Tim Cook: Apple

112 results back to index


pages: 535 words: 149,752

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

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

Shortly after the markets closed: “Letter from Tim Cook to Apple Investors,” Apple, January 2, 2019, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/. That afternoon, Cook sat down: “CNBC Exclusive: CNBC Transcript: Apple CEO Tim Cook Speaks with CNBC’s Josh Lipton Today,” CNBC, January 2, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/02/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-apple-ceo-tim-cook-speaks-with-cnbcs-josh-lipton-today.html. The following day: Sophie Caronello, “Apple’s Market Cap Plunge Must Be Seen in Context,” Bloomberg, January 4, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/apple-s-market-cap-plunge-must-be-seen-in-context.

Cook’s inbox overflowed: Interview with Tim Cook. “Apple is open”: Edward Moyer, “Apple’s Cook Takes Aim at Trump’s Immigration Ban,” CNET, January 28, 2017, https://www.cnet.com/news/tim-cook-trump-immigration-apple-memo-executive-order/. Cook assured Apple’s staff: Interview with Tim Cook. In late May: Lizzy Gurdus, “Exclusive: Apple Just Promised to Give U.S. Manufacturing a $1 Billion Boost” (video), CNBC, May 3, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/exclusive-apple-just-promised-to-give-us-manufacturing-a-1-billion-boost.html. Cramer didn’t point out: Tripp Mickle and Yoko Kubota, “Tim Cook and Apple Bet Everything on China.

In 1969, the local school: Interviews with Wayne Ellis, Fay Farris, and others. In sixth or seventh grade: Todd C. Frankel, “The Roots of Tim Cook’s Activism Lie in Rural Alabama,” Washington Post, March 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/07/in-rural-alabama-the-activist-roots-of-apples-tim-cook/; Matt Richtel and Brian X. Chen, “Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own,” New York Times, June 15, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/technology/tim-cook-making-apple-his-own.html. After he became Apple’s CEO: Auburn University, “Tim Cook Receiving the IQLA Lifetime Achievement Award,” YouTube, December 14, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

New York Times, December 2, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shooting.html. an iPhone 5c: Ng, Alfred. “FBI Asked Apple to Unlock iPhone Before Trying All Its Options.” CNET, March 27, 2018. https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-asked-apple-to-unlock-iphone-before-trying-all-its-options. not just one iPhone: Grossman, Lev. “Apple CEO Tim Cook: Inside His Fight with the FBI.” Time. Time Magazine, March 17, 2016. https://time.com/4262480/tim-cook-apple-fbi-2. the side of privacy: Cook, Tim. “Customer Letter.” Apple. Accessed February 16, 2016. https://www.apple.com/customer-letter. “To me, marketing is about values”: “Best Marketing Strategy Ever!

CNBC, October 23, 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/23/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-not-upgrading-to-iphone-x-right-away.html. Cook, in an interview with CNBC: “CNBC Exclusive: CNBC Transcript: Apple CEO Tim Cook Speaks with CNBC’s Jim Cramer Today.” CNBC. CNBC, January 8, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/exclusive-cnbc-transcript-apple-ceo-tim-cook-speaks-with-cnbcs-jim-cramer-today.html. Apple had Siri: Gross, Doug. “Apple Introduces Siri, Web Freaks Out.” CNN. Cable News Network, October 4, 2011. https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/04/tech/mobile/siri-iphone-4s-skynet/index.html. “Since October 2011, when Steve died”: Note that Jobs began the Siri project.

These elements—the design-led development process, the focus, and the element of surprise—have all combined to make Apple’s flagship devices the most desired products in the world. But these same factors are conspiring against Apple as it faces a shift of a similar magnitude to the one Google encountered when typing and clicking turned into talking and tapping. “A Form That’s Right” On January 2, 2019, Tim Cook posted a rare letter to Apple’s website. “To Apple investors,” he wrote. “Today we are revising our guidance for Apple’s fiscal 2019 first quarter.” The letter marked the first time Apple had revised its financial predictions since 2002, when it anticipated it would miss revenue expectations by at least $150 million.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Jon Rubinstein and Avie Tevanian were the next members of the “Save Apple” team to depart. Ruby and Avie had been a buddy act of sorts, managing the hardware and software sides of Apple’s whole widget. Says Ruby, “There’s as much of the turnaround team’s DNA in Apple as there is of Steve’s, and you can still see it today.” They had been involved in every key decision at Apple since 1997. And before they left they helped pull off a move that they’d been talking about with Steve and with Tim Cook for years—switching the microprocessors that powered every Apple personal computer from the PowerPC chip to one made by Intel.

THE LAST MEMORIAL service occurred at the Apple campus in Cupertino, on October 20. Nearly ten thousand people gathered on the lawn within the ellipse formed by the campus’s main buildings. Every Apple retail outlet around the globe had been closed for the occasion, with the store employees gathered to watch video of the event streamed live to them over Apple’s virtual network. Tim Cook was the first speaker. Coldplay and Norah Jones, whose music had been featured in Apple television advertisements, played short sets for the crowd. But two speakers provided the highlights: Jony Ive and Bill Campbell, the Apple board member who had been a close adviser of Steve for many, many years.

Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Eddy Cue on April 29, 2014; Fred Anderson on August 8, 2012; Avie Tevanian on October 11, 2012; Tim Cook on April 30, 2014; Jon Rubinstein on July 25, 2012; Jony Ive on May 6, 2014, and June 10, 2014; John Doerr on May 7, 2014; Jean-Louis Gassée on October 17, 2012; and Marc Andreessen on May 7, 2014. Online resources we consulted include Fastcodesign.com, the Fast Company magazine website that focuses on design, May 22, 2014, http://www.fastcodesign.com/3030923/4-myths-about-apple-design-from-an-ex-apple-designer; and the blog by former Apple engineer Don Melton, donmelton.com/2014/04/10/memories-of-steve/. Also, Apple SEC filings provided unit sales data each quarter from Fiscal Year 2000 through Fiscal Year 2013.


pages: 275 words: 84,418

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

But perhaps the most notable example: Jessica Lessin, “An Apple Exit over Maps,” Wall Street Journal, 10/29/2012; Liz Gannes, “Google Maps for iPhone Had 10 Million Downloads in 48 Hours,” AllThingsD.com, 12/17/2012. Apple’s Tim Cook knows all the challenges: Ina Fried, “Apple’s Tim Cook: The Full D11 Interview,” Tim Cook interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video), AllThingsD.com, 5/29/2013, available at www.allthingsd.com/20130529/apples-tim-cook-the-full-d11-interview-video. Jobs was a master: Peter Kafka, “Apple CEO Steve Jobs at D8: The Full, Uncut Interview,” Steve Jobs interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video), AllThingsD.com, 6/7/2010, available at www.allthingsd.com/20100607/steve-jobs-at-d8-the-full-uncut-interview.

Android’s share of the mobile phone and tablet markets: “Android Captures Record 80 Percent Share of Global Smartphone Shipments in Q2 2013,” Strategy Analytics press release, 8/1/2013; “Small Tablets Drive Big Share Gains for Android,” Canalys press release, 8/1/2013. Apple was also taking heat: Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, “How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work,” New York Times, 1/21/2012; Duhigg and Bradsher, “In China, Human Costs Are Built into an iPad,” New York Times, 1/25/2012; Mark Gurman, “Tim Cook Responds to Claims of Factory Worker Mistreatment: ‘We Care About Every Worker in Our Supply Chain,’” 9to5mac.com, 1/26/2012; “Here’s Apple CEO Tim Cook’s Apology Letter in China” (Digits blog), Wall Street Journal, 4/1/2013. But perhaps the most notable example: Jessica Lessin, “An Apple Exit over Maps,” Wall Street Journal, 10/29/2012; Liz Gannes, “Google Maps for iPhone Had 10 Million Downloads in 48 Hours,” AllThingsD.com, 12/17/2012.

Indeed, the best phone ads of 2012 and 2013 came from Samsung, Google’s biggest Android phone maker. After Apple unveiled the iPhone 5, Samsung pounced with a barrage of TV spots that amusingly depicted iPhone users as misguided elitists waiting in line for a phone that was inferior in every way to the Galaxy S III. Apple was also taking heat for the way it was making its phones. The New York Times, in a handful of long articles about the “iEconomy,” presented evidence that Apple was making its iPhones and iPads in Asian sweatshops, forcing CEO Tim Cook to acknowledge Apple could do more to make its contractors provide safer workplaces.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

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

A Soōtoō Zen master in California who became Jobs’s spiritual teacher. LEE CLOW. Advertising wizard who created Apple’s “1984” ad and worked with Jobs for three decades. DEBORAH “DEBI” COLEMAN. Early Mac team manager who took over Apple manufacturing. TIM COOK. Steady, calm, chief operating officer hired by Jobs in 1998; replaced Jobs as Apple CEO in August 2011. EDDY CUE. Chief of Internet services at Apple, Jobs’s wingman in dealing with content companies. ANDREA “ANDY” CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna’s firm who handled Apple in the early Macintosh years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made the Pixar deal, then clashed with Jobs.

Panasonic came out with a CD drive that could rip and burn music, and it was available first for computers that had old-fashioned tray loaders. The effects of this would ripple over the next few years: It would cause Apple to be slow in catering to users who wanted to rip and burn their own music, but that would then force Apple to be imaginative and bold in finding a way to leapfrog over its competitors when Jobs finally realized that he had to get into the music market. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT CEO Still Crazy after All These Years Tim Cook and Jobs, 2007 Tim Cook When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and produced the “Think Different” ads and the iMac in his first year, it confirmed what most people already knew: that he could be creative and a visionary.

Business Week, July 31, 2000; Tim Cook, Auburn commencement address, May 14, 2010; Adam Lashinsky, “The Genius behind Steve,” Fortune, Nov. 10, 2008; Nick Wingfield, “Apple’s No. 2 Has Low Profile,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 16, 2006. Mock Turtlenecks and Teamwork: Interviews with Steve Jobs, James Vincent, Jony Ive, Lee Clow, Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein. Lev Grossman, “How Apple Does It,” Time, Oct. 16, 2005; Leander Kahney, “How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong,” Wired, Mar. 18, 2008. From iCEO to CEO: Interviews with Ed Woolard, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs. Apple proxy statement, Mar. 12, 2001.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

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

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

The cost is tens of thousands of lives being made miserable by those last-minute orders, militaristic work environments, and relentless stretches of overtime. This is not necessarily Apple’s fault, but it is certainly a by-product of a globalized workforce. Apple was actually one of the last major tech companies to move its manufacturing overseas; it had spent decades touting its Made in America bona fides. And Tim Cook, who rose through the ranks at Apple on the strength of his supply-chain wizardry, is himself a key driver in that push toward breakneck production. One of his initiatives has been an attempt to eliminate inventory—today, Apple turns over its entire inventory every five days, meaning each iPhone goes from the factory line in China to a cargo jet to a consumer’s hands in a single workweek.

The top editorial staff of iPhoneLife magazine participated in an interview call during which I tried to suss out what it was like to write about the iPhone daily for a living. In a phone interview, Cory Moll detailed what forming a union at Apple was like. Mark Spoonauer provided context as a tech editor and longtime vet of Apple Events. I interviewed a couple dozen Apple Store employees, but covertly, which is why I didn’t publish any of their quotes in the text—retail reps aren’t allowed to speak to the press. I also interviewed perhaps a dozen customers waiting in line on launch day. As for the Tim Cook email episode—an Apple PR rep confirmed that Tim had opened my email and forwarded it on; she said he had read it first. Streak’s representatives told me that their technology could “very accurately” determine which device a person used to open an email.

(While I’ve been on the science and tech beat for about a decade now, I’ve spent more time covering oil spills than product demos.) So, while I made Apple officials fully aware of this project from the outset and repeatedly spoke with and met their PR representatives, they declined my many requests to interview executives and employees. Tim Cook never answered my (very thoughtful) emails. To tell this story, I met current and former Apple employees in dank dive bars or spoke with them over encrypted communications, and I had to grant anonymity to some of those I interviewed. Many people from the iPhone team still working at Apple told me they would have loved to participate on the record—they wanted the world to know its incredible story—but declined for fear of violating Apple’s strict policy of secrecy.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

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

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

Jobs’s first surgery didn’t fully cure him and he later underwent a second round of surgery, taking a leave of absence from Apple to undergo a liver transplant in Memphis, Tennessee, in May 2009. Jobs flew home on his private jet with his wife, where he was met by Jony and Tim Cook at San Jose Airport. The question of Apple’s future was very much in the air, as the announcement of Jobs’s leave had led many in the press to predict that Apple was doomed without him. It seemed to be the consensus of the punditocracy that the fate of Apple rested solely on Jobs’s shoulders. Jony drove Jobs home from the airport and confided on the journey that he was disturbed by newspaper opinion pieces that staked Apple’s survival to Jobs.

Jonny Evans, “Apple Design Chief Jonathan Ive Collects CBE,”Macworld, http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/?newsid=16510, November 17, 2006. 24. Marcus Fairs, ICON, http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-issues/icon-004-|-july/august-2003/jonathan-ive-|-icon-004-|-july/august-2003, July /August 2003. 25. Dick Powell, “At the Core of Apple,” Innovate, issue 6, Summer 2009, http://www.innovation.rca.ac.uk/cms/files/Innovate6.pdf 26. Phil Schiller, Apple v. Samsung trial testimony. 27. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle Edition. 28. Apple Press info, “Tim Cook Named COO of Apple,” http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/10/14Tim-Cook-Named-COO-of-Apple.html, October 14, 2005. 29.

Apple Press info, “Tim Cook Named COO of Apple,” http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/10/14Tim-Cook-Named-COO-of-Apple.html, October 14, 2005. 29. Interview with Jon Rubinstein, October 2012 30. Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain, expanded edition (Portfolio, 2009), 96. 31. Joel West, “Apple Computer: The iCEO Seizes the Internet,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/60250577/APPLE-Business, October 20, 2002. 32. Adam Lashinsky, “Tim Cook: The Genius Behind Steve,” Fortune, http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/cook_apple.fortune/index.htm, August 24, 2011. 33. Interview with Doug Satzger, January 2013. 34. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition 35.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

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

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

Vestager,” Stephens admits, “but everyone who supports the liberal market economy that made possible the success of Apple, Google and the like should be applauding her courageous effort to reset the balance.”4 Vestager’s courage has been her unwavering determination to squarely stand up to what Farhad Manjoo calls the “new superclass of American corporate might.”5 By reminding companies like Google and Apple of their responsibilities in the real world, Philip Stephens suggests, Vestager—as it happens, the mother of three young girls—is socializing these often rather childish exponents of radical disruption. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, for example, “often sounds as if he believes his company should be free to decide how much it pays in tax,” Stephens notes.6 And Vestager hasn’t been shy about explaining to Cook his grown-up obligations.

But all she is doing, she explains, is siding with her fellow 507 million Europeans against multibillion-dollar multinationals like Apple, which cheats on taxes, and Google, which illegally crushes its smaller competitors. Tim Cook might call this “political crap,” but for Vestager it’s the essence of her calling as a public servant responsible for pursuing the interests of her community. Not everyone, of course, favors this kind of socially interventionist government. Tim Cook certainly doesn’t. Nor did Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore, who viewed it as foreign to his ideals. “Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government,” he said about Vestager’s style of European social democracy.

“If you have any ideas,” Bezos concluded, with typical quirkiness, “just reply to this tweet . . .”10 To take another example, Marc Benioff—the swaggering Henry VIII look-alike CEO of the business software provider Salesforce.com—though a remarkably generous supporter of many noble social causes, remains perhaps a little too enamored with attaching his name to public projects such as the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. Then there’s Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, whom we last met in Margrethe Vestager’s Brussels office, trying to convince the EU commissioner that the 0.005 percent tax his company paid to the Irish government was somehow in the public interest. Yet that’s the same Tim Cook who has been outspoken in his defense of immigration and minority rights and in his critique of the corrosive impact of fake news on our political culture. Yes, it’s complicated.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

But when I once asked him to do Apple CEO Tim Cook, he declined. “Nah, I can’t do Cook. I can only do crazies.”1 Of course, some people say Cook is crazy to listen to Icahn, who has spent the last several years trying to persuade him to give back more and more of Apple’s $200 billion cash hoard to investors in the form of massive share buybacks, instead of investing it back in R&D or product development. This had the effect of pushing up the price of Apple’s stock while conveniently increasing the value of Icahn’s $7 billion in Apple holdings along with those of all the other Apple investors. In April 2015, Icahn’s efforts paid off, bigger than even he could have imagined.

Sonn, and Yannet Lathrop, National Employment Law Project, “The Growing Movement for $15,” November 4, 2015. 5. Carl C. Icahn, “Sale: Apple Shares at Half Price” (an open letter to Tim Cook), carlicahn.com, October 9, 2014; William Lazonick, Mariana Mazzucato, and Oner Tulum, “Apple’s Changing Business Model: What Should the World’s Richest Company Do with All Those Profits?” Accounting Forum 37, no. 4 (2013): 261; author interviews and reporting for Time magazine. 6. Nabila Ahmed and Mary Childs, “Apple Is the New Pimco, and Tim Cook Is the New King of Bonds,” Bloomberg, June 4, 2015. 7. Interview with OFR economists and analysts for this book. 8.

Worse, financial thinking has become so ingrained in American business that even our biggest and brightest companies have started to act like banks. Apple, for example, has begun using a good chunk of its spare cash to buy corporate bonds the same way financial institutions do, prompting a 2015 Bloomberg headline to declare, “Apple Is the New Pimco, and Tim Cook Is the New King of Bonds.”6 Apple and other tech companies now anchor new corporate bond offerings just as investment banks do, which is not surprising considering how much cash they hold (it seems only a matter of time before Apple launches its own credit card). They are, in essence, acting like banks, but they aren’t regulated like banks.


pages: 239 words: 69,496

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

As just one example of this, the largest individual owner of Apple is CEO Tim Cook, but he owns only 0.02 percent of the company. Even the largest mutual fund owner of Apple owns less than 10 percent of the company. There are millions of investors in Apple who have decided to delegate the job of running Apple to managers—and these investors expect the managers to pursue what is in the best interest of the investors in Apple. For financial economists, this transition to companies with diffuse owners who delegate authority to professional managers is akin to Adam biting the apple in the Garden of Eden—it represents the end of innocence and the beginning of the modern world.

