of other things. Its humble beginnings account for some of its simplicity. Notch was a software developer, not a designer, and he didn’t have a creative department to fall back on. The characters and world he created were therefore unashamedly rudimentary and low-res. This not only marks Minecraft out from a lot of its competitors, it also allows participants to apply a lot of imagination to it – in a similar way that kids do with simple building toys like Lego.


pages: 412 words: 116,685

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

By 2009, it exceeded half a billion dollars, with users cashing out $55 million into real-world currency that year. For all the success of Second Life, it was the rise of virtual world platforms Minecraft and Roblox that brought its ideas to a mainstream audience in the 2010s. In addition to offering significant technical enhancements compared to their predecessors, Minecraft and Roblox also focused on children and teenage users, and were therefore far easier to use, rather than just offer greater capabilities. The results have been astounding. Throughout the 2010s, bands of users collaborated in Minecraft to build cities as large as Los Angeles—roughly 500 square miles. One video game streamer, Aztter, constructed a stunning cyberpunk city out of an estimated 370 million Minecraft blocks, having worked an average of 16 hours per day for a year.7 Scale is not the sole achievement of the platform.

One video game streamer, Aztter, constructed a stunning cyberpunk city out of an estimated 370 million Minecraft blocks, having worked an average of 16 hours per day for a year.7 Scale is not the sole achievement of the platform. In 2015, Verizon built a cellphone inside Minecraft that could make and receive live video calls to the “real world.” As the COVID-19 virus spread across China in February 2020, a community of Chinese Minecraft players rapidly re-created the 1.2-million-square-foot hospitals built in Wuhan as a tribute to the “IRL” (“in real life”) workers, receiving global press coverage.8 One month later, Reporters Sans Frontières (also known as Reporters Without Borders) commissioned the construction of a museum within Minecraft that was composed of over 12.5 million blocks assembled by 24 virtual builders in 16 different countries over some 250 hours combined.

Because as fast as these virtual giants are growing, the number of virtual experiences, innovators, technologies, opportunities, and developers are all growing faster. While Roblox and Minecraft are among the most popular games in the world, their reach is modest when considered in the broadest terms. These two supposed titans have 30–55 million daily active users, a fraction of the global internet population of 4.5–5 billion. In effect, they are still at the ICQ stage of virtual words; billions of users and millions of developers have yet to even try them. It’s easy to assume that Roblox or Minecraft will be the primary beneficiaries of this growth, yet history cautions us to be skeptical. When Microsoft acquired Minecraft developer Mojang in 2014, the title had sold more copies than any other game in history, and also had more monthly active users—25 million—than any AAA video game in history.


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

Minecraft spread like World of Warcraft through the global gaming community. In January 2011, Minecraft passed one million purchases. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made $33 million in revenue. By August 2012, Minecraft claimed more than thirty-six million users, nearly seven million of whom had purchased the game. That translated into a sales rate of about $100 million per year for the game’s PC-based version. At the time, Minecraft was the fastest-selling game on Microsoft Xbox, and it featured an extensive catalog of merchandise, including a partner product with LEGO. With the explosion of 3-D printing tools in 2012, Minecraft moved further into LEGO territory.

Players had to quickly build a shelter to protect themselves, because at night monsters came out—zombies, skeletons, and (later) green “creepers.” Persson called his game Minecraft. Based on feedback from users, Persson steadily expanded Minecraft, adding new building materials, new monsters, a multiplayer capability, and the capacity for users to create “mods,” their own DIY versions of the game. He started charging for the game soon after releasing it, and steadily increased the price as the game’s features expanded and its popularity exploded. As it worked its way upmarket, Minecraft began to take on all the hallmarks of a disruptive innovation. When it launched, Minecraft was decidedly a low-end product. Its crude, blocky look and feel had none of the LEGO brick’s precision and Universe’s attempt at perfection.

Its crude, blocky look and feel had none of the LEGO brick’s precision and Universe’s attempt at perfection. Early on, Minecraft’s “building experience,” which involved hitting things with an axe, offered none of the brick’s limitless capacity for creative play. And the characters—zombies and creepers—were barely recognizable. But Minecraft was inexpensive. An unlimited, lifetime license for Minecraft cost just $13, which was far cheaper than a typical themed LEGO set consisting of plastic bricks and just a little more than the price tag for a month’s play on LEGO Universe. And the gameplay, where the primary goal was to escape attacks by monsters, proved addictive. Minecraft spread like World of Warcraft through the global gaming community.


pages: 307 words: 92,165

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

Eric thought I might be interested in a new online world called Minecraft. “You could describe Minecraft as an 8-bit vision of the future of design for 3D printing,” Eric told me. “Millions of people play Minecraft. It’s adult LEGOs.” The reason Eric had contacted me was because he thought I might be interested in Mineways, a software tool he created. Mineways is an open source (and free of charge) software tool that enables people to edit, then 3D print what they’ve designed in Minecraft. Eric developed Mineways when he realized the rich virtual worlds people were building online in Minecraft were begging to be materialized in physical form.

Eager to learn more, I arranged to meet Eric so he could show me the online world of Minecraft. One of the first things I noticed in Eric’s living room were 3D printed tchotchkes scattered around. He showed me a 3D printed replica of a castle, plus a blocky, rough-hewn, gray stone house with a yellow thatch roof. The house, Eric explained, was a printed replica of a village in Minecraft. We sat down in front of a widescreen computer monitor, and Eric logged into his Minecraft account. Eric explained that Minecraft is a multiplayer game where players create an avatar and set up their own custom-designed virtual world.

He explained that it was a challenge to design the grasshopper’s spindly legs and antennae in such a way that they could survive the 3D printing process. In a Minecraft world, each cube-shaped building block represents the real-world equivalent volume of one cubic meter. Unlike contemporary video games that are so sleek and finely rendered they look like movies, the graphics on Minecraft, at first glance, appear crude, even primitive. Minecraft worlds are made of big, blocky chunks of raw material. Trees, houses, lakes, structures are coarsely pixelated. Each flat surface appears to be made of individual tiles. What makes Minecraft so addictive? Part of the appeal is that the visual effect is magical, the cube-shaped building blocks lend a mystical air to the cities, buildings, and fantasy worlds that people build.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

since buying the game in 2014: “Minecraft for Windows,” Minecraft, accessed February 27, 2022, https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/store/minecraft-windows10. 55 million users play it: Tom Warren, “Minecraft Still Incredibly Popular as Sales Top 200 Million and 126 Million Play Monthly,” Verge, May 18, 2020, www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/5/18/21262045/minecraft-sales-monthly-players-statistics-youtube. This is up from the 100 million Warren reported in 2016: Tom Warren, “Minecraft Sales Top 100 Million,” Verge, June 2, 2016, www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11838036/minecraft-sales-100-million. $100,000 a month: Graff, “How a Dorm Room.”

Because the competition between servers is so fierce, Minecraft administrators often hire DDoS services to knock rivals off-line. Others can buy DDoS tools on the web for as little as $15 or watch YouTube videos to learn how to launch these attacks themselves. By taking Minecraft servers off-line, attackers hope to poach their customers. “If you’re a player, and your favorite Minecraft server gets knocked off-line, you can switch to another server,” Robert Coelho, vice president of ProxyPipe, a San Francisco company specializing in defending Minecraft servers, explained. “But for the server operators, it’s all about maximizing the number of players and running a large, powerful server.

Paras was particularly drawn to the online game Minecraft. Minecraft is a video game in which players explore a world made out of pixelated blocks. Players mine these blocks for raw materials to build tools, furniture, houses, gardens, castles, even Turing Machines. The game supports single and multiplayer modes. In multiplayer mode, individuals can cooperate in teams or compete with others from all around the internet. The game is easily “modded”—that is, modifiable to generate new worlds with different rules and novel capabilities. Many players switch between Minecraft servers that host these modded games, usually for a fee.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Freed, Medium, March 12, 2018. 63.  Genxee, “7 Years Later: Minecraft $2.5B Deal Microsoft’s Most Successful Acquisition?,” Influencive, June 30, 2021, www.influencive.com/7-years-later-minecraft-2-5b-deal-microsofts-most-successful-acquisition. 64.  Globe Newswire, “ThinkGeek and Mojang Build on Licensing Deal,” news release, Dow Jones Institutional News, June 15, 2011. 65.  Alex Cox, “The History of Minecraft—the Best Selling PC Game Ever,” TechRadar, September 4, 2020, www.techradar.com/news/the-history-of-minecraft. 66.  Sandra Fleming, “The Parents Guide to the Minecraft Marketplace,” Best Apps for Kids (blog). 67.  

In the world of for-profit apps and video games, the sandbox game Minecraft epitomizes tech’s potential to offer children wonderfully fun, creative, and educational experiences even as its prevailing business model exploits and corrupts those same experiences. I first encountered Minecraft in March 2014, when I was preparing to participate in a panel about tech, which included a teacher who used the game in his classroom. I was charmed by it. Six months later, Microsoft bought Minecraft from its creator for $2.5 billion.63 What excited me most about Minecraft was that it was pretty much completely unstructured.

You could play alone or collaborate with friends online. At that point, Minecraft was by no means commercial-free—there were ever-increasing numbers of licensed products,64 including T-shirts and even a Lego set.65 I was bothered by the commercialism—which of course now seems rather quaint—but I was still intrigued by the game. Like Mark, ten-year-old Henry was thrilled to show me what Microsoft’s Minecraft is like today. He was even more thrilled when his dad said, “Let me show you what I don’t let Henry play on Minecraft,” and we were transported to a virtual multiplayer battlefield, which still looks like Minecraft—blocky landscape, blocky avatars, and all.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

Phil understood that we needed to be the most attractive platform in the world for gamers, and he knew Minecraft had a dedicated and gigantic community of players who invented and built new worlds in this virtual Lego-like video game. It’s the rare video game that is invited into the classroom, and Minecraft is not just invited but desired. Teachers love the way it encourages building, collaboration, and exploration. It’s a 3D sandbox of sorts. If the classroom curriculum calls for building a river ecosystem with marshes, Minecraft can do that. If the river needs to flow, the Minecraft logic function can make that happen. It teaches digital citizenship because it’s multiplayer.

Phil and his team built a great relationship with the Swedish game studio and managed to expand the Minecraft franchise to multiple devices including mobile and console. Early in Microsoft’s relationship with Mojang, before I was CEO, Phil presented an opportunity to purchase Minecraft, but Phil’s boss at the time chose not to move forward. For some, such a visible, high-level rejection could have been withering, but Phil didn’t give up. He knew that this beloved game belonged in a place where it could continue to scale up and prosper. He also knew that for Microsoft, bringing Minecraft into our ecosystem could lead to deeper engagement with the next generation of gamers.

Acquiring the Finnish smartphone company led to numeric growth in terms of people and revenue, but ultimately we failed to break through in the highly competitive mobile phone business. Importantly, though, we learned a lot about what it means to design, build, and manufacture hardware. Our acquisition of Sweden-based Mojang and its video game Minecraft also represented a growth mindset because it created new energy and engagement for people on our mobile and cloud technologies, and it would open new opportunities in the education software space. The story of how the Minecraft acquisition happened illustrates some of the key qualities of a growth mindset, including the readiness to empower and learn from individuals who possess insights and passion that the rest of the organization needs to learn from.


pages: 302 words: 73,946

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams by Jono Bacon

Airbnb, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bounce rate, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, content marketing, Debian, Firefox, gamification, if you build it, they will come, IKEA effect, imposter syndrome, Internet Archive, Jono Bacon, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, lateral thinking, Mark Shuttleworth, Minecraft, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, planetary scale, pull request, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Scaled Composites, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Virgin Galactic, Y Combinator

“Pebble Time—Awesome Smartwatch, No Compromises,” Kickstarter, accessed November 25, 2018, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-time-awesome-smartwatch-no-compromises/description; “Exploding Kittens,” Kickstarter, accessed November 25, 2018, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elanlee/exploding-kittens/description. 26. Haydn Taylor, “Minecraft Exceeds 90m Monthly Active Users,” Games Industry, October 2, 2018, https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-10-02-minecraft-exceeds-90-million-monthly-active-users. 27. Minecraft Forum, accessed January 9, 2019, https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums; Minecraft Wiki, accessed January 9, 2019, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki. 28. Alex Sherman, and Lora Kolodny, “IBM to Acquire Red Hat in Deal Valued at $34 Billion,” CNBC, October 28, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-deal-valued-at-34-billion.html. 29.

Enthusiastic users of your product or service will often produce guides, documentation, videos, how-tos, and more, all which help to seal this education gap. Not only this, community members will often provide on-tap help and support where prospective and existing customers can ask questions and get help. For example, the game Minecraft has 90 million active monthly users.26 Many of these players learn the game and how to master it from the Minecraft Forum and Minecraft Wiki, the latter of which has more than forty-five-hundred articles, entirely produced by the community.27 If people love your product or service, and it is something that they want to master, it is ripe for this kind of content.

Index Abayomi, 1–3, 7, 9, 19, 35, 278 abuse of system, 158, 217, 233, 234 access, 7–8, 16–17, 54–55, 225, 226 accountability, 139, 146, 148, 149 actions, tracking, 158–59 active participation, 109 adaptability, 176–77, 268–69 Adobe, 244 advertising, 195–96 advocacy, 23–24, 49, 111 Airbnb, 57 ambiguity, 155–56 American Physical Society, 139 Amnesty International, 18 Anderson, Chris, 46, 47 Android platform, 65 Ansari XPRIZE, xviii Apache, 6, 26 Apple, 6, 58, 128 approachability, 69–70 Ardour, 44, 52, 66 Areas of Expertise, 172–75 Ariely, Dan, 17 assets, building, 68–69 assumptions, 137, 271 asynchronous access, 54 attendance, 157 attendees, summit, 247–49 audience personas, 100, 108–19 in Bacon Method, 33 choosing, 109–12 content for, 194–95 creating, 114–16 examples of, 116–19 on Incentives Map, 230–32 On-Ramp Model for, 131, 135–38 Participation Framework for, 130 prioritizing, 112–13 productive participation by, 162–67 and relatedness, 107 audience(s) access to, 7–8 assumptions about, 137 and community strategy, 13 irrational decision making by, 101–8 for local communities, 5 surprising, 73–74 understanding your, 33, 99–100 authenticity, 75, 111, 183, 224 authority, 55–56, 200–201 Author persona, 166–67 automated measuring of condition, 217–18 autonomy, 105–6, 123 awareness, 22–24, 59–61, 192 Axe Change service, 14 Axe-Fx processors, 49–50 backlog, 150–51 Bacon Method, 32–34 Bahns, Angela, 47 Bassett, Angela, 237 Battlefield, 24, 128, 228 behavioral economics, 102–4 Bell, Alexander Graham, 153 belonging, sense of, 15, 18, 20, 143, 187, 215 Bennington, Chester, 183, 184 Big Rocks, 33, 88–96 and cadence-based cycles, 168–70 in community strategy, 94–95 and critical dimensions, 157, 161 defined, 88–89 departmental alignment on, 263 examples of, 91–94 format and key components of, 89–91 and Quarterly Delivery Plan, 34, 145–46, 148, 149 realistic thinking about, 95–96 Black Lives Matter, 18 blocked (status), 147 blogs, 193, 275 Bosch, 13 brand awareness, 24, 59–60 brand recognition, 85 Branson, Richard, 190 Buffer, 214 Build Skills stage, 132, 136, 137 business cards, 241–42 buy-in, 67, 85 cadence, operating on, 34, 264–66 Cadence-Based Community Cycle, 167–70, 264 Canonical, 1, 121, 151, 167, 245 capabilities, persona, 114, 116–18 Capital One, 13 career experience, 83 CasinoCoin, 244 Casual members, 129, 140–42 advancing, 196–97 engagement with, 198–99 incentivizing, 219, 221, 226–27 maturity model for, 166 mentoring, 203 CEOs, reporting to, 260 certainty, 105 Champions model, 49–52, 63–64, 66–67, 113, 260 chat channel, 250 check-ins, 267 civility, 187 clarity, 69–72, 138–39, 234 closing party, 250 coaching, 82–83, 205–6 Coca-Cola, 57 Coffee Bean Rewards app, 145 Colbert, Stephen, 73–74 collaboration, 8–9, 74–75, 185–86 Collaborators model, 52–56, 64–67, 86, 260, see also Inner Collaborator community; Outer Collaborator community commitment, 122 communication, 121 Community Associate, 255 Community Belonging Path, 16–20 community building, 14 additional resources on, 274–76 Bacon Method of, 32–34 as chronological journey, 127–28 consultations on, 276–77 continuing to learn about, 272–74 defining your value for, 77–78 end-to-end experience in, 125–26 fundamentals of, 15–16 getting started with, 37–38, 62 key principles of, 67–74 monitoring activities related to, 206–8 risks associated with, 154–55 tools for, 8 see also successful community building community–community engagement, 157 community culture, 30–31, 70–72, 179–88 Community Director, 254–58, 260 Community Engagement Model(s), 49–67 in Bacon Method, 33–34 Champions model, 49–52 Collaborators model, 52–59 and Community Value Statement, 80 Consumers model, 45–48 importance of selecting, 43–45 and marketing/public awareness, 59–61 scenarios for selecting, 61–67 Community Evangelist, 255 community(-ies) defined, 13–15 digital, 2–3, 5–13, 237 experimenting in, 123 foundational trends in, 7–9 future of, 35, 277–79 local, 3–5 power of, 7 social dynamics of, 15–16 value generated by, 20–29 Community Launch Timeline Template, 191 Community Leadership Summit, 179, 239 community management staff, 254–61 Community Managers, 78, 125, 126, 195, 255–56, 260–61 Community Mission, 40–43, 169 Community Mission Statement, 42, 80, 113 Community On-Ramp Model, 33–34, 130–38 community overview cards, 241–42 Community Participation Framework, 128–45 building community based on, 151–52 and building engagement, 138–44 Community On-Ramp Model in, 130–38 described, 128–30 engagement strategy to move members along, 196–206 focusing on creativity and momentum in, 209 incentives and rewards in, 145 incentives on, 211–13 incentivizing transitions in, 218–22, 226–27 mentoring in, 202–6 Community Personal Scaling Curve, 184 Community Persona Maturity Model, 163–67 Community Promise, 70–71 Community Specialist, 255 community strategy, 30 Big Rocks in, 94–95 changing, 96, 208 control over and collaboration on, 74–75 Core members’ contributions to, 201 execution of, 253–54 importance of, 13 integration of, in organization, 261–68 learning from implementation of, 268–69 planning, 39 Regular members in, 143 risks with, 29–32 and SCARF model, 105–8 variability in, 30 community summits, 245–51 finalizing attendees and content for, 247–49 follow through after, 250–51 running, 249–50 structure for, 246–47 community value, 164–67 Community Value Proposition, 175 Community Value Statement, 80–88 and Big Rocks, 89, 95 in cadence-based cycle, 169 maintaining focus on, 97 and on-ramp design, 135–36 prioritizing audience personas based on, 113 updating, 83–84, 87–88 value for community members in, 80–84 value for organization in, 84–88 company–community engagement, 157 competitions, 194 complete (status), 147 CompuServe, 5 conditions, for incentives, 216–18, 230–32 Conference Checklist, 241 conferences, 194, 195, 239, 240–43 connection(s) desire for, 9 for Regular members, 200 constructive criticism, 122–23 consultations, on community building, 276–77 Consumers model, 45–48, 62–63, 260 content for community summits, 247–49 in Growth Strategy, 192–95 for launch, 189 as source of value, 82 Content Creators (persona), 110–11, 113–15 content development in Champion communities, 49–50 in Collaborator communities, 52–56 by communities, 26–27 as source of value, 82, 86–87 contests, 194 contributions, to communities, 17, 19 control over community strategy, 74–75 over Regular members, 143 co-organizing events, 239 Core members, 129, 140 advancement for, 196–97 characteristics of, 143–44 at community summits, 242 engagement with, 201–2 incentivizing, 215, 219–20, 222, 227 maturity model for, 165, 166–67 mentoring for, 203, 205 percentage of, 141 creativity, 209 critical dimensions, 156–58, 161 criticism, 122–23, 176 cross-functional communities, 88 crowdfunding, 23–24 Cruz, Ted, 73–74 culture, community, see community culture Culture Cores, 181–88 customer engagement, 20–22 customer growth, as source of value, 85 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, 21 Cycle Planning, 168 Cycle Reviews, 268 dashboards, 160–61 data analysis, 207, 208 Davis, Miles, 182 Debian, 6, 26 decision making irrationality of, 101–8 pragmatism about, 184 SCARF model of behavior, 104–8 System 1 and 2 thinking, 102–3 unpopular decisions, 186 decision paralysis, 38, 106 dedicated events, organizing, 239–40 delayed (status), 147 delivery commitment to, 263–64 successful, 162, 167–70 delivery, as critical dimension, 157 delivery plans, see Quarterly Delivery Plan demonstrations, 194, 244 departmental alignment, 263–64 developer community, Big Rocks for, 93–94 Developer Relations personnel, 255 Developers (persona), 111, 114, 115 Diamandis, Peter, 40 Dickinson, Emily, 211 difficulty, of condition, 217 diffusion chain, 54 Digg, 12–13 digital communities early, 5–7 evolution of, 9–13 foundational trends in, 7–9 in-person events for, 237 as local and global communities, 2–3 digital interaction, and in-person events, 251 digital training, 243–44 dignity, 17 discipline, for community building, 31 Discourse, 66, 228, 233, 267 discovery, in gamification, 233 discussion forums, 49 Disney, 128 Docker, 12, 56 documentation, 274 domain expertise, 256, 257 Dreamforce conference, 22 Drupal, 204 Early Adopter program, 189–90 Editorial Calendar, 192–95 education (about product or service) in communities, 24–25 as source of value, 82 efficiency, as critical dimension, 157 ego calibration, 234–35 empathy, 186–87 employees openness for, 182–83 training and mentoring for, 266–68 empowerment, 55–56, 222 end-to-end experience, 59, 125–26 engagement as Area of Expertise, 174 Big Rocks related to, 93–94 with community, 72 in Community On-Ramp Model, 133–34, 136, 137 and Community Participation Framework, 138–44 in Community Participation Framework, 129 at conferences, 242 critical dimensions related to, 157 customer and user, 20–22 and Growth Strategy, 192 positivity and, 185 quality of, 159 rules for engaging with community members, 119–22 and submarine incentives, 226 and understanding audience, 99–100 Engagement Strategy, 181, 196–206 engineering department, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 equal opportunity, in Collaborator communities, 55, 58–59 estimated units, on Incentives Map, 231, 232 Event Evolution Path, 238–40 Event Organizers (persona), 111, 114–15, 117–18 events in-person, see in-person events online, 193 Everett, Noah, 224 execution of community strategy, 253–54, 268 successful, 162, 167–70 expectations clear, 70–72 in gamification, 234 in great experience, 127 related to Big Rocks, 95–96 experience, of audience persona, 114, 116, 118 experimentation, 123, 171 to build organizational capabilities, 206–8 with events, 251 expertise of community leadership staff, 256, 257 of community members, 28 in digital communities, 8 as source of value, 83 Exploding Kittens game, 24 extrinsic rewards, 214, 215, 216 on Incentives Map, 231 submarine incentives for, 224–25 Facebook, 13, 24 failure, as opportunity for improvement, 151 fairness in SCARF model, 107–8 of submarine incentives, 225 Fans as audience persona, 110, 113 community model for, 44, 62–63 fears, of audience persona, 114–15, 117, 118 Fedora, 66, 264 feedback about audience personas, 116 on Big Rocks, 94–95 from communities, 72–73 and community culture, 186 from Core members, 202 on mission statement, 41 on Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, 176 in peer-based review, 204 from Regular members, 143, 200 Figment community, 10 Final Fantasy, 128 financial commitment, and creating value, 96 Firefox, 23, 209 Fitbit, 139, 145 focus for community building, 31 on Community Value Statement, 97 follow through after community summits, 250–51 after conferences, 242–43 formal experience, 114 forums, 91–92, 158 founders, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 Four Rules for Measuring Effectively, 156–61 Fractal Audio Systems, 14–15, 49–50 freeloaders, 54 fun, in community experience, 84 gamification, 232–35 Garmin, 190 GitHub, 24 global communities, digital communities as local and, 2–3 Global Learning XPRIZE Community, 189 GNOME, 26 GNU community, 6 goals for community summit sessions, 249 of Core members, serving, 202 for employee participation with community, 267 in incentives, 214 on Incentives Map, 230–32 for new hires, 259 Google, 13, 57, 58, 65, 128 Gordon-Levitt, Dan, 11–12 Gordon-Levitt, Joseph, 11–12, 219 governance, in Inner Collaborator communities, 66 gratification, 120, 127 group dynamics, 100, 119–22 group experiences, referral halo for, 61 grow, willingness to, 257 Growth (Area of Expertise), 174 growth, as critical dimension, 157 Growth Strategy, 181, 188–96 growth plan, 192–96 launch plan, 189–91 guest speakers, 238–39 habits, building, 142, 267 HackerOne, 69–70, 194, 214 Harley Owners Group, 132 help asking community members for, 120, 144 as source of value, 82 high-level objectives, see Big Rocks hiring, 27–29, 256 hiring away approach, 258–59 HITRECORD, 11–12, 219 Hoffman, Reid, 152 HomeRecording.com community, 81 humility, 187, 257 hypothesis testing, 207–8, 271–72 IBM, 6 idealism, 153–54 IGN (Imagine Games Network), 47–48 Ikea Effect, 101–2 impact in Community Belonging Path, 18 and Engagement Strategy, 199 multiplying, with communities, 2, 3, 9 imperfections, 188 imposter syndrome, 142 inauthentic participation, 233 incentives, xvii–xviii, 197 in Community Participation Framework, 145 on Community Participation Framework, 211–13 components of, 213–18 in Growth Strategy, 196 maintaining personal touch with, 235 in Outer Collaborator communities, 65 power of offering, 213–18 stated vs. submarine, 218–27 Incentives Map, 34, 229–32 Incentive Transition Points, 218–19 stated incentives for, 221–22 submarine incentives for, 226–27 incentivization building engagement with, 140 in Community Participation Framework, 130 Incubation stage, 171, 172 independent authenticity, 111 Indiegogo, 23 individual value, 164–67 influence, psychological importance of, 71 Influencing phase (Product Success Model), 52 information in community, 121 in digital communities, 8 infrastructure, for launch, 189 Inner Collaborator community, 56–58, 65–67, 86, 229 Inner Developers (persona), 111 in-person events community summits, 245–51 conferences, 240–43 and digital training vs. training workshops, 243–45 Event Evolution Path and strategy for, 238–40 fusion of digital interactions and, 251 in Growth Strategy, 195 launch, 190–91 in local communities, 4–5 managing, 237–38 value of, 77–78 in progress (status), 147 insight, from communities, 28, 72–73 intangible value, 78–79, 83 Integration stage, 171–72 Intel, 57 intentionality, 39, 69–70, 187 Intention stage, 171, 172 internal communities, 13 Community Engagement Model for, 66–67 importance of culture for, 180 personal interaction in, 185 value of, for community members, 83 Internet, 5–7, see also digital communities Internet Explorer, 23 intrinsic rewards, 215, 224–25 involved teams, on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 147, 148 Iron Maiden, 39 Jeep, 139 Jenkins, 26 job candidates, community members as, 27–29 job descriptions, community leadership staff, 258 Jokosher, 199 jQuery, 204 Kahneman, Daniel, 102 karma (Reddit), 228 Key Initiatives, for Big Rocks, 90, 91–93 keynote addresses, 245–47 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), 90–94 cadence-based cycles for delivery of work on, 169, 170 on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 146, 148–50 tracking progress on, 159–60, 160–61 Kickstarter, 12, 23 Kubernetes, 26, 53, 66, 134, 204 labor, community members as source of, 120 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (television series), 73–74 launch event, 190–91 launch plan, 189–91 leaders, community, 3, 4 leadership as Area of Expertise, 174 and autonomy in organizations, 123 clear and objective, 69–70 in community culture, 186 community involvement by, 262 by Core members, 144 in Inner Collaborator communities, 66 leadership value, 165, 167 lead generation, 28–29 A League of Their Own (film), 39 learning about community building, 272–74 from community strategy implementation, 268–69 Learning phase (Product Success Model), 51 Lego, 9, 10 Lego Ideas, 10 Lenovo, 57 Leonardo da Vinci, 37 Lindbergh, Charles, xvii Linkin Park, 183 Linux, 6, 26, 273–74 Linux Foundation, 26, 74 live stream, 250 local communities decline of, 3–5 digital communities as global and, 2–3 The Long Tail (Anderson), 46 Ma, Jack, 77 Ma Jian, 125 Make:, 195 Management (Area of Expertise), 173–74 marketing, 22–24 audience personas in, 108–9 and Community Engagement Model, 59–61 as source of value, 85 marketing department, community leadership staff reporting to, 260 Mastering phase (Product Success Model), 51–52 Mattermost, 214 maturity models, 34 Community Persona Maturity Model, 163–67 Organizational Capabilities Maturity Model, 171–76 meaningful work, 9, 17–18, 27, 41 measurable condition, 217 measurable goals, 160 measurable value, in Community Persona Maturity Model, 164–65 measuring effectively, rules for, 156–61 meeting people, as source of value, 82 meetings after conferences, 242–43 with conference attendees, 241 in local communities, 4–5 Meetup.com, 133 meetups, organizing, 239 mentoring for Casual members, 142 for community-building employees, 267–68 for community leadership staff, 256 by community members, 29 in Community Participation Framework, 202–6 of new hires, 259 as source of value, 82–83 meritocracy, 55 message boards, 5–6 Metal Gear Solid, 128 Metrics (Area of Expertise), 175 Mickos, Mårten, 69–70, 74, 262 Microsoft, 6, 13, 23 Minecraft, 25 Minecraft Forum, 25 Minecraft Wiki, 25 Minimum Viable Product, 68–69 mission statements, 32, 42, 80, 113 momentum, in Engagement Strategy, 198 momentum effect, 209 in Growth Strategy, 188, 195 in marketing and brand/product awareness, 60–61 motivations for audience persona, 114, 117, 118 for community members, 119–20 Mozilla, 23 MySpace, 12–13 NAMM music show, 239 need, for community, 30 networking, 28–29, 242 New York Times, 23 Nextcloud, 134 niche interests, 45–47 Nintendo, 9, 228 norms, cultural, 70, 130, 180, 182 notification, 147, 148 not started (status), 147 objectives, see also Big Rocks objectivity, of leadership, 69–70 onboarding, 107 in Community Participation Framework, 129 Community Persona Maturity Model for members in, 164, 165–66 gamification for, 233 importance of, 130–31 in Outer Collaborator communities, 65 online events, 193 On-Ramp members, incentivizing, 218–19, 221, 226–27 openness, 182–84 open-source code, 26, 53 open-source communities, 57–58, 261 Open Source community, 10 OpenStack, 26 optimization, in Engagement Strategy, 199–200 Optimizing phase (Product Success Model), 51 organizational capabilities building, with communities, 27–29 cadence-based cycles for building, 265–66 executing strategy to build, 253–54 experimentation to build, 206–8 success in terms of building, 162, 171–76 organizational experience, of community members, 122 organizational values, and community culture, 182–88 organizations community members as labor for, 120 identifying value for, 84–88 integration of community strategy in, 261–68 internal communities at, 13 leadership and autonomy in, 123 Orteig Prize, xvii Outer Collaborator community, 56–59, 64–65, 86 Outer Developers (persona), 111–12, 136–37 Owner of Big Rocks, 90, 91 in cadence-based cycles, 168–69 on Incentives Map, 231, 232 on Quarterly Delivery Plan, 147, 148 Participant Rewards Peak, 215–16 participation active, 109 audience personas and types of, 109 by Casual members, 142 in Consumer communities, 48 inauthentic, 233 productive, 162–67 PayPal, 13, 57 Pebble Smartwatch, 23 peer-based review, 203–5 peer-review process, 55 peer support, 139–40 peer value, 164–67 Peloton, 133, 233 Penney, James Cash, 253 people person, 256–57 perfection, 268–69 performance review, community engagement in, 262 permanence, of communities, 14 personal interaction, 184–85, 199 personal touch with incentives, 235 and submarine awards, 222–26 personal validation, 120, 224–25 personas, audience, see audience personas Photoshop “Magic Minute” videos, 244 PlayStation, 233 podcasts, 194 Pop!


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Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

”: Jeff Atwood, “Please Don’t Learn to Code,” Coding Horror (blog), May 15, 2012, accessed August 21, 2018, https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/. Ian Bogost once noted: Clive Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation,” New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2016, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html. “around me are programmers”: Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation.” “made the game for ourselves”: Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation.” “in front of a bull’s face”: Smiley, “Can You Teach.” Index Aaron Swartz hackathon, ref1 Abbate, Janet, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Abene, Mark, ref1 Abma, Jobert, ref1 Adams, John, ref1 Addiction by Design (Schüll), ref1 addictive behavior, as side effect of optimization, ref1 Adler, Mortimer J., ref1 Adobe, ref1 advertising, ref1, ref2 African American coders.

If you click this switch and that switch, a light turns on; turn that lever or that lever, and a door opens. (These are AND gates and OR gates, and in fact you can use Minecraft to build many of the main forms of logic you see in coding and microchips.) So these kids start building mechanisms of ridiculous complexity—complex doors, little traps that get triggered when you walk by—then showing them off to friends and posting videos of them online. Minecraft, these kids found, was a world where being able to build cool things out of logic was fun and made them impressive to the outside world. For these kids, Minecraft wasn’t just a game. It was this generation’s “personal computer,” their Commodore 64, as my friend the philosopher and game designer Ian Bogost once noted.

People learn to wield logic and think like a machine not merely because that activity itself is fun but because they’re trying—as Papert realized—to create something other people will find awesome. So while Minecraft may be a surprisingly powerful on-ramp for coding, it only has that power because the game is fun and cool. (The creators of Minecraft itself never intended for it to be remotely educational, nor did they intend to make it a way to learn logic. “We have never done things with that sort of intent,” as Jens Bergensten, the lead Minecraft developer, told me. “We always made the game for ourselves.”) The same is likely true of Neopets: Its creators didn’t think, Hey, we’re making something that will give rise to a whole generation of front-end developers.


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

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

In an interview, the directors noted that while teenagers were increasingly able to lead political movements in the real world, simulations help them understand how to wield the complementary mechanisms and levers of the political process in a safe environment.5 Teenagers are also gaining civic literacy from a very different game: Minecraft. Technology writer Clive Thompson suggested to me that Minecraft is less interesting as a way to teach maths or programming than it is as a simulation for kids to invent miniconstitutions that stop each other from blowing up their creations on shared servers.6 Seth Frey, assistant professor at UC Davis, watched Minecraft players learning how to negotiate the joint use and care of natural resources: “You’ve got these kids, and they’re creating these worlds, and they think they’re just playing a game, but they have to solve some of the hardest problems facing humanity.

David Carnoy, “Palm m515 Review,” CNET, September 22, 2002, www.cnet.com/reviews/palm-m515-p80809us-review. 5. Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins, “The Movie of the Year Is Here: ‘Boys State,’” The Ringer, August 17, 2020, www.theringer.com/2020/8/17/21372227/the-movie-of-the-year-is-here-boys-state. 6. Clive Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation,” New York Times, April 14, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html. 7. “Gather | A better way to meet online,” Gather, Gather Presence, accessed November 28, 2021, https://gather.town. 8. “Roguelike Celebration 2021 Was Held on October 17–18, 2021,” Roguelike Celebration, accessed November 28, 2021, https://roguelike.club. 9.

Not long after he wrote these words, educational board games grew into a flourishing transatlantic market, teaching everything from geography and history to maths and astronomy.1 These games were enabled by technological advancements of a different kind that made the manufacturing and publishing of board games much cheaper than before. Locke might have admired educational board games, but he’d have loved educational video games like SimCity and Minecraft that can teach urban planning and architecture and programming. Only by learning the history of how games have been used for purposes beyond entertainment can we understand how gamification has taken such a large role in our lives, and how it might come to dominate the world. There is still some debate in the games industry and among academics as to what precisely constitutes gamification, and it’s easy to get mired in definitional quicksand involving related terms like exploitationware, the “gameful world,” and ludification.


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

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

Also, when the company wanted to, it went in and turned the dials. Consider Minecraft. After the watch-time transition, YouTube’s audience clearly loved Minecraft, heaving the niche game into the mainstream. At one point, in May 2015, fourteen slots on YouTube’s logged-out home page—the version of its site for people not signed in with Google accounts—were devoted to Minecraft game play, according to a meticulous video from the YouTuber MatPat. By June, MatPat counted seven slots for Minecraft. By September, Minecraft disappeared. This sparked a theory in YouTubeland that some company suit, outraged by the abundance of Minecraft, ordered up the change.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 26: Reinforce an American cleric: Martin Evans, Nicola Harley, and Harry Yorke, “London Terrorist Had Twice Been Referred to Police Over His Extremist Views,” The Telegraph, June 4, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/04/london-terrorist-had-twice-referred-police-extremist-views/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT abundance of Minecraft: Another data point in this theory: Microsoft, Google’s rival, bought the Minecraft studio in 2014 for $2.5 billion. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT researcher described Reinforce: Kevin Roose, “The Making of a YouTube Radical,” The New York Times, June 8, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html.

That novelty had birthed an entire creative industry, a stable of performers, personalities, artists, influencers, instructors, and franchises, a new media as revolutionary as radio and TV, all in just a few short years. YouTube made everyone broadcasters. YouTube has given us “Gangnam Style,” Charlie biting a finger, “Baby Shark,” It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday. Yoga with Adriene, lunch doodles with Mo, professional Minecraft players. A diverse sea of enormous talent old media had ignored or overlooked. Thousands of microcelebrities you might not know, but millions of young fans certainly do, watching with a fervor they never show for movie or TV stars. YouTube was formed in the same stretch as a crop of flashy consumer internet upstarts, and has outlasted nearly all of them, except Facebook.


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Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

The global reach of games is even more pronounced in virtual gameplay. Consider the epic success of Minecraft, an immense online universe populated by players logging in from around the world. In the case of Minecraft, of course, the world of the game itself—and the rules that govern it—are being created by that multinational community of players, in the form of mods and servers programmed and hosted by Minecraft fans. McLuhan coined the term “global village” as a metaphor for the electronic age, but if you watch a grade-schooler constructing a virtual town in Minecraft with the help of players from around the world, the phrase starts to sound more literal.

Thanks to Franco Moretti for introducing me to the kleptomaniacs of Paris more than two decades ago. And thanks to Jay Haynes, Annie Keating, Alex Ross, and Eric Liftin for so many conversations about music and the mind over the years. Finally, a word of gratitude to my sons—Clay, Rowan, and Dean—for keeping me in touch with the gaming world, from Minecraft to H1Z1, from Kingdom Builder to Far Cry. I love and respect the energy and creative spirit that you bring to your life in games. Now it’s time to turn off the computer and go read a book. July 2016 Marin County, California NOTES Introduction “Every household was plentifully supplied”: William Stearns Davis, ed., Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources, 2 vols.

See also technology Deep Blue, 193–94 digital simulations that trigger emotions, 184–85 Expensive Planetarium, 217–18 and games, 230–31 global collaboration, 201–202, 217–20 Hingham Institute, 215–16 IBM, 193–94, 227–28, 230, 280 “low-rent” vs. “high-rent” product development, 220 Minecraft, 201 networks of the early 1990s, 170 PDP-1, 215–16 for purposes of non-scientific pursuits, 219–20 Claude Shannon, 221–26, 223 software, development of, 215–19 Spacewar! 216–20, 218 “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” 219–20 Edward Thorp, 221–27 Turing Test, 227 Type 20 Precision CRT, 215–16, 218 Watson, 228–30 wearable computers, 221, 225–26 Conflagration of Moscow, The, 164–66 Conroy, David, 241 Constantine the African, 134 Cooperstown, New York, 199–200 Copland, Aaron, 97 Cortés, Hernan, 213 cotton appealing texture of, 26–28 British East India Company, 28 “Calico Madams,” 28 chintz and calico, vivid colors of, 26–27, 27 described by John Mandeville, 26 economic fears regarding the import of, 28–29 European desire for, 29–31 importing from India, 26, 28 inventions to aid in the production of fabric, 29, 30 slavery to produce, 34–36 Cox, James, 14 criminology physiological causes vs. environmental causes, 47–48 Cristofori, Bartolomeo, 88 cultural diversity in modern times, 274–76 Darrow, Charles, 198–99 Darwin, Charles, 269–70 Das Kapital (Marx), 153–54 De Coitu (Constantine the African), 134 Defoe, Daniel, 24, 28 Dell, Michael, 216 demand for cotton fabrics, 29–31, 34–36 “desire of Novelties,” 30–31 for experiencing the world through exotic spices, 137–38 for new experiences and surprises, 61 for rubber, 214 democratizing force of fashion, 38–40 department stores as alternatives to chapels and cathedrals, 43–44 Au Bonheur des Dames (Zola), 43–44 Le Bon Marché, 41–46, 45 commercial profitability of wandering shoppers, 41–44 credit, extending, 44 “department-store disease,” 47 haggling, elimination of, 44 influence of Aristide Boucicaut, 40, 41–42, 48–49 origins of, 41 sensory overload and disorientation, 41–42 shoplifting, 46–49 De Smet, Pieter, 137 Devil’s Milk, The (Tully), 214 Devlin, Keith, 208–209 Diamond, Jared, 141, 143 dice astragali, 205–206, 208–209 and probability, 206–207, 209 to speed up the game of chess, 203 standardized design of, 209 Dickens, Charles, 163 Digital Revolution artistic origins of the, 83 Spacewar!


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Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

most popular video game of all time: “About Tetris,” Tetris.com, http://tetris.com/about-tetris/. second bestselling game of all time: Tom Huddleston, Jr., “Minecraft Has Now Sold More Than 100 Million Copies,” Fortune, June 2, 2016, www.fortune.com/2016/06/02/minecraft-sold-100-million/. Minecraft, where users build shapes: Clive Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation,” New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html. an “achievable challenge”: Joshua A. Krisch, “Why the 2048 Game Is So Addictive,” Popular Mechanics, April 3, 2014, www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a10341/why-the-2048-game-is-so-addictive-16659899/.

Many novels and mystery stories may be analogous to falling puzzle pieces clicking into place, but Tetris is explicitly just that. The second bestselling game of all time is Minecraft, where users build shapes and virtual worlds from digital bricks. Minecraft is a kind of cultural inheritor to Lego, which was itself an “heir to the heritage of playing with blocks,” as tech journalist Clive Thompson wrote. But whereas Lego sets often come with a detailed set of precise instructions, Minecraft is more open-ended. The most popular games for smartphones, where the level of play must be simple enough to execute with a stray thumb, are often puzzles, too, including 2048 and Candy Crush.

., 110 marketing and fashion, 49, 134 of Fifty Shades of Grey, 202–3 importance of, 8 information as, 82 necessity of, 62 in politics, 40 resistance to, 57 marriage equality, 128–29 The Martian (2015), 238 Martin, Max, 75, 76 mass production, 48, 49 A Matter of Taste (Lieberson), 136–37, 322n135, 323n135 MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable), 47–48, 56, 59, 70–71, 286–87 McGraw, Peter, 146 Mean Girls (2004), 170n meaning, desire for, 15, 57 Meeker, Mary, 12 memory, 86, 99–100 Mendelsohn, Nicola, 273 Mendelsund, Peter, 98 Messitte, Anne, 197–99, 200, 202–3, 205 metacognition, 42 Metcalfe’s law, 220 Miller, Dave, 164 Millet, Jean-François, 312n22 Minecraft, 58–59 mobile technology, 11–12, 67 Model T cars, 48, 133 Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci), 168–69 Monet, Claude and art dealer, 251–52 and Caillebotte’s bequest, 22, 23, 24, 312n22 Caillebotte’s friendship with, 21 fame of, 19–20, 27 selling works of, 26 Moonies, 217, 217n Moore’s law, 290, 333n289 Morisot, Berthe, 312n22 Morse, Samuel, 151 Morton, Mary, 26 Mosseri, Adam, 268, 270 movies and Hollywood, 103–6 and Academy Awards, 126–27 animated films, 110–11 apocalypse genre of, 112–13 and audiences, 107, 113–14, 127–28, 291 and best seller lists, 237 and chaos, 177 as complex products, 177, 178–180 distribution of success in, 177–78 double standards in, 127–28 and emergence of television, 297 and familiarity, 181–82 franchise strategy in, 7, 181–82 gender bias in, 123–28, 321n126 globalization of, 182 and high-concept pitches, 61 international consumption of, 291 lack of diversity in, 123–28, 129–130, 321n126 and merchandising, 294 predicting successes in, 237–38 and promotional expenses, 181 rules for storytelling in, 111, 113–14 studio system of, 181 suspense genre of, 112 and television, 10–11, 290, 297 and ticket sales, 10, 11, 181, 182 multiplier effects of hits, 240–41, 245 Munoz, Joe, 222 Murdoch, Rupert, 115n, 233, 235 museums, 32–33, 41 music and Billboard, 80–82, 134, 166, 175, 176–77, 238 and chaos mitigation, 180–81 collaborative filtering in, 69–70 digital revolution in, 289–290 distribution of, 33–34 and earworms, 79–80 elemental role of, in civilization, 85–86 finding new, 68–70 habituation/dishabituation in, 82–85 hip-hop/rap music, 81–82 and hooks, 3–4, 76, 79, 80, 82 and Kotecha, 73–76 and language, 85–86 and Leslie, 301–5 and memory, 85–86 and music labels, 175n, 304–5 and neophobia, 68 and Pandora, 67–68 and phonographs, 289 pop music, 33, 59–60, 73–77, 80–85, 90–91, 176–77 preference for familiar in, 79 quality/catchiness of, 34–37, 76–77, 80, 142 and radio stations, 180–81 rankings in, 205–6 repetition in, 77–80, 82, 83–85, 283 and rhyme-as-reason effect, 92–94 “Rock Around the Clock” (Bill Haley and His Comets), 163–67 rock ’n’ roll, 175–77 rules in, 85 and song-testing operations, 35–36, 37, 142 and speech-to-song illusion, 77–79 and Spotify, 68–70 structure in, 3–4, 76, 84–85 and Swedish music industry, 75–76 and technology, 13–14 and vinyl records, 13, 292 Muth, Claudia, 57 MySpace, 151, 152 myths and myth-busting, 130–31 name choices, 135–37, 139–142, 152–53, 322–23n135 Nast, Condé, 46 neophilia/neophobia, 7, 48–49, 56, 68, 138–39, 160 Netflix, 130 networks, importance of understanding, 8, 305 newness, optimal, 60–61, 61 news and journalism, 253–275 and aggregators, 265–66 and aspiration-behavior gap, 271–72, 272n and Facebook, 267–275 and familiarity/surprise in, 65 and Gallup, 258–261, 267, 275 and golden age of reading, 255 and Internet, 265–66, 291, 292 and measuring readership, 257–58, 259–261 myths and falsehoods in, 130–31 new economic model in, 292 news alerts, 65 objective of, 253 and power of press, 130–31 and reader preferences, 253–54, 257–58, 264, 267–273 repetition in, 64–65 and smaller papers, 256–57 and social media, 266 and syndication of news, 257 and tabloids, 255–56 and television, 262, 264–65, 273, 290 Newton, Nigel, 233 New York City, 47 New Yorker magazine, 272 New York Times, 157, 196 Nielsen, 33, 81 Nineteenth Amendment, 92 Ninth Symphony (Beethoven), 4 Nixon, Richard, 38 nostalgia, 100 novelty, 60–61, 61 Obama, Barack, 86–91 Obergefell v.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

To grasp the essential difference between old and new power models, think of the difference between the two biggest computer games of all time, Tetris and Minecraft. You will likely remember the block-based game Tetris, which exploded with the Gameboy craze of the 1990s. The way it worked was simple. Blocks fell down from the top of the screen and the player’s job was to make them fit into neat regular lines. They came down faster and faster until the player was eventually overwhelmed. In old power fashion, the player had a limited role, and you could never beat the system. New power models work more like Minecraft, now the second biggest game of all time. Like Tetris, it is a clunky block-based game.