In short, capital markets begin to look like a daisy chain of principal-agent contracts, each with significant problems and conflicts. Let’s return to Apple. In 2013, Tim Cook faced a revolt triggered by the actions of David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, who wanted Cook to start releasing all the cash that was building up inside of Apple. Cook, and Steve Jobs before him, had resisted calls to release that cash. Einhorn was the principal telling his agent, Tim Cook, to return that cash to shareholders. But Einhorn is himself the agent of state pension funds that have delegated to him the job of generating returns.

And those state pension funds have our savings invested in them, and we’ve appointed those pension fund managers to manage our wealth. It is a series of principal-agent relationships—we (the ultimate principal) save through pensions funds (our agents), which appoint David Einhorn (the agents of the pension funds), who monitors Tim Cook (the agent of David Einhorn), who appoints Jony Ive (Cook’s agent as Apple’s chief design officer), who appoints . . . you get the idea. Once you become attuned to the principal-agent relationship, it’s hard not to see it playing out everywhere in life. In many ways, the biggest debates today on what is wrong with capitalism are actually debates about finance and agency theory.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

When the clock struck midnight: Sebastian Anthony, “Tim Cook Says Apple Will Fight US Gov’t Over Court-Ordered iPhone Backdoor,” Ars Technica, February 17, 2016. Available at: https://arstechnica.com/​gadgets/​2016/​02/​tim-cook-says-apple-will-fight-us-govt-over-court-ordered-iphone-backdoor/. “We have great respect”: Tim Cook, “A Message to our Customers,” February 16, 2016. https://www.apple.com/​customer-letter/. Seventy-two hours later: UNITED STATES V. IN THE MATTER OF THE SEARCH OF AN APPLE IPHONE, GOVERNMENT’S MOTION TO COMPEL, February 19, 2016. https://www.documentcloud.org/​documents/​2715997-Apple-iPhone-Access-MOTION-to-COMPEL.html.

Two days later, FBI Director: FBI Director Comments on San Bernardino Matter, February 21, 2016. https://www.fbi.gov/​news/​pressrel/​press-releases/​fbi-director-comments-on-san-bernardino-matter. The following day, February 22: “Email to Apple employees from Apple CEO Tim Cook,” February 22, 2016. Available at: https://www.documentcloud.org/​documents/​2716997-Tim-Cook-Emails-Apple-Employees.html. While all of this was going on: David Kravets, “Trump Urges Supporters to Boycott Apple in Wake of Encryption Brouhaha,” Ars Technica, February 19, 2016. Available at: https://arstechnica.com/​tech-policy/​2016/​02/​trump-urges-supporters-to-boycott-apple-in-wake-of-encryption-brouhaha/​. The New York case: Cyrus Farivar, “Feds: Since Apple Can Unlock iPhone 5S Running iOS 7, It Should,” Ars Technica, October 24, 2015.

Available at: https://arstechnica.com/​tech-policy/​2014/​03/​judge-denies-govt-request-to-search-suspects-iphone-in-ricin-case/​. “On devices running iOS”: Cyrus Farivar, “Apple Expands Data Encryption Under iOS 8, Making Handover to Cops Moot,” Ars Technica, September 18, 2014. Available at: https://arstechnica.com/​apple/​2014/​09/​apple-expands-data-encryption-under-ios-8-making-handover-to-cops-moot/​. That same day, in an open letter: “A mess age from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy.” September 18, 2014. Available at: https://web.archive.org/​web/​20141112091320/​https://www.apple.com/​privacy/​ Google followed suit the next day: Craig Timberg, “Newest Androids Will Join iPhones in Offering Default Encryption, Blocking Police,” The Washington Post, September 18, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​the-switch/​wp/​2014/​09/​18/​newest-androids-will-join-iphones-in-offering-default-encryption-blocking-police/​?


pages: 414 words: 117,581

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

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

CHAPTER 6: LIVE FROM CUPERTINO Details of the Apple event are the authors’ firsthand account. The chapter also draws upon Dawn Chmielewski, “Apple Brings Out Oprah to Tout Apple TV+ Streaming TV but Leaves Viewers Guessing,” Forbes, March 25, 2019; Jessica E. Lessin and Amir Efrati, “Apple’s TV Push Stalls as Partners Hesitate,” Information, July 30, 2014; Jimmy Iovine interview with Ben Sisario, “Jimmy Iovine Knows Music and Tech. Here’s Why He’s Worried,” New York Times, December 30, 2019; Tim Cook remarks, Apple Keynote Event, March 25, 2019; Mark Lawson, “Apple TV+: Less a Rival to Netflix, More a Smug Religious Cult,” Guardian, March 25, 2019; Josef Adalian, “We Learned a Lot About Apple TV+ Today, but Not How Much It’ll Cost,” New York, March 25, 2019; Elahe Izadi, “Bono Is Sorry U2’s Album Automatically Showed Up on Your iTunes,” Washington Post, October 15, 2014.

Cue questioned how the company could sell a $7,000 device and make any profit on high-end screens that delivered low margins. Cook wondered about how Apple might build a business around a piece of glass in the living room. It didn’t fit with CEO Tim Cook’s vision for building out Apple’s ecosystem. The executive who first made his mark smoothing out Apple’s supply chain isn’t known for introducing groundbreaking new wares, but rather, for building an array of products and services around his predecessor’s creations. He’s a smart, steady operator—and that’s precisely what Apple needed after its iconic founder’s death. Cook’s calm, hands-clasped stage presence, leavened with a warm Alabama lilt, lacks the crackle of electricity that Jobs generated.

But here I am, bowing to the needs of Apple TV.” Apple immediately did damage control, telling other members of the press that Hanks had been misquoted. The star’s trademark sardonic wit had been misinterpreted by writer Hadley Freeman as sincere complaining, the company insisted. The Guardian stood by its story, which remained unchanged on its website. Then, on Today, Hanks seemed to channel Apple CEO Tim Cook. On the eve of the Apple TV+ launch, Cook raved to Wall Street analysts that its $5 price point was “amazing,” as was the offer of twelve months of free service to anyone buying an Apple device. “It’s a gift to our users,” he said, “and from a business point of view, we’re really proud of the content, we’d like as many people as possible to view it.”


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Yet he would not be hurried; once again he managed the moment perfectly, releasing a statement to the board later that month saying that ‘I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.’ He ‘strongly recommended’ that the board ‘execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple’. That Apple had a succession plan came as a surprise to analysts and shareholders who had repeatedly asked the company to specify what, if any, plans there were if Jobs were to fall under a bus, and been rebuffed. He asked to be made chairman (a role largely seen inside Apple as a sinecure). The board acquiesced to all his demands. ‘I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it,’ Jobs wrote.

The latter was the case with the town of Mildura, in the Australian Outback, which was shown miles from its correct location; Australian police issued a warning to people not to use Apple’s Maps to find it lest they die of heatstroke in the arid land. (The error was tracked down to a difference in the official Australian gazetteer, which gives place locations, between ‘Mildura’, the town, and ‘Mildura Rural City’, the nominal centre of a 22,000 square kilometre area including the town. Apple had used the latter. It was corrected within days.) A week after the release, and with Apple’s maps a laughing stock, Tim Cook – who had now been in unquestioned charge of Apple for a year – surprised the media with an effusive apology posted on the website.

He insisted, as had Rubinstein, that the screen was a tough polycarbonate, the same one that had been used for the fourth-generation iPod (the colour-screen devices launched in June, which were also discontinued the next month with the release of video-capable iPods). The message – problem in one batch, not many calls, same material, concerned users should buy a case – became the only one that Apple would put out. There was no off-the-record nudge and wink, no backroom briefing. Apple had its message and stuck to it. Later in October, during Apple’s quarterly results, chief operating officer Tim Cook was asked about the scratching issue. He sang from exactly the same hymn sheet: ‘We’ve had very, very few calls from customers,’ he said. ‘We don’t believe it’s a widespread issue. It’s made of the same material as the fourth-generation iPods.


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

Tyler Wilde, “Epic Will Lose Over $300M on Epic Games Store Exclusives, Is Fine With That,” PC Gamer, April 10, 2021, accessed February 14, 2022, https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-exclusives-apple-lawsuit/. 8. Adi Robertson, “Tim Cook Faces Harsh Questions about the App Store from Judge in Fortnite Trial,” The Verge, May 21, 2021, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22448023/epic-apple-fortnite-antitrust-lawsuit-judge-tim-cook-app-store-questions. 9. Nick Wingfield, “IPhone Software Sales Take Off: Apple’s Jobs,” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2008. 10. John Gruber, “Google Announces Chrome for iPhone and iPad, Available Today,” Daring Fireball, June 28, 2021, accessed January 4, 2022, https://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/28/chrome-ios. 11.

In 2020, an estimated $700 billion was spent using iOS apps. However, less than 10% of this was billed by Apple. Of this 10%, nearly 70% was for games. Put differently, seven in every 100 dollars spent inside iPhone and iPad apps were for games, but 70 of every 100 dollars grossed by the App Store were from the category. Given that these devices are not gaming-focused, are rarely bought for this purpose, and that Apple offers almost none of the online services of a gaming platform, this figure often comes as a surprise. The judge overseeing Epic Games’ lawsuit against Apple famously told Apple CEO Tim Cook: “You don’t charge Wells Fargo, right? Or Bank of America?

Microsoft, “Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard to Bring the Joy and Community of Gaming to Everyone, Across Every Device,” January 18, 2022, accessed February 2, 2022, https://news.microsoft.com/2022/01/18/microsoft-to-acquire-activision-blizzard-to-bring-the-joy-and-community-of-gaming-to-everyone-across-every-device/. 2. Adi Robertson, “Tim Cook Faces Harsh Questions about the App Store from Judge in Fortnite Trial,” The Verge, May 21, 2021, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/21/22448023/epic-apple-fortnite-antitrust-lawsuit-judge-tim-cook-app-store-questions. 3. Brad Smith, “Adapting Ahead of Regulation: A Principled Approach to App Stores,” Microsoft, February 9, 2022, accessed February 11, 2022, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/09/open-app-store-principles-activision-blizzard/ 4.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

failed to attract: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel’s College Tour,” Valleywag, October 6, 2017, https://gawker.com/308252/peter-thiels-college-tour.gawker.com “but Thiel’s taken”: Owen Thomas “Peter Thiel Crush Alert,” Valleywag, November 27, 2007. out Tim Cook: Owen Thomas, “Is Apple COO Tim Cook Gay?” Valleywag, November 10, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20090119085309/http://valleywag.gawker.com/5082473/is-apple-coo-tim-cook-gay. that he was psychologically unstable: Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue (New York: Portfolio, 2018), 31. “Wal-Mart of Banking”: Peter Goodman and Gretchen Morgenson, “Saying Yes, WaMu Built Empire on Shaky Loans,” The New York Times, December 28, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/business/28wamu.html.

His closest advisers were there: Bannon, Pence, Priebus, Kushner, Stephen Miller, Ivanka Trump, plus Eric and Don Jr. But the real stars were the CEOs of the United States’ largest and most important tech companies, and their shepherd in all things Trump, Peter Thiel. He sat at Trump’s left elbow, with Pence on the other side. To his left was Apple’s Tim Cook. Arrayed around the table, interspersed between Trump’s advisers and children, was a group that included Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, as well as the CEOs of Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Intel, and IBM. “These are monster companies,” Trump said, beaming before lavishing praise on Thiel.

Zuckerberg had taught himself Mandarin, and while hosting a top party official, he’d displayed copies of Xi’s book, saying that he’d been presenting them to employees as gifts. The following year, just as Trump’s anti-China rhetoric was propelling him to the front of the Republican field, Zuckerberg was laying it on thick with Xi in person. Over dinner at the White House with the Chinese leader—as well as President Obama, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella—Zuckerberg, whose wife, Priscilla, was pregnant at the time, asked Xi to give his unborn child an honorary Chinese name. Xi declined. Zuckerberg had bent over backward in 2016 to avoid being seen as anti-conservative, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the conservatives had maneuvered him into helping Trump win the election.


pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

A year after launch, out of 100 users, about 17 had ever tried it and out of those 17 just 5 used it when they could.20 Over the course of the year more people got the new iPhone model so that more people in total had Apple Pay set up on their phones and used it when they could. The number of people who probably had Apple Pay on their phones increased from roughly 2.7 million in November 2014 to 11.7 million in October 2015.21 As a result, the likelihood that an American adult would use Apple Pay at a terminal that accepted Apple Pay increased from 0.7 percent in November 2014 to 1.8 percent in October 2015.22 When it planned Apple Pay, the company had reasons to believe that more retailers would have the slick NFC terminals that Tim Cook showed at the September 2014 announcement.

As they make the journey toward the critical mass frontier, how can they know whether they have made a wrong turn and need to adjust, whether they should abandon the trip, or whether they are about to cross the frontier into the growth zone? Let’s follow one of the most successful matchmakers of all time on a recent trek. Chapter 10 Fizzle or Sizzle Making Smart Bets on New Matchmakers Forty-three minutes into the Apple live event, on September 9, 2014, after introducing the new iPhone 6, Tim Cook announced he was going to talk about an “entirely new category of service” for Apple.1 A thick wallet with cash and cards sticking out appeared on the screen behind him. “Our vision is to replace this.” According to Cook, people in the United States “scramble” for their cards about 200 million times a day, and they “go through what is a fairly antiquated payment process.”

When eBay attempted to expand its business into China, it had trouble attracting enough retailers and buyers to interest either side, and it had to give up its expansion plans. Apple Pay Organizes Support In 2014, there was a well-developed ecosystem for consumer payments in the United States. Along with cash and checks, there were credit and debit cards.6 The average person over the age of 18 had 2.4 cards. Many merchants accepted these cards; consumers could pay with them at millions of locations.7 Americans used them a lot, as Tim Cook pointed out: more than 200 million times a day for a total of $4 trillion of purchases a year.8 Debit and credit cards involve three major groups of businesses in the United States and many developed countries.


pages: 120 words: 33,892

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Jeff Bezos, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tim Cook: Apple

Carl Icahn wrote an open letter to Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook. Icahn asked for Apple to return cash through a $150 billion buyback. Icahn wrote in the letter:61 When we met, you agreed with us that the shares are undervalued. In our view, irrational undervaluation as dramatic as this is often a short-term anomaly. The timing for a larger buyback is still ripe, but the opportunity will not last forever. While the board’s actions to date ($60 billion share repurchase over three years) may seem like a large buyback, it is simply not large enough given that Apple currently holds $147 billion of cash on its balance sheet, and that it will generate $51 billion of [operating earnings] next year (Wall Street consensus forecast…With such an enormous valuation gap and such a massive amount of cash on the balance sheet, we find it difficult to imagine why the board would not move more aggressively to buy back stock by immediately announcing a $150 billion tender offer (financed with debt or a mix of debt and cash on the balance sheet).

“iPrefs: Unlocking Value.” Greenlight Capital, 2013. Available at https://www.greenlightcapital.com/905284.pdf. 60 David Einhorn. “iPrefs: Unlocking Value.” Greenlight Capital, 2013. Available at https://www.greenlightcapital.com/905284.pdf. 61 Carl Icahn, Letter to Tim Cook. Available at https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/24/carl-icahns-letter-to-tim-cook.html 62 Carl C Icahn, Tweet, 11:21 AM, August 14, 2013. Available at https://twitter.com/Carl_C_Icahn/statuses/367350206993399808 63 David Einhorn. “iPrefs: Unlocking Value.” Greenlight Capital, 2013. Available at https://www.greenlightcapital.com/905284.pdf. 64 Carl C Icahn, Tweet, 11:12 AM, 11:13 AM, August 19, 2014.

In early 2013, Einhorn pushed Apple, Inc., then trading at $60, to pay out some of its huge pile of cash. Einhorn said that Apple’s $150 billion in cash was too much for a stock with only $60 billion in fixed assets. Apple could use it to buy “all but 17 companies in the S&P 500.”59 It earned next to no interest. It was better in the hands of shareholders. He said Apple’s stock price was discounted to the value of the cash, about $20 per share. Apple could “unlock significant shareholder value” by cutting the cash on its “bloated balance sheet.”60 Einhorn wasn’t the only activist to complain about Apple’s cash pile.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

“it will be about health”: Lizzy Gurdus, “Tim Cook: Apple’s Greatest Contribution Will Be ‘About Health,’ ” CNBC, January 8, 2019. See: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/tim-cook-teases-new-apple-services-tied-to-health-care.html. Racing Apple are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, Baidu, Tencent, and others: CB Insights does an excellent job summarizing the big-tech healthcare ecosystem in these two reports: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/top-tech-companies-healthcare-investments-acquisitions/ and https://www.cbinsights.com/research/google-amazon-apple-health-insurance/. DIY Diagnostics Oura ring: See: https://ouraring.com.

AR is projected to create a $90 billion market: “For AR/VR 2.0 to Live, AR/VR 1.0 Must Die,” Digi-Capital, January 15, 2019. See: https://www.digi-capital.com/news/2019/01/for-ar-vr-2-0-to-live-ar-vr-1-0-must-die/. I regard [AR] as a big idea like the smartphone: David Phelan, “Apple CEO Tim Cook: As Brexit Hangs over UK, ‘Times Are Not Really Awful, There’s Some Great Things Happening’,” Independent. See: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/apple-tim-cook-boss-brexit-uk-theresa-may-number-10-interview-ustwo-a7574086.html. Nintendo released Pokémon GO: Lauren Munsi, “Pokémon GO Surpasses the 1 Billion Downloads Milestone,” Nintendo Wire, July 31, 2019.