It relies entirely on participatory energy. In the world of Minecraft, you will find houses, temples, and Walmarts; dragons, caves, boats, farms, and roller coasters; working computers made by engineers; forest fires, dungeons, cinemas, chickens, and stadiums. The players set their rules and create their own tasks. There is no “manual”; players learn from the example—and often the homemade videos—of others. Some players (known as “modders”) are even entrusted with the capacity to alter the game itself. Without the actions of the players, Minecraft is a wasteland. A key dynamic in the world today is the mutual incomprehension between those raised in the Tetris tradition and those with a Minecraft mindset.

: Rita Katz, “The State Department’s Twitter War with ISIS Is Embarrassing,” Time, September 16, 2014. A popular thread: Reddit, “90’s Kids, What’s Something You Did When You Were in School That Youths of Today Wouldn’t Understand?,” Reddit, June 15, 2015. www.reddit.com. New power models work more like Minecraft: Matt Peckham, “ ‘Minecraft’ Is Now the Second Best-Selling Game of All Time,” Time, June 2, 2016. He retweeted his most extreme: Taylor Wafford, “Donald Trump Retweets Racist Propaganda,” Newsweek, November 23, 2015. He offered to pay: Alan Rappeport, “Donald Trump Says He May Pay Legal Fees of Accused Attacker from Rally,” New York Times, March 13, 2016.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

Kalvin Wang, “The Difference Between Jason Shen and Jason Shen.com,” Tech & Do-Goodery blog, February 22, 2011, http://kalv.in/the-difference-between-jason-shen-and-jasonshen-com/. 11. http://apps.facebook.com/graffitiwall. 12. For samples of some extraordinary Minecraft art, such as a rendering of the Taj Mahal, see David Thomas, “How the Creator of Minecraft Developed a Monster Hit,” Wired, December 2011, www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/st_alphageek_minecraft/. 13. HT, “I’m a Partner at Y Combinator.” Asked what is “the hardest part” of his position at YC, HT said reading the applications, which was “draining in a way I’ve never experienced before.” Giving each application his full attention, while reading hundreds, “just fries my brain.”

This would never be possible if users had to download and install software each time the program was tweaked, but because it will be a Web-based game played inside the browser, the code can be changed at any time without imposing any inconvenience upon the users. All three founders are concerned about the competition for talent that will be set off once Demo Day is past and the summer batch’s companies start to hire. Their recruiting should be helped, they figure, by being able to point to the success of Minecraft, the building game. Minecraft was created by only one person, Markus Persson of Sweden, and its graphics are not as sophisticated as Graffiti World’s will be. Persson has made more than $50 million in a single year. Kantor remembers noticing the game just after it had been introduced, when it had only about one hundred users.

Other than having Kantor minding the sponsor queue, Graffiti, the app, does not require much attention. Rather than endowing Graffiti with more features, the three want to embark upon a related, but new, venture, which is why they have come to YC. They are working on Graffiti World, which combines digital Legos and the social aspects of the building game Minecraft.12 Graffiti World’s users will be invited to submit drawings of objects, which other users will use to build scenes, their own Graffiti Worlds. Much coding needs to be done before it will be ready for a beta release, however. Kantor and Tim Suzman live in an apartment in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco and their front room serves as the company’s office.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

c=y. 46Quoted in Keith Stuart, “Richard Bartle: We Invented Multiplayer Games as a Political Gesture,” Guardian, November 17, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/17/richard-bartle-multiplayer-games-political-gesture. 47Stuart, “Richard Bartle.” 48Quoted in Stuart, “Richard Bartle.” 49Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 96. 50“Video Game History Timeline.” 51Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 13. 52Daniel Joseph, “Code of Conduct: Platforms Are Taking over Capitalism, but Code Convenes Class Struggle as Well as Control,” Real Life, April 12, 2017, http://reallifemag.com/code-of-conduct. 53Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 13. 54Mary Aitken, The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behaviour Changes Online (London: John Murray, 2016). 55Drew Robarge, “From Landfill to Smithsonian Collections: ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ Atari 2600 Game,” Smithsonian, December 15, 2014, http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/landfill-smithsonian-collections-et-extra-terrestrial-atari-2600-game. 56Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 14. 57Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 14. 58Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 15. 59Dal Yong Jin, Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 60Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 16. 61Nintendo, “Historical Data: Consolidated Sales Transition by Region,” last modified October 26, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20171026163943/https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/finance/historical_data/xls/consolidated_sales_e1703.xlsx. 62Joseph, “Code of Conduct.” 63Nintendo, “Historical Data.” 64Emily Gera, “This Is How Tetris Wants You to Celebrate for Its 30th Anniversary,” Polygon, May 21, 2014, www.polygon.com/2014/5/21/5737488/tetris-turns-30-alexey-pajitnov. 65“Yearly Market Report,” Famitsu Weekly, June 21, 1996. 66Nintendo, “Historical Data.” 67“Video Game History Timeline.” 68Sony Computer Entertainment, “PlayStation Cumulative Production Shipments of Hardware,” May 24, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110524023857/http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps_e.html. 69Nintendo, “Historical Data.” 70“Video Game History Timeline.” 71Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 20. 72Sony Computer Entertainment, “PlayStation 2 Worldwide Hardware Unit Sales,” November 1, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20131101120621/http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps2_sale_e.html. 73Nintendo, “Historical Data.” 74Colin Moriarty, “Vita Sales Are Picking Up Thanks to PS4 Remote Play,” IGN, November 17, 2014, http://uk.ign.com/articles/2014/11/17/vita-sales-are-picking-up-thanks-to-ps4-remote-play. 75Xbox.com, “Gamers Catch Their Breath as Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Reinvent Next-Generation Gaming,” May 10, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20070709062832/http://www.xbox.com/zh-SG/community/news/2006/20060510.htm. 76Eddie Makuch, “E3 2014: $399 Xbox One Out Now, Xbox 360 Sales Rise to 84 million,” GameSpot, June 9, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20141013194652/http://www.gamespot.com/articles/e3-2014-399-xbox-one-out-now-xbox-360-sales-rise-to-84-million/1100-6420231/. 77“Video Game History Timeline.” 78Sony Computer Entertainment, “Q4 FY2014 Consolidated Financial Results Forecast (Three Months Ended March 31, 2015),” April 30, 2015, www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/14q4_sonypre.pdf. 79Nintendo, “Historical Data.” 80“Video Game History Timeline.” 81“Video Game History Timeline.” 82Nintendo, “Historical Data.” 83“Dedicated Video Game Sales Units,” Nintendo, January 31, 2018, www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html. 84Aernout, “Minecraft Sales Reach 144 Million Across all Platforms; 74 Million Monthly Players,” Wccftech, January 22, 2018, https://wccftech.com/minecraft-sales-144-million/. 85Eugene Kim, “Amazon Buys Twitch for $970 Million in Cash,” Business Insider, August 25, 2014, www.businessinsider.com/amazon-buys-twitch-2014-8. 86Craig Smith, “50 Interesting Fortnite Stats and Facts (November 2018) by the Numbers,” DMR, November 17, 2018, https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/fortnite-facts-and-statistics/.

Nintendo launched the Wii U, which sold 14 million units, relatively few in comparison to the handheld 3DS, which sold 53 million units.82 The Switch, a hybrid of mobile and home consoles, was launched later, selling 18 million in one year alone.83 While these console battles raged, PC gaming entered a new phase. The independently developed (indie) game Minecraft sold an astonishing 144 million copies (across multiple platforms, with a high of 74 million monthly players), and the developer was purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion.84 The crowdfunding platform Kickstarter provided a new way for developers to raise money for games, shifting the business model of many titles.

That first major shift in dominance, from the US to Japanese companies (something I discussed in my historical overview of videogames), has now been followed by a second shift that is seeing Chinese companies becoming increasingly dominant on the world level.33 In keeping with that trend, Bungie (the American studio that developed Destiny for Activision) announced that it was working on a new title with NetEase, raising $100 million for development. NetEase had previously published Minecraft and Blizzard’s games in China but is now replacing US companies in terms of funding studios.34 THE VIDEOGAME AS A COMMODITY The importance of publishing in the industry must be understood in relation to the role of the videogame as commodity. Our erstwhile quest giver in Syndicate, Karl Marx, had this to say about commodities: A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 789 6 Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 790 2 E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 791 9 Printed in Great Britain Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ www.atlantic-books.co.uk To classical liberals of all parties CONTENTS Preface: What happened to Reagan and Thatcher? 1. Life under savage capitalism 2. At each other’s service 3. The silence of the factory whistle 4. In defence of the 1 per cent 5. Monopoly or Minecraft? 6. Picking losers 7. China, paper tiger 8. But what about the planet? 9. The meaning of life Epilogue: The Emperor’s singing contest Notes Index Preface WHAT HAPPENED TO REAGAN AND THATCHER? ‘No one is particularly keen on globalization now, except possibly Johan Norberg.’ PO TIDHOLM, SWEDISH PUBLIC RADIO, 29 MAY 2020 Twenty years ago I wrote a book in defence of global capitalism.

Socialism for capitalists is no better than other forms of socialism, and few reforms could be more important than once again making capitalism a system of profit and loss. The market-liberal logic is merciless: either a business is competitive and so does not need support, or it is not competitive and so doesn’t deserve support. 5 MONOPOLY OR MINECRAFT? ‘If you care about democracy, you need to break up the monopolies. If you care about the economy, same thing.’ TUCKER CARLSON Alright, you might object, perhaps there are examples of entrepreneurs who become super-rich by working hard to give consumers the goods and services they have been longing for.

Rossi-Hansberg and Hsieh refer to it as an ‘industrial revolution in services’.6 These are not some lazy monopolists who are slowing down the economy (although there are some like that). These are creative entrepreneurs who increase the pace so much that others do not keep up. It is not ‘monopoly capitalism’, where one gains by simply taking up more and more limited space and taking more of people’s pay cheques.7 It is rather Minecraft capitalism, an open environment, where other players are not primarily opponents but partners, where you extract and collect resources, acquire ever better tools and, on your own or with others, stack blocks to build increasingly ingenious constructions, and in that way make the whole game more beautiful, interesting and exciting for others.


pages: 525 words: 147,008

SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal

autism spectrum disorder, data science, full employment, game design, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mirror neurons, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, social intelligence, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel

“It’s very important to me, especially now that she’s a teenager, that we keep playing together. It helps keep the lines of communication open.” Antonio’s daughter Julia had just turned thirteen, and her new favorite game was Minecraft, the Lego-like building universe where players gather resources to architect whatever they can imagine. Monsters roam the Minecraft world, requiring players to build safe rooms and craft armor to protect themselves. Apparently Minecraft was giving Julia a new way to think about real-life problems—and a way to talk to her dad about them. “Just last week I was dropping Julia off at school, and she really didn’t want to go in.

The purpose: “I’m staying fit even when I’m busy, plus I’m helping my whole family be physically active, which is important to me.” Joshua, 13, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada The game: “My favorite game is Minecraft.” The benefit: “I get to be creative. I can make whatever I can imagine!” The purpose: “When I have to be creative for school projects, I never draw a blank. I’m good at thinking up new things to make because I practice all the time in Minecraft.” Now it’s your turn. Choose a game, find the benefit, and connect it to a purpose. Quest complete: Were you able to complete the three steps? If so, well done. You’re starting to realize the powerful strengths and skills you’re building when you play—and knowing your strengths is the first and most important step toward using them in daily life.

It’s been rough on her. “It’s not something she usually talks to me about—she’d rather talk to her mom about that stuff. But when we pulled up at school last week, she turned to me and said, ‘Dad, you know what I can do? I can put my armor on.’ I knew what she meant immediately. When she puts on her armor in Minecraft, the monsters, the lava, all the bad stuff—it can’t hurt her. “I told her that was a great way to think about it. ‘You’re going to put on your diamond armor today, and it won’t matter what anyone says to you. It’ll bounce right off you.’ And she said, ‘Yep,’ and smiled, and hopped out of the car.


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

Generation Xers seem a little more addicted to their social media feeds than millennials,7 and kids seem to get bored faster by the endless foliation of self-similar vanities. Minecraft would please my younger self especially. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a whimsical, blocky-looking virtual world, originally seen on PC screens, which is constantly redesigned and reprogrammed by the people who use it. One of the most popular digital designs ever for children. Microsoft bought the company that makes Minecraft, and I got to work with the Minecraft crew on tweaking it for VR release. I tested designs with my nine-year-old daughter and her friends, and the word has to be “ecstatic.”

How do I even begin? A former nun, rosy and boisterous, a figure from a Manet canvas, Ann had become obsessed with the potential of computers in education. She started the Learning Company, which sold Warren Robinett’s seminal programming game Rocky’s Boots. It was the progenitor of builder games like Minecraft. Her hope was that we’d get VR tools to kids and transform teaching, math most of all. Another remarkable programmer, a candidate for one of the best ever, was Bill Alessi. He had previously been at HP, where he was known as their resident code demon. He aspired to be a music star, and had the looks and talent to get there.

In the first phase the software is written or tweaked, while in the other it is run. Programmers take code back and forth; tweak it again, run it again. The two-phase nature of software is practically universal. In a given moment a programmer either is writing a particular piece of software or observing it run. (It is true that there are “builder” games like Minecraft in which you can change a lot while you’re also playing, but there is typically a limit to how much change can occur before you have to switch to the caterpillar mode to make deeper changes.) But this feels inadequate for VR. VR doesn’t run in an external box, like your smartphone. You’re in it.


pages: 119 words: 36,128

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

They got down to business immediately. Three riflemen fired seven times. I considered pushing my mom in front of them (so convenient, as we were already at a cemetery) but they were shooting blanks. Then the bugler stepped forward. Nothing wrecks a room like taps on a bugle. Tough guys weep, kids stop playing Minecraft. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that military buglers have a post-funeral hookup rate of 100 percent. OTHER PEOPLE WHO SHOULD PLAY TAPS Those 24 lonesome notes are so powerful, they should be used more often. THERAPISTS: How much faster will your patients recover if you can skip the initial 5 to 10 minutes of evasive chitchat?

When they get caught, they burst into preplanned tears, saying, “I’m looking at YouTube because I miss Grandpa!” When kids are crying, it’s never for the same reason you are. HOW I GOT MY KID TO STOP BEGGING ME FOR MY IPHONE AT DAD’S FUNERAL SON: Mom, how did Grandpa get lung cancer? ME: Well, he quit a long time ago, but for many, many years, Grandpa played Minecraft. OTHER THINGS YOUR KID IS UPSET ABOUT THAT AREN’T THE DEATH OF YOUR LOVED ONE •Your loved one died during the summer—your kid didn’t miss any school. •Your loved one died during the winter break—your kid didn’t miss any school, but he did miss some vacation. •Your loved one died during the school year, but lived nearby—your kid only got to miss one day of school.

It seems implausible, but in 2003, so did a telephone that could film movies. Figure it out. This is more than a sentimental plea from a grieving daughter. This is an appeal to your business side. To get that sweet VC money, you need to prove there’s a market. Well, here’s some stats. Dead people can’t download apps. Dead people can’t create Minecraft worlds. Dead people can’t find horny strangers in a nearby public bathroom for anonymous gay sex. Corpses aren’t customers. Delaying every user’s death should be the nerd’s top priority. WE MUST SHAME SMART PEOPLE One hundred fifty years ago, every Irish family had one kid who became a priest.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

Is an object really just a model that happens to be printed using certain materials we find in nature? In the “real” world, we take materials such as wood, stone, and metals and then cut up those objects and assemble them into new objects in the real world. A virtual version of this process can be seen at work in a different kind of virtual world: the game Minecraft, which has become extremely popular with youngsters. In Minecraft, the player mines different materials and then uses those building blocks to build content in the simulated world. Could objects in our physical world really be the result of a type of 3D printing that relies on some model of the object and some set of instructions?

This is defined as a persistent world that changes based upon what players do. This is the information stored on the “server”; there could be multiple versions of the world hosted on different servers, each with different states. This is what creates persistence of objects in virtual worlds like Second Life (and, more recently, Minecraft), even after individual players have logged out. Of course, this persistence is an illusion; it lasts only as long as the information about the game world on the server is saved and doesn’t change. Multiple Online Players. An MMORPG has simultaneous players who can play with each other by logging into the same “persistent world.”

But it’s not a major leap to realize that as this technology improves, we will be able to print smaller and smaller dots, perhaps getting to the point of printing individual atoms and molecules. At first glance, 3D printers might appear to have nothing to do with video games, yet in fact the modeling techniques developed for video games are the same models that are used by 3D printers, and once again we see physical objects being reduced to digital information. A table created in Minecraft or Second Life (or the fictional OASIS) consists of digital information that is rendered using the basic building blocks of the game (pixels), which persists inside the virtual world as long as the world is running. Can we say any more of the physical world around us? Nature as a 3D Printer of Biological Material One thing we haven’t been able to print (yet) are organic materials, which contain carbon, the basic building block of life.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

Throughout the month, the excitement for Oculus continued—eventually surpassing $2 million on Kickstarter with pledges from over nine thousand supporters (including heavy hitters like Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson, who backed the guys to the tune of $10,000). On the heels of that momentum, Meteor Entertainment and Adhesive Games—whose almost complete mech shooter Hawken was headed to PCs in December—announced that they’d be porting an iteration of the game to work with the Rift.1 Now, in addition to Doom 3 BFG, there’d be another game ready to go when the headsets shipped in December. And it looked like there might even be a third: a new game from Notch—a space-themed follow-up to Minecraft—who the guys had managed to track down at Seattle’s Penny Arcade Expo.

Because the knee-jerk reaction from people with absolutely no skin in the game is so strong. Besides, it probably would just get lost in the shuffle; the media only really cares about amplifying negative reactions. Just look at the Notch thing.” The “Notch thing” was a reference to comments made earlier that day by Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson. “We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus,” Notch had tweeted. “[But] I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out.” Notch then elaborated on this in a lengthy blog post, stating that “Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company.

“It would be hard for the CEO of a sailboat company to be enthusiastic and genuine if they always got seasick whenever they went out, but Brendan is in exactly that position. My Minecraft work is a good example. By its very nature, it is terrible from a comfort position . . . Regardless, I have played more hours in it than any other VR experience except Cinema. Brendan suggested there might be a better “Made for VR Minecraft” that was stationary and third person, like the HoloLens demo. This was frightening to hear, because it showed just how wide the gulf was between our views of what a great VR game should be.”


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

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

No one in the working space he was hanging out at today worked regular hours, some got paid, some were studying, some were here every day, others might just be there for a few hours and then go off to find some new space. Work was a much more fluid concept to Matt and his friends. A good analogy for Matt’s generation was environments like Minecraft, which had become hugely popular in the early 2010s. Minecraft was part game, part puzzle, part coding problem; Matt had learned some basic Java when he was ten just so he could code up a mod for some of his friends who were in a Minecraft mob. Hacking together cloud-based servers, setting up local instances of dev platforms and pushing code and AR models out to other teams working around the world was a pretty basic skill set to these guys.

That’s how strong IBM’s branding around “PC” became back then. 7 At the History of Science auction held at Bonhams New York on 22nd October 2014, one of the 50 original Apple-I computers (and one of only about 15 or so that are operational) was sold to The Henry Ford for a staggering US$905,000. 8 Cisco—Internet of Things (IoT) 9 Minecraft is a trademark owned by Mojang/Microsoft. 10 Globally, the term ECG is most common in which the Greek word for “heart” cardia or kardia is central to the acronym (elektro-cardia-graph, literally “electric-heart-writing”). The US common usage is EKG, using the original Greek spelling term rather than the English transliteration (cardio). 11 R.W.

Interestingly, Stephenson also described an entire industry built around the business of avatars and the Metaverse, including designers who can fashion a body, clothes and even facial expressions for your virtual persona. Today, the term “avatar” describes any virtual representation of a user in the digital realm. From Steve and his buddies in Minecraft to characters in Halo, the Guardians in Destiny and avatars in virtual worlds like Second Life. However, the development in computer animation to depict virtual characters in parallel can also be seen as contributing to the possible futures of interaction. Figure 7.3: Aki Ross, a computer-generated human analog actor in Final Fantasy (Credit: Square Pictures) From Woody in Toy Story through to James Cameron’s Avatar, the development of computer character animation has evolved into a multi-billion dollar segment of the software industry.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

The table providing some of the predictive ‘likes’ in Michal and his colleagues’ scientific article is a list of painfully embarrassing stereotypes.1 In 2010/11, when the study was carried out, gay males liked Sue Sylvester from the TV show Glee, Adam Lambert from American Idol and supported various human rights campaigns. Straight men liked Foot Locker, Wu-Tang Clan, the X Games and Bruce Lee. People with only a few friends liked the computer game Minecraft, hard rock music and ‘walking with your friend and randomly pushing them into someone’. People with lots of friends liked Jennifer Lopez. People with low IQ liked the National Lampoon’s character, Clark Griswold, ‘being a mom’ and Harley Davidson motorbikes. People with high IQ liked Mozart, science, The Lord of the Rings and The Godfather.

African Americans liked Hello Kitty, Barack Obama and rapper Nicki Minaj, but were less keen on camping or Mitt Romney than other ethnic groups. These observations don’t mean that we should conclude a person is gay based on a single ‘like’ for Sue Sylvester, or that just because someone likes Mozart they are smart. That would be school playground logic: ‘Ha ha, you like Minecraft … you don’t have any friends.’ Such reasoning is not only unpleasant, it is usually wrong. Instead, Michal found that each ‘like’ provided a little bit of information about a person and an accumulation of lots of ‘likes’ allows his algorithm to draw reliable conclusions. To combine all of our ‘likes’, Michal and his colleagues used principal component analysis.

They begin to wonder if WhatsApp might be selling their private messages, or if their iPhone might be recording their conversations. Conspiracy theories about companies using private messages are unlikely to hold. The more plausible explanation is that data alchemists are finding statistical relationships in our behaviour that help them target us: kids who watch Minecraft and Overwatch videos eat sandwiches in the evening. My wife might not have noticed that she had already been shown an advert for that chocolate brand on Facebook. The other major source of ‘spooky’ adverts is retargeting: we simply forgot that we searched for a trip to the Algarve, but your web browser has remembered and fed this information to TUI, who are now offering you a room in their finest hotel.


pages: 426 words: 117,775

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

“Charismatic Authority.” In The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, edited by Talcott Parsons, 358–363. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1947. Westervelt, Eric. “The Cubist Revolution: Minecraft For All.” Morning Edition. Aired August 8, 2017, on NPR. Audio, 3:52. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/08/08/538580856/the-cubist-revolution-minecraft-for-all. Wilby, Peter. “Sugata Mitra: The Professor with His Head in the Cloud.” Guardian, June 7, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jun/07/sugata-mitra-professor-school-in-cloud. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs. 1977.

It is true that certain kinds of video games can at least temporarily improve reaction times and spatial reasoning, but their connection to other kinds of learning is much more contested.17 Some games—like some books, movies, television shows, or other media—have complex storylines and grapple with heady issues. Some, such as Minecraft (which was in an alpha version during my 2010 fieldwork and was completely unknown among my participants at that time, but had been played by a few by the time I returned in 2013), have since been hailed as pathways into programming.18 These were generally not the kinds of games I saw being played among children in Paraguay, however.

Instead, she used a desktop computer, and although she had Scratch and eToys installed on it, she said that she had not done much programming in the previous couple of years because she no longer saw much of her beloved teacher or of Paraguay Educa’s erstwhile trainers. She had also lost touch with Nelson, who had moved to Asunción, and she did not have other friends interested in exploring Scratch or eToys with her. Instead, she spent a lot of time playing video games—particularly Minecraft and an online multiplayer game called DOTA 2 (the second Defense of the Ancients, a multiplayer online battle arena game). She even entered in regional eSports video-game tournaments, competing in DOTA 2 for small prizes of cash or computer equipment. She told me that she wanted to study graphic design at Caacupé Technical College starting the following year and then to be a video-game artist—but she also wanted to be a veterinarian.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

MacKinnon, “The First Amendment: An Equality Reading,” in The Free Speech Century, ed. Geoffrey R. Stone and Lee C. Bollinger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 140. 2. Darnton, Censors at Work, 19. 3. Caleb Chen, “Activists in Minecraft Made a Digital Library to Bypass Government Censorship,” Privacy News Online, March 24, 2020, https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/activists-in-minecraft-made-a-digital-library-to-bypass-government-censorship, accessed June 20, 2020; Miriam Deprez, “Emojis, Minecraft and Spotify: How Citizens Are Beating the Censors,” Southeast Asia Globe, May 4, 2020, https://southeastasiaglobe.com/press-freedom-beating-censors, accessed June 20, 2020. 4.

Given the digitization of hundreds of millions of existing texts and the diffusion into the cloud of countless others as soon as they are composed, the channels for eliminating forbidden materials are closing. Even the tightest controls can often be circumvented. In 2020, the press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders managed to make a large cache of forbidden news stories available in heavily controlled countries such as China by routing it through the popular online game Minecraft. Banned news has also been embedded into pop songs and distributed through the online music service Spotify.3 Authorities know about such tactics as well as anyone, yet they persist with their suppression efforts because they believe they must. It is not just speech they fear, but also the appearance of toleration.

See also violence Masschaele, James, 64 Maule, Thomas, 87–88 Maxentius, 44 Maximus, Valerius, 32 Mayan cultural knowledge, 3–4 McCarthy, Joseph, 7 McDougall, Alexander, 112–13 McGovern, Daniel, 197 McNamee, Roger, 220, 225 Mead, Frederick, 192 Medvedev, Zhores, 206 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Dugdale), 143 memory, 29–30 The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (Pynchon), 87 Merriam, Clinton, 152 Messina, Piero, 217 Metternich, Klemens von, 119 Microsoft, 234 Mill, John Stuart, 130–32, 157 Milton, John, 16, 85–86, 126 Minecraft, 255 Mock, James, 173 The Monk (Lewis), 141 Montgomery, James, 93 monuments, 39–40, 77, 106–8 Moore, Nicole, 191 Moro, Sérgio, 217 Morozov, Evgeny, 221 Moulin Rouge (Paris), 161–62 Moura, Clóvis, 203 movies. See cinematic censorship Mühl-Benninghaus, Wolfgang, 169 Mulford, Samuel, 109 Murillo, Juan Bravo, 133 Murray, Robert K., 179 Museum of French Monuments, 107, 108 Museum of Jewish Art and Culture (Estonia), 189 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 245 Muslim communities: hate crimes and hate speech against, 241, 243–44, 247–48, 256; in Myanmar, 224; in Palestine, 204–5.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

Being my own boss affords me the independence and flexibility I need to express my creative processes, be they typically artistic or intellectually creative. I am not tied down to other people’s wants and expectations and can choose the paths I want or need to focus on at any particular stage in my life.” In Providence, Rhode Island, David told me about his son, Ethan, who started playing Minecraft about two years ago. His father described him as a fairly normal twelve-year-old enjoying a group-building experience with kids his age from around the globe. Ethan turned out to be quite adept at building these virtual kingdoms in the sky and below the earth. He soon got a little more serious about studying architecture, and he built his own computer for gaming from components.

In the process, he has made mistakes common to a lot of young entrepreneurs: underestimating the time required to complete a project, going too far beyond his actual skill set, taking on more work than he could actually do in a given time period, and getting into ill-conceived partnerships. He has also learned a lot: how to build solid, trusting relationships based on an unspoken code of ethics and honor, and how to invest in his small business. To spur his productivity, Ethan recently partnered up with another teenager to purchase a turnkey network Minecraft business with a ready-made client base, compiled code, and website. He stands to start making a lot more money. His father emailed me that “no one seems to care if he is fourteen. He can deliver the goods.” I met Miriam, a newly minted lawyer in her twenties, in Boston. She works long hours and is at the office more than sixty hours a week.

., 86 LinkedIn, 127 Linux controlled kernel path, 109–110 power users, 117–118 private sector’s inability to influence, 208 Location, key criterion for success, 56 Lyft benefit of peers to company, 67–68 “everybody welcome” phase, 111–112 keeping drivers happy, 124 Ma, Jack, 37 Maps, replaced by GPS, 139 Martin, Trayvon, protests through social media, 84 Mayor’s Challenge, 174 Mazzella, Frédéric, 21, 111 McKibben, Bill, 232 Meetup, 238–239 Mesh network, Red Hook Initiative, 245–246 Micro-businesses, 187 Micro-entrepreneurs, 148, 154–156 Minds, diverse and networked, 66, 81–85, 177–178, 231, 251 Mindstorms, 175–176 Minecraft, benefits to peers, 51–52 Mining, Bitcoins, 213 Minitel, 142 Miracles theory excess capacity, 73–78 peers, 81–85 platforms, 78–81 pressing needs, 89–96 putting together, 72–73, 95 Mission edge, innovation, 167–169 Mondragon, 203 Money Bitcoin, 211–217 limitations, 253 See also Financing Monopolies, 124–126 avoiding, 187–188 diversity as barrier, 252–253 platforms as, 46 See also Power imbalance Muñoz, Jordi, 53–54 Musk, Elon, 177–178 MySQL, 43–44 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 212 NASA Apollo 13 innovation, 222–223 diverse contributions, 66–67 work with Global Forest Watch, 230–231 National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 143–144 Newmark, Craig.


pages: 420 words: 130,503

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards by Yu-Kai Chou

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, functional fixedness, game design, gamification, growth hacking, IKEA effect, Internet of things, Kickstarter, late fees, lifelogging, loss aversion, Maui Hawaii, Minecraft, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Skype, software as a service, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

URL: http://farmville.wikia.com/wiki/File:Farmville-mona-lisa-by-kevin-johnson-300x186.png↩ Jenny Ng. Games.com Blog. “FarmVille Pic of the Day: Embrace of Swan Lake at Liveloula46’s farm.” 03/01/2012.↩ Amy-Mae Elliott. Mashable.com. “15 Beautiful and Creative QR Code”. 11/7/23.↩ Wikipedia Entry “Minecraft”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minecraft↩ Raph Koster. A Theory of Fun. 2nd Edition. p122. O’Reilly Media. Sebastopol, CA. 10/2013. ↩ Chapter 8: The Fourth Core Drive - Ownership & Possession Ownership & Possession is the fourth Core Drive in Octalysis Gamification. It represents the motivation that is driven by our feelings of owning something, and consequently the desire to improve, protect, and obtain more of it.

The truth is, simply incorporating game mechanics and game elements does not make a game fun. Games aren’t necessarily fun because of high quality graphics or flashy animations either. There are many unpopular, poor-selling games with state-of-the-art 3D high- resolution graphics. There are also games with very basic graphics such as Minecraft, or even no graphics, such as the purely text-based multi-user dungeon games (MUDs), that have large communities of players addicted to them. Clearly, there are more to games than “meets the eye.” Unfortunately, a lot of people who work in gamification incorrectly think that applying game mechanics like points, badges, and leaderboards – elements that you can also find in boring and unsuccessful games - will automatically make the product or experience fun and engaging.

I showcase myself playing through these popular games while making comments on their game design and how they use various game techniques to entice me to come back every day and spend more money buying virtual goods. I started out with Blizzard’s new card-battling computer game Hearthstone, and plan to eventually move on to games like Minecraft, League of Legends, and others. I do this for my own research, but if you go to my channel http://twitch.tv/fdlink, you may be able to catch me broadcasting actual gameplay research. I also announce when I plan to live stream on my Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com/yukaichou so that’s another place to experience a FOMO Punch.


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

But it took many hours to master the arcane 3-D tools. In 2009 a game company in Sweden, Minecraft, launched a similar construction world in quasi-3-D, but employed idiot-easy building blocks stacked like giant Legos. No learning was necessary. Many would-be builders migrated to Minecraft. Second Life’s success had risen on the ability of kindred creative spirits to socialize, but when the social mojo moved to the mobile world, no phones had enough computing power to handle Second Life’s sophisticated 3-D, so the biggest audiences moved on. Even more headed to Minecraft, whose crude low-res pixelation allowed it to run on phones.

See also artificial intelligence “machine readable” information, 267 Magic Leap, 216 malaria, 241 Malthus, Thomas, 243 Mann, Steve, 247 Manovich, Lev, 200 manufacturing, robots in, 52–53, 55 maps, 272 mathematics, 47, 239, 242–43 The Matrix (1999), 211 maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), 265 McDonalds, 25–26 McLuhan, Marshall, 63, 127 media fluency, 201 media genres, 194–95 medical technology and field AI applications in, 31, 55 and crowdfunding, 157 and diagnoses, 31 future flows of, 80 interpretation services in field of, 69 and lifelogging, 250 new jobs related to automation in, 58 paperwork in, 51 personalization of, 69 and personalized pharmaceuticals, 173 and pooling patient data, 145 and tracking technology, 173, 237, 238–40, 241–42, 243–44, 250 Meerkat, 76 memory, 245–46, 249 messaging, 239–40 metadata, 258–59, 267 microphones, 221 Microsoft, 122–23, 124, 216, 247 minds, variety of, 44–46 Minecraft, 218 miniaturization, 237 Minority Report (2002), 221–22, 255 MIT Media Lab, 219, 220, 222 money, 4, 65, 119–21 monopolies, 209 mood tracking, 238 Moore’s Law, 257 movies, 77–78, 81–82, 168, 204–7 Mozilla, 151 MP3 compression, 165–66 music and musicians AI applications in, 35 creation of, 73–76, 77 and crowdfunding, 157 and free/ubiquitous copies, 66–67 and intellectual property issues, 208–9 and interactivity, 221 liquidity of, 66–67, 73–78 and live performances, 71 low-cost reproduction of, 87 of nonprofessionals, 75–76 and patronage, 72 sales of, 75 soundtracks for content, 76 total volume of recorded music, 165–66 Musk, Elon, 44 mutual surveillance (“coveillance”), 259–64 MyLifeBits, 247 Nabokov, Vladimir, 204 Napster, 66 The Narrative, 248–49, 251 National Geographic, 278 National Science Foundation, 17–18 National Security Agency (NSA), 261 Nature, 32 Negroponte, Nicholas, 16, 219 Nelson, Ted, 18–19, 21, 247 Nest smart thermostat, 253, 283 Netflix and accessibility vs. ownership, 109 and crowdsourcing programming, 160 and on-demand access, 64 and recommendation engines, 39, 154, 169 and reviews, 73, 154 and sharing economy, 138 and tracking technology, 254 Netscape browser, 15 network effect, 40 neural networks, 38–40 newbies, 10–11, 15 new media forms, 194–95 newspapers, 177 Ng, Andrew, 38, 39 niche interests, 155–56 nicknames, 263 nondestructive editing, 206 nonprofits, 157 noosphere, 292 Northwestern University, 225 numeracy, 242–43 Nupedia, 270 OBD chips, 251, 252 obscure or niche interests, 155–56 office settings, 222.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

The controlled app world of Apple and Android has some benefits for users – it protects against viruses, and to an extent against dodgy apps and scams, but it does it at the price of experimentation, and against freedom of control (and fee-skimming) from the phone manufacturer or the phone networks, or both. It doesn’t, Wales says, let you play – and playing is where lots of good ideas start. ‘Something like Minecraft. Minecraft grew out of a clever guy on a forum with a bunch of gaming geeks, going, “Hey, I made this little game. What do you think?” They give him feedback. He changes it and so on. That just doesn’t happen in the app world.’ As for Wales himself, does doing the right thing – even if you do experiment and play – mean giving up all prospects of being dotcom-founder levels of successful?

Ethiopian government, here Kleinrock, Leonard, here, here, here, here, here Kline, Charley, here Knight Foundation, here Kunlun, here Leigh, David, here LinkedIn, here London Olympics, here Lukasik, Steve, here Lumley, Joanna, here Luther, Martin, here MacAskill, Ewen, here machine learning, here, here Marby, Göran, here, here, here, here Markota, Martina, here Mastering the Internet programme, here Meckl, Steve, here, here Medium, here Menwith Hill, here MI5, 146 Microsoft, here, here, here see also Encarta; Windows Millar, Stuart, here Minecraft, here Morgan, J.P., here music publishers, here MySpace, here NASA, here National Health Service (NHS), here National Science Foundation, here National Security Agency (NSA), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and encryption, here NBC, here net neutrality, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Netflix, here, here, here, here Netscape, here network effects, here network slicing, here neurolinguistic programming, here New York magazine, here New York Times, here, here, here, here New Yorker, here newspapers, here, here, here, here see also journalism North Korea, here nuclear weapons and warfare, here, here, here Obama, Barack, here, here, here O’Kelley, Brian, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Oliver, John, here, here OpenSecrets database, here Opera, here Optic Nerve programme, here Outbrain, here, here packet switching, here, here Page, Larry, here Pai, Ajit, here, here, here Pakistan Telecom, here Panopticlick 3.0, here Parker, Sean, here PayPal, here, here, here, here, here People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), here Philippines, human rights violations, here pinging, here Pizzagate conspiracy, here Poitras, Laura, here populism, here, here pornography, here, here Postel, Jon, here privacy, here, here, here, here see also surveillance Privacy Badger, here Prodigy, here ProPublica, here, here publishers, and advertising, here, here, here railways, here, here, here, here, here Read, Max, here Reagan, Ronald, here Reddit, here Register, The, here Rekhter, Yakov, here, here Requests for Comments (RFCs), here, here, here, here Right Media, here, here Roberts, Brian, here, here, here Rockefeller, John D., here Roosevelt, Franklin D., here routers, here, here Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), here, here Rubenstein, Michael, here Rusbridger, Alan, here Russia, here, here, here, here Sainsbury’s/Asda merger, here Schneidermann, Eric, here secure operations centres (SOCs), here sensitive compartmented information facilities (SCIFs), here Shaw, Mona, here Silicon Valley, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sinclair Broadcast Group, here Skype, here, here, here, here Snapchat, here, here Snowden, Edward, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘social credit’, here Soundcloud, here South Korea, here sovereign immunity, here Spotify, here Stanford Research Institute (SRI), here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stripe, here Sun, The, here Sun Microsystems, here surveillance, here, here, here, here resistance to, here Symantec, here, here, here Syria, here, here Taboola, here, here TCP/IP, here, here Telefonica, here Telegram, here telephone networks, here, here, here Tempora, here, here TenCent, here, here terror plots, foiled, here Texas A&M, here Thatcher, Margaret, here Thiel, Peter, here, here Tibet, here Time Warner, here, here Times, The, here Tishgart, Barry, here Topolski, Robb, here traceroute, here, here tracking, see cookies trade unions, here, here, here trademark law, here transatlantic cables, here Tribune newspaper group, here Trump, Donald, here, here, here, here Tuchman, Barbara, here Tumblr, here, here Turkey, bans Wikipedia, here Tweetdeck, here Twitter, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Uber, here Ukraine, here Union Square Ventures (USV), here Universal Declaration of Human Rights, here Universal Studios, here University College, London, here University of California, Los Angeles UCLA, here, here, here, here University of Maryland Law School, here US Congress, here US Constitution, here, here US culture, and internet regulation, here US Department of Commerce, here, here US Department of Defense, here, here, here, here, here, here, here US Department of Energy, here US internet infrastructure, here, here US Supreme Court, here venture capital, here, here, here, here funding phases, here funding series, here, here Verizon, here, here Wales, Jimmy, here WannaCry attack, here Washington Post, here, here, here, here, here web addresses (URLs), here, here, here top-level domains (TLDs), here and WannaCry attack, here WeChat, here Wenger, Albert, here, here, here, here, here WhatsApp, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Wheeler, Tom, here, here, here WikiLeaks, here, here, here Wikipedia, here, here Williams, Evan, here Windows, vulnerability in, here wired.com, here wireless internet, here, here wiretapping, here Woodward, Bob, here World Economic Forum, here World Wide Web, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Wu, Tim, here Yahoo, here, here, here YouTube, here, here, here, here, here, here Zittrain, Jonathan, here Zuckerberg, Mark, here, here, here, here, here, here Zynga, here BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1b 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 This electronic edition published 2020 Copyright © James Ball, 2020 James Ball has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work All rights reserved.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

-Canada Power System Outage Task Force (1 Apr 2004), “Final report on the August 14, 2003 blackout in the United States and Canada: Causes and recommendations,” https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandMedia/Blackout Final-Web.pdf. 94Similarly, the authors of the Mirai botnet: Brian Krebs (18 Jan 2017), “Who is Anna-Senpai, the Mirai worm author?” Krebs on Security, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who-is-anna-senpai-the-mirai-worm-author. 94In fact, three college students wrote: Garrett M. Graff (13 Dec 2017), “How a dorm room Minecraft scam brought down the Internet,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brought-down-the-internet. 94But it erased all data on over 30,000 hard drives: Parmy Olson (9 Nov 2012), “The day a computer virus came close to plugging Gulf Oil,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2012/11/09/the-day-a-computer-virus-came-close-to-plugging-gulf-oil. 94The shipping giant Maersk was hit: Iain Thomson (16 Aug 2017), “NotPetya ransomware attack cost us $300m—shipping giant Maersk,” Register, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/16/notpetya_ransomware_attack_cost_us_300m_says_shipping_giant_maersk. 95To this we can add mass murder: Elton Hobson (24 Nov 2017), “Powerful video warns of the danger of autonomous ‘slaughterbot’ drone swarms,” Global News, https://globalnews.ca/news/3880186/powerful-video-warns-of-the-danger-of-autonomous-slaughterbot-drone-swarms. 95malicious code received from space aliens: Michael Hippke and John G.

Similarly, the authors of the Mirai botnet didn’t realize that their attack against Dyn would result in so many popular websites being knocked offline. I don’t think they even knew what companies used Dyn’s DNS services, and that they were a single point of failure without any backup. In fact, three college students wrote the botnet to gain an advantage in the video game Minecraft. Damage to computers controlling physical systems radiates outwards. A 2012 attack against the Saudi Arabian national oil company only affected the company’s IT network. But it erased all data on over 30,000 hard drives, crippling the company for weeks and affecting oil production for months—which had an effect on global availability.