For most of the last century, the healthcare industry was an uneasy partnership between big pharma, big government, and the full spectrum of doctors, nurses, and trained medical professionals. Now we’re witnessing an invasion. Many of the big technology companies are getting into this game, all intent on making an impact. “If you zoom out into the future,” Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said (in that same interview with the Independent where he talked about the potential of AR), “and ask what was Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind, it will be about health.” Racing Apple are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Samsung, Baidu, Tencent, and others. As we shall see in a moment, all of these companies have three clear advantages over the establishment: They’re already in your home, into artificial intelligence, and experts in collecting and analyzing your data.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

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

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

S&E Enterprise in a Global Context,” National Science Foundation, https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/report/sections/overview/workers-with-s-eskills. 50 Jane Croft, “China plays catch-up with Europe and US in patents filing race,” Financial Times, July 9, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/8ecf7464-8d05-11e9-b8cb-26a9caa9d67b. 51 “Charting a Course for Success: America’s Strategy for Stem Education,” National Science and Technology Council, December 2018, https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/05/f62/STEM-Education-Strategic-Plan-2018.pdf. 52 “2019 1st Quarter Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey,” National Association of Manufacturers, https://www.nam.org/2019-1st-quarter-manufacturers-outlook-survey/. 53 Glenn Leibowitz, “Apple CEO Tim Cook: This Is the No. 1 Reason We Make iPhones in China (It’s Not What You Think),” Inc., December 21, 2017, https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-is-number-1-reason-we-make-iphones-in-china-its-not-what-you-think.html. 54 “Recommendations for Strengthening American Leadership in Industries of the Future.” 55 O’Mara, The Code, 389. 56 “The Global AI Talent Tracker,” MacroPolo, https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-tracker/. 57 Sara Salinas, “Mary Meeker just presented 294 slides on the future of the internet—read them here,” CNBC, May 30, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/mary-meekers-internet-trends-2018.html. 58 Ruchir Sharma, “The Comeback Nation,” Foreign Affairs, May 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-03-31/comeback-nation. 59 Stuart Anderson, “Trump Cuts Legal Immigrants By Half and He’s Not Done Yet,” Forbes, July 21, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/07/21/trump-cuts-legal-immigrants-by-half-and-hes-not-done-yet/#4446d3f46168. 60 “Suspension of Entry of Immigrants Who Present a Risk to the United States Labor Market During the Economic Recovery Following the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Outbreak,” The White House, April 22, 2020, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/04/27/2020-09068/suspension-of-entry-of-immigrants-who-present-a-risk-to-the-united-states-labor-market-during-the. 61 Laura Collins and Matthew Denhart, “Policy Recommendations: Modernizing Immigration for Today’s Realities,” George W.

FBI director James Comey publicly requested that Apple write code to bypass the phone’s security features. Eventually, a judge ordered Apple to do so. Apple refused. “Some would argue that building a backdoor for just one iPhone is a simple, clean-cut solution,” Tim Cook wrote in an open letter. “Ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.”29 In the debate between the government’s responsibility to protect Americans and the tech industry’s obligation to safeguard its customers’ privacy, each side wielded dueling metaphors. In Comey’s estimation, Apple selling encrypted iPhones to terrorists was no different than selling a kidnapper a closet that could never be opened.

In 2010, Time magazine named Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year.7 A couple of years later, the cover of Forbes featured Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey under the headline “America’s Best Entrepreneurs.”8 When I arrived in the Bay in the summer of 2014, Airbnb, which had started six years earlier as an air mattress in its founders’ San Francisco living room, had recently closed a $475 million funding round.9 Uber had just launched Uber Pool.10 Within a year, Fitbit had IPOed.11 Palantir, the data analytics company, was valued at $20 billion.12 The term “unicorn” had originally been coined to describe the rarity of billion-dollar start-ups; by mid-2015, there were over 130 unicorns.13 By the middle of the decade, 62 percent of adult Americans were on Zuckerberg’s Facebook.14 Sleek Apple Watches started appearing on the wrists of the well connected, and Amazon Echos began dotting living rooms around the United States. The optimism was electric. The decade was also a high-water mark in Washington’s love affair with Silicon Valley; this crystallized when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a group of tech executives, “Use me like an app!”15 Hardly a White House roundtable or commission was complete without a handful of Silicon Valley luminaries. State dinners at the White House were studded with tech titans—Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison.16 The so-called tech surge to overhaul the healthcare.gov website in late 2013 brought a growing number of technologists into government.17 Google seemed so completely intertwined with the Obama administration that some dubbed it the “Android administration,” after the Google mobile phone.18 Googlers flooded into the administration, and a steady stream of White House staffers left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington for 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View.19 It had not yet become cliché—or ironic—to say that we were changing the world.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

“Bringing high-volume electronics” Kenneth Kraemer, Greg Linden, and Jason Dedrick, “Capturing Value in Global Networks: Apple’s iPad and iPhone,” Personal Computing Industry Center, University of California, Irvine, and Syracuse University School of Information Studies, July 2011, http://pcic.merage.uci.edu/​papers/​2011/​Value_iPad_iPhone.pdf. jobs for Apple engineers, marketers, and sales staff Apple CEO Tim Cook claims that the company has created “two million” American jobs (https://apple.com/​newsroom/​2018/​01/​apple-accelerates-us-investment-job-creation), but only eighty thousand of the holders of these jobs are actual Apple employees. Almost 1.5 million are members of what he describes as the “developer community” who write the apps he says have “changed the world.”

Spence, “Job Market Signalling,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (1973): 355–74. “he more nearly resembles” Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911), 59. “began to stop having as many vocational kinds of skills” Shawn Langlois, “Tim Cook Says This Is the Real Reason Apple Products Are Made in China,” MarketWatch, December 21, 2015, http://www.marke­twatch.com/​story/​tim-cook-apple-doesnt-make-its-products-in-china-because-its-cheaper-2015-12-20. a significant “negative impact” factor on their bottom line “The Boiling Point? The Skills Gap in the United States,” Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute, 2011, http://www.theman­ufacturi­nginsti­tute.org/​~/​media/​A07730B2A7­98437D985­01E798C­2E13AA.ashx.

Given the rapid advances in factory automation, it’s unclear just how many people should be trained up for jobs in mass manufacturing, no matter how “advanced.” In May 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a $1 billion advanced-manufacturing fund to bolster US manufacturers by offering skills training, such as teaching people to write code to create apps. But the announcement came with a caveat: the cost of this program would be paid with “US money which we have to borrow to get.” Cook was intentionally reminding us that a substantial portion of Apple’s cash holdings is registered overseas and cannot be used in the United States unless repatriated under the US tax code, triggering the collection of income tax. Apple has kept earnings abroad and has borrowed money from its own foreign subsidiaries to pay dividends and make new investments.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

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

He and a few close colleagues helped to orchestrate some of the drug busts in New York, limited widespread fraud in China, and helped repair other areas in which Uber was bleeding money and facing liabilities. He was valuable. When he started in March 2014, Quentin’s team faced a very specific headache. Two years earlier, Apple released a version of its iOS mobile software that killed outside access to the unique identification number of every iPhone, the so-called IMEI number, or “international mobile equipment identity” number. The update was a hallmark of Tim Cook’s Apple. Unlike its rivals Google, Facebook, and Amazon, Apple’s business didn’t rely on hoovering up personal data from its customers. Facebook and Google were advertising companies, and as such relied on discovering every digital detail of its customers’ lives in order to target them with ads.

Uber’s method of identifying fraudsters made use of digital surveillance techniques common to Silicon Valley’s largest companies. That practice ran against some of Apple’s long-espoused principles, specifically an individual’s right to privacy. Steve Jobs had valued consumer privacy, but his successor, Tim Cook, was a fanatic. He believed Apple’s users should have complete control of their private digital lives. And if an Apple customer decided to wipe their iPhone clean of data, no one else—individuals, family members, companies, law enforcement—should be able to find a trace of that data on the device afterwards.

Should they address the issue with the public? And what if Apple started snooping around? Uber had recently submitted their newest iOS app build. What were they supposed to tell Apple if they found out Uber was breaking the rules? At first, nothing happened. But a few weeks later they got their answer: the App Store declined Uber’s latest software update. Quentin’s team had been caught. As the man in charge of the App Store, Eddy Cue had seen the best—and worst—of the startup world. Eddy Cue reported directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and no one else. He was the guy who saw rising startup stars before nearly anyone else in Silicon Valley, because their apps skyrocketed to the top of his charts.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

And to be fair, some companies, including Apple and, more recently, Google, are trying to get out in front of such efforts, by making tweaks to their own devices and systems that make it easier for people to track and limit their own technology usage. In 2018, in a speech to EU officials, Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted that there was, and is, a serious dark side to the Big Tech revolution. “We shouldn’t sugar-coat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data only serve to enrich the companies that collect them.” Earlier that year, he admitted that he himself—like many Apple users—was spending way too much time on his phone, and that this was a problem.

In a speech at a European privacy commissioners conference in late October 2018, Apple CEO Tim Cook decried the “data industrial complex” made up of companies (including Google and Facebook) that make the vast majority of their money by keeping people online for as long as possible in order to garner as much of their personal data as possible. “Our own information—from the everyday to the deeply personal—is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” said Cook, whose own company still makes most of its money from hardware. Apple has its own issues—from tax offshoring to legal battles over intellectual property infringement, which we will explore later.

Rana Foroohar, “Vivienne Ming: ‘The Professional Class Is About to Be Blindsided by AI,” Financial Times, July 27, 2018. 69. Sam Levin, “Facebook Told Advertisers It Can Identify Teens Feeling ‘Insecure’ and ‘Worthless,’ ” The Guardian, May 1, 2017. 70. Foroohar, “All I Want for Christmas Is a Digital Detox.” 71. Emily Bary, “Apple Never Meant for You to Spend So Much Time on Your Phone, Tim Cook Says,” MarketWatch, June 27, 2019. 72. Olivia Solon, “Ex-Facebook President Sean Parker: Site Made to Exploit Human ‘Vulnerability,’ ” The Guardian, November 9, 2017. Chapter 2: The Valley of the Kings 1. Rana Foroohar and Edward Luce, “Privacy as a Competitive Advantage,” Financial Times, October 16, 2017. 2.


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Matthew Panzarino, “Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy,” TechCrunch, June 2, 2015, http://techcrunch.com/​2015/​06/​02/​apples-tim-cook-delivers-blistering-speech-on-encryption-privacy/. 2. Ibid. 3. Tim Cook, “Apple’s Commitment to Your Privacy,” Apple, http://www.apple.com/​privacy/. 4. Robin Anderson, Consumer Culture and TV Programming (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). 5. Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, “Television Delivers People,” Persistence of Vision—Volume 1: Monitoring the Media (1973), video. 6. Farhad Manjoo, “What Apple’s Tim Cook Overlooked in His Defense of Privacy,” New York Times, June 10, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/​2015/​06/​11/​technology/​what-apples-tim-cook-overlooked-in-his-defense-of-privacy.html?

Farhad Manjoo, “What Apple’s Tim Cook Overlooked in His Defense of Privacy,” New York Times, June 10, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/​2015/​06/​11/​technology/​what-apples-tim-cook-overlooked-in-his-defense-of-privacy.html?_r=0. 7. Lev Grossman, “Inside Facebook’s Plan to Wire the World,” Time, December 15, 2014, http://time.com/​facebook-world-plan/. 8. iOS Developer Library, “What’s New in Safari,” Apple, https://developer.apple.com/​library/​ios/​releasenotes/​General/​WhatsNewInSafari/​Articles/​Safari_9.html [website is no longer active]. 9. Joshua Benton, “A Blow for Mobile Advertising: The Next Version of Safari Will Let Users Block Ads on iPhones and iPads,” NiemanLab, June 10, 2015, http://www.niemanlab.org/​2015/​06/​a-blow-for-mobile-advertising-the-next-version-of-safari-will-let-users-block-ads-on-iphones-and-ipads/. 10.

But the word became widely used in 2013 after Netflix began releasing the full seasons at once, prompting the Oxford Dictionary to add it to the language and also short-list it as “Word of the Year” (the ultimate winner was “selfie”). CHAPTER 28 WHO’S BOSS HERE? On June 1, 2015, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, the world’s most valuable company, gave a speech at the annual dinner of a small Washington nonprofit named EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Apple’s leaders almost never give speeches in Washington, making Cook’s appearance something of a surprise; though to be fair, he didn’t actually show up at the dinner, but rather videoconferenced his way in. All the same, even more surprising was what he had to say.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

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

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

Spy Agencies,” Washington Post, November 20, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/11/20/amazon-launches-new-cloud-storage-service-for-u-s-spy-agencies/?utm_term=.8dcf7ac21a9f. Cook’s social and political intuition: Todd Frankel, “The Roots of Tim Cook’s Activism Lie in Rural Alabama,” Washington Post, March 7, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/07/in-rural-alabama-the-activist-roots-of-apples-tim-cook/?utm_term=.5f670fd2354d. “more than 5½ years”: Computer-security experts question that figure, because Apple does not fully realize how quickly the NSA’s supercomputers can crack codes. the agency developed the “Clipper chip”: Steven Levy, “Battle of the Clipper Chip,” New York Times, June 12, 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipper-chip.html.

But the real irony was that as tech firms publicly protested the NSA’s intrusions into their networks—Microsoft, IBM, and AT&T among them—they were privately vying for the hugely profitable business of managing the intelligence community’s data. * * * — Tim Cook, the quiet, almost ascetic chief executive of Apple, rose in the company as a counterweight to Steve Jobs. Jobs was the showman, Cook the understated strategist. Jobs erupted when products didn’t look right or politics limited the ideal technological solution; Cook lacked Jobs’s intuitive sense of what made a product feel distinctly like an Apple product, but what he lacked as a designer he made up for with his considerable geopolitical sensibility. Whereas Jobs was no ideologue and rarely dug deeply into the question of Apple’s place in society, Cook seemed as comfortable making a civil-liberties argument as a technological one.

If it wouldn’t be tolerated in the physical world, he said, why should it be tolerated in the digital world? From the other coast, Tim Cook had an answer: the apartment keys and trunk keys belonged to the owner of the apartment and the car, not to the manufacturer of their locks. “It’s our job to provide you with the tools to lock up your stuff,” Cook said. At Apple and Google, company executives told me that Washington had brought these changes on themselves. Because the NSA had failed to police their own insiders, the world was demanding that Apple prove their data was secure, and it was up to Apple to do so. Naturally the government saw this as a deliberate dodge.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Some corporations launched public initiatives to help Black people progress within their company ranks, while others created multimillion-dollar funds that target minorities. On June 3, 2020, Goldman Sachs established a $10 million fund to help address racial and economic injustice. SoftBank, a Japanese company focused on technology, launched a $100 million fund to invest in start-ups led by Black Americans and people of color. CEO Tim Cook announced the investment of $100 million in Apple’s racial equity and justice initiative. Beyond this, many executives spoke of the need to educate themselves about the realities of daily racial injustice. However, the global nature and scale of the demonstrations mean that corporations must move from large proclamations and statements to actions—from tell to show.

Global technological tensions and competition necessarily throw up questions of surveillance, counterterrorism, and regulatory creep. Boards and management often find these to be among the hardest questions to answer, as they can pit moral and ethical views against the imperative to grow the business and achieve commercial success. Take the matter of data use. At a conference in Orlando, Florida, in 2019, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, declared data privacy to be the most important issue of the century. Western society assumes that an individual’s personal information is theirs and theirs alone and should be protected. This notion was enshrined in the European Union’s 2016 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which forced companies to reevaluate their data management.

May 6, 2019. https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/chairman-clayton-companies-should-provide-more-disclosure-on-human-capital-management/. Thorndike, William, Jr. The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2012. 350.org. “About 350.” https://350.org/about/. Tibken, Shara. “Tim Cook Says Some Tech Regulation Likely Needs to Happen.” CNET, October 2, 2018. www.cnet.com/news/tim-cook-talks-privacy-regulation-congress-alex-jones-china-during-interview/. Tonello, Matteo. “Separation of Chair and CEO Roles.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, September 1, 2001. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2011/09/01/separation-of-chair-and-ceo-roles/.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

They asked a nationally representative group of people about their intent to buy Apple products in the near future. Some of the respondents were first randomly shown a statement that the Apple CEO Tim Cook had made criticizing Indiana’s religious freedom bill as discriminatory to LGBTQ individuals. Other respondents randomly received a generic statement about Cook’s management philosophy. And some respondents were provided with no additional statement. Those who heard about Cook’s activism expressed a significantly higher intent to buy Apple products in the near future than those in the other two groups. The authors concluded, “Learning about Cook’s activism increased intent to purchase among supporters of same-sex marriage but did not erode intent among its opponents.

They want to make sure the company they are in is actually committed to improving the state of the world. What is going to happen is that you have these very young people getting involved with next-generation technologies, and they are going to use it to create this [new] industrial revolution, which is actually about saving the planet.” Apple CEO Tim Cook, speaking to my colleague Adam Lashinsky at a CEO event in San Francisco in 2018, put it this way: “For Apple, we have always been about changing the world. It became clear to me a number of years ago that you don’t do that by staying quiet on things that matter. And so, for us, that’s been the driving issue.… I don’t think business should only deal in commercial things.

CNBC, December 16, 2019. 9. Letter from Josh Bolten, Business Roundtable, to Senator Elizabeth Warren, October 21, 2019. https://www.boston.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/2019.10.03-Response-to -Letter-to-Business-Round-Table-re-stakeholder-commitments-and-the-Accountable -Capitalism-Act.pdf. 10. Jonathan Vanian. “Apple CEO Tim Cook on Data Privacy, Immigration, and Speaking Out.” Fortune, June 25, 2018. 11. Leadership Next interview, Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt with Chip Bergh. 12. Alan Murray and David Meyer. “Satya Nadella Explains Microsoft’s Climate Responsibilities.” CEO Daily/Fortune, January 24, 2020. 13. Alan Murray and David Meyer.


pages: 382 words: 92,138

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Lewis, J. 2007. ‘Technology Acquisition and Innovation in the Developing World: Wind Turbine Development in China and India’. Studies in Comparative International Development 32, nos. 3–4: 208–32. Liedtke, M. 2012. ‘Apple Cash: CEO Tim Cook Says Company Has More Than It Needs’. Huffington Post, 23 February. Available online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/23/apple-cash-ceo-tim-cook_n_1297897.html?view=print&comm_ref=false (accessed 19 July 2012). Lim, B. and S. Rabinovitch. 2010. ‘China Mulls $1.5 Trillion Strategic Industries Boost: Sources’. Reuters, 3 December. Available online at http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/12/03/us-china-economy-investmentidUSTRE6B16U920101203 (accessed 24 July 2012).