., 190 wiretapping by, 168 FDA, 137, 145, 151 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 149 FedRAMP, 123 Felten, Ed, 223 financial crisis (2008), 125–26 FinFisher, 64–65 FireEye, 42 flash crash, 85 Ford Foundation, 224 Fort Hood shooting (2009), 202 Freeh, Louis, 193 FTC, 148, 154 Gamma Group, 30, 65 Gartner tech analyst firm, 101 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) [EU], 151, 184–88 Geer, Dan, 163, 217 George, Richard, 170 Gerasimov Doctrine, 71 Germany, BSI and BND in, 173 GGE (Group of Governmental Experts), UN, 158 Gmail, 153 Goldsmith, Jack, 163 Google: Advanced Protection Program, 47 censorship by, 60 controls exerted by, 61, 62 and EU regulations, 185 identification systems in, 199 lobbying by, 154 state investigation of, 187 surveillance via, 58–59, 169, 196 governments, 144–59 asymmetry between, 91–92 censorship by, 60 and defense over offense, 160–79 functions of, 10 and industry, 176–79 information sharing by, 176 and infrastructure, 117 insecurity favored by, 57 international cooperation, 156–59 international espionage, 171–72 jurisdictional arbitrage, 156 and liability law, 128–33 lobbying of, 154–55 mistrust of, 208, 220 policy challenges in, 99, 100–101, 192–206 regulatory bodies, 121, 144, 150–52, 156–59, 192 and security standards, 167 supply-chain attacks on, 87–89 surveillance by, 64–68, 172, 195, 208 vulnerability disclosure by, 163 Greer, John, 126 GTT Communications, 115 Gutenberg, Johannes, 24 hacking: catastrophic, 9, 16, 217 class breaks, 33, 95 contests in, 85 costs of, 102–3 cyberweapons in, 73 increasing threat of, 79 international havens of, 156 through fish tank, 29 hacking back, 203–4 HackingTeam, 30, 45, 65 HAMAS, 93 Hancock Health, 74 harm, legal definition of, 130 Harris Corporation, 168 Hathaway, Melissa, 114 Hayden, Michael, 170 Healey, Jason, 158, 160 Heartbleed, 21, 114–15 Hello Barbie (doll), 106 Hilton Hotels, 185 Hizballah, 93 Honan, Mat, 29 Hotmail, 153 HP printers, 62 Huawai (Chinese company), 87 Human Rights Watch, 223 humans, as system component, 7 IBM, 33 iCloud, 7 hacking of, 78 and privacy, 190 quality standards for, 111, 123, 135 Idaho National Laboratory, 79, 90 identification, 51–55, 199–200 attribution, 52–55 breeder documents for, 51 impersonation of, 51, 75 identity, 44 identity theft, 50–51, 74–76, 106, 171 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 221 iMessage, 170 impersonation, 51, 75 IMSI (international mobile subscriber identity), 168–70 industry lobbying groups, 183 information asymmetries, 133–38 information security, 78 infrastructure: critical, use of term, 116 security of, 116–18 Inglis, Chris, 28 innovation, 155 insecurity, 56–77 cost of, 126 criminals’ benefit from, 74–77 and cyberwar, 68–74 insurance industry, 132–33 integrity, attacks on, 78–82 intellectual property theft, 66, 72–73, 75 interconnections, vulnerabilities in, 28–30, 90 International Organization for Standardization (ISO), 140 Internet: advertising model of, 57, 60 changing concepts of, 5, 218 connectivity of, 5, 91, 105–6 demilitarization of, 212–15 dependence on, 89–90 development phase of, 22–23, 157 explosive growth of, 5, 146 global, 7, 16, 161 governance model of, 157 government regulation of, 152–55 horizontal growth of, 146 industry standards for, 23, 122–23 lack of encryption on, 170–72 maintenance and upkeep of, 143 nonlinear system of, 211 private ownership of infrastructure, 126 resilience of, 210–12 as social equalizer, 214, 217 surveillance and control via, 64–68 viral dissident content on, 158 Internet+: authentication in, 49–51 coining of term, 8 cybersecurity safety board for, 177 risks and dangers of, 217–18 simultaneous vulnerabilities in, 94 Internet+ security: closing the skills gap, 141–42 correcting information asymmetries in, 133–38 correcting misaligned incentives in, 124–28 current state of, 9 defense in, see attack vs. defense enforcement of, 121 funding maintenance and upkeep in, 143 incentives and policy solutions for, 100–103, 120–43 increasing research in, 142–43 liabilities clarified for, 128–33 litigation for, 121 meanings of, 15–17 and privacy, 9 public education about, 138–41 public policies for, 120–21 standards for, 122–23, 140–41, 157–59 as wicked problem, 11, 99 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), 23, 167 Internet of Things (IoT), 5 as computerization of everything, 7 Cybersecurity Improvement Act, 180 in developmental stage, 8 patching of, 37–38 smartphone as controller hub for, 48 Internet Policy Research Initiative, MIT, 224 Investigatory Powers Act (UK), 195 iPhones, 3–4 encryption on, 174, 197 new versions of, 42–43 IPsec, 167 Iran: cyberattack by, 71, 116, 178 hackers in, 45 Stuxnet attack on, 79 Iraq, 212 ISIS, 69, 93 ISPs: connections via, 113–14 Tier 1 type, 115 ISS World (“Wiretappers’ Ball”), 65 jobs, in cybersecurity, 141–42 John Deere, 59–60, 62, 63 Joyce, Rob, 45, 53, 54, 164, 166 Kaplan, Fred, 73 Kaspersky Lab, 29, 74, 87 Kello, Lucas, 71 Kelly, John, 66 Keurig coffee makers, 62 key escrow, 194 KICTANet, Kenya, 214 labeling requirements, 134–35 LabMD, unfair practices of, 130–31 Landau, Susan, 175, 176, 223 Las Vegas shooting (2017), 202 Ledgett, Rick, 163–64, 166 lemons market, 134 Lenovo, 187 letters of marque, 204 Level 3 ISP, 115 liability law, 125, 128–33 Liars and Outliers (Schneier), 101, 209 Library of Congress, 42 license plate scanners, 201 linear systems, 210 Lloyd’s of London, 90 Lynn, William, 198 machine learning, 7, 82–87 adversarial, 84 algorithms beyond human comprehension, 111–12 autonomous, 82–83, 85 Maersk, 71, 94 malware, 26, 30, 196 man-in-the-middle attacks, 49, 169 market economics, and competition, 6 mass shootings, 202 May, Theresa, 197 McConnell, Mike, 198 McVeigh, Timothy, 202 medical devices: bugs in, 41 and government regulations, 151 hacking, 16 and privacy, 151 Meltdown vulnerability, 21 Merkel, Angela, 66 metadata, 174 Microsoft, 57, 190 Microsoft Office, new versions of, 42, 43 military systems, autonomous, 86 Minecraft video game, 94 miniaturization, 7 Mirai botnet, 29, 37, 77, 94, 130 money laundering, 183 monocultures, vulnerabilities in, 31 Moonlight Maze, 66 “movie-plot threats,” 96 Mozilla, 163 Munich Security Conference, 70 My Friend Cayla (doll), 106 Nader, Ralph, Unsafe at Any Speed, 182 National Cyber Office (NCO), 146–50 National Cyber Security Centre (UK), 173 National Cybersecurity Safety Board (proposed), 177 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Cybersecurity Framework of, 123, 147 National Intelligence Council, 211–12 National Science Foundation (NSF), 147 National Security Council, 163 National Security Strategy, 117 National Transportation Safety Board, 177 Netflix, 148 net neutrality, 61, 119 network effect, 60 networks: “air gapped,” 118 collective action required of, 23–24 end-to-end model of, 23 firewalls for, 102 iCloud, 111 secure connections in, 113–14, 125 and spam, 100 telephone, 119 New America, 223 New York Cyber Task Force, 213 NOBUS (nobody but us), 164–65, 169, 170 norms, 157–59 North Korea: cyberattack by, 71 cybercrimes by, 76, 157 hacking by, 54, 71, 78 threats by, 70, 72 Norwegian Consumer Council, 105–6 NotPetya malware, 71, 77, 89, 94 NSA: attribution in, 53–55 BULLRUN program, 167–68 credential stealing by, 45 cyberattack tools of, 165–67 on cybersecurity, 86 cyberweapons stolen from, 73 disclosing and fixing vulnerabilities, 162–67 encryption circumvented by, 171, 193 intelligence-gathering hacks by, 116, 118 missions of, 160–61, 172 mistrust of, 208 reorganization (2016) in, 173 and security standards, 167–70 splitting into three organizations, 172–73 supply-chain attacks by, 87 surveillance by, 65, 66–67, 190, 202 NSO Group, 65 Nye, Joseph, 157 Obama, Barack, 66, 69, 92, 117, 163, 180, 208 Ochoa, Higinio O.


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Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

In fact, the end goal of biologists is to create models and identify regularities, even if on a smaller scale. So, when confronted with a complex piece of technology, we must begin by acting like field biologists, experimenting around its edges to see how it behaves, with the end goal of some degree of generalization. This is actually how a lot of people approach open-ended video games like Minecraft. You first collect huge amounts of information about your virtual world—what you can do, what you can’t, what kills you, how you successfully survive—and then begin to make little mental models, small-scale generalizations within a much larger whole. Or, when you are working with an advanced piece of software such as a gargantuan word-processing tool, and the endnotes in your document go haywire, do not panic.

., 40 machine translation, 57–59, 207 Macintosh computers, 161–63 magic crayons, 162–63 Maimonides, Moses, 151–52, 156 Mandel, Michael, 46 Mandelbrot, Benoit, 130 mathematics, limitative theorems in, 175 Mauries, Patrick, 87–88 Maxwell, James Clerk, 114–15 medicine, specialization in, 91 memory, human, long-term, 74–77 microbes, synthetic, 49 Microsoft, 106–7 Microsoft Office, 16 Microsoft Research, 62 Microsoft Windows, 35, 98 Microsoft Word, 42 Minecraft, 132 “miscellaneous,” concept of, 108–10, 140–41, 143 models, see scientific models modules, 63–65, 208 Moravec, Hans, 230 multitasking, 76 mutagenesis, 124–25 mutations, 109–10, 120 Myers, Brad A., 159 Myst, 162 mystery: human comprehension and, 173–74 under- vs. overemphasis on, 171 wonder vs., 170–76 Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks), 38 naches: definition of, 167–68 as response to technological complexity, 168–69, 174 natural world: complexity in, 107–10 diversity of, 113–14 interconnection of technology and, 3 scientific study of, 107–10 search for unity in, see physics thinking Netflix, 5, 59, 107, 126 Newark, N.J., 46 Newton, Isaac, 89, 112, 114, 152, 221 New York Stock Exchange, 1, 187 Niagara Falls Museum, 88 nonlinear systems, 78–79 Norman, Don, 158–59, 172 Northeast Blackout (2003), 48, 128 Norton, Quinn, 22 Norvig, Peter, 56 “novelty detection,” 127 nuclear power plants, 126 Oremus, Will, 189 outliers, 76–77, 137 see also edge cases Out of Control (Kelly), 83 overclocking, 76 Oxford English Dictionary, 55 Pac-Man, 160 Parkinson’s Law, 41 particle accelerators, 2 pattern-making mind, 146–47 penicillin, 124 percolation, 133–34 personbyte, 212 pharmaceutical research, 125 Philosophical Transactions, 111 philosophy of technology, 79–81 Photoshop, 35 physical systems, biological systems vs., 116–17 physics thinking, 112–13, 121 abstraction in, 115–16, 121–22, 128 aesthetics and, 113, 114 in ancient Greece, 138–40 biological thinking vs., 114–16, 137–38, 142–43, 222 technological complexity and, 122, 127–28 unity in, 117 Pinker, Steven, 73 poliovirus, 49 polymaths, 86–89, 93, 144 Post, David, 61 Postal Service, U.S., 34 posterior hippocampus, 78 power grid, cascading blackouts in, 47–48, 128 power laws, 55–56, 206 pre-Socratics, 138–40 programmers, programming: computer vs. human counting in, 69–70, 209 differences of scale and, 50–51 languages in, 23 lessons from, 160–63 recursion and, 71 as valuable skill, 43 see also software Programming Pearls, 104–5 progress, overoptimistic view of, 12–13 progress bars, 159–60 Progressive Policy Institute, 46 Ptak, John, 147–48 Quabbin Reservoir, 101 radiation machines, overdose failures of, 67–69 radical novelty, 3, 50 railroads, 2 RAM, 110 Ramanujan, Srinivasa, 77, 78 recursion: in language, 71–72, 75 in programming, 71 refactoring, 200, 201 regulatory accumulation, 46–47 Renaissance man, 86–89, 93, 144 see also generalists resilience, in technological complexity, 16 resolution, levels of, 127–28 RNA interference (RNAi), 123–24, 141 road system, complexity of, 16 Rosenberg, Scott, 69 Royal Society, 111 scale, difference of, 50–51 Schwarz, Barbara, 10 scientific method, 109 limits to, 153 scientific models, 131 edge cases in, 54–62, 207 interconnection of, 2 as means of understanding complex systems, 165–67 software bugs in, 97 Scientific Reports, 4 Scientific Revolution, optimistic view of human comprehension in, 152–53 security, software bugs and, 97–98 Seinfeld (TV show), 130 sentences: garden path, 74–75 parsing of, 73–74 sewage systems, complexity of, 101 Shakespeare, William, 55 Shatner, William, 160 Shepard, Alan, 200 sickle-cell anemia, 128 SimCity, 159, 166 simulations, see scientific models software: accretion in, 37–38, 41–42, 44 in automobiles, 10–11, 13, 45, 65, 100, 174 branch points in, 80–81 complexity of, 43–44, 59, 68–69 “dark code” in, 21–22 “hygiene” in, 65, 81 interaction in, 44–45 kluges in, 35 legacy code in, see legacy code, legacy systems modules in, 63–64 multidisciplinary teams and, 92 testing of, 107 see also programmers, programming software bugs, 1, 45, 65, 156 complexity and, 96–97 dangerous consequences of, 67–69 debugging of, 103–7 in Galaga, 95–96, 97, 216–17 inevitability of, 174–75 in Microsoft Windows, 98 in scientific models, 97–98 security and, 97–98 in Vancouver Stock Exchange index, 105–6 soldiers, “losing the bubble” and, 70 sophistication, in technological complexity, 16 space shuttle missions, outdated computer systems used by, 38 spaghetti code, 44–45, 201 spatial memory, 78 special effects, greeblies in, 130 specialization: abstraction and, 24, 26–27 collaboration and, 91–92 complexity and, 85–93 generalists and, 146 as rewarded by job market, 144 technological complexity and, 142 Stephenson, Neal, 128–29 stock market systems: complexity of, 4 crashes in, 1, 4, 25, 187 interconnectivity of, 2, 24–26 laws and rules of, 25 and limits of human comprehension, 26–27, 189 storytelling, biological and physical thinking in, 129–30 strangeness, as impetus for scientific discovery, 124, 140–41 subitizing, 75 supply chains, interconnection of, 2 Supreme Court, U.S., 40 Symons, John, 79–80, 97 Systems Bible, The (Gall), 157–58 tax code, 16, 40, 42 Tay (chatbot), 106–7 technological complexity: abstraction and, 23–28, 81, 121–22 accretion in, 130–31 awe as response to, 6, 7, 154–55, 156, 165, 174 biological thinking and, 116–49, 158, 174 branch points and, 80–81 evolution of, 127, 137–38 as examples of human ingenuity, 4 fear as response to, 5, 7, 154–55, 156, 165 “field biologists” for, 123, 126, 127, 132 humility as response to, 155–56, 158, 165, 167, 170, 174, 176 impact of computer on, 3 inevitability of, 42 interconnectivity in, 2, 47–48 interdependence in, 47–48 interoperability in, 47–48, 64–65 interpreters of, 166–67, 229 kluges as inevitable in, 34–36, 127, 128, 154, 173–74 and limits of human comprehension, 1–7, 16–29, 69–70, 80–81, 153–54, 169–70, 175–76 misunderstandings about, 68–69 models as means of understanding, 165–67 naches as response to, 168–69, 174 new ways of thinking about, 6–7, 28–29, 163–67, 176 optimal interoperability in, 62–63 pervasiveness of, 15–16 physics thinking and, 122, 127–28 rapid growth of, 173 resilience in, 16 sophistication in, 16 specialization and, 142 unexpected behavior in, see unexpected behavior user interfaces and, 159 wonder vs. mystery in comprehension of, 170–76 see also complexity, complex systems technological werewolves, 93, 97, 102 technology: cost of construction vs. cost of failure in, 48–50 interconnection of natural world and, 3–4 “natural history” of, 103–4 philosophy of, 79–81 self-contained ecosystems in, 4 Teece, David, 144 Thales, 139 Theory of Everything, 113 Therac-25, overdose failures of, 67–69 Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, 12, 126 time zones, 2, 51–52 tinkering, 118, 125–26, 127, 132, 191 Torvalds, Linus, 102 Toyota automobiles: massively complex software in, 11, 45, 65 unintended acceleration of, 10–11, 13, 65, 174 Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), 18–19 translation software, 57–59, 207 triumphalism, 153, 156 T-shaped individuals, 143–44, 146 Tubes (Blum), 101–2 TurboTax, 160 Turing, Alan, 96, 175 Twitter, 106 unexpected behavior, 4, 18–20, 95–110 accretion and, 38 in biology, 109–10, 123–24 complexity and, 93, 96–97, 98–99, 192 debugging and, 103–4 deliberate inducing of, 124–25 edge cases and, 99–100 inevitability of, 157, 174–75 interconnectivity and, 11–12 as learning experience, 102–7, 123–24, 219–20 and limits of human comprehension, 18–22, 96–97, 98 “magical” explanation for, 20–22 modules and, 64 of software, see software bugs of Toyota automobiles, 10–11, 13, 65, 174 United Airlines, 1 United States Code, 33–34, 64, 136–37 unity, search for, see physics thinking unthinkable present, 176 user interfaces, 159–60, 163 Valéry, Paul, 193 Vancouver Stock Exchange stock index, software bug in, 105–6 Wall Street Journal, 1, 187 water supply systems, complexity of, 101, 102 Watson, 169 Watts, Duncan, 62 weather science, 148, 165 Weber, Max, 13 websites, interconnection of, 2 Wells, H.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

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

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

Sarah Marsh, “US Joins UK in Blaming Russia for NotPetya Cyber-Attack,” Guardian, February 15, 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/15/uk-blames-russia-notpetya-cyber-attack-ukraine. 38. Clapper, Facts and Fears, 350. EPILOGUE 1. Garrett M. Graff, “How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet,” Wired, December 13, 2017, www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brought-down-the-internet/. 2. Jack Corrigan, “Air Force Pays Out Government’s Biggest Bug Bounty Yet,” NextGov, December 18, 2017, www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2017/12/air-force-pays-out-governments-biggest-bug-bounty-yet/144640/. 3. Sophia Chen, “Why This Intercontinental Quantum-Encrypted Video Hangout Is a Big Deal,” Wired, January 20, 2018, www.wired.com/story/why-this-inter continental-quantum-encrypted-video-hangout-is-a-big-deal/. 4.

The DDoS attacks were an order of magnitude more powerful than anything yet seen—so large that there was no way for internet companies to mitigate them. “There’s no bandwidth large enough,” said one person who worked on the response. This incredibly destructive force—one that disrupted the internet for tens of millions of people across the globe—appears to have grown largely out of a group of college-aged gamers seeking an advantage in their Minecraft video games.1 At the time of this writing, though, the Mirai botnets they created have spiraled far beyond their creators’ control and will continue to wreak havoc for years to come. That such a small group could unintentionally unleash such a destructive—and perhaps permanent—online force is a perfect illustration of how our digital world remains fragile.

See also specific types Mandia, Kevin, 104, 114, 247 Mandiant, 195, 243–249, 265, 268 Mantegna, Joe, 69–70 Maroon.com, 102 Masters of Deception, 89, 97 McAfee, 36, 182, 183, 193–194, 197, 296, 354 McCain, John, 168 McClure, Stuart, 355 McConnell, Mike, 39, 154–155, 157, 160, 174, 243 McConnell, Mitch, 385 McDonough, Denis, 168, 241, 364, 386 McFaul, Michael, 383 McGahn, Daniel, 255–256 MCI, 120 McLarty Associates, 314 McNab, Chris, 304 The Meaning of Stability #2 (ISIL video), 16 media coverage, 8, 15 Medvedev, Dmitry, 282, 284 Mei Qiang, 248 Menn, Joseph, 119, 280 Merck, 387 Mersad Company, 230 Metcalfe, Robert, 81 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 66 Metropolitan Area Exchanges, 39 Micrel Semiconductor, 259 Microsoft, 75, 120, 159, 182, 293, 296 Microsoft Windows Terminal Services, 193 al-Mihdhar, Khalid, 9 Military Critical Technologies List, 104 MILNET, 86 Mimikatz, 235–236 Minecraft (video game), 391 Ministry of State Security (China), 166 Mirai botnet, 391, 396 Mitnick, Kevin, 83–84, 98, 98n Moberly, Kevin, 129 mobile games, as attack vectors, 322 Monaco, Lisa, 134, 138, 141, 146, 233, 241, 384–385; as assistant attorney general for national security, 187, 189–191; bubble chart and, 325; data security discussions convened by, 364; NCIJTF and, 137; on need for cyberthreat response capability, 328; on NSCS, 200; Russia response and, 383; as White House homeland security advisor, 250–251, 269, 325, 327, 327n, 330–331, 333 money mules, 287 Monroe, Jana, 141 MOONLIGHT MAZE, 103–106 Morell, Michael, 331 Morris, Robert T., Jr., 91–95 Morris Worm, 59, 91–95, 150 Motorola, 147 MSUpdater, 195 Mudge, 124 Mueller, Robert, 46–47, 122, 127, 138, 187, 191, 201, 280–282, 384, 398, 401–402; career of, 136; CCIPS and, 76–77; cybersecurity agreement proposal, 175–176; FBI post-9/11 evolution and, 139–140, 142; NCIJTF and, 137; Pittsburgh cybersecurity speech, 153–154; public speaking, 150 Mughal, Waseem, 7 Mularski, J.


pages: 206 words: 64,212

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

airport security, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, defund the police, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, index card, McMansion, Minecraft, pre–internet, QAnon, Skype, social distancing, Transnistria

The console was the first thing they’d reach for in the morning and the last thing they’d look at before going to bed, which most nights was well after one a.m. The boys didn’t seem to have any rules the way I did when I was their age. “You can’t just leave the table,” I said to Harrison on the first night of his visit, when he finished his dinner and ran off to play Minecraft. “You have to ask if you can be excused.” “No, I don’t.” “No, I don’t, Mr. Sedaris.” I made the boys call me that, and would correct them whenever they slipped up. “I’m an adult and you’re guests in my house.” “It’s not your house, it’s Hugh’s,” Harrison said. Hugh looked up from his plate. “He’s right.

It was sulfur, for the most part, what I imagine Satan’s bathroom would smell like after he’d been on the toilet with the National Review for a while. “Goddammit,” Hugh said, holding his nose and opening the front and back doors, letting the hot, humid air in. “And we have company coming!” “Why you…book writer,” Harrison scolded. He was wearing Minecraft pajamas and looked like a male model who’d been put into a machine and made small. Of the two brothers, Austin had the sweeter temperament. He’d ask questions and offer to help out. His voice had an old-fashioned quality to it, like a boy’s in a radio serial. “Gee willikers!” you could imagine him saying, if that were the name of a video game in which things blew up and women got shot in the back of the head.


pages: 313 words: 75,583

Ansible for DevOps: Server and Configuration Management for Humans by Jeff Geerling

Abraham Maslow, AGPL, Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, continuous integration, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, DevOps, fault tolerance, Firefox, full text search, Google Chrome, inventory management, loose coupling, microservices, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, punch-card reader, Ruby on Rails, web application

I have my eyes on you, 218.78.214.9… * * * 1 sshd[19731]: input_userauth_request: invalid user db2admin 2 sshd[19731]: Received disconnect from 218.78.214.9: 11: Bye Bye 3 sshd[19732]: Invalid user jenkins from 218.78.214.9 4 sshd[19733]: input_userauth_request: invalid user jenkins 5 sshd[19733]: Received disconnect from 218.78.214.9: 11: Bye Bye 6 sshd[19734]: Invalid user jenkins from 218.78.214.9 7 sshd[19735]: input_userauth_request: invalid user jenkins 8 sshd[19735]: Received disconnect from 218.78.214.9: 11: Bye Bye 9 sshd[19736]: Invalid user minecraft from 218.78.214.9 10 sshd[19737]: input_userauth_request: invalid user minecraft 11 sshd[19737]: Received disconnect from 218.78.214.9: 11: Bye Bye * * * Only you will know what logs are the most important to monitor on your servers, but some of the most common ones are database slow query logs, webserver access and error logs, authorization logs, and cron logs.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

As weeks turned to months, everyone except the heroic teachers stopped caring. Kids showed up infrequently and skipped days at a time. My daughter finished her work in minutes and spent most of the day reading Harry Potter novels or watching Harry Potter videos on YouTube, while her classmates played Minecraft or watched sports highlights. We all did what we had to do to get through it, but any learning was incidental, as kids, parents, and teachers all just tried to survive until school resumed (which for us didn’t happen until September 2021, one of the longest school interruptions in the world). Virtual school was the worst.

We paddled along the shoreline or just stared out at the perfectly still lake, which reflected the ragged pine, maple, and birch trees like a mirror. Somewhere in the midst of this, lying on a rock one night, looking up at the stars, I realized I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Here. Now. Software promises us limitless variations too, but even the most “immersive” digital environments, like the games Minecraft, Roblox, or Fortnite, have firm limits. You can only do and see what someone has programmed, and no more. There are walls you run up against all the time, and there is simply no going beyond them. “When you’re really reliant on someone else designing your world for you, which is what all digital is, you get a set of rules and a platform and a way to engage with it,” Immordino-Yang said.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

“Individually, then collectively, we realized the virtual world could never provide us with enough bandwidth to associate with each other the way we want,” said Bernie De Koven, a pioneering computer game designer, theorist, and writer who focuses on the study of play and fun. When we play with a computer, either alone or in a multiplayer game, we share ownership of that experience with the software. The program and device restrict our ability to shape the experience of play to our imagination, even in games as pliable as Minecraft. “There’s never going to be a virtual environment as completely engaging as the physical environment is. It is so much more engaging to play a game of chess face to face than it is online. Online is a good substitute when we can’t meet. The ultimate contest is when you see each other face to face; see each other sweat and squirm.”

91 Hill, Jon, 114 Hirschfeld, James, 44–45 HMV, 13, 16 Hoarders, 97 hobby game market, 77 hobby stores, 78, 79, 85 Holley, Willie, 160 Hollywood Reporter (magazine), 72 home libraries, 128, 208, 227 Houstonia (magazine), 109 HP computers, 65 Huffington Post, 115 Huizar, Jose, 185 human assistance, preference for, 134 human-in-the-loop processes, 224 Hungry Hungry Hippos, 76 Husni, Samir, 104–105 hypercapitalism, 157 IBM computers, 65 ICQ, 217 IdeaPaint, 191 IDEO, 193, 225 Ilford film, 55, 71 I’m the Boss, 86 Impossible Project, 66, 67–70 In Wilderness Is the Preservation of the World (Thoreau), 232 independent booksellers increase in, 125 See also bookstores independent magazine publishing, 103–107 independent record stores, annual meeting of, 13 See also record stores Indigo, 127 information age, 219 information overload, 37, 111 information persistence, 191 Initiative, 108 innovation building blocks for, buzzwords in, 192 culture of, fostering, 214 deeply held values around technology and, 179 different narrative of, xvi driver of, 36 standard narrative of, trend running counter to, xiv, 155 Instacart, 166 Instagram, 62, 80, 94, 162, 170, 217, 224, 234, 235, 241 instant film photography, xv, 66, 67, 69–70 Instax camera, 70 integrative thinking, 175, 176–177, 197, 199 Intel, 163 Internet/web access to, in education, 183, 185 growing use of, economy based on, 152, 154 role in saving vinyl, 11–12, 20–21 at summer camp, 231, 235 trust and, challenge of, 145–146 view of, 46, 238 See also online entries investing, 170–172 iPads, 13, 42, 81, 84, 110, 111, 113, 132, 180, 182, 185–186, 188, 208, 234, 241 iPhone, ix, xiii, 62, 63, 73, 84, 140, 144 iPods, 7, 9, 12, 18, 19, 27, 28, 233 IRL, 237 See also reality iTunes, ix, 12, 19 Jackman School, 187–188, 203 Jackson, Wanda, 22 Jaipur, 87 job creation, 151, 152, 160, 161–166, 167, 171–173, 173 job market, 164, 165–166, 175 See also digital work; manual work Jobs, Steve, 138, 139, 206, 207–208 Johnson, Jeff, 182 Johnson, Ron, 139, 140 jukeboxes, 8, 9, 18 June Records, ix, xi–xii, 137 Kalanick, Travis, 155 Kaps, Florian “Doc,” 66–68, 69 Kartsotis, Tom, 150–151, 160, 167, 169, 172 Kassem, Chad, 17 Katigbak, Everett, 214, 215–216 Kaufman, Donna Paz, 127, 128 Kelly, Kevin, 226–230 keyboards, xvii, 186, 237 Keynes, John Maynard, 164 Khan Academy, 200 Kickbox, 208–209 Kickstarter, 43, 73, 91–92, 94, 95–96, 98 Kim, Eurie, 137, 138 Kind of Blue (album), 25 Kindle, 124, 130, 142, 143, 228 Kinfolk (magazine), 105 Kleinman, Gabe, 214 Kobo, 142 Kodak, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 63, 64, 71, 153 Kroger, 134 Krugman, Paul, 171 Kurtz, Michael, 13–14, 15, 16, 20 Kwizniac, 91 laboratory school, 187–188 Landor Associates, 36 Lanier, Jaron, 157 laptops early childhood education and, 182 in education, learning outcomes and, 183–185, 188, 190 See also computers Launch Monitor (blog), 111 Lazaretto (album), 21 LC-A camera, 59–60 Lechtturm, 43 LEGOs, 182, 198 Lennon, John, 26 Leslie, Jeremy, 104, 106, 111 letterpress cards/invitations, xiv letterpress printing, 44, 215 Levin, Diane, 180–181 Levin, Eric, 14 Levitin, Daniel, 37 Levy, David, ix Lexus and the Olive Tree, The (Friedman), 154 liberal arts programs, 192 Libin, Phil, 222 Lichtenegger, Heinz, 11, 17 Lieu, John, 213 Lim, Sen-Foong, 98 limitless selection, issue with, 130, 134 LinkedIn, 45, 46 Little Brother (magazine), 104–105 Live Action Role Play (LARP) retreat, 82 live performances, xv, 6, 15, 22, 27, 28 Livescribe, 47, 228 Lomographic Society International, 60 Lomography, 59–62, 64, 66, 71 Lonely Typewriter, The (Ackerman), 131 Long Good Read, The (newspaper), 116, 117 Long Tail, The (Anderson), 208 Los Angeles Times (newspaper), 185 Los Angeles Unified School District, 185–186 Lowery, David, 20 Lucas, George, 72 Lululemon, 126–127 luxury approach, 112, 114, 116, 150, 151, 168 MacArthur, Rick, 142 made-in-America approach, 150, 151, 152, 160, 167, 168 Maffé, Carlo Alberto Carnevale, 39, 40 Mag Culture (blog), 104 magazine ads, 108, 109 magazine market, 105–106 magazine publishing, 103–107, 108, 112 magazine subscription service, 103, 106 magazines ability to charge for, 109, 110, 112 circulation of, 104, 105 luxury approach to, 112–113 See also digital publications; print publications Magic cards, 78 Magnetic, 108 magnetic tape, 23, 24, 25, 72 mah-jongg, 82 manual work classic educational model for, 199 investing in, 172 skilled, manufacturing providing, 150, 151, 152, 157–158, 159–161, 167, 168, 169 standard narrative on, 154, 155, 160 value gap involving, 160, 161, 171 Mara, Chris, 24–25 Marazza, Antonio, 35–36 market logic/laws, 132–133, 140 See also capitalism Martin, Penny, 112 Matsudaira, Kate, 43 Mattel, 85 Mazzucca, Daren, 111 McAfee, Andrew, 162, 163 McAlister, Matt, 116–117 McBeth, Leslie, 198–199 McCartney, Paul, 26 MCIR (magazine), 106 McNally, Sarah, 129 McNally Jackson, 129, 148 McNally Robinson, 129 McNeish, Joanne, 188–189 Medina, Allison, 132 meditation, xv, 205–206, 207, 209–210, 210 Medium, 208, 213–214 meetings, improving, 219–220 Meetup, 220 merchandising appeal, 131–132 merchandising tactics, 133 Michaels, Mark, 9–10, 16 microphones, 83 Microsoft, 43, 154, 163, 206, 211 Microtouch, 190–191 Millar, Jay, 6, 7–8 Mille Bornes, 78 millennials, xii Milton Bradley, 76, 92 mindfulness, xv, 206, 207 Minecraft (game), 81 Mitchell, Jenny, 97 Mittelstein apprentice system, 160 Mod Notebooks, 43 Modo & Modo, 32, 33, 34 Mohawk Paper, 46 Moleskine (company), 31–32, 38, 39, 40, 41–43, 46, 47, 48–49 Moleskine notebooks appeal of, 31, 34–35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43, 49, 111, 228 branding of, 35–36, 39, 40, 41, 48 buyers of, change in, 36–37 history of, 33–34 integration of, with digital companies, 46, 47–48, 222–223 and the notebook market, 31, 41, 43–44 sales of, 39, 41, 48, 223 Moleskinerie (blog), 38 Monocle (magazine), 112–113 monopolies, 162–163 Monopoly, 76, 77, 78, 86, 88–89 Montessori school, 208 MOO (Pleasure Cards), 45–46 MOOC (massive open online course), 201–202, 203 Moore’s Law, 225 Moross, Richard, 45, 46 motion picture film, 52, 53, 55, 56, 71–73 Motown, 6 Mousetrap, 76 movie sets and props, 72 MP3s, xvi, 7, 9, 12, 19, 23, 143, 231, 242 Mraz, Jason, 15 multiplayer gaming, massive, 77, 80–81, 83 Munchkin, 85 Murchison, Mike, 227 Muscle Shoals, 25 music, evolution of technology used to listen to, xv–xvi See also digital music; live performances; record stores; recording studios; vinyl records MusicWatch, 12, 18 Musk, Elon, 155 MySpace, 217 Nadaraja, Nish, 217, 218 Nakamura, Yoshitaka, 70 Napster, x, 12 National Bureau of Economic Research, 192 NBA Jam (game), 80 Negroponte, Nicholas, 184 neoliberalism, 153 nerd/geek culture, 14, 78, 84–85, 94, 211 Netflix, 223 Netscape, 154 New 55, 70 New York Times Magazine, 238 New York Times (newspaper), 92, 108, 110, 114–115, 136, 151, 154, 171 New Yorker (magazine), 89 NewBilt Machinery, 17 News Corp, 186 Newspaper Club, 117–120, 121 newspaper-printing plants, 117, 119–120 newspapers appeal of, 114–155, 238, 239 custom, 116, 117–120 decline of, 117, 120 integrating digital and new business models for, 116–120 online versions of, 114, 115–116 See also print publications Nicholson, Scott, 82–83 Nielsen BookScan, 142 Night (Wiesel), 130 1989 (album), 6, 18, 27, 69 nineteenth-and twentieth-century model of education, 198–199 Nintendo, 76 Noah, David, 189–190 Nolan, Christopher, 71, 72 Nook, 142, 143 Nordstrom, 44, 137, 150 Norvig, Peter, 201 nostalgia, xii, xvii, 18, 44, 46, 62, 85, 189, 221, 238, 239 notebook market, 34, 41, 43–44, 48 notebooks/journals, 31, 34, 37, 41, 43–44, 49, 72, 104, 126, 142, 149, 207, 208, 218 See also Evernote; Moleskine notebooks Observer, The (newspaper), 116 obsolescence, xiv, xv, 12, 21, 44, 153, 187 offshoring, 156, 163, 165, 167, 168 omnichannel retail strategy, 126, 134 on-demand freelance work, 164, 165–166 on-demand printing of card games, 91 of newspapers, 117 of photos, 70 One Laptop per Child (OLPC), 184, 185 O’Neal, Johnny, 85 online communities, 38, 47, 60–61, 91, 96, 146, 215, 217–218, 218, 226 See also social media/networks online education, 176, 200–202 online gaming, 76–77, 80–81, 82, 83, 94 online retailing appeal of, 124 creating brick-and-mortar stores in, xv, 137–140, 208 disadvantages of, 132, 136 See also specific retailers online schools.


pages: 316 words: 106,321

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening by John Elder Robison

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, cognitive dissonance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Minecraft, mirror neurons, neurotypical, placebo effect, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

.* With diagnoses of autism, attention deficit disorder (ADD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), he was still doing a lot better than I ever had in school, but his good grades didn’t insulate him socially. There, he ran into the same challenges that I had at his age. As Nick moved through junior high, he took to saying he was “just not a friend person,” spending his free time playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos rather than hanging out with other kids. His parents watched him struggle to connect with other people and to function in his daily activities. As Kimberley described, “Although Nick is very smart in terms of vocabulary or math skills, it took him much longer than others to complete class work and homework and activities of daily living.

“Today, Nick says he can’t remember anything being better after the TMS, he doesn’t acknowledge ever making any positive gains, and he professes himself unwilling to try it again. The school assignments he’d started breezing through are once again an insurmountable challenge. His ability to participate in conversations with others has slipped away, and he’s back to being interested in little besides Minecraft and YouTube videos.” As Kimberley says, “Outside of gaming and a few other interests, he doesn’t participate much in conversations unless we drag him in. He doesn’t ask us how we are, and at mealtimes, he sits with his face and body twisted away from us. The lovely parts of his personality that appeared after TMS are hidden once again.”


pages: 424 words: 114,820

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

The future could be anything from building and designing Lego buildings, or creating a working world in Minecraft, to answering technical questions or showing how you can solve real-world problems. It’s no secret that GCHQ have been known for their interest in those who think differently for some time, and they take a fun approach to creating challenges that are open to many, to not-so-secretly find the few who could make the cut as the next 007 agent!7 The Dutch military are also looking at actual game behaviour in games like Minecraft and League of Legends to predict potential fit for military jobs. There are also experiments with this technology within the social services.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

The 4IR is less a historical fact, more a loosely assembled set of conference talking points notionally about ‘cyber-physical systems’, a handy label for a basket of potentially transformative but still nascent technologies that face a host of technical, ethical and social barriers. In the meantime innovation has been directed at ways to order pizza or take better selfies; the softest frontiers around. To be fair, Google Maps, Zoom, Minecraft, Spotify – these are marvels and big ideas that have found purchase, and digital is the bright spot. But it only makes the contrast with other areas starker, and doesn't fully explain why measures like TFP have fallen so much. While we shouldn't play down the significance of the 3IR, its impact doesn't equal let alone exceed the 2IR.33 It adds further context to Huebner's 1873 hypothesis and its many heirs: that far from living in an escalation of big ideas, we live in a confused, halting sort of advance.

Rogers 332 Homo omnis (Homni) 300 Honjo, Tasuko 58 Hooke, Robert 333 Horgan, John 118, 168 Hossenfelder, Sabine 121–2 Howard Hughes Medical Institute 322 Howes, Anton 24, 172 hubris 122 Huebner, Jonathan 77–9, 81, 86, 91, 94, 97 Hugo, Victor 27 human frontier 7–19, 27, 40–1, 147–8, 156, 158, 249, 277–8, 336, 342–3 and artificial intelligence 250 diminishing returns of the 98 getting stuck at the 45 moral 132, 138 putting to rest 42 and science 123, 124 slowing down at the 14, 86–7, 131 and women 269 hydrogen 145 Hypatia of Alexandria 304 IBM 33, 184, 240, 265, 296, 312 Idea Paradox 178–9, 187, 191, 217, 226, 250, 254, 283–4, 301, 312, 342 ideas ‘0-I’ ideas 31 and economic growth 88, 89–92 nature of 17–18 protection 89 and research and development 90–1 slowdown 90–1 spread of 89–90 world-changing 5–6 see also big ideas illiteracy 277 imagination 16, 236 immunotherapy 57–61 income global 278 median 95 incrementalism 34, 71, 279 India 44, 71, 213, 264–8, 275, 277, 279–80, 284, 294–5, 308, 313, 326–8 individualism 282 Industrial Enlightenment 27 Industrial Revolution 242–3, 252–3, 295, 301 First (IIR) 79–81, 253, 259, 289, 306, 325 Fourth (4IR) 82, 86, 253–4 Second (2IR) 79–80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 104, 253, 289 Third (3IR) 81–2, 83–4, 86, 92, 253–4 inequality 251 infant mortality rate 10, 54 influence 28, 32–3 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) 95 Inklings 124, 295 innovation 16, 18, 25, 31, 96, 98, 161, 183–5, 214, 274, 286, 288, 296–7, 298, 339 age of 5 breakthrough 32–3 curve of 77–9 disruptive 34 epochal 31 and human capital 277 and industrial revolution 84 and military technology 316–17 normal rates of 177–8 normalisation of 172 parasitic 194 radical 95 risky nature 335 scale 83 slowdown 83, 85 society's attitude to 17, 18 Innovation Illusion 13 institutional revolution 286–301, 309–10, 328–32, 337–8 Intel 92, 253, 272 intellectual, the, death of 110 intellectual property (IP) 89, 195–6, 251, 331 intelligence 247, 299 collective 339 ‘intelligence explosion’ 238 limits to 166–79 interconnectedness 274, 299–300 interest rates 95 International Exhibition of Modern Art, The 103 International Mathematics Olympiad 276 International Space Station 70 Internet 85, 128–9, 183, 185, 196, 246–7, 253–4, 265–6, 272, 274, 297, 300, 315, 329 invention 11, 15, 16, 156–8, 274, 286, 288, 339 and Bell Labs 180–4 and cities 270–2 industrial 24–5 macro- 31, 81 micro- 31 and military technology 316–17 and patents 97 IP see intellectual property IPOs see Initial Public Offerings iron oxide 89 Islam 133, 340 Islamic caliphate 259, 260 Islamic State 305 ITER 146 Jackson, Andrew 67 Jainism 108 Japan 264, 266, 268, 279, 296, 305 Jefferson, Thomas 211 Jenner, Edward 47 Jesus 24, 216, 303 jet engines 69–70 jetpacks 71, 72 Jiankui, He 255–7, 280, 285 job automation 228 job destruction 96 Jobs, Steve 159, 186 Jones, Benjamin F. 156, 158–9, 160–1 Jones, Charles I. 90–1, 93, 94, 152 joy 170–1 Joyce, James 103, 166 Jung, Carl 104 Justinian 304 Kahn, Bob 253 Kahn, Herman 129 The Year 2000 9, 12, 13 Kaku, Michio 337 Kardashev, Nikolai 337 Kardashev Scale 337–43 Kauffmann, Stuart 203 Kay, John 24–5 Kelly, Kevin 300 Kelly, Mervin 182, 206 Kepler, Johannes 36, 229 Khmer Rouge 305 Kim Il-Sung 114 Klimt, Gustav 188 Knossos 153 knowledge ‘burden of knowledge’ effect 154–65, 175, 178, 235, 338 human frontier of 7–19 Koch, Robert 38 Kodak 184 Koestler, Arthur 36, 39 Kokoschka, Oskar 188 Korea 138, 266, 268, 305 see also North Korea; South Korea Kremer, Michael 274 Kristeva, Julia 111 Kuhn, Thomas 29, 30, 159 Kurzweil, Ray 79 Kuznets, Simon 31 labour 88 Lakatos, Imre 121 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 35, 164 Langley, Samuel Pierpont 66 Laozi 108 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 118, 233, 239 Latin America 266–7, 275, 295 Latour, Bruno 111 Lavoisier, Antoine 29, 34 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 234–5, 296 Lawrence, D.H. 103 lawyers 205–6 Lazarsfeld, Paul 189 Le Figaro (newspaper) 64 Le Mans 64 Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) 99, 100–2, 104 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van 231 left wing politics 113 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 25 Lem, Stanisław 44–5 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 188 lenses 231 Leonardo da Vinci 155 Lessing, Doris 152 Lewis, C.S. 124 LHC see Large Hadron Collider Li, Danielle 317–18 liberal democracy 111–12 life expectancy 52–5, 57, 93–4, 169 lift 65 light 75–7 Lilienthal, Otto 62, 335 Lister, Joseph 332 literature 103, 108, 124 Locke, John 25, 137, 138 Lockheed Martin 184, 296 London 133 loonshots 31–2 Loos, Adolf 103, 188 Lorenz, Edward 163 low-hanging fruit paradox 149–54, 167, 178 Lucretius 35, 155 Lulu and Nana (genetically edited twins) 255–7, 264 Luther, Martin 230 Lyell, Charles 34, 35 Lynn, Vera 105 M-theory 120 Mach, Ernst 188 machine learning (ML) 225–7, 233–4, 237, 243, 338 Madonna 105 magnetism 74–7 Mahler, Gustav 188 mail order 84–5 Malevich, Kazimir 103 Malik, Charles 134–6, 140 Malthus, Thomas 35 managerialism 204–5, 206–7 Mandelbrot, Benoit 163 Manhattan Project 119, 144–5, 148, 289, 296, 315, 317–18 Manutius, Aldus 253–4 Mao Zedong 328 Maoism 114 Marcellus 4 Marconi, Guglielemo 216, 289 Margulis, Lynn 203 Mars 218, 296, 318, 338, 341 Marx, Karl 36, 329 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 88, 146, 184–5, 296, 314, 316, 327 see also MIT Technology Review materials science 234–5 Maxwell, James Clerk 74–7, 79, 80, 166 Demon (thought experiment) 76 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism 74–7 Mayan civilisation 43 Mazzucato, Mariana 185, 194, 318 McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen 24 McCormick, Cyrus 11 McKeown, Thomas 53 McKinsey 34, 246 medicine 45, 46–62, 70–3, 93–4, 98, 124–6, 217–18, 338 see also drugs mega-authored papers 157 Meister, Joseph 48 Mendeleev, Dmitri 149 Menlo Park lab 286–7, 293 Merton, Robert 328 Mesopotamia 25, 291 Mesoudi, Alex 164 micro-organisms 49–51 microscopes 49, 232 Microsoft 33, 265 Middle East 138 migration 272–3 military technology 3–4 Minecraft 86 Minoans 43, 153 Minsky, Marvin 227 Mises, Ludwig von 189 MIT see Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT Technology Review 255 Mitchell, Joni 104 modern art 103 modernity 11, 80, 81, 83–4, 85 Mokyr, Joel 25, 31, 44, 68, 81 molecule libraries 56 Mont Pelerin Society 329 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 335 Montgolfier brothers 65 Moon missions 70, 71, 218, 263, 315, 316 moonshots 8, 59, 136, 214, 317 Moore, Gordon 92 Moore's Law 55, 84, 92, 93, 97, 240 Morgan, J.P. 287, 288 Morris, Ian 260–1, 306 Morse, Samuel 289 motor vehicles 68–71, 95, 107–8, 219, 289 Motorwagen 68 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 159 multiculturalism 268 multiverse 170, 342 music 99–108, 115, 188 Musil, Robert 188 Musk, Elon 71, 247 Mussolini, Benito 114 mysterians 166, 249 nanotechnology 242, 243, 245, 341 Napoleon Bonaparte 49 Napoleon III 50, 51 narratives, breakdown of grand 115 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 71–2, 233, 315–16, 319 National Health Service (NHS) 56, 57 National Institute of Health (NIH) 60, 120, 185–6, 247, 319, 322 nationalism 213 natural selection 35–6, 37, 109, 118, 244 Nature magazine 12, 121, 157, 211, 220, 229 Nazis 48, 132, 190 Negroponte, Nicholas 13 neo-Enlightenment 98 Netherlands 24, 231, 283 neural networks, deep learning 225, 227, 233 Neurath, Otto 189 neuroscience 247 new molecular entities (NMEs) 93 ‘new normals’ 32 New Scientist (magazine) 122 new technology 95 disruptive 96 New York 103, 134 Newton, Isaac 25, 29, 34, 37, 74–5, 155, 159, 232, 341 Ng, Andrew 262 NHS see National Health Service Nielsen, Michael 117 Nigeria 267, 279 NIH see National Institute of Health Nijinsky, Vaslav 99–100 Nixon, Richard 59 NMEs see new molecular entities noble gases 149 Nokia 183 Nordhaus, William 186 norms, ‘new’ 32 North Korea 305 Novacene 238 Novartis 61 nuclear fission 144, 145–6, 148 nuclear fusion 145–8, 234, 317, 341 nuclear power 85, 119, 143–8, 220, 221, 290 nuclear weapons 45, 143, 144, 311 Oak Ridge laboratory 143, 147 Obama, Barack 59 Obninsk 144 Odlyzko, Andrew 184 Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) 316–17 Ogburn, William 39 oil 80 oligopolies 96 optical devices 231–2 orbits, elliptical 36 organisations breakthrough 294–9 see also companies originality 24, 28, 31–3, 152, 177, 283 lack of 108 Ørsted, Hans Christian 74–5 OSRD see Office of Scientific Research and Development Ottomans 277, 308 Oxford University 123–6, 127, 296 Packalen, Mikko 201, 202, 321 Page, Larry 326 Paine, Thomas 137 painting 176–7 panpsychism 340 paper 230, 259 paradigm rigidity 160 paradigm shifts 29, 33, 105, 109, 130, 164, 222, 250, 339 Parfit, Derek 203 Paris 99–103, 110, 132, 135, 205 particle physics 117–18, 119, 120–1, 122 partisanship 209–10 Pasteur, Louis 46–53, 57, 60–1, 71, 77, 79, 139, 232–3, 296, 332, 338 pasteurisation 50, 51 patents 64, 83, 156–8, 194–6, 271–2, 292–3, 297 new classes 97 patronage 322 Paul, St 303 Pauli, Wolfgang 159 Pauling, Linus 118, 323–4 PCR see polymerase chain reaction peer learning 326–7 peer review 320–1 penicillin 38, 52, 125 Penrose, Roger 124 Pentagon, Naval Air War Center 77 pessimism, rational 123–31, 150 pet food 147 Pfizer 61 pharmaceutical industry 31, 55–7, 60, 70 see also drugs Philo of Byzantium 4–5 philosophy 103–4, 111–12, 115, 121, 124, 339 Photoshop 162 physics 74–7, 79, 80, 116–22, 124, 131, 140, 159–62, 166, 239, 242–3, 332, 341 Picasso, Pablo 36, 101, 152 Pierce, John R. 182 Pitcairn Island 42–3 Planck, Max 104, 160, 296 planets, elliptical orbit 36 plasma 145, 146 Plato 3, 108, 169, 291, 304 Plotinus 303 Plutarch 4 polio 53 political policy 114–15 politics 111–15, 208–13 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) 202 Popper, Karl 189 population growth 78, 79 exponential 11 populism 208, 211, 214, 280–1, 307 post-scarcity society 340 post-truth world 213, 215 Pot, Pol 114 Pound, Ezra 103 present 13 Presley, Elvis 36, 152 ‘priming’ 4 Princeton 180, 296 printing press 36, 230, 253–4 problems, catastrophic 42–4 production lines 104 productivity growth 82 profit 186 progress acceleration 8 linear 29 mirage of 5 nature of 13 protein-folding problem 223–6, 228–9 Proust, Marcel 103 Prussia 50 Ptolemaic astronomical system 30 Ptolemy 303 public bodies 205 public health policy 53 PubMed 28, 116 Punic Wars, Second 3 Pythagoras 304 PYTHIA 237 quantum computing 240–1, 263, 296, 312 quantum physics 159, 166, 341 rabies 48, 51 radiation 57 radioactive elements 149 railways 67, 69 Ratcliffe, Peter 124 rational pessimism 123–31, 150 Ravel, Maurice 101 RCA 33, 289 Reagan, Ronald 211 Rees, Martin 167–8 Reformation 230, 233, 328 refugees 220 regulatory burden 205–6 Relativity Theory, General 104, 117 religion 108, 214, 303–4, 340 Rembrandt 236 Renaissance 130, 156, 177, 230, 233, 252, 254 reproducibility crisis 121 research and development 128, 180–7, 214, 252, 286–90, 312, 339–40 agricultural 92–3 autonomous vehicles 219 cancer 59–61 Chinese 262–3 cleantech 195 drugs 55–7, 61, 92–4, 119, 161, 172–3, 217–18, 234, 245, 315, 338 and financialism 192 funding 202–3, 314–24 global spend 128 government funding 314–19 and ideas 90–1 and India 265, 266 military 314–17, 319 multipolar 258 nuclear 147 productivity 91–5, 97–8, 307 and scaling up 279 specialisation 156, 157–8 and tax credits 331 and training 158–60 and transportation 70, 72 and universities 200–4 revolution, diminishing nature 74–98 Ridley, Matt 281, 325 right wing politics 113, 211 rights 132–40 risk 193, 251, 313, 335–6 risk society 329 risk-aversion 210–11 risk-minimisation strategies 330 roads 66, 67 Rocket engine 26 Roerich, Nicholas 100 Rome 3–4, 43 fall of 151, 187, 190, 303–6 Romer, Paul 88–91, 94 Roosevelt, Eleanor 132, 133–6, 139–40 Rose, Jacqueline 111 Rosetta Stone 155 Rotten, Johnny 104 Roux, Emile 48 Royal Institution 75, 154, 292 Royal Society 25, 75, 154, 292, 326 Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce 25, 292 Russia 11, 71, 111, 150, 213, 279 see also Soviet Union Russian Chemical Society 149 Rutherford, Ernest 119, 140 S-curve model 32, 33, 35 Sagan, Carl 306, 337 Salvarsan 52 sanitation 53–4 Sarewitz, Dan 175 Sartre, Jean-Paul 110 satellites 9, 70, 153, 181–2, 272, 315–16 saturation, at the limit 166–79 Saturn 75–6 Saussure, Ferdinand de 109 Scaling Revolution 232 scaling up 255–85, 293–5, 298–9, 301–2, 308, 314–15, 317, 337–8 Schiele, Egon 188 Schliemann, Heinrich 153 Schmidt, Eric 262 Schnitzler, Arthur 188 Schoenberg, Arnold 103, 104, 188 Schrödinger, Erwin 124, 237, 332 Schumpeter, Joseph 189 science 104, 115–25, 131, 157, 159–60, 201–2, 276, 332–3 limits of 168 see also biology, chemistry; physics Science (journal) 118, 164, 175, 229, 257 Science Education Initiative (SEI) 327 Scientific American (magazine) 122 Scientific Revolution 29–30, 123, 130, 229–33, 252–3, 291 Sears Roebuck 84–5 Second World War 138–9, 143–4, 148, 296, 314, 316–17, 319 Sedol, Lee 226–7 seed drills 25 SEI see Science Education Initiative semiconductors 180–1, 245, 338 Semmelweis, Ignaz 216 sensory perception 167 sewing machines 11, 33 Shakespeare, William 169 Shannon, Claude 182, 184 shareholder returns 193, 194, 217 Shaw, D.