To put this in greater perspective, the average employee at Foxconn earns $4,622 annually, meaning the top 9 executives earned the same amount of money as 95,000 workers did in 2011 and 89,000 workers did in 2012. Borrowing the method that Shapiro used, one could factor that the top 9 Apple executives are expected to earn the same amount of money as roughly 17,600 of the company’s US retail employees did in 2011 (64 per cent of the total) and 15,000 (55 per cent of the total) in 2012 (Shapiro 2012).2 When Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, announced in February 2012 that the company has more cash ($98 billion) than it currently needs to sustain its operations, many analysts and shareholders expected Apple to return a portion of its record-high cash to its shareholders (Liedtke 2012). The top executives were intrigued by the question of what to do with the excess sitting cash, since the company had not been distributing dividends or repurchasing its own stocks during Steve Jobs’ tenure.

‘Display’s the Thing: The Real Stakes in the Conflict over High Resolution Displays’. Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE) Working Paper no. 52. Available online at http://brie.berkeley.edu/publications/WP%2052.pdf (accessed 24 January 2013). Haslam, K. 2012. ‘Tim Cook’s Disastrous First Appointment as CEO’. Macworld, 30 October. Available online at http://www.macworld.co.uk/apple-business/news/?newsid=3407940&pagtype=allchandate (accessed 22 January 2013). Henderson, J. 2004. ‘UT Professor, 81, Is Mired in Patent Lawsuit’. Houston Chronicle, 5 June. Available online at http://www.chron.com/default/article/UT-professor-81-is-mired-in-patent-lawsuit-1662323.php (accessed 11 February 2013).


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Jobs was prepared to sue. Tim Cook, as Apple’s supply chain expert, was wary of endangering the relationship with a supplier that Apple depended on. When Jay Lee visited the Cupertino campus, Jobs and Cook expressed their concerns to him. Apple drafted a proposal to license some of its patents to Samsung for $30 per smartphone and $40 per tablet, with a 20 percent discount for cross-licensing Samsung’s portfolio back to Apple. For 2010 that revenue would have come to $250 million. In the end, Samsung’s lawyers reversed the offer. Since Apple was copying Samsung’s patents, they argued, Apple had to pay Samsung.

The commercial was more a brand-building exercise than an effort to sell more phones, poking fun at Apple’s lawsuit. Samsung was riding a powerful wave of positive publicity. Forbes described the ad as “a barrage of not-so-subtle jabs at competitor Apple Inc.” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for marketing, was livid at Samsung’s marketing campaign. He shot an email to Apple’s ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, with a link to the Wall Street Journal article. “We have a lot of work to do to turn this around,” he wrote. He emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook that Apple “may need to start a search for a new agency.” “We feel it too and it hurts,” wrote an advertising executive at TBWA back to Schiller.

She later decided that the jury had miscalculated Samsung’s damages and cut Apple’s award down to $600 million. The legal war between the two companies, however, was far from over. A second trial between Apple and Samsung was already in the works. Samsung took home some legal victories as well in the UK, Japan, and South Korea. * * * — ON THE MORNING OF September 12, 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage in Cupertino for his first product launch as successor to the late Steve Jobs. “Today we’re taking it to the next level,” he said. After years of waiting to deliver something dramatically new, Apple was releasing the iPhone 5.


Deep Value by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, financial engineering, fixed income, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, John Bogle, joint-stock company, low interest rates, margin call, passive investing, principal–agent problem, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Teledyne, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple

Applied Deep Value 207 Einhorn argued that, at a 10 percent cost of capital, the cash represented an opportunity cost of close to $13.7 billion per year, or $14 in earnings per share. His solution was for Apple to issue to existing shareholders “iPrefs”— high-yielding preference shares—which, said Einhorn, would allow Apple to “unlock significant shareholder value” by reducing the cash on its “bloated balance sheet.”18 He wasn’t the only activist to complain about Apple’s huge cash stockpile. Shortly after Einhorn unveiled his idea at the Ira W. Sohn Conference, Icahn would also propose in an open letter to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, that Apple return cash through a $150 billion buyback:19 When we met, you agreed with us that the shares are undervalued.

If no activist emerges to improve the unexploited intrinsic value, other corrective forces act on the market price to generate excellent returns in the meantime. The coda to Einhorn’s and Icahn’s campaigns to have Apple pay out $150 billion in excess capital clearly demonstrates the power of this idea. After both had prodded Apple for 6 months, writing letters and meeting with Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Apple initiated a buyback in 2013. By February 2014 it had repurchased $40 billion of stock, a record amount for any company over a 12-month span.21 Shortly afterward, Icahn withdrew his plan to have the company undertake the bigger buyback he had proposed, writing in an open letter to Apple shareholders, “We see no reason to persist with our nonbinding proposal, especially when the company is already so close to fulfilling our requested repurchase target.”22 After Icahn had withdrawn his plan, Apple announced in April that it would in fact 210 DEEP VALUE return $130 billion in capital through an increased buyback and a hike in its dividend.

Greenlight Capital, 2013. Available at https://www.greenlightcapital.com/905284.pdf. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Carl Icahn, “Letter to Tim Cook.” Icahn Enterprises, October 8, 2013. Available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/178753981/Carl-Icahn-s-Letter-To-Apple-s-Tim-Cook. 20. Einhorn, 2013. 21. David Benoit. “Icahn Ends Apple Push With Hefty Paper Profit.” The Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2014. Applied Deep Value 215 22. Steven Russolillo. “Carl Icahn: ‘Agree Completely’ With Apple’s Bigger Buyback.” The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2014. 23. Benoit, 2014. 24. Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. Security Analysis.


pages: 190 words: 53,409

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, attribution theory, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, experimental subject, framing effect, full employment, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, hindsight bias, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, low interest rates, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Thaler, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, selection bias, side project, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, ultimatum game, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, winner-take-all economy

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, part 4, section 3, Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html. 8. Adam Satariano, Peter Burrows, and Brad Stone, “Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice at Apple,” Bloomberg Business, October 12, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/scott-forstall-the-sorcerers-apprentice-at-apple-10122011.html. 9. Jay Yarrow, “Tim Cook: Why I Fired Scott Forstall,” Business Insider, December 6, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-why-i-fired-scott-forstall-2012–12. 10. Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, New York: Simon and Shuster, 2015. 11. M. A. Fox, B. A. Connolly, and T.

Yet few press accounts of him during his heyday at the company failed to mention that he was unusually ambitious. According to Bloomberg Business, some associates described him off the record as someone who “routinely takes credit for collaborative successes, deflects blame for mistakes.”8 When Forstall was dismissed in October 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained that the move was necessary to preserve the company’s collaborative culture.9 Does willingness to acknowledge the contributions of others—to admit that your success stemmed in part from what others did—affect your attractiveness as a teammate? My experience with former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, with whom I had the privilege of coauthoring an introductory economics textbook, suggests that it does.

Perceptions that someone is “too ambitious” may sometimes be rooted in jealousy or envy, but unusually ambitious individuals can threaten team cohesion even in the absence of such emotions. Many believe, for example, that former Apple senior vice president Scott Forstall was discharged from his post for that reason. Forstall had been the chief architect of the iOS operating system that powers the iPhone and iPad, whose meteoric sales growth made Apple the most profitable company in history. He had been the longtime protégé of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, was universally acknowledged as an extraordinary engineering talent, and was sometimes mentioned as a potential future Apple CEO. Yet few press accounts of him during his heyday at the company failed to mention that he was unusually ambitious.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

“In terms of business competitiveness”: Businessweek Archives, “Same Sex Benefits: Where IBM Goes, Others May Follow,” Bloomberg Business, October 6, 1996, www.​bloomberg.​com/​bw/​stories/​1996-​10-​06/same-​sex-​benefits-​where-​ibm-​goes-​others-​may-​follow. a gay man, Tim Cook: Timothy Donald Cook, “Tim Cook Speaks Up,” Bloomberg Business, October 30, 2014, www.​bloomberg.​com/​news/​articles/​2014-​10-​30/​tim-​cook-​speaks-​up. Apple, the most valuable company: Verne Kopytoff, “Apple: The First $700 Billion Company,” Fortune, February 10, 2015, http://​fortune.​com/​2015/​02/​10/​apple-​the-​first-​700-​billion-​company/. In 1907 alone, 3,242 miners died: MSHA, “Coal Fatalities for 1900 Through 2014,” US Department of Labor, accessed January 9, 2016, www.​msha.​gov/​stats/​centurystats/​coalstats.​asp.

Since then, gays and lesbians have registered impressive progress in many domains. This progress is uneven, of course. Many gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans are still victims of prejudice, violence, and WMDs. This is especially true among poor and minority populations. Still, as I write this, a gay man, Tim Cook, is the chief executive of Apple, the most valuable company on earth. And if he so chooses, he has the constitutional right to marry a man. Now that we’ve seen how corporations can move decisively to right a wrong in their hiring algorithms, why can’t they make similar adjustments to the mathematical models wreaking havoc on our society, the WMDs?

By doing this, we have unwittingly built the greatest-ever training corpus for natural-language machines. As we turned from paper to e-mail and social networks, machines could study our words, compare them to others, and gather something about their context. The progress has been fast and dramatic. As late as 2011, Apple underwhelmed most of techdom with its natural-language “personal assistant,” Siri. The technology was conversant only in certain areas, and it made laughable mistakes. Most people I know found it near useless. But now I hear people talking to their phones all the time, asking for the weather report, sports scores, or directions.


pages: 223 words: 60,909

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Amélie Lamont, “Not a Black Chair,” Medium, March 14, 2016, https://medium.com/@amelielamont/not-a-black-chair-8a8e7e2b9140#.gpk28w3fp. 3. Erica Joy, “The Other Side of Diversity,” Medium, November 4, 2014, https://medium.com/this-is-hard/the-other-side-of-diversity-1bb3de2f053e#.xn7th3cbt. 4. Megan Rose Dickey, “Apple’s Tim Cook on Latest Diversity Numbers: There’s ‘a Lot More Work to be Done,’” TechCrunch, August 13, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/13/apples-tim-cook-on-latest-diversity-numbers-theres-a-lot-more-work-to-be-done. 5. Maxine Williams, “Facebook Diversity Update: Positive Hiring Trends Show Progress,” Facebook Newsroom, July 14, 2016, http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/07/facebook-diversity-update-positive-hiring-trends-show-progress. 6.

CRAWLING TOWARD REPRESENTATION To be fair, I’m not saying tech isn’t doing anything to improve diversity. You can find annual diversity reports from most of the big companies now, highlighting shifts in employee demographics and glossy profiles of staff from underrepresented groups. Whenever a new one comes out, though, it tends to read something like this one, from Apple CEO Tim Cook, in 2015: We are proud of the progress we’ve made, and our commitment to diversity is unwavering. But we know there is a lot more work to be done.4 Or this one, from Facebook’s global director of diversity, Maxine Williams, in 2016: Over the past few years, we have been working hard to increase diversity at Facebook through a variety of internal and external programs and partnerships.

And the title “Doctor” was coded as male.2 Or in March of 2016, when JAMA Internal Medicine released a study showing that the artificial intelligence built into smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Google, and Microsoft isn’t programmed to help during a crisis. The phones’ personal assistants didn’t understand words like “rape,” or “my husband is hitting me.” In fact, instead of doing even a simple web search, Siri—Apple’s product—cracked jokes and mocked users.3 It wasn’t the first time. Back in 2011, if you told Siri you were thinking about shooting yourself, it would give you directions to a gun store. After getting bad press, Apple partnered with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to offer users help when they said something that Siri identified as suicidal.


pages: 309 words: 96,168

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

When Burberry stores started seeing double-digit growth in sales, it became clear that Angela’s leadership style was equal parts vision and substance. * * * — Her success at Burberry was what got Tim Cook’s attention. Angela may have been hesitant to sign on to Apple at first, but she couldn’t resist the challenge Tim laid out for her. From its inception, the Apple Store had almost mythic status as a mecca for Apple superfans. But as the brand grew more and more popular, Apple’s customer base had grown and changed, too. The challenge now was to maintain the stores’ allure for techies while also appealing to more mainstream crowds. To pull that off would require a big vision.

And she’d regularly rotate in appearances by different senior execs from Apple’s offices across the globe, to build that sense of one cohesive team. Angela also worked to create more human-to-human contact across Apple’s network of retail stores: for example, through apps designed to make it easier for people working in different stores to connect and solve problems together. The mission she brought to the Apple Stores started with a question inspired by a quote from Tim Cook. Says Angela, “Tim used to always say, ‘Apple Retail has always been about so much more than just selling.’ So if it’s not just about selling, then what is it about?”

The change was so dramatic, Angela herself was declared by the British press to be the highest-paid executive in the United Kingdom. She and her family had settled happily into their life in the United Kingdom, and she had just shared a plan with her board—to double revenue again, over the next five years. And then Apple called. Or the search firm anyway. Apple CEO Tim Cook felt she should become Apple’s next Head of Retail. “And I said, ‘I’m honored, absolutely honored to be considered, but I have the greatest job in the world and I’m on a mission. So, no, thank you.’ ” Six months later, they called again. “And I said, ‘Look, it’s only been six months and nothing has changed.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

(In fact, the company soon filed for bankruptcy, and as of this writing was searching for a new owner.) Apple faced a similar dilemma. In 2012, the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, proudly announced on prime-time television that its new computer would be manufactured in the United States. It was to be the first Apple product in many years bearing the words, “Assembled in USA.” But the plan to make Macs in Austin, Texas, turned out to be far more difficult than imagined, and sales of the computer were delayed by several months. The main obstacle ended up being something tiny, a custom screw that American manufacturers couldn’t produce enough of and that Apple ended up having to order from China.

Meanwhile, small wearable devices can constantly monitor a person’s vital functions and transmit the data to the cloud, where it can be analyzed and, if something irregular is detected, sent to medical specialists. Apple CEO Tim Cook has said he believes that his company’s “greatest contribution to mankind . . . will be about health”—through the increasingly sophisticated medical use of products like the Apple Watch. Ideally, the pandemic-induced move online will shift the entire focus of medicine away from treating diseases and toward preventing them, which is a far more effective way to keep us all healthy.

PublicationDocumentID=6322. 104 “25% of our workforce”: Sonal Khetarpal, “Post-COVID, 75% of 4.5 Lakh TCS Employees to Permanently Work from Home by ’25; from 20%,” Business Today India, April 30, 2020. 104 issued a correction: Saunak Chowdhury, “TCS Refutes Claims of 75% Employees Working from Home Post Lock-Down,” Indian Wire, April 28, 2020. 104 450,000 employees: Tata Consultancy Services, “About Us,” https://www.tcs.com/about-us. 106 up one billion: Jeff Becker and Arielle Trzcinski, “US Virtual Care Visits to Soar to More Than 1 Billion,” Forrester Analytics, April 10, 2020, https://go.forrester.com/press-newsroom/us-virtual-care-visits-to-soar-to-more-than-1-billion/. 106 “greatest contribution to mankind”: Lizzy Gurdus, “Tim Cook: Apple’s Greatest Contribution Will Be ‘About Health,’ ” CNBC Mad Money, January 8, 2019. 107 97% accuracy: “Using Artificial Intelligence to Classify Lung Cancer Types, Predict Mutations,” National Cancer Institute, October 10, 2018, https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2018/artificial-intelligence-lung-cancer-classification. 107 up to 11% fewer false positives: D.


pages: 271 words: 62,538

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

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

Adam Lashinsky, “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune, November 16, 2012. http://fortune.com/2012/11/16/amazons-jeff-bezos-the-ultimate-disrupter/ 3 “Cook: It’s never been stronger. Innovation is so deeply embedded in Apple’s culture. The boldness, ambition, belief there aren’t limits, a desire to make the very best products in the world. It’s the strongest ever. It’s in the DNA of the company.” “Live Recap: Apple CEO Tim Cook Speaks at Goldman Conference,” Wall Street Journal - Digits, February 12, 2013. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/02/12/live-apple-ceo-tim-cook-speaks-at-goldman-conference/ 4 Jesse Solomon, “Google Worth More Than Exxon. Apple Next?” CNN, February 7, 2014. http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/07/investing/google-exxon-market-value/ 5 2012 Lobbying (Millions $) Google, 18.22 Exxon Mobil, 12.97 “Biggest Increases in Lobbying in U.S.,” Bloomberg, May 28, 2013. http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/biggest-increases-in-lobbying-in-u-dot-s-companies 2014 April–June (Q2) Lobbying (Millions $) Google, 5.03 Exxon Mobil, 2.80 Pfizer, 1.60 Lauren Hepler, “Google Drops $5M on Q2 2014 Lobbying: Self-Driving Cars, Health, Tax, Immigration,” Silicon Valley Business Journal, July 28, 2014. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/07/28/self-driving-cars-health-tech-immigration-google.html 6 Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different,” Businessweek, April 14, 2011. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm Chapter 5 Addiction UX 1 “A whopping 96 percent of Google’s $37.9 billion 2011 revenue came from advertising . . .”

The result is that much of our lives today is dominated by digital interfaces asking us to tap, touch, swipe, click, and hover because that’s what people were hired to create. HP CEO Meg Whitman says, “We’ve got to continue the innovation engine.”1 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards.”2 Apple CEO Tim Cook says, “Innovation is so deeply embedded in Apple’s culture.”3 But when you specifically hire someone to generate UI, you won’t get new, innovative solutions. You’ll get more UI, not better UX. This is UI: Navigation, subnavigation, menus, drop-downs, buttons, links, windows, rounded corners, shadowing, error messages, alerts, updates, checkboxes, password fields, search fields, text inputs, radio selections, text areas, hover states, selection states, pressed states, tooltips, banner ads, embedded videos, swipe animations, scrolling, clicking, iconography, colors, lists, slideshows, alt text, badges, notifications, gradients, pop-ups, carousels, OK/Cancel, etc. etc. etc.

1 John Pavlus, “A Tale of Two Newspaper Interfaces,” MIT Technology Review, March 13, 2013. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512486/a-tale-of-two-newspaper-interfaces/ 2 Karis Hustad, ““Netflix Rolls Out Updated, Smarter TV Interface,” Christian Science Monitor, November 13, 2013. http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2013/1113/Netflix-rolls-out-updated-smarter-TV-interface 3 “Apple TV: A Simpler Interface, Easier Access to Media Through the iCloud” Washington Post, March 8, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/apple-tv-a-simpler-interface-easier-access-to-media-through-icloud/2012/03/08/gIQARVivzR_story.html Chapter 2 Let’s Make an App 1 “Apple iPhone 3G ad - There’s An App For That (2009),” YouTube, Last accessed August 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc-pV2YYOAs 2 Simon Hudson, Bumps for Boomers: Marketing Sport Tourism to the Aging Tourist, 2011, (Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers), p.14 3 Apple in 2009 started using the phrase, “There’s an app for that” in TV ads to show off the multitude of apps available for iOS devices through its popular App Store, which opened July 2008.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

See Mikey Campbell, “Apple Rails against FBI Demands for ‘Govtos’ in Motion to Vacate Decryption Request,” Appleinsider.com, February 25, 2016. Tim Cook personally addressed the company’s battle with the FBI in interviews and in a message to Apple’s customers: “A Message to Our Customers,” February 16, 2016. In private, Apple employees argued that the government could not be trusted with the keys to Apple’s communications when it could not even keep its own employees’ data secure, as it had failed to do in the Chinese hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The quote from Carole Adams, the mother of one of the San Bernardino shooting victims, in support of Apple was sourced from Tony Bradley, “Apple vs. FBI: How Far Can the Government Go in the Name of ‘National Security’?”

“Espionage groups don’t reach out and say, ‘You burned my zero-day!’ ” Grosse told me. But, anecdotally, “We’re hearing that we’ve made their jobs a lot harder. I can live with that.” Tim Cook was getting flooded with personal letters from every corner of the globe—Brazil, China, his home state of Alabama. He received more personal notes from Germans throughout 2013 and 2014 than the sum total of notes he had received in his seventeen years at Apple. And the words in these notes were not merely dramatic and emotional. They were heartfelt. Germans had lived through Stasi surveillance, when every workplace, university, and public venue was monitored by soldiers, analysts, tiny cameras, and microphones to root out “subversive individuals.”

See also Tim Cook’s 2019 Commencement Address to Stanford University: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C2VJwGBRRw. My colleagues Matt Richtel and Brian X. Chen chronicled Cook’s early days as CEO: “Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own,” New York Times, June 15, 2014. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, then President Obama held several closed-door meetings with Cook and other tech executives in 2014. In December, Obama met with Cook as well as Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, Dick Costolo of Twitter, Eric Schmidt of Google, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Brian Roberts of Comcast, Randall Stephenson of AT&T, Brad Smith of Microsoft, Erika Rottenberg of LinkedIn, and Reed Hastings of Netflix.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Tom Orlik, “China’s Latest Official GDP Report Is Accurate. No, Really,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 25 January 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/china-s-latest-official-gdp-report-is-accurate-no-really. 15. Tim Cook, “Letter from Tim Cook to Apple Investors,” Apple Press Release, 2 January 2019, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/. 16. Tim Jackson, Chasing Progress: Beyond Measuring Economic Growth (London: New Economics Foundation, 2004), https://neweconomics.org/2004/03/chasing-progress. 17. George Monbiot, “Goodbye, Kind World,” 10 August 2004, https://www.monbiot.com/2004/08/10/goodbye-kind-world/. 18.

Do that and then it becomes hard to maintain a common front. Some businesspeople will turn on their own politicians—turning on Donald Trump, in the case referred to above—to try to explain why their government’s approach is not helping. Although to see that in Tim Cook’s message, you need to read between the lines. That the chief executive officer of Apple, the eleventh-largest company in the world by revenue in 2019 and the fourth largest in America, should be so concerned about U.S. relations with China is telling. His predecessors were worried about whether it was best to manufacture in China and what the risks might be.

See also great acceleration Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), 31 Affordable Care Act, 313 Afghanistan, 172, 173 Africa: children in, 316–17; fertility rates, 158, 226, 227; language in, 73; Niger fertility rate, 201–4, 203; out-migration from, 158; population, 157–61, 159 agnosia, 287 AI (artificial intelligence), 85, 87, 96–97, 301–2 air travel, 302–4, 303, 363n2 Alexa, 79, 97 Americas: fertility rates, 226, 227; population, 177–79, 178, 209. See also United States Amsterdam: as center of selfishness, 263; house prices, 248, 249 Anderson, Li, 312 Angus Maddison Project Database 2018, 149, 155; GDP, 234, 238; population, 146, 148, 150, 151, 156, 159, 164, 167, 169, 172, 176 Apple (Tim Cook, CEO), 239–40 Ardern, Edward, 269 Armstrong, William, 94, 97 artificial intelligence (AI), 85, 87, 96–97, 301–2 Australia, population, 175, 176, 177 automobile debt, 43–49, 48 automobiles: and carbon emissions, 101–2, 112–16; and debt, 43–49, 48; numbers manufactured, 114–15, 118 babies, 143, 218, 309.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

But over time, Benioff's outspoken stance did inspire others to take similar steps. Fellow Big Tech leaders, such as Tim Cook of Apple, started calling for regulation of their sector, in areas where they felt they were ill-equipped to make decisions on their own. Even if subtly aimed at other competitors, it showed that technology companies had started to reflect on the societal consequences of their actions. “Technology has the potential to keep changing the world for the better,” Apple's Tim Cook wrote ahead of Davos in 2019,27 “but it will never achieve that potential without the full faith and confidence of the people who use it.”

., November 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/15/13631938/benioff-salesforce-data-government-federal-trade-commission-ftc-linkedin-microsoft. 26 Trailblazer, Marc Benioff, October 2019, pp. 12–13. 27 “You Deserve Privacy Online. Here's How You Could Actually Get It,” Tim Cook, TIME Magazine, January 2019, https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502591/tim-cook-data-privacy/. 28 “Big Tech Needs More Regulation,” Mark Zuckerberg, Financial Times, February 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/602ec7ec-4f18-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5. 29 “Benioff Comes Out Strong for Homeless Initiative, although Salesforce Would Pay Big,” Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle, October 2018, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Benioff-comes-out-strong-for-homeless-initiative-13291392.php. 30 “The Social Responsibility of Business,” Marc Benioff, The New York Times, October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/business-social-responsibility-proposition-c.html. 31 “We can now measure the progress of stakeholder capitalism.

Notes 1 “Top 5 Tech Giants Who Shape Shenzhen, ‘China's Silicon Valley,’” South China Morning Post, April 2015, https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/technology/enterprises/article/1765430/top-5-tech-giants-who-shape-shenzhen-chinas-silicon. 2 Interview with Liu Guohong by Peter Vanham, Shenzhen, China, June 2019. 3 Nanyang Commercial Bank, https://www.ncb.com.hk/nanyang_bank/eng/html/111.html. 4 “First Land Auction Since 1949 Planned in Key China Area,” Los Angeles Times/Reuters, June 1987, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-28-mn-374-story.html. 5 “The Silicon Valley of Hardware,” Wired, https://www.wired.co.uk/video/shenzhen-episode-1. 6 “Exclusive: Apple Supplier Foxconn to Invest $1 Billion in India, Sources Say,” Reuters, July 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-india-apple-exclusive/exclusive-apple-supplier-foxconn-to-invest-1-billion-in-india-sources-say-idUSKBN24B2GH. 7 “Global 500: Ping An Insurance,” Fortune, https://fortune.com/global500/2019/ping-an-insurance. 8 “The World's Biggest Electric Vehicle Company Looks Nothing Like Tesla,” Bloomberg, April 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/the-world-s-biggest-electric-vehicle-company-looks-nothing-like-tesla. 9 “How Shenzhen Battles Congestion and Climate Change,” Chia Jie Lin, GovInsider, July 2018, https://govinsider.asia/security/exclusive-shenzhen-battles-congestion-climate-change/. 10 “China's Debt Threat: Time to Rein in the Lending Boom,” Martin Wolf, Financial Times, July 2018 https://www.ft.com/content/0c7ecae2-8cfb-11e8-bb8f-a6a2f7bca546. 11 “China's Debt-to-GDP Ratio Surges to 317 Percent,” The Street, May 2020, https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/chinas-debt-to-gdp-ratio-hits-317-percent. 12 “Climate Change: Xi Jinping Makes Bold Pledge for China to Be Carbon Neutral by 2060,” South China Morning Post, September 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3102761/climate-change-xi-jinping-makes-bold-pledge-china-be-carbon. 13 “Current Direction for Renewable Energy in China,” Anders Hove, The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, June 2019, https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Current-direction-for-renewable-energy-in-China.pdf. 14 “Everyone around the World is Ditching Coal—Except Asia,” Bloomberg, June 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/the-pandemic-has-everyone-ditching-coal-quicker-except-asia. 15 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2020,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html. 16 “World Integrated Trade Solution,” World Bank, 2018, https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Year/LTST/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/by-country/Product/Total#. 17 “China Imports,” Comtrade, UN, 2018, https://comtrade.un.org/labs/data-explorer/. 18 “Does Investing in Emerging Markets Still Make Sense?”


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

But over time, Benioff's outspoken stance did inspire others to take similar steps. Fellow Big Tech leaders, such as Tim Cook of Apple, started calling for regulation of their sector, in areas where they felt they were ill-equipped to make decisions on their own. Even if subtly aimed at other competitors, it showed that technology companies had started to reflect on the societal consequences of their actions. “Technology has the potential to keep changing the world for the better,” Apple's Tim Cook wrote ahead of Davos in 2019,27 “but it will never achieve that potential without the full faith and confidence of the people who use it.”

., November 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/15/13631938/benioff-salesforce-data-government-federal-trade-commission-ftc-linkedin-microsoft. 26 Trailblazer, Marc Benioff, October 2019, pp. 12–13. 27 “You Deserve Privacy Online. Here's How You Could Actually Get It,” Tim Cook, TIME Magazine, January 2019, https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502591/tim-cook-data-privacy/. 28 “Big Tech Needs More Regulation,” Mark Zuckerberg, Financial Times, February 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/602ec7ec-4f18-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5. 29 “Benioff Comes Out Strong for Homeless Initiative, although Salesforce Would Pay Big,” Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle, October 2018, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Benioff-comes-out-strong-for-homeless-initiative-13291392.php. 30 “The Social Responsibility of Business,” Marc Benioff, The New York Times, October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/business-social-responsibility-proposition-c.html. 31 “We can now measure the progress of stakeholder capitalism.

Notes 1 “Top 5 Tech Giants Who Shape Shenzhen, ‘China's Silicon Valley,’” South China Morning Post, April 2015, https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/technology/enterprises/article/1765430/top-5-tech-giants-who-shape-shenzhen-chinas-silicon. 2 Interview with Liu Guohong by Peter Vanham, Shenzhen, China, June 2019. 3 Nanyang Commercial Bank, https://www.ncb.com.hk/nanyang_bank/eng/html/111.html. 4 “First Land Auction Since 1949 Planned in Key China Area,” Los Angeles Times/Reuters, June 1987, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-28-mn-374-story.html. 5 “The Silicon Valley of Hardware,” Wired, https://www.wired.co.uk/video/shenzhen-episode-1. 6 “Exclusive: Apple Supplier Foxconn to Invest $1 Billion in India, Sources Say,” Reuters, July 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-india-apple-exclusive/exclusive-apple-supplier-foxconn-to-invest-1-billion-in-india-sources-say-idUSKBN24B2GH. 7 “Global 500: Ping An Insurance,” Fortune, https://fortune.com/global500/2019/ping-an-insurance. 8 “The World's Biggest Electric Vehicle Company Looks Nothing Like Tesla,” Bloomberg, April 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/the-world-s-biggest-electric-vehicle-company-looks-nothing-like-tesla. 9 “How Shenzhen Battles Congestion and Climate Change,” Chia Jie Lin, GovInsider, July 2018, https://govinsider.asia/security/exclusive-shenzhen-battles-congestion-climate-change/. 10 “China's Debt Threat: Time to Rein in the Lending Boom,” Martin Wolf, Financial Times, July 2018 https://www.ft.com/content/0c7ecae2-8cfb-11e8-bb8f-a6a2f7bca546. 11 “China's Debt-to-GDP Ratio Surges to 317 Percent,” The Street, May 2020, https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/chinas-debt-to-gdp-ratio-hits-317-percent. 12 “Climate Change: Xi Jinping Makes Bold Pledge for China to Be Carbon Neutral by 2060,” South China Morning Post, September 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3102761/climate-change-xi-jinping-makes-bold-pledge-china-be-carbon. 13 “Current Direction for Renewable Energy in China,” Anders Hove, The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, June 2019, https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Current-direction-for-renewable-energy-in-China.pdf. 14 “Everyone around the World is Ditching Coal—Except Asia,” Bloomberg, June 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/the-pandemic-has-everyone-ditching-coal-quicker-except-asia. 15 “Statistical Review of World Energy 2020,” BP, https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html. 16 “World Integrated Trade Solution,” World Bank, 2018, https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Year/LTST/TradeFlow/Import/Partner/by-country/Product/Total#. 17 “China Imports,” Comtrade, UN, 2018, https://comtrade.un.org/labs/data-explorer/. 18 “Does Investing in Emerging Markets Still Make Sense?”


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

This is where an idea that sounds so compelling in principle begins to run into trouble. Let’s start with the idea of a competitive marketplace. The best current example of a big tech company deeply committed to privacy is Apple. Indeed, the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, has made the battle for privacy a hallmark of his leadership, positioning Apple in opposition to other corporate behemoths in the technology industry. Apple’s approach to privacy—“Privacy by design”—privileges the protection of personal data at every turn. The company collects only the personal data required to deliver the services people need (“data minimization”).

One can imagine that the CEOs gathered their best and brightest in the C-suite to figure out how to counter the incoming criticisms. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, went for the personal approach—leading with their own inspiring stories of having risen from humble beginnings. Apple CEO Tim Cook continued his effort to differentiate Apple from the other companies, claiming that it doesn’t have a “dominant market share in any market where we do business.” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg took perhaps the most interesting line in defending the company’s enormous market power: “Facebook is a successful company now, but we got there the American way: we started with nothing and provided better products that people find valuable.”

Harvard professor Cynthia Dwork: Cynthia Dwork, “Differential Privacy,” in Automata, Languages and Programming, edited by Michele Bugliesi et al. (Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2006), 1–12. Cook refused to cooperate: Leander Kahney, “The FBI Wanted a Backdoor to the iPhone. Tim Cook Said No,” Wired, April 16, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/the-time-tim-cook-stood-his-ground-against-fbi/. “We’re not trying”: Matt Burgess, “Google Got Rich from Your Data. DuckDuckGo Is Fighting Back,” Wired, June 8, 2020, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-android-choice-screen-search. Google had acted illegally: Ibid.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

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

“If you’re not”: Cook’s remark was made on an MSNBC “Revolution” event in an interview with Kara Swisher and Chris Hayes, on April 6, 2018. Cook disagreed: Matthew Panzarino, “Apple’s Tim Cook Delivers Blistering Speech on Encryption, Privacy,” TechCrunch, June 2, 2015. measure their worth with Likes: Brian Fung, “Apple’s Tim Cook May Have Taken a Subtle Dig at Facebook in His MIT Commencement Speech,” Washington Post, June 9, 2017. After Cambridge: Peter Kafka, “Tim Cook Says Facebook Should Have Regulated Itself, but It’s Too Late for That Now,” Recode, March 28, 2018. “extremely glib”: Ezra Klein, “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Hardest Year, and What Comes Next,” Vox, April 2, 2018.

“It’s a shared view that we’ve turned the corner and that we now have confidence that we can not only address problems that come up but we can systematically get ahead of them in the future,” Andrew Bosworth told me in late 2018. Not all of them, it turned out. While Facebook’s critics were abundant, one in particular seemed to get under Zuckerberg’s skin: Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook. As Facebook’s problems became more public after the election, Cook began to voice reservations about social media, and Facebook in particular. Apple’s business model, Cook noted at every opportunity, was based on a straightforward exchange: you pay for the product and use it. The Facebook business model, Cook would note, provides a service that seems free but actually isn’t, as you are paying with your personal information and constant exposure to ads.

Just as leaders of great national powers would summit despite their hostilities, Zuckerberg and Cook would generally set aside time to talk at the annual Herb Allen summer gathering. In 2017, Zuckerberg had been upset at a remark Cook had made at a commencement speech; the Apple CEO had told the graduates not to measure their worth with Likes, and Zuckerberg had taken that personally. Tim Cook wasn’t about to run his speeches past Zuckerberg. By then Cook was promoting privacy as a pillar of Apple’s deal with its customers. The targets of his jibes were Google and Facebook, but only Google was a direct competitor, and Zuckerberg felt sideswiped. After Cambridge Analytica, Cook was asked what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s place.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

Purges Hundreds of Millions of Call and Text Records,” New York Times, June 28, 2018. p. 93 German media scholar Till Wäscher: Wäscher, “Six Frames against Surveillance.” p. 94 Apple CEO Tim Cook: Eric Lichtblau and Katie Benner, “Apple Fights Order to Unlock San Bernardino Gunman’s iPhone,” New York Times, February 17, 2016; Kate Fazzini, “In a Three-Way Privacy Fight, Apple Has More to Lose Than Facebook or Google,” CNBC, October 25, 2018. p. 94 Justice Department officials derided the company’s refusal to cooperate: Eric Lichtblau and Matt Apuzzo, “Justice Department Calls Apple’s Refusal to Unlock iPhone a ‘Marketing Strategy,’” New York Times, February 19, 2016. p. 94 Snowden told the Guardian he had no regrets: Ewen MacAskill and Alex Hern, “Edward Snowden: ‘The People Are Still Powerless, but Now They’re Aware,” Guardian, June 4, 2018.