pages: 206 words: 51,534

Wrap It In A Bit Of Cheese Like You're Tricking The Dog: The fifth collection of essays and emails by New York Times Best Selling author David Thorne by David Thorne

Day of the Dead, Minecraft, pink-collar, telemarketer

She was wearing some kind of purple velvet dress that ended just above her knees, striped black & white knee-high stockings, and cherry Doc’s with four-inch soles. I thought there might be a bit of running around that day so I’d dressed in cargo shorts, t-shirt and sneakers. Simon was wearing a red Adidas track suit, purchased a decade earlier during a hip-hop phase, while the teens all wore skinny jeans and Call of Duty t-shirts - apart from one in a Minecraft singlet who mustn’t have got the memo. After signing waivers and being instructed on how to use the masks and paintball guns, the eight of us were sent into a room with benches to wait for the other team to arrive. We probably should have used that time to discuss strategy but I doubt it would have made a difference.


pages: 224 words: 45,431

Python Web Penetration Testing Cookbook by Cameron Buchanan, Terry Ip, Andrew Mabbitt, Benjamin May, Dave Mound

en.wikipedia.org, information security, Kickstarter, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, SQL injection, web application

./]{1,}$"), ("MD5(Joomla)", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{32}:[a-zA-Z0-9]{16,32}$"), ("MD5(Wordpress)", r"^\$P\$[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.]{31}$"), ("MD5(phpBB3)", r"^\$H\$[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.]{31}$"), ("MD5(Cisco PIX)", r"^[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.]{16}$"), ("MD5(osCommerce)", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{32}:[a-zA-Z0-9]{2}$"), ("MD5(Palshop)", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{51}$"), ("MD5(IP.Board)", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{32}:.{5}$"), ("MD5(Chap)", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{32}:[0-9]{32}:[a-fA-F0-9]{2}$"), ("Juniper Netscreen/SSG (ScreenOS)", r"^[a-zA-Z0-9]{30}:[a-zA-Z0- 9]{4,}$"), ("Fortigate (FortiOS)", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{47}$"), ("Minecraft(Authme)", r"^\$sha\$[a-zA-Z0-9]{0,16}\$[a-fA-F0- 9]{64}$"), ("Lotus Domino", r"^\(?[a-zA-Z0-9\+\/]{20}\)?$"), ("Lineage II C4", r"^0x[a-fA-F0-9]{32}$"), ("CRC-96(ZIP)", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{24}$"), ("NT crypt", r"^\$3\$[a-zA-Z0-9./]{8}\$[a-zA-Z0-9./]{1,}$"), ("Skein-1024", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{256}$"), ("RIPEMD-320", r"^[A-Fa-f0-9]{80}$"), ("EPi hash", r"^0x[A-F0-9]{60}$"), ("EPiServer 6.x < v4", r"^\$episerver\$\*0\*[a-zA-Z0-9]{22}==\*[a- zA-Z0-9\+]{27}$"), ("EPiServer 6.x >= v4", r"^\$episerver\$\*1\*[a-zA-Z0- 9]{22}==\*[a-zA-Z0-9]{43}$"), ("Cisco IOS SHA256", r"^[a-zA-Z0-9]{43}$"), ("SHA-1(Django)", r"^sha1\$.{0,32}\$[a-fA-F0-9]{40}$"), ("SHA-1 crypt", r"^\$4\$[a-zA-Z0-9./]{8}\$[a-zA-Z0-9./]{1,}$"), ("SHA-1(Hex)", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{40}$"), ("SHA-1(LDAP) Base64", r"^\{SHA\}[a-zA-Z0-9+/]{27}=$"), ("SHA-1(LDAP) Base64 + salt", r"^\{SSHA\}[a-zA-Z0- 9+/]{28,}[=]{0,3}$"), ("SHA-512(Drupal)", r"^\$S\$[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.]{52}$"), ("SHA-512 crypt", r"^\$6\$[a-zA-Z0-9./]{8}\$[a-zA-Z0-9./]{1,}$"), ("SHA-256(Django)", r"^sha256\$.{0,32}\$[a-fA-F0-9]{64}$"), ("SHA-256 crypt", r"^\$5\$[a-zA-Z0-9./]{8}\$[a-zA-Z0-9./]{1,}$"), ("SHA-384(Django)", r"^sha384\$.{0,32}\$[a-fA-F0-9]{96}$"), ("SHA-256(Unix)", r"^\$5\$.{0,22}\$[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.]{43,69}$"), ("SHA-512(Unix)", r"^\$6\$.{0,22}\$[a-zA-Z0-9\/\.]{86}$"), ("SHA-384", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{96}$"), ("SHA-512", r"^[a-fA-F0-9]{128}$"), ("SSHA-1", r"^({SSHA})?


pages: 194 words: 54,355

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Big Tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, emotional labour, financial independence, Google Earth, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, TikTok, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Wall-E

(Remember gift certificates—those oversized rectangles of stiff paper, calligraphed by hand with a colored fountain pen while you watched, wishing it could be for you rather than the birthday girl? You’d stand by mesmerized as the salesperson magically wrapped your purchase, even a gift certificate, curling the ribbons with the edge of a scissors in a way impossible to replicate at home.) Most of the time, the iPad is the toy and the game. Online playdates (meeting in Minecraft, for example, or via Discord) are replacing physical ones. Yesterday’s kids, the ones who collected baseball cards and gathered for board games labeled “12 and up,” have morphed into kids who scoff at “playing” anything other than videogames by the time they are eleven; they want to play what their parents are often playing.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Craigslist beat rivals, and VHS won out over Betamax, not because those companies had superior products but because they had larger network shares early on. Social videogames like Zynga’s FarmVille and CityVille or, more recently, Mojang’s Minecraft are not notable for high-quality graphics, 3-D functionality, or riveting gaming experiences—their features are bleak compared with Electronic Arts’ Madden NFL and Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. But each of the Zynga games commanded more than ten million viewers within a few months of launch—a feat that took EA and Blizzard years; and Minecraft became the second-bestselling videogame of all time. Success came in each case not from making these games perfect but from making them networked.


pages: 478 words: 149,810

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, bitcoin, call centre, Chelsea Manning, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, it's over 9,000, Julian Assange, lolcat, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, pirate software, side project, Skype, speech recognition, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day

The hotline was suddenly inundated with calls, and the three people that initially got through all requested gaming companies: Eve, Minecraft, and League of Legends. Within minutes, Ryan’s botnet had hit all three, as well as a site called FinFisher.com, “because apparently they sell monitoring software to the government or some shit like that.” DDoSing sites like this was nothing new, and neither was one or two hours of downtime, but it was the first time anyone had boasted about it to a hundred fifty thousand Twitter followers or referred to it as a DDoS party called Titanic Takeover Tuesday. “If you’re mad about Minecraft, we’d love to laugh at you over the phone,” Topiary announced.


pages: 171 words: 57,379

Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (But Also My Mom's, Which I Know Sounds Weird) by Michael Ian Black

Bernie Madoff, David Sedaris, double helix, false flag, Minecraft, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, TED Talk

I look for animal tracks in the snow but see none. I stand and stretch and straighten out my scoliosis shoulder. I roll my head around my neck, my joints cracking like popping corn. I do a quick inventory of my family. Everybody is where they should be: here, safe and warm. Elijah is on the computer playing Minecraft. Ruthie is in her room gabbing to one of her friends on the iPad I told her I would not buy her but did anyway. Martha reads the Sunday Times in the living room, a blanket Santa brought tucked around her waist. I head upstairs and throw on some sweats and a long-sleeve technical shirt and my puffy black vest.


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

Their goal is to develop “smart glasses” that can project three-dimensional images in the user’s field of vision that appear to blend perfectly into the real world. For now, the firm that has made the most progress is Microsoft. Its HoloLens headset is a self-contained computer that uses a suite of sensors to build a 3D model of the world around it. It can then do everything from placing a set of virtual “Minecraft” blocks onto a kitchen table to generating virtual cadavers for anatomy students to study. Other companies are interested, too. Magic Leap, a startup based in Florida, has attracted $2.3bn in investment to develop a similar technology. Facebook, which bought Oculus, a VR company, for $2bn in 2014, says its ultimate goal is to produce a set of glasses that can do both VR and AR at the same time.


Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

., Free Press, 2003 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diffusion_of_ideas.svg (September 25, 2019) the source of Figure 6-1 Chapter 7 Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution , Bjarke Ingels, Taschen 2009 www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIsIKv1lFZw (September 27, 2019) a video by Bjarke Ingels: architecture should be more like Minecraft Chapter 8 The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change , Charles Duhigg, Random House, 2013 Chapter 9 Scoring Points, How Tesco Continues to Win Customer Loyalty , Clive Humby, Terry Hunt and Tim Phillips, Kogan Page, 2008 The World’s Most Valuable Resource is no longer Oil but Data , The Economist, May 6th 2017 Enterprise Integration Patterns , Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf, Addison Wesley, 2003 The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modelling, Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross, Wiley 2013 Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, Tom White, O’Reilly Media, 2015 Chapter 10 www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/ (October 2, 2019) a story about the Mars Climate Orbiter’s crash https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2760821-olympic-mens-alpine-skiing-results-2018-medal-winners-for-slalom (October 2, 2019) the results of the 2018 Olympic show a difference less than 1.5 seconds between number 1 and 10 https://home.cern/science/computing/processing-what-record (October 2, 2019) a description of what the Large Hadron Collider processes Chapter 11 The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information , George A.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

The cohort who solicited my doomsday advice readily admitted they were “low-level billionaires” who could at best hitch a ride with Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Jeff Bezos—who are themselves still at least a few generations away from colonizing anything. Offering a slightly more reasonable techno-utopian escape fantasy, the “seasteading” movement—publicized in a flurry of maga zine stories a few years ago—promises a sustainable solution to a world of climate catastrophe, social chaos, and economic collapse. In the Minecraft-meets-Waterworld future envisioned by “aquapreneurs ,” wealthy people are to live in independent, free-floating city-states—giant clusters of high-tech rafts using clean, renewable ocean thermal energy to power themselves and escape from a civilization of oil-drilling land dwellers. The hype around these initiatives may have died down, but several billionaires and even some legitimate organizations including the United Nations and MIT are still hard at work on humanity’s return to the sea .


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

If Sun drew power from the waves of innovation that preceded it, the company also created momentum for those that came after. Sun’s legacy is more than a fading logo on the back of a sign. Sun’s Java programming language runs beneath millions of websites and applications, in web-based applications such as Google Docs, in financial trading systems, and in video games such as Minecraft. Among the more than 250,000 people who worked at Sun are the former CEOs of Google, Yahoo!, and Motorola.7 Sun’s cofounders went on to fund new generations of technology companies. Vinod Khosla has backed dozens of startups as a venture capitalist, first at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and later at Khosla Ventures.

., 27, 55, 210, 291 mentors, mentoring, xii, 38, 128, 153–54, 197, 370 see also entrepreneurs, network of mergers and acquisitions, 168–75, 269–74, 353–55, 364, 370–71 Mertz, Janet, 136n, 263 Metaphor Computer Systems, 288 Metcalfe, Bob, 96–98, 103, 288n Mexico, 41, 50, 162 microchip companies, see semiconductor industry microprocessors, 54, 73–74, 147–48, 169–70, 213, 238–39, 306, 347 Microsoft, 96, 224, 288, 306, 366, 369 Middleton, Fred, 192n, 256n, 261 Miller, Al, 277, 278n Minecraft game, 365 minicomputers, 74, 85–86, 91, 176–80, 186, 208, 222, 314, 357, 371 missile systems, 10, 45 MIT, 11, 15–19, 30, 62, 74, 91, 108, 190–91, 289 Mitchell, Jim, 96 MITS (company), 211 mobile phones, 38, 367 molecular biology, 141, 194 Molecular Biology of the Gene (Watson), 138 Moore, Fred, 211, 284 Moore, Gordon, 51, 126n–27n, 149, 190n, 213 Morgan Stanley, 293, 296, 303n Morse, Wayne, 30 MOS Technology, 169, 212n Motorola, 48, 365 Mott, Tim, 105 Mountain View, Calif., 49, 107, 110, 207 Nader, Ralph, 135 NASA, 11, 23, 26 NASDAQ, 262, 320 National Academy of Engineering, 376 National Academy of Sciences, 93, 142–43, 188 National Guard, 35–36 National Institutes of Health, 58, 188, 265 National Medal of Science, 93 National Medal of Technology, 376 National Office Machine Dealers Association, 286 National Safety Council, 172 National Science Foundation, 58, 134, 142, 351 National Semiconductor, 51–53, 127, 147, 154, 213, 234–35, 241, 255, 313 National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), 254, 293n Natural Resources Defense Council, 187 Navy, U.S., 48, 58 NBC News, 158 Nelson, Ted, 95 Newman, Frank, 60–63 Newsweek, 344, 358, 372 New York, N.Y., 59, 81, 168, 230 New Yorker, 246, 351 New York Stock Exchange, 4–5, 317 New York Times, 133, 157, 172, 187, 257, 264n, 347, 371 NeXT, 372 Nintendo, 348 Nixon, Richard, 37, 120, 143, 158 NLS (oNLine System), 24 Nobel Prize, 133, 144, 188, 190, 193, 258, 263–64 Noyce, Robert, xi, 51, 54, 126n–27n, 129, 149, 190n, 235, 254n, 285, 302 Nutting Associates, 116 Office of Naval Research, 58 Opalka, Josephine, 138–40, 204 “Open Letter to Hobbyists” (Gates), 212 Oracle, 38, 78, 185, 364, 371 orchards, 4, 43, 46, 49, 149, 180, 370 order-processing systems, 148–49, 247 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), 186 Ornstein, Severo, 95, 100 Orwell, George, 158 Osborne Computer, 358 Oshman, Ken, 44–46, 165, 319–22, 371 Packard, David, xi, 86, 254n, 255 packet switching, 21 PAC-MAN game, 345 Page, Larry, xii, 351 Pake, George, 94–95, 101, 217–23, 335–39 Palevsky, Max, 93n, 101 Palo Alto, Calif., 74, 80–84, 89, 93, 179, 207, 216–18, 221, 225, 235, 334, 342, 369 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), xii–xiii Pake as director of, 94–95, 101, 217–21 Scientific Data Systems and, 90, 93, 101–2, 149, 215, 249 Sun technology and, 364 and women in workforce, 99–101 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Computer Science Laboratory at, 89–106, 146, 157, 213–14, 215–24, 285, 289 Alto system and, 92, 101–6, 141, 146, 215–17, 221–24, 285–88, 334 “dealer” meetings at, 99–103, 226, 340 personal computers and, 91–92, 101–6 paperless office, 224 Patent and Trademark Office, U.S., 144 patents, 59–62, 112, 132–37, 142–44, 157, 187–89, 257, 263, 349, 374 Peddle, Chuck, 212n People’s Park, 33–35, 55–56, 211, 226 peripheral devices, 209–10, 230, 246 Perkins, Tom, 128, 190–93, 197, 200–201, 254–60, 263 personal computers, xii, xv, 74, 91, 101–6, 141, 148, 213, 231, 239, 246–50, 269, 285, 301–3, 358, 366 pharmaceutical companies, 189, 235, 256–58, 266, 375 Philco-Ford, 58–59 pinball machines, 109, 113–14, 117–18, 273 Pitfall!


pages: 246 words: 70,404

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free by Cody Wilson

3D printing, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, active measures, Airbnb, airport security, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, assortative mating, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Cody Wilson, digital rights, disintermediation, DIY culture, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, Google Glasses, gun show loophole, jimmy wales, lifelogging, Mason jar, means of production, Menlo Park, Minecraft, national security letter, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, printed gun, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, Streisand effect, thinkpad, WikiLeaks, working poor

When I woke, I was looking up at some great bearded programmer with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “Where is Amir?” I asked. He finished exhaling smoke with a purse of his lips. “Who is Amir?” Slumped and unmoving on the ratty couch, I looked over slowly to watch some hollow-cheeked curiosity hunched over his keyboard playing Minecraft. The blue light blanked the lenses in his glasses and his mouth was agape. “What do you do?” My eyes traveled back to the moldering Teuton. “You know 3D printing?” “Mmm.” He blew smoke. “I’m the guy printing the gun.” He nodded, tapped his cigarette on a glass tray, and said something in German to the boy digging in the digital sandbox.


pages: 270 words: 64,235

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I’m hesitant to recommend any particular approach to coding other than the fundamentals as outlined in Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, because I’m not sure we’ll even recognize coding in the next 20 or 30 years. To kids today, perhaps coding will eventually resemble Minecraft, or building levels in Portal 2. But everyone should try writing a little code, because it somehow sharpens the mind, right? Maybe in the same abstract way that reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica from beginning to end does. Honestly, I’d prefer that people spend their time discovering what problems they love and find interesting, first, and researching the hell out of those problems.


pages: 420 words: 61,808

Flask Web Development: Developing Web Applications With Python by Miguel Grinberg

business logic, database schema, Firefox, full text search, information security, Minecraft, platform as a service, web application

I’m also in debt to David Baumgold, Todd Brunhoff, Cecil Rock, and Matthew Hugues, who reviewed the manuscript at different stages of completion and gave me very useful advice regarding what to cover and how to organize the material. Writing the code examples for this book was a considerable effort. I appreciate the help of Daniel Hofmann, who did a thorough code review of the application and pointed out several improvements. I’m also thankful to my teenage son, Dylan Grinberg, who suspended his Minecraft addiction for a few weekends and helped me test the code under several platforms. O’Reilly has a wonderful program called Early Release that allows impatient readers to have access to books while they are being written. Some of my Early Release readers went the extra mile and engaged in useful conversations regarding their experience working through the book, leading to significant improvements.


pages: 238 words: 75,994

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

We left the main office and walked back into the attached workshop to see one of Alizade’s contraptions standing in the center of the warehouse. The unrelentingly gray, bunker-like box consisted of several dozen two-foot-square panels bolted together like a cubist armadillo. It was pieces attached to pieces attached to pieces. If ever a structure seemed to have been designed using Minecraft, this was it. Alizade was clearly happy with his product, as well as delighted by the visible scars left on its side from unsuccessful attacks by prospective clients. He even urged me to pick up a sledgehammer—several were lying about—and try it out myself, to drive home how pointless such an attack would be.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

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

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

In the case of video games, because the goal (maximizing score) is closely related to prediction (will this move increase or decrease the score?), the automated process does not separately need judgment. The judgment is the simple recognition that the objective is to score the most points. Teaching a machine to play a sandbox game like Minecraft or a collection game like Pokemon Go would require more judgment, since different people enjoy different aspects of the games. It isn’t clear what the goal should be. 8. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger quoted in Katy Couric, “Capt. Sully Worried about Airline Industry,” CBS News, February 10, 2009; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capt-sully-worried-about-airline-industry/. 9.