In 2016, the popular messaging service WhatsApp began using end-to-end encryption to protect users’ communications. The same year, tensions rose as Apple defied a federal court order to help the FBI break into an iPhone belonging to one of the perpetrators of a San Bernardino mass shooting that killed fourteen people. “The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook, who later made “privacy is a human right” his public mantra. Justice Department officials derided the company’s refusal to cooperate, calling it a “marketing strategy.”

I absorbed the story, trying to process the enormity of it all. A national freakout was brewing. I called Dale: “Is that it?” “Yes.” “Shit.” I felt light-headed. “Is that all of it?” “No.” Over the next few days, more disclosures followed. The NSA had been collecting users’ private communications from AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other companies. Obama had told intelligence officials to make a list of possible foreign targets for American cyberattacks. During a single thirty-day period, the NSA had harvested nearly 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks. And so on.


pages: 285 words: 91,144

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

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

I planned to spend the night with the other hard-core attendees who lined up in lawn chairs around the block the night before opening day. When the doors opened tomorrow at eight a.m., we’d be the first inside, stampeding into the main hall to nab front-row seats to the keynote address by Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook. Charline had managed to score permission to film me at the event—no small feat, as Apple is very strict about whom they let into the conference. They don’t allow big cameras, so a fourth crew member she’d sent for the day filmed me on his phone. “You sure you don’t want to stay out with us?” I asked Marcello, licking ketchup from my fingers.

., the doors opened, and I threw myself, laughing crazily, into the stampede. Marcello, who’d returned just in time to catch the mad rush on video, joined me inside for the keynote lecture. “You guys don’t mess around.” He laughed, shaking his head. The lights dimmed, and Tim Cook appeared on the stage before a prominent Apple logo at the center of the massive wide-screen displays. He began the keynote by highlighting the diversity of their developer conference attendance that year. There were record numbers of nationalities, young adults, and online participants. As Cook spoke, I was already plotting my next move: to get a picture with him.

I thanked him and was off. I’d gotten my fifteen seconds; it was time to give someone else a chance. After pausing to tweet the Tim Cook photo, I made a beeline—with Marcello running alongside, filming—for the pressroom. I wanted to see if any reporters might be interested in hearing about 4 Snaps. The app had been steadily marching down the charts since I’d stopped promoting it to turn my attention to preparing for the internship. But now I was reenergized about 4 Snaps—as if some of the Apple CEO’s magic had rubbed off on me during our handshake. For the rest of the conference, I was a whirling dervish.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

When confronted about these tactics by angry U.S. senators from both parties—“It is completely outrageous,” said John McCain, the Arizona Republican, “that Apple has not only dodged full payment of U.S. taxes, but it has managed to evade paying taxes around the world through its convoluted and pernicious strategies”—Apple executives responded with indignation of their own. “We pay all the taxes we owe, every single dollar,” declared Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, who noted that Apple paid significant sums in U.S. taxes on its sales in the United States—more than $16 million in corporate income tax every day of the year. “We do not depend on tax gimmicks. . . . We do not stash money on some Caribbean island.” The problem, Cook said, was that 35% corporate tax rate, which would make it “very expensive” to record those international sales in the United States or to bring home the billions of dollars Apple had assigned to its foreign subsidiaries.

By routing its manufacturing through a tiny factory in Puerto Rico, Microsoft saved over $4.5 billion in taxes on goods sold in the United States” over a three-year period.8 Despite these industrious efforts to escape American taxes, Caterpillar, Apple, Google, and Microsoft still declare themselves to be American corporations. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, was adamant on this point that day when the senators were grilling him about “stateless income.” “I am often asked,” Cook said, “if Apple still considers itself an American company. My answer has always been an emphatic ‘Yes.’ We are proud to be an American company and equally proud of our contribution to the U.S. economy.”

The best solution would be for the United States to “eliminate all corporate tax expenditures, lower corporate income tax rates, and implement a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that allows the free flow of capital back to the United States.” In short, Tim Cook gave Congress the same message that Gérard Depardieu had given to François Hollande: if you set tax rates high, taxpayers will fall back on “convoluted and pernicious strategies” to avoid them—including taking their money to a different country. Although Cook did not mention it to the senators, Apple Inc. had actually found a roundabout way to bring home some of the billions it held overseas without paying U.S. tax on the earnings. In 2013, Apple borrowed billions of dollars—that is, it sold corporate bonds—in the United States.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

The only safety of nations lies in removing the unearned increments of income from the possessing classes, and adding them to the wage-income of the working classes or to the public income, in order that they may be spent in raising the standard of consumption. John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902) Contents Acknowledgments Introduction ONE From Adam Smith to Tim Cook: The Transformation of Global Trade TWO The Growth of Global Finance THREE Saving, Investment, and Imbalances FOUR From Tiananmen to the Belt and Road: Understanding China’s Surplus FIVE The Fall of the Wall and the Schwarze Null: Understanding Germany’s Surplus SIX The American Exception: The Exorbitant Burden and the Persistent Deficit Conclusion.

The challenge is an intellectual one (getting people to appreciate this perspective) and a political one (defeating entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo). To understand how all this works, it helps to have a historical perspective of how we got here. O•N•E From Adam Smith to Tim Cook The Transformation of Global Trade International trade used to be simple. High transport costs and politically imposed constraints limited the flow of finished goods and raw materials across borders. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British thinkers argued for removing tariffs and other barriers to encourage specialization, while Americans and Germans proposed protecting infant industries to develop diversified domestic markets.

See also Thomas Hauner, Branko Milanovic, and Suresh Naidu, “Inequality, Foreign Investment, and Imperialism,” Stone Center Working Paper 2017, for a modern quantitative analysis of Hobson’s thesis. 8. Kenneth Austin, “Communist China’s Capitalism: The Highest Stage of Capitalist Imperialism,” World Economics, January–March 2011, 79–94. ONE From Adam Smith to Tim Cook 1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904), vol. 1, bk. 1, chap. 1, available at https://oll.libertyfund.org/. 2. R. H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16 (November 1937): 386–405. 3. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, bk. 4, chap. 2. 4.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Google has done much the same: Associated Press (2 Apr 2013), “Timeline: A look at developments linked to Google privacy concerns,” CTV News, http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/timeline-a-look-at-developments-linked-to-google-privacy-concerns-1.1220927. Apple is somewhat of an exception: Rich Mogull (25 Jun 2014), “Why Apple really cares about your privacy,” Macworld, http://www.macworld.com/article/2366921/why-apple-really-cares-about-your-privacy.html. It uses iTunes purchase information: Charles Arthur (18 Sep 2014), “Apple’s Tim Cook attacks Google and Facebook over privacy flaws,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/18/apple-tim-cook-google-facebook-privacy-surveillance. It’s very big business for Amazon: Jay Greene (18 Mar 2014), “Amazon easing into $1 billion sideline business: ad sales,” Union Bulletin, http://union-bulletin.com/news/2014/mar/18/amazon-easing-1b-sideline-business-ad-sales.

The UK wants similar access: Guardian (19 Sep 2014), “Former UK ambassador to the United States given data-access role,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/19/sir-nigel-shienwald-data-access-role-david-cameron. Apple’s business model protects: Rich Mogull (25 Jun 2014), “Why Apple really cares about your privacy,” Macworld, http://www.macworld.com/article/2366921/why-apple-really-cares-about-your-privacy.html. Charles Arthur (18 Sep 2014), “Apple’s Tim Cook attacks Google and Facebook over privacy flaws,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/18/apple-tim-cook-google-facebook-privacy-surveillance. Do you trust a company: European countries allow for far more permissive government access than the US does.

companies are employing “warrant canaries”: Cyrus Farivar (5 Nov 2013), “Apple takes strong privacy stance in new report, publishes rare ‘warrant canary,’” Ars Technica, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/apple-takes-strong-privacy-stance-in-new-report-publishes-rare-warrant-canary. valiant and clever effort: In fact, Apple’s canary disappeared in the report following the one where it debuted. No one is sure what it means. Jeff John Roberts (18 Sep 2014), “Apple’s ‘warrant canary’ disappears, suggesting new Patriot Act demands,” Gigaom, https://gigaom.com/2014/09/18/apples-warrant-canary-disappears-suggesting-new-patriot-act-demands.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

Magic Johnson heads a group that bought Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers from Frank McCourt for $2 billion. most recent Forbes list: “Forbes Releases 2018 List of America’s Richest Self-Made Women, a Ranking of the Successful Women Entrepreneurs in the Country,” Forbes, July 11, 2018, https://bit.ly/​2NI4zje. Apple CEO: Tim Cook, “Tim Cook Speaks Up,” Bloomberg, October 30, 2014. attitudes toward diversity: Gary R. Hicks and Tien-Tsung Lee, “Public Attitudes Toward Gays and Lesbians: Trends and Predictors,” Journal of Homosexuality 51, no. 2 (2006): 57–77; Andrew Markus, “Attitudes to Multiculturalism and Cultural Diversity,” in Multiculturalism and Integration: A Harmonious Relationship, ed.

Prominent African Americans like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson aren’t just former athletes, they’re now team owners. The most recent Forbes list of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women” includes seventeen billionaires, with businesses ranging from roofing to trucking to retail. Same-sex marriage is now a federally mandated constitutional right in all fifty states, and high-profile business leaders like Apple CEO Tim Cook openly identify as gay. And even though we’ve lately taken a step back as a society in terms of public and political tolerance, polls confirm that over recent decades, attitudes toward diversity in education and the workplace, gender equality, and same-sex marriage have shifted steadily.

In 2008, Hector Zenil, who coleads the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, studied 3,400 people between the ages of four and ninety-one on their ability to behave randomly. The idea is that random thinking—seeing beyond the obvious—is connected to creative thinking. When an apple falls from a tree, the creative person doesn’t simply think that apple must have been ripe; like Isaac Newton, she sees the apple fall and pictures the invisible force of gravity. How did Hector Zenil and researchers test for random thinking? They developed five short “random item generation” tasks performed on a computer, including twelve simulated coin flips, ten simulated rolls of a die, and arranging boxes on a grid.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Despite instituting temperature checks, social distancing guidelines, and other safety measures, some employees were still getting sick and workers protested that the company was prioritizing sales over safety. Leandro Justen After it resisted making Bezos available to testify before Congress, Amazon was forced to relent. On July 29, 2020, the CEO appeared virtually, along with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook, during the House Judiciary Subcommittee’s hearing on online platforms and market power. Mandel Ngan “My life is based on a large series of mistakes,” Bezos said in November 2019 at the Smithsonian’s American Portrait Gala in Washington D.C. He was introduced by his oldest son, Preston. Joy Asico/AP for National Portrait Gallery Bezos sorted through binders of artists before choosing the photorealistic painter Robert McCurdy.

It’s part of what makes it so special.” Bezos had saved the Post. But he was also, in a way, benefiting from the refracted glow of its noble journalistic mission. In 2016, Fortune magazine placed Bezos in the top spot on its list of the world’s 50 Greatest Leaders—above Angela Merkel, Pope Francis, and Tim Cook. The accompanying article spent as much space on the turnaround at the paper as it did on the momentum at Amazon. “We used to joke that Jeff changed retail completely, built a 10,000-year clock, and sent rockets into space. But he wasn’t called the greatest leader in the world until he helped a newspaper company,” a former Post executive told me.

For Bezos and his advisors though, who were still trying to positively spin the embarrassing events surrounding his divorce, such a cloud of uncertainty was at the very least distracting from the more unsavory and complicated truth. * * * As the entire mêlée quieted over the course of 2019, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez started appearing together in public. In July, they attended the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, mingling with the likes of Warren Buffett, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. A few days later, they watched the Wimbledon men’s finals from the Royal Box, three rows behind Prince William and Kate Middleton. In August, they gamboled in the western Mediterranean Sea on the super yacht of mogul David Geffen. There were also trips to Solomeo, Italy, for a summit organized by luxury designer Brunello Cucinelli and to Venice, aboard the mega yacht of Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

he asked. “Just call Apple and tell them to give you the data you need.” Roth was taken aback. If a midlevel employee like himself called Apple and asked them to change their policies on information privacy, they would, as he put it, “tell me to go fuck myself.” Musk insisted the problem was fixable. “If I need to call Apple, I’ll call Apple,” he said. “I’ll call Tim Cook, if I have to.” Yoel Roth resigns That conversation was the final straw for Roth. The business model for Twitter Blue was imperiled given the constraints imposed by Apple. The issue of blue-checked impersonators was impossible to control immediately because Musk had laid off most of the human moderators.

He could be confrontational, with both colleagues and competitors. Tim Cook, who took over Apple in 2011, was different. He was calm, coolly disciplined, and disarmingly polite. Although he could be steely when warranted, he avoided unnecessary confrontations. Whereas Jobs and Musk seemed drawn to drama, Cook had an instinct for defusing it. He had a steady moral compass. “Tim doesn’t want any animosity,” a mutual friend told Musk. That was not the type of information that would usually have moved Musk out of warrior mode, but he realized that being at war with Apple was not a great idea. “I thought, well, I don’t want any animosity either,” Musk says.

When the meeting was over, Cook walked Musk to the apricot trees and serenity pond in the middle of the circular campus that Jobs had envisioned. Musk pulled out his iPhone to take a video. “Thanks @tim_cook for taking me around Apple’s beautiful HQ,” he tweeted as soon as he got back into his car. “We resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” 89 Miracles Neuralink, November 2022 A slide showing the goal and Jeremy Barenholtz Cures When Musk moved to Texas, followed by Shivon Zilis, he decided to open a Neuralink facility in Austin in addition to the one in Fremont, California.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

‘Google May Cut Pay of Staff Who Work from Home’, BBC News, 11 August 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58171716 22. Sarah O’Connor, ‘Cutting Pay for Remote Workers is a Risky Move’, Financial Times, 17 August 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/a37150e3-7480-4181-90e4-1ce9dc5d1d39 23. Zoe Schiffer, ‘Apple Employees Push Back Against Returning to the Office in Internal Letter’, Verge, 4 June 2021, https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/4/22491629/apple-employees-push-back-return-office-internal-letter-tim-cook 24. ‘11.8% CAGR, Employee Communication Software Market is Emerging with $1,780.09 Million by 2027’, Industry Today, 8 June 2021, https://industrytoday.co.uk/it/11-8--cagr--employee-communication-software-market-is-emerging-with--1-780-09-million-by-2027 25.

Barry Levine, ‘Study: Gen Z Cares About Issues and is Skeptical of Brands’, Marketing Dive, 30 May 2019, https://www.marketingdive.com/news/study-gen-z-cares-about-issues-and-is-skeptical-of-brands/555782/ 15. https://www.businessofpurpose.com/statistics New Paradigm Strategy Group & Fortune, 2019 16. https://www.businessofpurpose.com/statistics DDI World, 2018 17. Zoe Schiffer, ‘Apple Employees Push Back Against Returning to the Office in Internal Letter’, Verge, 4 June 2021, https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/4/22491629/apple-employees-push-back-return-office-internal-letter-tim-cook 18. ‘Machines Will Do More Tasks Than Humans by 2025: WEF’, Phys.org, 17 September 2018, https://phys.org/news/2018-09-machines-tasks-humans-wef.html 19. Scott Stein, ‘Virtual Mark Zuckerberg Showed Me Facebook’s New VR Workplace’, Cnet, 19 August 2021, https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/virtual-mark-zuckerberg-showed-me-facebooks-new-vr-workplace-solution/ 20.

Some companies are clearly struggling to accept the serious shift in mindset and values of their talent. It remains to be seen whether management will rise to the challenges of supporting home-based working or continue to believe they can persuade and cajole workers to be present in the office when they don’t want to be. There was a pushback experienced by other major companies such as Apple, which found itself forced to row back from dictating office working days post-pandemic.23 Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, a French broadcaster and columnist based in Paris, understands presenteeism as something else too: a feature of power politics: The French system hates hybrid. Because the French boss wants to know what his subordinates are doing, very micromanaging most of the time.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Along with John Ashcroft, Steve Jobs helped lead America’s B2K transition, and the internet has not changed back. The connection between Steve Jobs and Apple’s customer base is intense and bizarre, but it’s at most half the story: DESIGNED BY APPLE IN CALIFORNIA reads the most common label on the company’s products, followed by ASSEMBLED IN CHINA. Behind Apple’s success was another world-historical phenomenon: the rise of Chinese high-tech manufacturing. In 1998, Jobs hired a VP from leading compatibles producer Compaq named Tim Cook to build Apple’s offshore manufacturing relationships. Cook depended on those relationships at Compaq, and at Apple he turned to one of his former contractors: Terry Gou, the politically connected head of the Taiwanese electronics firm Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd.

Of the cracks in Apple’s notoriously uniform corporate communications front, the biggest was probably the one in the Chinese-language Commercial Times, which reported a couple of months early that the product was due to arrive on the market in the first half of 2007.1 Its sources knew better than anyone when the iPhone was going to be ready: They were building it. Demos like Macworld 2007 gave Apple fans an inside look at the product, somewhere between the regular public sales pitch and an internal company celebration. This fits with the outsized role that devotees play in Apple’s success as well as the curious parasocial relationship these super-users have with the computer brand. Jobs introduced the supporting cast: Apple designer extraordinaire Jony Ive, Google and Yahoo! CEOs Eric Schmidt and Jerry Yang, as well as the head of exclusive wireless partner (and recent AT&T acquisition) Cingular. Tim Cook got a shoutout during a display of the “visual voicemail” technology, but there was no mention of Foxconn or the nation of China at all.

Lizhi, “A Screw Fell to the Ground,” from “The Poetry and Brief Life of a Foxconn Worker.” 13. “Foxconn to Raise Wages Again at China Plant,” Reuters, October 1, 2010. 14. Tripp Mickle and Yoko Kubota, “Tim Cook and Apple Bet Everything on China. Then Coronavirus Hit,” Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2020. 15. Paul Mozur, “Apple Puts Key Contractor on Probation over Labor Abuses in China,” New York Times, November 9, 2020. 16. David Barboza, “How China Built ‘iPhone City’ with Billions in Perks for Apple’s Partner,” New York Times, December 29, 2016. 17. Ibid. 18. John Charles Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 30. 19.


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

Neal Larson, “Apple Would Be in Trouble with Customers If They Weren’t a Cult,” Idaho State Journal, December 31, 2017, idahostatejournal.com/opinion/columns/apple-would-be-in-trouble-with-customers-if-they-weren/article_feb63db0-7e47-51a2-a17d−6e95a8ebbf69.html; Lindsay Willott, “10 Brand Loyalty Statistics for 2017,” Customer Thermometer, May 25, 2017, www.customerthermometer.com/customer-retention-ideas/brand-loyalty-statistics-2017; Kurt Badenhausen, “The World’s Most Valuable Brands 2019: Apple on Top at $206 Billion,” Forbes, May 22, 2019; Marty Swant, “Apple, Microsoft and Other Tech Giants Top Forbes’ 2020 Most Valuable Brands List,” Forbes, May 22, 2019; Communications, “Forbes Releases Seventh Annual World’s Most Valuable Brands List,” Forbes, May 23, 2017. 40.  “Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh Computer,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA. 41.  “Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘Privacy Is a Fundamental Human Right,’” NPR, October 1, 2015, www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/10/01/445026470/apple-ceo-tim-cook-privacy-is-a-fundamental-human-right. 42.  Chen Guangcheng, “Apple Can’t Resist Playing by China’s Rules,” New York Times, January 23, 2018. 43.  Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong, and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China,” New York Times, May 17, 2021. 44.  

The screen explodes into a bright white light, and we see and hear the following words: “On January 24th Apple Computer will launch Macintosh, and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” The ad launched a decades-long marketing trajectory that positioned Apple as antiauthoritarian, pro-freedom, pro-democracy, and pro-nonconformity. In 2015, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook reinforced this branding when he was interviewed about privacy on National Public Radio. He described privacy as “a fundamental human right,”41 and claimed that Apple was more protective of its customers than other tech companies were. Yet in 2017, Apple began allowing the highly authoritarian, nondemocratic Chinese government to access data from all Chinese citizens who stored data in Apple’s iCloud—including their contacts, photos, text files, and calendars.42 Four years later, the New York Times quoted Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director for the human rights group Amnesty International, describing Apple as a “cog in the censorship machine that presents a government-controlled version of the internet.”

Yet in 2017, Apple began allowing the highly authoritarian, nondemocratic Chinese government to access data from all Chinese citizens who stored data in Apple’s iCloud—including their contacts, photos, text files, and calendars.42 Four years later, the New York Times quoted Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director for the human rights group Amnesty International, describing Apple as a “cog in the censorship machine that presents a government-controlled version of the internet.” Bequelin went on to say that “if you look at the behavior of the Chinese government, you don’t see any resistance from Apple—no history of standing up for the principles that Apple claims to be so attached to.”43 Apple is just one example of a corporation whose actions belie its branding.


pages: 254 words: 81,009

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstrale, Karaoke Capitalism (New York: Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2004). 6. Cited by Susan Adams, “The Test That Measures a Leader’s Strengths,” Forbes.com (August 28, 2009), http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/28/strengthsfinder-skills-test-leadership-managing-jobs.html. 7. Quoted by Dan Frommer, “Apple COO Tim Cook: ‘We Have No Interest In Being In The TV Market,’” Business Insider (February 23, 2010), http://www.businessinsider.com/live-apple-coo-tim-cook-at-the-goldman-tech-conference-2010-2. 8. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, “The Balanced Scorecard: Measures That Drive Performance,” Harvard Business Review 83 (July–August 2005): 172–80. 9. M. Baghai, S. Coley, and D.

We say “no” to good ideas every day. We say “no” to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we choose.7 —Tim Cook, Apple CEO Succeeding in a world of too much is not about producing “more”; in fact, it is about doing less, better and with more impact. It’s about focusing on fewer, bigger things with enormous energy. Like Apple. Here are some practical tactics to help you to do this. Do the Big Stuff First There is a little experiment Stephen Covey used to do with rocks, gravel and sand. You take a big jug and fill it with big rocks.

Product-based positioning can come from either strategy. Henkel, the German company, invented the glue stick to allow people to easily and cleanly glue paper. Henkel released Pritt Stick in 1969, which fit a need (we didn’t know we had) in schools and offices; by 2001 they were being sold in 121 countries. Apple is the obvious example of sexy. At the time iPods were becoming dominant, there were many other MP3 players, but none were so cool. It’s about doing very few things really well, so that they stand out from the competition in a crowded market. How could you differentiate yourself through what you do?


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Charles Duhigg, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” New York Times, February 16, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all. 18. Wade Roush, “The Story of Siri, from Birth at SRI to Acquisition by Apple—Virtual Personal Assistants Go Mobile,” xconomy, June 14, 2010, http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/06/14/the-story-of-siri-from-birth-at-sri-to-acquisition-by-apple-virtual-personal-assistants-go-mobile/?single_page=true. 19. “A letter from Tim Cook on Maps,” Apple, http://www.apple.com/letter-from-tim-cook-on-maps/. 20. Amadeo, “Google’s Iron Grip on Android.” CHAPTER 8: GOVERNANCE 1. Josh Dzieza, “Keurig’s Attempt to DRM Its Coffee Cups Totally Backfired,” The Verge, February 5, 2015, http://www.theverge .com/2015/2/5/7986327/keurigs-attempt-to-drm-its-coffee-cups-totally-backfired. 2.

Apple’s decision to create its own mapping app to compete with Google Maps made sound strategic sense—despite the fact that the initial service was so poorly designed that it caused Apple significant public embarrassment. The new app misclassified nurseries as airports and cities as hospitals, suggested driving routes that passed over open water (your car had better float!), and even stranded unwary travelers in an Australian desert a full seventy kilometers from the town they expected to find there. iPhone users erupted in howls of protest, the media had a field day lampooning Apple’s misstep, and CEO Tim Cook had to issue a public apology.19 Apple accepted the bad publicity, likely reasoning that it could quickly improve its mapping service to an acceptable quality level—and this is essentially what has happened.

These laws moderate behavior at both the user and the ecosystem level. For example, at the user level, the Apple rule that allows a user to share digital content among up to six devices or family members prevents unlimited sharing while nonetheless providing economic incentives for the purchase of Apple services and making a reasonable amount of sharing convenient.22 At the ecosystem level, the Apple rule compelling app developers to submit all code for review, combined with the rule that releases Apple from any duty of confidentiality, allows Apple to proliferate best practices.23 Platform laws should be, and usually are, transparent.


pages: 350 words: 115,802

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy by Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud

activist lawyer, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, COVID-19, David Vincenzetti, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, food desert, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, operational security, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero day

The talk in that building and beyond was that this new facility would be the launchpad for future versions of Apple’s signature product, the iPhone. If anybody at Apple had an inkling that a few dozen NSO cyber-researchers right around the corner from the new digs were spending their days and nights hunting for weaknesses to exploit in the iPhone operating software, they didn’t show it. NSO was barely known at the time and not really on Apple’s threat radar. So the relatively small spyware company’s presence certainly didn’t shake the conviction that the business district of Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv, was the place to be. “Apple is in Israel,” Tim Cook said on his visit to inaugurate the new R&D center in February 2015, “because the engineering talent here is incredible.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE FIRST DON’T When CEO Tim Cook and his gurus were deciding where to situate Apple Inc.’s largest R&D facility outside the United States, they had few limits. The company’s annual net profits were around $40 billion a year and climbing, as was the global market share of its mobile phone. Cook and company had the planet to choose from, and they picked a midsize suburb pinched between sea and desert, 7,500 miles from their headquarters in Cupertino, California, in a country with less than nine million inhabitants and a gross domestic product in the vicinity of Norway’s and Nigeria’s. Apple erected a gleaming twenty-first-century glass box of an eco-friendly building in that faraway spot and reserved 180,000 square feet of office space for seven hundred of its employees—with room to grow.

The number of cybersecurity firms in Israel had grown from 171 in 2013 to 420 in 2017; private investments had sextupled in those same four years, to more than $800 million. Team8, a seed fund started by a former commander of 8200, was nearing the $100 million mark after new investments from Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Citi. The personal investment fund of Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt had been one of the first to kick money into that fund. So Tim Cook and Apple were in the flood tide. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft had operations in Israel, along with NEC and IBM and Cisco. “We have special programs for comfortable landing for companies that are coming here,” Netanyahu explained. Netanyahu had become the chief proselytizer for the new industry, which gave him plenty chances to take credit as its chief visionary.


pages: 393 words: 115,217

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

Just like the failure of Friendster prior to Facebook, or the failure of cholesterol-lowering drugs and diets prior to Endo’s statins, or the failure of the Comets before the Boeing 707, IBM’s failure with OS/2 had been a False Fail. In rescuing Apple, Jobs demonstrated how to escape the Moses Trap. He had learned to nurture both types of loonshots: P-type and S-type. He had separated his phases: the studio of Jony Ive, Apple’s chief product designer, who reported only to Jobs, became “as off-limits as Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.” He had learned to love both artists and soldiers: it was Tim Cook who was groomed to succeed him as CEO. Jobs tailored the tools to the phase and balanced the tensions between new products and existing franchises in ways that have been described in many books and articles written about Apple.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder along with Jobs, who was working on the Apple II franchise, left, along with other critical employees; the Mac launch failed commercially; Apple faced severe financial pressure; Jobs was exiled; and John Sculley took over (eventually rescuing the Mac and restoring financial stability). When Jobs returned twelve years later, he had learned to love his artists (Jony Ive) and soldiers (Tim Cook) equally. Although equal-opportunity respect is a rare skill by nature, it can be nurtured with practice (more on this in chapter 5). Manage the transfer, not the technology Bush, although a brilliant inventor and engineer, pointedly stayed out of the details of any one loonshot.

Elevating Jobs first to interim CEO in mid-1997 and then to full-time CEO in early 1998 was viewed as a Hail Mary play, and one with a particularly small chance of saving the company. The many failed promises of NeXT had reduced Jobs’s credibility as a technology leader in the eyes of industry analysts and observers. When Jobs finally took over, gone was the dismissive attitude toward soldiers. In March 1998, he hired Tim Cook, known as the “Attila the Hun of inventory,” from Compaq to run operations. Also gone were the blinders to S-type loonshots. For example, by 2001 music piracy on the internet was rampant. The idea of an online store selling what could easily be downloaded for free seemed absurd. And no one sold music online that customers could keep on their own computers (online music, at the time, was available only through subscription: monthly fees for streaming songs).


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

The founder of Bulletproof Coffee is equally obsessed by the importance of his own life: ‘The Bulletproof Coffee Founder Has Spent $1 Million in His Quest to Live to 180’, www.menshealth.com/­health/­a25902826/­bulletproof-dave-asprey-biohacking/ 9 2019 commencement address by Apple CEO Tim Cook at Stanford University, news.stanford.edu/­2019/­06/­16/­remarks-tim-cook-2019-stanford-commencement, accessed 8 August 2019 10 The hospice movement proved a tremendous ally to the gay community during the AIDS crisis 10 BE PREPARED 1 The World Health Organization considers the death toll of 11,310 to be a significant under-estimate.

Why is he, like fellow transhumanists Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, so uninterested in real problems, like the fall in life expectancy, even in rich countries like the United States? Or the immediate climate crisis that could, after all, make eternal life pretty miserable? The vision feels literally disembodied and strangely inhuman. Was it these technologists that Tim Cook had in mind when he said: ‘You cannot possibly be the greatest cause on the earth, because you aren’t built to last’?9 These men seem incapable of imagining a world being any good without them. Is that the bug they’re trying to fix? The transhumanist world is largely white, male, middle-aged and middle-class.

We used to ignore these systems but their problems have become ours now, when a bank halfway across the world crashes or a government falls. Apple’s iPhone may have been ‘designed in California’, but making it depends on raw materials and suppliers from Ireland, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, Austria, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Malaysia, Israel, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Vietnam, Morocco, Malta, Belgium and most of the United States. This complex supply chain is designed to reduce costs, take advantage of labour specialisms, employment conditions, currency fluctuations and tax breaks. But they expose Apple (and similar phone manufacturers) to natural disasters, labour disputes, economic volatility, social turmoil, religious strife, trade wars and political discontent: all factors over which the company has no control, little influence and poor foresight.


pages: 56 words: 16,788

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

Even its forgotten desktop business is showing steady if unspectacular growth. There are many factors contributing to Apple’s remarkable success, from the brilliance of the late Steve Jobs to the supply chain sophistication of current CEO Tim Cook. And of course, Apple’s success is itself fueling more success. In the tablet market, for example, would-be competitors face not only the daunting task of countering Apple’s unparalleled hardware and software design abilities, but the economies of scale that allow Apple to buy components more cheaply than anyone else. The perfect storm of Apple’s success is such that some analysts are forecasting that it could become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.

Here are five businesses that, in at least one area, understood the importance of developers and engaged appropriately. Apple In August 2011, a month after reporting record earnings, Apple surpassed Exxon as the world’s biggest company by market capitalization. This benchmark was reached in part because of fluctuations in oil price that affected Exxon’s valuation, but there’s little debate that Apple is ascendant. By virtually any metric, Steve Jobs’s second tenure at Apple has turned into one of the most successful in history, in any industry. Seamlessly moving from hit product to hit product, the Apple of 2012 looks nothing like the Apple of the late nineties, when Dell CEO Michael Dell famously suggested that Apple should be shut down, to “give the money back to the shareholders.”

Lost in the shuffle has been the role of developers in Apple’s success. But while the crucial role played by Apple’s developers in the company’s success might be lost on the mainstream media, it is not lost on Apple itself. In March 2012, Apple dedicated the real estate on its website to the following graphic. Setting aside the 25 billion applications milestone for a moment, consider the value of the home page. For a major retailer to devote the front page of a website to anything other than product is unusual. This action implies that Apple expects to reap tangible benefits from thanking its developers—most notably when it comes to recruiting additional developers.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

These outsourcing decisions do not fundamentally alter the business model of the company, however, since it keeps tight control over the end-to-end production process of its devices. 18 Statista, June 2016, www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-inleading-app-stores/. 19 If you want to better understand the nature of this ‘governance’, you may want to have a look at the App Store guidelines for app developers: https://developer.apple.com/appstore/review/guidelines/. 20 Apple’s services include the various app stores, as well as iTunes, iCloud, Apple Music, Apple Pay, Apple Care, licensing and other services. 21 Fiscal data from Apple’s website, www.apple.com/pr/library/2016/. 22 http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-services-q3-2016-7. 23 Apple announced in June 2016 that this 30% figure could go down to 15% (with 85% going to developers) in some circumstances. See www.theverge.com/2016/6/8/ 11880730/apple-app-store-subscription-update-phil-schiller-interview. 24 Horace Dediu, Asymco (2014), www.asymco.com/, www.asymco.com/2015/08/26/muchbigger-than-hollywood/ and www.asymco.com/2015/01/22/bigger-than-hollywood/. 72 Platform-powered ecosystems 25 At the developer level, Apple now allows third-party developers to plug into Siri across multiple operating systems (iOS, tvOS and macOS).

A closer review of revenues generated by Apple’s non-hardware activities since 2005 shows how apps, which were responsible for only a fraction of Apple’s revenues in 2008, are now a multibillion-dollar business. In fact, Tim Cook expects that it will be ‘the size of a Fortune 100 company by the end of 2017’.22 And this, of course, excludes the amount of money that was paid to the developers of these apps (Apple keeps 30% of the price paid for the apps sold on its App Store).23 When looking at total App Store billings (what customers actually spend), Figure 6.5 shows that they are now larger than Hollywood’s US box office revenues and are likely to overtake Hollywood’s global box office revenues in 2016.24 Apple has been able to match different business models to different activities in order to design a self-reinforcing business architecture.

Through 64 Platform-powered ecosystems Figure 6.3 Apple’s main business lines Source: Apple website, Wikipedia, Launchworks analysis Table 6.2 Apple’s ecosystem APPLE Apple hardware (iPhone, MacBook, iPad, Apple Watch) Apple Operating Systems (iOS, macOS, Watch OS) Digital Stores (iTunes, Apple Music) App stores (iOS, Mac) Cloud services (iCloud) Apple software (iMovie, iPhoto) Platform Retailer/ Reseller Input/Output business 3 3 3 3 3 3 Source: Launchworks analysis its operating systems and app stores for computers, mobile phones, tablets and wearables, Apple manages a two-sided platform between consumers and software providers. This model fosters a diverse range of software applications. As of June 2016, Apple’s App Store had more than 2 million applications.18 It is interesting to note that Apple, unlike other marketplaces, remains very keen to control the experience of its products end-to-end, and has therefore maintained strong governance around its businesses.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Get Ready for the Internet to Disappear In January 2015, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt caused a stir while speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Asked about his predictions for the future of the Web, Schmidt said, ‘I will answer very simply that the Internet will disappear.’ There was, of course, nothing simple about this answer. Upon first listen, it was a bit like Apple CEO Tim Cook telling people that they should put down the smartphones and have a face-to-face conversation with friends, or a movie studio boss saying that cinema is stuck in a rut and people ought to spend their time reading books or going for walks. In reality, Schmidt was saying nothing of the kind. Instead, he was making an observation about what has happened to technology in recent years as it has become both smaller and more pervasive.