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Benioff also has inverse mentors, with completely different experience sets, such as Black Eyed Peas superstar and music entrepreneur will.i.am. In times of disruption, reverse and inverse mentors will help you see things you couldn’t otherwise see. And yes, parents, this is your excuse to play Minecraft with your kids. Learn to Code In 2008, Dave Gledhill became the group executive and head of group technology and operations at DBS Bank, a leading Singapore-based bank that, as of the writing of this book, had more than S$400 billion in assets and a market capitalization of about S$50 billion (roughly US$300 billion and US $35 billion).


pages: 243 words: 76,686

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

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

Thus, the project involved not only tearing down a structure but building a riverbed from scratch. Drone footage of the new riverbed is surreal. The project engineers designed a series of cascading pools specifically to be trout-friendly, but without anything yet growing around the artificial banks, it looked like something from Minecraft. Meanwhile, those hoping for a dramatic demolition of the dam were met with disappointment. Once the river had been successfully rerouted, six excavators and two sixteen-thousand-pound pneumatic hammers arrived and proceeded to slowly and arduously pick away at the concrete structure, turning it into dust bit by bit.


pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

They frequently appealed to an ur-Jew named “Shlomo”: one user in Gen Z Y K L O N lamented his own habit of sleeping in by saying he was behaving “like a minority” and vowed to do better. “Not today shlomo [sic],” he wrote, “not today. Time to get up and prepare for the coming race war.” The topic of an impending “race war”—an event variously referred to as “Minecraft,” “The Hootenanny,” “All Saints’ Day,” “the collapse,” and the “Day of the Rope”—was a consistent obsession across myriad chats. One channel, “Sminem’s Siege Shack,” with nearly four thousand subscribers, dispensed survivalist advice along with a steady stream of racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-Semitic propaganda.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

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

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

One of them, as demonstrated in the surprise egg mashups, is a kind of keyword excess, cramming as many relevant search terms into a video title as possible. The result is what is known as word salad, a random sample from just a single channel reading, ‘Surprise Play Doh Eggs Peppa Pig Stamper Cars Pocoyo Minecraft Smurfs Kinder Play Doh Sparkle Brilho’; ‘Cars Screamin’ Banshee Eats Lightning McQueen Disney Pixar’; ‘Disney Baby Pop Up Pals Easter Eggs SURPRISE’; ‘150 Giant Surprise Eggs Kinder CARS StarWars Marvel Avengers LEGO Disney Pixar Nickelodeon Peppa’; and ‘Choco Toys Surprise Mashems & Fashems DC Marvel Avengers Batman Hulk IRON MAN’.6 This unintelligible assemblage of brand names, characters and keywords points to the real audience for the descriptions: not the viewer, but the algorithms that decide who sees which videos.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

And then there’s the question of consumer acceptance, which is unlikely to be straightforward. These changes will save money for some. But one person’s savings are another’s lost income. People will likely need Netflix (the world’s largest streaming video subscription service) more than they’ll need insurance providers, or Minecraft (the world’s most popular computer game) more than they’ll need car repairs. Historically, technological advances have largely offset the job losses they’ve displaced in traditional industries with new opportunities. The change from artisanal to mass production brought a precipitous decline in the need for skilled workers, but at the same time gave rise to the importance of highly trained engineers and technicians, who would take growing responsibility for planning and managing the production process.


pages: 249 words: 80,762

Odd Girl Out: An Autistic Woman in a Neurotypical World by Laura James

autism spectrum disorder, cognitive dissonance, Kintsugi, Minecraft, neurotypical, pink-collar, Skype, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk

You’re trying to understand the motives of people and – if you’re not good at getting into the minds of people and understanding them – then the special interest is a way of exploring your concern. ‘All special interests serve a function. It may be a sense of self-worth or a sense of identity because, if you’re good at Minecraft, then you’re valuable at school. And sometimes the interest can become a source of employment. There are a variety of reasons why the special interest is valuable for emotion management and also emotional understanding of the thoughts and feelings of other people. It is a thought blocker, a refresher.


Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

If you’re in a WhatsApp group with 256 people (you and 255 friends) and you try to add a 257th person, you will simply be stopped from doing so. But given you’re pretty much claiming to have 255 better friends than them, they’re probably a tenuous enough associate that they’re not going to take it personally. The threat of a roll-over error is also why the game of Minecraft has a maximum height limit of 256 blocks. Which is an actual brick-wall solution. A different way to deal with roll-overs is to loop around so that 00000000 follows 11111111. This is exactly what happens in Civilization and on Swiss railways. But in both of those cases there were unintended knock-on effects.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

They’re the games we come back to and continue to play from where we left off. They’re the games that more closely represent our physical reality. They include the social nuances of life, human interactions and replications enhanced in a digital environment. This genre includes Farmville, Cityville, World of Warcraft and Minecraft, games during which we want to use digital tools and a virtual environment to create a better (yet virtual) reality for ourselves. While these two types of game seem differentiated and separate, they’re starting to overlap. The smartphone-based games are teaching us to use them to track physical movements, while the continued web-enabled game play is teaching us to shape environments based on social interaction and iteration.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

The next layer to think about is another software layer: a program that runs on top of an operating system. A web browser (like Safari or Firefox or Chrome or Internet Explorer) is a program that allows you to view web pages. Microsoft Word is a word processing program. Desktop video games like Minecraft are also programs. These programs are all designed to take advantage of certain underlying features of the different operating systems. That’s why you can’t just run a Windows program on a Mac (unless you use another software program—an emulator—to help you). These programs are designed to seem very easy to use, but underneath they’re highly precise.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

‘Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign’, www.nytimes.com, 29 October 2016. 42. Associated Press, ‘Leaked DNC emails reveal details of anti-Sanders sentiment’, www.theguardian.com, 24 July 2016. 43. ‘Pizzagate: How a 4chan conspiracy went mainstream’, www.newstatesman.com, 8 December 2016. 44. Brian Patrick Byrne, ‘Minecraft Creator Alleges Global Conspiracy Involving Pizzagate, a “Manufactured Race War,” a Missing Tabloid Toddler, and Holistic Medicine’, www.thedailybeast.com, 28 August 2017. 45. Joshua Gillin, ‘How Pizzagate went from fake news to a real problem for a D.C. business’, www.politifact.com, 5 December 2016. 46.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

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

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

The Internet, marketplace, Bitcoin and AI are examples of some of these technological waves, which it turn have transformed industries and some of the companies associated with them. Industries transformed by the Internet: Information (Google), Shopping (Amazon), Communications (Skype), Entertainment (Netflix), Media (iTunes), Gaming (Minecraft), Community (Facebook) Industries transformed by the marketplace: Transportation (Uber), Hotels (Airbnb), Startups (AngelList), Workforce (Thumbtack), Lawyers (LawTrades), PR (PRx), Brokerage (Robinhood), Interior Decorating (Laurel and Wolf), Stock Market (Equidate, EquityZen), Cap Tables (eShares, Capshare), Gaming (Twitch) Industries transformed by Bitcoin: Currencies (Bitcoin), Government (Tezos), Contracts (Ethereum), Banking (Ripple), Real Estate (BenBen), Insurance (Augur), Finance (Bancor) Industries transformed by AI: Automotive (Cruise Automation), Identity (Neurala) In addition to the industries and transformations listed above, VR/AR promise to challenge education, drones will likely challenge surveillance, and Tesla will challenge utilities Understanding Trends It can also be a good exercise to study trends in and around your industry.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

In the next chapter we will look at how collecting this data and repurposing it for urban analytics can generate policy change. HACK IT! USING DATA CREATIVELY The term hacker conjures up images that range from nefarious Russian spies trying to influence the United States elections to computer geeks sitting in their dorm rooms eating junk food and playing Minecraft. For many, hacking means following the hacker ethos, summarized in the preface of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy: “sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost to improve the machines, and to improve the world.” 1 Yet the Hacker Code of Ethics, as first documented in Levy's book, leaves ample room for interpretation.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Others provide the pleasure of collecting and categorizing, or incredible concentration and attention to detail, or harmony, literal and figurative, with others. Singing in a choir, that’s a hobby. So is a bowling league, a quilting circle, a running club. A video game can definitely be a hobby—especially community-building, strategy-refining games like Minecraft or The Sims. Some hobbies, especially ones involving exercise, double as a means to build aspirational capital. In most places in the country, being a person who downhill skis is to underline that you have the means to outfit yourself and pay for a hundred-dollar lift ticket. But many hobbies, especially ones related to craft, feel like throwbacks, cool only insomuch as they’re proudly uncool.


pages: 362 words: 87,462

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demand response, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, financial independence, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, Google Chrome, helicopter parent, impulse control, Jean Tirole, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, meta-analysis, Minecraft, New Journalism, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, working poor

They both worked all day, Riley as a public-school elementary teacher and Tom at a science museum. At the end of the day, Riley would make time to tidy up the house, picking up empty food containers, sweeping the dirt by the front door, and throwing socks in the laundry. Tom would just flop onto the couch and play Minecraft. One evening, Riley came home late and found that Tom had left a pile of boxes on the kitchen counter. A bunch of Amazon orders had come in that day, and he’d torn open their packaging and left them in a heap. “I decided I was going to test him,” Riley says. “I wanted to see how long he would just let the boxes sit there if I didn’t say anything about them.”


pages: 337 words: 103,522

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think by Marcus Du Sautoy

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Automated Insights, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, John Conway, Kickstarter, Loebner Prize, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, move 37, music of the spheres, Mustafa Suleyman, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons

Of course, human creativity extends beyond the arts: the molecular gastronomy of the Michelin-star chef Heston Blumenthal; the football trickery of the Dutch striker Johan Cruyff; the curvaceous buildings of Zaha Hadid; the invention of the Rubik’s cube by the Hungarian Ernö Rubik. Even the creation of code to make a game like Minecraft should be regarded as part of some of the great acts of human creativity. More unexpectedly creativity is an important part of my own world of mathematics. One of the things that drives me to spend hours at my desk conjuring up equations and penning proofs is the allure of creating something new.


pages: 302 words: 100,493

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business logic, business process, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, microservices, Minecraft, performance metric, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, web application, why are manhole covers round?

We love you all and you were a constant source of feedback and inspiration. To our children, Phoebe, Finn, Evan, and Maddox: your curiosity and insightful questions forced us to hone our message until it was concise and clear. And thanks for letting us use more than our fair share of the family computer at the expense of your Minecraft time. A special thanks to our parents, George and Cicely, Betty and Bill Sr. We would not be where we are today without your constant love and support along the way. You’ve been telling us since we were young that we could make a difference in the world and could do anything if we put our minds to it.


pages: 346 words: 97,890

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

Roughly speaking, all a computer can do is follow lists of instructions such as the following:7 Add A to B If the result is bigger than C, then do D, otherwise, do E Repeatedly do F until G Every computer program boils down to lists of instructions similar to these. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint boil down to instructions like these. Call of Duty and Minecraft boil down to instructions like these. Facebook, Google and eBay boil down to instructions like these. The apps on your smart-phone, from your web browser to Tinder, all boil down to instructions like these. And if we are to build intelligent machines, then their intelligence must ultimately reduce to simple, explicit instructions like these.


pages: 347 words: 103,518

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Anthropocene, basic income, Black Lives Matter, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, food desert, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, helicopter parent, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, Kintsugi, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Minecraft, moral panic, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, rent stabilization, risk tolerance, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

“Some young people—across race/ethnicity and social class—are thriving, freed from the drudgery of school,” Orellana writes. Children pursued their own interests, and not just in wealthy families. They picked up hobbies and crafts. They used YouTube to learn about whatever took their fancy. They explored and created worlds in Minecraft and Roblox. The platform Outschool exploded in use during the pandemic; it offered live video classes designed to cater to children’s obsessions, from frogs to fairies. The great loss, in Orellana’s view, was that schools rarely were equipped to collaborate with families in these explorations. They remained beholden to external metrics, like grade-level standardized tests in math and reading.


pages: 319 words: 102,839

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

Workers moved around, welded this, tightened that bolt, ran some wires—whatever they needed to do, digitally, as a dry run to see where problems might be, to discover what might work and what might not. Newport News managers thought the method promised to revolutionize the shipbuilders’ training. Little Ed understood that. The new digital realm helped train the youngsters coming out of the Apprentice School, who faced a harder time visualizing things not actually visible if they weren’t in Minecraft or something like that. The company could manipulate this newly created digital dockwork in the same way. But, kibitzing with his father and Lee Murphy during a gossip session outside the gates, Little Ed acknowledged, “I swear I was born in the wrong generation. Like older hands, you get stuck in your ways.


pages: 341 words: 99,495

Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully by Kelly Starrett, Juliet Starrett

airport security, call centre, COVID-19, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microdosing, Minecraft, phenotype, place-making, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

Soon enough, MobilityWOD had morphed into our present company, The Ready State, and we were working on movement and mobility with all branches of the military; NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL players and coaches; Olympic athletes; university sports teams; Fortune 500 companies; individual CEO types; and thousands of others. But the thing about mobility that bears repeating is that it’s not just what enables the physically elite or the well-connected to perform at the top of their game. It’s what makes everybody perform at the top of their game—even if that game is Minecraft or Fortnite executed while nearly dormant in a chair. The practices that maximize mobility are the same for everyone. It turns out that what makes an elite athlete excel also makes a nonathlete a more agile, vital, and pain-free human being. And the great thing is, you hardly need to be an athlete to work mobility practices into your life.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

Yet even though she had online games, the stress of living at home was eating away at Merisa. Sleep became increasingly evasive, and she would often get panic attacks. But one day, someone she knew from the chat rooms she’d frequented as a teen tweeted about a YouTube series in which people played Minecraft. Merisa found the videos soothing and discovered that watching them helped her fall asleep. Eventually she started talking with one of the women in the videos. After five years of chatting they became good friends, and eventually Merisa told her she was trans and planned to transition someday. After that, she became a confidante and resource, helping Merisa navigate and improve her relationship with her parents and even helping her get in voice practice over Skype.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

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

We could mark an ancestral trace from Yona Friedman's La Ville Spatiale to the new Asian smart cities such as New Songdo City (“a ubiquitous city,” says its brochure) in South Korea's Incheon development, or see Paolo Soleri's Arcology as a first pass at Masdar, the massive “green” smart city in Abu Dhabi. (Both Songdo and Masdar were built with Cisco and IBM as key partners.) Is Situationist cut-and-paste psychogeography reborn or smashed to bits by Minecraft? What binds the hyperlibertarian secessionism of the Seasteading Institute, which would move whole populations offshore to live on massive ships floating from port to port unmolested by regulation and undesired publics (Facebook funder Peter Thiel is a key funder) with Archigram's Walking City project from 1967, which plotted for Star Wars Land Walker–like city machines to get up and amble away to greener pastures as needed?

See also interfaces atmospheric, 91 boundary, 123, 150, 172, 289, 324 encrypted, 288 legal and physical, 149–150 partition, 2, 22, 379n9 porosity, 123, 140 of safety, 23 memorialization, 239–240 memory memories of, 262 of objects, 212, 215 requirements for using, 239–240 software eclipsing need for, 239–240 theological, 239–240, 297 mereological technology, 206 message queue telemetry transport (MQTT), 207 messages, restricting, 194 Messianism, mythopoetic political, 382n40 meta-addressing, 296 metadata for surveillance, 287 Metahaven, 127 metals, mining and trading in, 82–83 meta-metadata recursivity, 287 meta-User, 259 metroeconomics, 159–160 metroplexes, borders within, 311–312 Mexican drug cartels, 110 Mexico-United States border, 172–173, 308, 323, 409n42 microbial biome, 268 microeconomics, 127 microjurisdictions, ecological, 99–100 microplatforms, 289 micropolitics, architectural, 166–167 Microsoft, 128, 134 Excel, 162 Kinect, 226 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 53 Miéville, China, 112 migrants cross-border, Apps for aiding, 173–176 ecological, 100–101 interiority/exteriority status, 173–175 intracountry, 310, 409n39 rural to urban, 409n39 military/civilian deployments, 325 millenarianism, 442n14 Millionth Map, 195, 413n5 Minecraft, 180 mining of coins, 337 data, 267 gold, 337 mineral resource extraction, 82–83, 93–94 and trading in electronics, 171 Mirowski, Philip, 439n65 mirror box installations, 151 mirror reflection of the self, 253, 264 mirror stage parable, 261 mobile devices. See also consumer electronics Agamben on, 174, 176 anatomy of, 238 autonomy of, 342–343 cameras, 236, 240 evolution-to-come, 171 growth in data from, 225 at hand, 168, 238 inert metals in, 82 interfaces, 164, 168–169, 237 phone-car interface, 280 as sensors, 342 virtual envelope of, 168–170 mobile ecology of interfaces, 237–238 mobility.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

DeepMind had shown in 2015 that temporal difference learning could learn to play Atari arcade games such as Pong at superhuman levels, taking the pixels of the screen as input.15 The next stepping-stone is video games in a three-dimensional environment. StarCraft is among the best competitive video games of all time. DeepMind is using it to develop autonomous deep learning networks that can thrive in that world. Microsoft Research recently bought the rights to Minecraft, another popular video game, and has made it open source so others could customize its three-dimensional environment and speed up the progress of its artificial intelligence. Playing backgammon and Go at championship levels is an impressive achievement, and playing video games is an important next step, but what about solving real-world problems?


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Here is a representative but not exhaustive list of the social media platforms I think about, and that will be central to my concern in this book: social network sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Hi5, Ning, NextDoor, and Foursquare; blogging and microblogging providers like Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, and Livejournal; photo- and image-sharing sites like Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Photobucket, DeviantArt, and Snapchat; video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion; discussion, opinion, and gossip tools like Reddit, Digg, Secret, and Whisper; dating and hookup apps like OK Cupid, Tinder, and Grindr; collaborative knowledge tools like Wikipedia, Ask, and Quora; app stores like iTunes and Google Play; live broadcasting apps like Facebook Live and Periscope.62 To those I would add a second set that, while they do not neatly fit the definition of platform, grapple with many of the same challenges of content moderation in platformlike ways: recommendation and rating sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor; exchange platforms that help share goods, services, funds, or labor, like Etsy, Kickstarter, Craigslist, Airbnb, and Uber; video game worlds like League of Legends, Second Life, and Minecraft; search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. At this point I should define the term that I have already relied on a great deal. Platform is a slippery term, in part because its meaning has changed over time, in part because it equates things that nevertheless differ in important and sometimes striking ways, and in part because it gets deployed strategically, by both stakeholders and critics.63 As a shorthand, “platform” too easily equates a site with the company that offers it, it implies that social media companies act with one mind, and it downplays the people involved.


The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Technically Wrong, Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). 59. See, for example, Hilary Bergen, “‘I’d Blush If I Could’: Digital Assistants, Disembodied Cyborgs and the Problem of Gender,” Word and Text 6 (December 2016): 95–113. 60. Dan Golding and Leena Van Deventer, Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, the Fight for the Future of Videogames (South Melbourne: Affirm, 2016). 61. C. Scott Brown, “Say Goodbye to M, Facebook’s Virtual Assistant,” Android Authority, January 8, 2018, https://www.androidauthority.com/goodbye-m-facebook-virtual-assistant-828558/; Barry Schwartz, “Microsoft Drops Ms.


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

Facebook was attempting to lure them with experimental side apps, without much traction. But Instagram had a great opportunity, because it was already full of young people. She focused on getting to know particular Instagram communities that skewed heavily young, like those for skateboarders and Minecraft enthusiasts, and the one centering around #bookstagram, the hashtag for talking about books. She would interview a community’s most popular members and then keep track of them on spreadsheets, noting how often they posted, what kind of content they chose, and if they were doing anything unique. If she thought she found a trend, she would urge someone at Instagram or Facebook to help her pull data to see if it was real.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

“Fuck your enormous bag of ping-pong balls.” “Fuck your angel communication journal.” “Fuck your feces-themed board game.” “Fuck your eco-friendly jeans.” “Fuck your Beautiful Celtic Dragonfly Zodiac Wall Clock by Brigid Ashwood.” “Fuck your shapewear.” “Fuck Derrida.” “Fuck your Michael Kors bag.” “Fuck Minecraft.” “Fuck your Alexander Del Rossa Women’s Super Plush Microfiber Fleece Bathrobe Robe.” “Fuck your fucking Amazon gift card—seriously, what kind of asshole orders an Amazon gift card off fucking Amazon?” There’s one outlier in the “fuck your” period—a very long recording in which, after recording my objections to a TARDIS throw blanket, I accidentally continue to record for a couple of hours.


pages: 444 words: 118,393

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

The load balancer can use the health check to tell if a machine has crashed, but it can also use the health check for the “go live” transition, too. When the health check on a new instance goes from failing to passing, it means the app is done with its startup. Wrapping Up Instances are the basic blocks that make up our system. They’re like cobblestone Minecraft blocks—not that interesting by themselves, but we can make amazing things out of them. If we do a good job of building code to run in instances, then we can make a solid large-scale structure. That means instances should be designed for production. We’ve seen how to make them deployable, configurable, and monitorable.


pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

Have a nice day:)” Daniel was determined to track down the hacker, who went by the name EvilTwin online. EvilTwin had made “dumb mistakes in operational security,” which allowed Daniel to trace his identity. On a beautiful fall Saturday afternoon, before heading outside to enjoy the North Carolina foliage, he reported his progress to the team. “Pretty much have this little kid and his Minecraft buddies all fully identified,” he wrote over Slack. “Names, and towns they live in. They are all like 15-16 as was pretty much expected.” He said that the skiddies—script kiddies—lived in Grafing, Germany, a small town near Munich. “Of course … Bayern,” Fabian replied, referring to the German state.


pages: 489 words: 136,195

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

On the table is a blue-and-white china plate, Russian in its decorative style, showing a steam train emerging from a tunnel into winter fields. Two peasant figures walk by the trackside, carrying bundles of sticks on their backs, and the train trails a rooster-plume of steam that rises up into the blue dusk sky before bending back into the tunnel mouth. Jane and Sean’s two boys, Louis and Orlando, are playing Minecraft on a computer in a corner of the room. I go over to join them. They are mining hard, pickaxing down towards bedrock in search of precious minerals. ‘We don’t want redstone, we need obsidian,’ says Louis. ‘We want to fight the Ender Dragon!’ says Orlando. ‘We’re building a portal to the Nether!’


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

The more divergent the reactions, the more we can learn from each other about what the future could or should be like. When I playtest a scenario, I also wait to see if someone has a surprising reaction, one that catches me off guard. In gaming, this is called “unintentional emergence”—when the players do something truly unexpected, like the Minecraft players who started re-creating ancient cities and building working roller coasters, guitars, and even quantum computers inside the virtual world. As a game designer, you look forward to these moments, because they mean you’re helping people express and increase their creativity. So when I collect reactions to future scenarios, I look out for surprises and then I keep adjusting the details of the scenario, the same way I would fine-tune the rules of a game, until I reliably see that spark of deep attention and creativity that tells me the future scenario is guiding people to a future worth imagining.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

In rare cases a pawn may be transformed into a queen, but you cannot produce new pawns, nor can you upgrade your knights into tanks. So chess players never have to think about investment. In contrast, many modern board games and computer games revolve around investment and growth. Particularly telling are civilisation-style strategy games, such as Minecraft, The Settlers of Catan or Sid Meier’s Civilization. The game may be set in the Middle Ages, in the Stone Age or in some imaginary fairy land, but the principles always remain the same – and they are always capitalist. Your aim is to establish a city, a kingdom or maybe an entire civilisation. You begin from a very modest base, perhaps just a village and its nearby fields.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

A person might value his online pseudonym—I still have a soft spot for the one I used for many years in various online role-playing and action games; he exists as a distinct character in my mind—precisely because it is a form of expression, bound to certain experiences. And indeed, handles, avatars, and the other raw ingredients of online identity have long been treated as types of expression and play, things to be tried on and cast off, manipulated and customized. Markus Persson, the creator of the enormously popular game Minecraft, is widely known as Notch, and the nickname is no less real or authentic because it originated online. His continued use of it, both online and off, only shows how much he values it. Our digital and offline lives are more intertwined than ever, and in some respects, that’s a good thing. These two worlds have never been fully separate.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

There’s also the part that parodied the global sweatshop economy: American players started paying real money to low-wage workers in China, including labor camp inmates, to do online “gold farming” for them, the tedious game-world work that generates virtual currency. Today most American adults inhabit digital game worlds some of the time, and a quarter of those are so seriously engaged that they devote at least five hours a week to playing with the best set of blocks ever (Minecraft) or angsting and living and dying in some supernatural netherworld (Mortal Kombat, Final Fantasy) or on Earth in a realistically violent past (Assassin’s Creed), a realistically grotesque present (Grand Theft Auto), or a realistically ghastly future (Halo, Fallout, Call of Duty). Virtual reality is finally, actually here, and the gear costs no more than a smartphone or a game console.