The sounds of classic rock and roll – which extrapolated ideas from the rhythm and blues music of the 1940s – make sense to a 1955 audience. Heavy metal music, which did the same to ideas from 1960s and 70s rock music, made no sense. However, the act of simply combining ideas by themselves is not necessarily creative, even if the result is novel. As Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has said about unnecessary invention, ‘You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but you know those things are not going to probably be pleasing to the user.’ One of my favourite movies of all time is a film by Robert Altman called The Player, a satire on Hollywood and its sometimes lack of creativity.

Like Google, Facebook and other tech companies, Apple has competed fiercely to hire AI experts in recent years. According to a former Apple employee, the company’s number of machine learning experts has tripled or quadrupled in the past several years. As with these other companies, Apple uses humans as part of its largely AI-driven services. However, unlike the other companies, Apple presents its human workers as a selling point; not simply as a stand-in for the bits of its technology which don’t quite work properly yet. When Apple introduced its much-anticipated Apple Music streaming service in June 2015, one of its most heavily advertised features was its reliance on humans with specialist music knowledge to curate playlists.


pages: 254 words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation by Chris Nodder

4chan, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, drop ship, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, game design, gamification, haute couture, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, late fees, lolcat, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Monty Hall problem, Netflix Prize, Nick Leeson, Occupy movement, Paradox of Choice, pets.com, price anchoring, recommendation engine, Rory Sutherland, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile

Use self-generated persuasion. Apple fans are the company’s best salespeople. Hype and limited initial availability lead to total strangers asking early adopters how they like their new toy. It’s unlikely these avid fans are going to say, “I hate it!” 6. Construct vivid appeals. New products are demonstrated on-stage using a few select applications that show off the key elements of the product in an emotionally compelling manner (editing vacation photos, planning an exciting event, and so on). 7. Use pre-persuasion. Apple often shies away from direct technical comparison with competitors. Indeed, CEO Tim Cook said, “[Product specifications] are the things tech companies invent because they can’t provide a great experience.”

Pratkanis’ techniques: Anthony R. Pratkanis. “How to Sell a Pseudoscience.” Skeptical Inquirer T9 (1995). Tim Cook quote: Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference, February 12, 2013. BBC Superbrands documentary: Alex Riley and Adam Boome. “Superbrands' success fuelled by sex, religion and gossip” BBC (bbc.co.uk). May 16, 2011. Retrieved December 2012. Kirsten Bell’s observations: Francie Diep. “Why Apple Is the New Religion.” TechNewsDaily (technewsdaily.com). Oct 23 2012. Retrieved December 2012. Apple as religion: Pui-Yan Lam. “May the Force of the Operating System be with You: Macintosh Devotion as Implicit Religion.”

The newer influx of Apple users may have diluted the original fervor of Mac devotees, but it’s still possible to see rationalization at work just by starting a discussion of the relative value-per-dollar of Apple computers versus generic PCs. 3. Manufacture source credibility and sincerity. Steve Jobs, the now-deceased father of Apple, has been replaced by head designer Jony Ive as the spiritual leader of the Apple clan. 4. Establish a granfalloon. Enter any Apple store to see ritual, symbolism, and feelings at work creating a feeling of belonging for the in-group of Apple users. Door greeters might as well be saying, “Welcome home.” 5.


pages: 250 words: 64,011

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day by John H. Johnson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, Black Swan, business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, obamacare, p-value, PageRank, pattern recognition, publication bias, QR code, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, statistical model, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons, Yogi Berra

Ever,” Flowing Data website, accessed August 4, 2015. http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/26/fox-news-makes-the-best-pie-chart-ever/. The pie chart was aired on Fox Chicago, and the source was given as Opinion Dynamics. 12. David Yanofsky, “The Chart Tim Cook Doesn’t Want You to See,” Quartz website, September 10, 2013, http://qz.com/122921/the-chart-tim-cook-doesnt-want-you-to-see/. 13. For a stunning look at how data can be captured, check out www.dear-data.com—“a year-long, analog data drawing project” by two extremely talented information designers: Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, “Dear Data,” accessed June 7, 2015, http://www.dear-data.com/. 14.

Finally, identify outliers, and understand the impact they can have on your average. Some outliers are perfectly valid parts of the data set. Other times, it makes sense to exclude extreme examples in order to get a fair answer to the question you’re asking. One bad apple can spoil the bunch, as they say. Not every outlier is a bad apple—but an outlier can skew your results in a way you need to be aware of.46 4 Are You Smarter Than an iPhone-Using, Radiohead-Loving Republican? Understanding Correlation Versus Causation As any self-respecting parent will tell you, there’s a lot of pressure to make sure little Susie and Johnny are smarter than their classmates.

For example, Starbucks chief creative officer and president of Global Innovation and Evolution Fresh Retail (and former director of real estate) Arthur Rubinfeld has written an entire book on how everyday franchisees can learn the lessons of Starbucks with respect to site selection; his secrets include looking for oil stains in the parking lot (a sign that there’s lots of traffic).18 Maybe a Starbucks location is more likely to have sidewalks, and people like living where there are sidewalks. Maybe every time a Starbucks opens, an Apple Store opens next door—and that’s what is driving the rise in real estate prices. We don’t know. And that’s the point. OMITTED VARIABLES All of these factors—town centers, sidewalks, Apple Stores—are possible omitted variables. An omitted variable is one of the primary reasons why correlation doesn’t equal causation. Remember when we talked about bivariate relationships—relationships between two variables?


pages: 625 words: 167,349

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Some movements are made; . . . but the first actions are seen to be quite wrong; there is a manifest want of coincidence, which originates a new attempt, and that failing, another is made, until at last we see that the posture is hit. —ALEXANDER BAIN45 What would I do? I wouldn’t be in the situation. —APPLE CEO TIM COOK, WHEN ASKED WHAT HE WOULD DO IN THE SITUATION CONFRONTING FACEBOOK CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG46 It’s 2009, and twenty years after ALVINN but in the very same building, Carnegie Mellon graduate student Stéphane Ross is playing Super Mario Kart—or, rather, a free and open-source derivative called SuperTuxKart, featuring the Linux mascot, a lovable penguin named Tux.

“Interpretability Beyond Feature Attribution: Quantitative Testing with Concept Activation Vectors (TCAV).” In Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning, edited by Jennifer Dy and Andreas Krause, 2668–77. PMLR, 2018. Kimball, Spencer, and Paayal Zaveri. “Tim Cook on Facebook’s Data-Leak Scandal: ‘I Wouldn’t Be in This Situation.’” CNBC, March 28, 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/tim-cook-on-facebooks-scandal-i-wouldnt-be-in-this-situation.html. Kindermans, Pieter-Jan, Sara Hooker, Julius Adebayo, Maximilian Alber, Kristof T. Schütt, Sven Dähne, Dumitru Erhan, and Been Kim. “The (Un)reliability of Saliency Methods.” arXiv Preprint arXiv:1711.00867, 2017.

See also Pomerleau, “Knowledge-Based Training of Artificial Neural Networks for Autonomous Robot Driving”: “Autonomous driving has the potential to be an ideal domain for a supervised learning algorithm like backpropagation since there is a readily available teaching signal or ‘correct response’ in the form of the human driver’s current steering direction.” 44. The course was Sergey Levine’s CS294-112, Deep Reinforcement Learning; this lecture, “Imitation Learning,” was delivered on December 3, 2017. 45. Bain, The Senses and the Intellect. 46. Kimball and Zaveri, “Tim Cook on Facebook’s Data-Leak Scandal.” 47. Ross and Bagnell, in “Efficient Reductions for Imitation Learning,” discuss their architecture choice: a three-layer neural network taking in 24-by-18-pixel color images, with 32 hidden units and 15 output units. Pomerleau, “Knowledge-Based Training of Artificial Neural Networks for Autonomous Robot Driving,” discusses the architecture of ALVINN, made from a three-layer neural network taking in 30-by-32-pixel black-and-white images, with 4 hidden units and 30 output units. 48.


pages: 258 words: 74,942

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, big-box store, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, call centre, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital nomad, drop ship, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, follow your passion, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, growth hacking, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, index fund, job automation, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, passive investing, Paul Graham, pets.com, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, software as a service, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, uber lyft, web application, William MacAskill, Y Combinator, Y2K

Petitions and boycotts quickly went up online, with thousands of ex-customers, feeling betrayed by the change in the core values on which Daiya had been founded, signing on within days of the announcement. Several retailers, like Portland’s Food Fight and Brooklyn’s Orchard Grocer, stopped selling Daiya immediately. Within hours, over 6,000 people signed a petition to boycott the brand. Bear in mind that Daiya is not just an isolated incident. When Apple released its bug-filled maps software, CEO Tim Cook had to issue a public apology. When United Airlines yanked a customer from his paid-for seat, the internet exploded, and United stock plummeted by a market value of about $1 billion. When Nivea staged an ill-conceived “White Is Purity” campaign that was quickly embraced by white supremacy groups (not their target audience), the company saw a huge backlash from consumers who felt that the ad was overtly racist.

Next, customers need to admire your “whole person”—not just how you act when you’re trying to sell them something. What charities do you support? How do you act outside of work? With everyone sharing everything on social media, your entire life is available to anyone with access to Google. CEOs are sharing the news when their own babies are born (like Mark Zuckerberg or Marissa Mayer). Tim Cook, an incredibly private man, shared an essay about being gay and campaigns against anti-transgender laws. Customers admire businesses that feel and act similarly to them. Admiration develops when you do this well, and once you have their admiration, customers develop an interest in your success and accomplishments instead of a sense of resentment or jealousy.

As a small business or one that isn’t aiming to grow rapidly, you can use polarization to provide an avenue for reaching your potential audience—without massive advertising spends or paid user acquisition—by getting people talking. Think back to before Apple was a monolith in the tech industry, when it was a tiny company going up against the giant IBM. In a now-famous Apple television advertisement—an homage to George Orwell’s classic book 1984—a hero battles against conformity and “Big Brother.” The ad was so controversial and different from all the other ads at the time that all the cable news outlets picked it up after it first aired and re-aired it for free as a news story. By being different, Apple ended up selling $3.5 million worth of its new Macintoshes just after the ad first ran.


Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

With the exact same data, The Washington Post subsequently redrew the figure, zooming in to a more appropriate range. The temperature increase that leaps out of that chart tells a different story. The Internet news site Quartz used this technique to strong effect when, in 2013, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a presentation about iPhone sales. Below is a version of the graph that Cook showed: This graph looks quite impressive; it seems as if Apple is taking over the world with the iPhone as cumulative sales go up and up and up. But of course cumulative sales go up—cumulative sales can’t go down! What the graph hides is the fact that quarterly iPhone sales had been declining for at least the past two quarters prior to Cook’s presentation.

April 4, 2018. https://kuow.org/​stories/​driving-downtown-seattle-you-may-soon-have-pay-toll/. Tatem, A. J., C. A. Guerra, P. M. Atkinson, and S. I. Hay. “Athletics: Momentous Sprint at the 2156 Olympics?” Nature 431 (2004): 525. Yanofsky, David. “The Chart Tim Cook Doesn’t Want You to See.” Quartz. September 10, 2013. https://qz.com/​122921/​the-chart-tim-cook-doesnt-want-you-to-see/. BY CARL T. BERGSTROM AND JEVIN D. WEST Calling Bullshit BY CARL T. BERGSTROM Evolution (with Lee Alan Dugatkin) ABOUT THE AUTHORS CARL T. BERGSTROM is an evolutionary biologist and professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington, where he studies how epidemics spread through populations and how information flows through biological and social systems at scales—from the intracellular control of gene expression to the spread of misinformation on social media.

The asterisk directs us to small print reading “5 grams of fat per 30 gram serving compared to 7 grams of fat in the average of the leading chocolate candy brands.” Here’s an example of a number provided without enough context to be meaningful. What brands are chosen as comparators? Is this an apples-to-apples comparison or are we comparing chocolate-covered malt balls to straight chocolate bars? How about sugar? Refined sugar may be a bigger health concern than fat; are Whoppers higher or lower in sugar? Are there other bad ingredients we should be concerned about? And so on, and so forth. The 25 percent figure sounds like an important nutritional metric, but it is really just meaningless numerosity.


pages: 302 words: 80,287

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle by Scott Wapner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, deal flow, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Tim Cook: Apple, unbiased observer

In a little more than six months, Cheniere shares lost 50 percent of their value from where Icahn had bought in. Investments in Freeport-McMoRan and Hertz had also fallen hard. Even Icahn’s top horse, Apple, which had been a home-run investment, hadn’t been cooperating lately. Icahn had revealed the position back in August 2013 when he tweeted, “We currently have a large position in APPLE. We believe the company to be extremely undervalued. Spoke to Tim Cook today. More to come.” The news had sent Wall Street into a full-fledged frenzy. Apple wasn’t just any stock; it was the market’s crown jewel and the biggest company on Earth by market cap. Back in September 2012, shares had hit an all-time intraday high of $705, but had recently fallen on hard times as investors began to worry about Apple’s margins and the pace of iPhone sales.

Four minutes later, Icahn sent a second tweet that read, “Had a nice conversation with [CEO] Tim Cook today. Discussed my opinion that a larger buyback should be done now. We plan to speak again shortly.” Icahn had called Cook before going public out of respect for the CEO and to give him a head’s up about what was about to hit the tape. Cook was in a meeting at the time and called Icahn back when he got out, finding the investor to be direct but cordial. Icahn said he wanted a large buyback and in short order. Cook explained that Apple had begun returning money to shareholders in 2012 after a long period of not doing so, had already expanded the program earlier in the year, and remained committed to the process, though at its own pace.

Icahn had spent decades sparring with large companies, often urging them to buy back their own shares or add new board members, but Apple represented something different. It was the richest company on Earth, and even though Icahn could only do so much given Apple’s size, he proved unafraid to take on the giant. Icahn even pledged to hold onto his shares, saying in the letter, “There is nothing short-term about my intentions here.” On October 28, 2013, Apple reported strong earnings, but margins fell to 37 percent, down from 40 percent the prior year. Shares fell 4 percent after hours when the numbers hit. For the year, Apple shares still closed up 5.5 percent. But on January 28, 2014, Apple suffered its worst one-day stock performance in months, with shares dropping 8 percent as a result of disappointing iPhone sales.


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

He’d met Ruth Porat, Google’s CFO, and both he and Bruce Dunlevie tried to persuade her to join WeWork’s board, to no avail. He hotly pursued a meeting with Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. Neumann and his lieutenants pitched Apple on the idea that a supercharged version of the WeWork key card could be tied into the iPhone. Eventually, Cook agreed to a meeting, and Neumann was so excited he asked aides if he should get his hair done, noting that Cook was gay. Still, nothing concrete resulted from these meetings—not from Google, not from Apple, and not even from another startup closer to WeWork in age and valuation: Airbnb. In multiple meetings with the San Francisco home rental startup, Neumann pitched Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, on a plan to reinvigorate WeLive and spread it around the world.

By 2012, the itch had returned. Son yearned to become a force in the United States again. He turned back to his mobile phone playbook and started trying to buy both Sprint and T-Mobile—a move to compete against AT&T and Verizon. He announced a $21.6 billion deal in late 2012 for 70 percent of Sprint. Apple’s Tim Cook and others assured him that a deal to buy T-Mobile as well would pass muster with U.S. regulators, he told others. As if to announce his return to the Silicon Valley elite, Son bought one of the most expensive houses ever sold in the country, spending $117 million for a nine-acre estate in Woodside, California, a stone’s throw from the epicenter of venture capital on Sand Hill Road.

Aiming to modernize his country and diversify Saudi Arabia away from oil, Prince Mohammed was plunging money into the U.S. startup scene, not only via the Vision Fund but also through investments in companies like Lucid Motors, an electric car company. The techno-optimist was happily received by top venture capitalists and tech giant CEOs. Tim Cook of Apple, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook were all photographed with him. Neumann managed to secure his own meeting. On a stop in Los Angeles, Prince Mohammed was holding court at a mansion, sitting down with people like Oprah Winfrey. Neumann and Roni Bahar traveled there and met with the crown prince as well as the head of the PIF, Yasir al-Rumayyan, for around an hour.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

Amazon, with its books-to-Mars trajectory, demonstrates the limitlessness of American avarice and exploitation, while for libraries to offer not only books but also suit jackets and bicycles upholds in perfect opposition the limitless spirit of compassion and generosity to those in need—a spirit that is curtailed only by the reality of municipal budgets. Apple has even set up shop in an old library. You can upgrade your phone at the Apple Carnegie Library in Washington, D.C., which opened in 2019. As Tim Cook announced, the company will “continue the legacy of this beautiful building as a place where people seek knowledge and a sense of community.” Once it was home to ninety-five thousand volumes; now a customer can purchase a laptop there for three thousand dollars. Then again, there’s a reason why it wasn’t called the Central Public Library when Apple took over. Its very name—Apple Carnegie Library—demonstrates a problem older than the personal computer.

He is constantly making comments like “Every time you buy shoes, you’re helping fund Blue Origin,” as he did at the Yale Club in New York in 2019; the transcript of this conversation is available at Business Insider (“Jeff Bezos Just Gave a Private Talk in New York. From Utopian Space Colonies to Dissing Elon Musk’s Martian Dream, Here Are the Most Notable Things He Said,” February 23, 2019). Tim Cook’s announcement about the Apple Carnegie Library comes from a post to his Twitter account on May 1, 2019. The library held ninety-five thousand volumes according to The Washington Post (Judith Valente, “UDC Opens $4.2 Million Library, But Its Campus Not Likely to Be Built,” December 11, 1980). Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy “was certainly not unimpeachable—it was often warped by his own ego and eccentricity—but we don’t need to idealize it in order to admire elements of it, especially his library campaign,” Benjamin Soskis wrote in a piece about the complicated history of the library for Boston Review (“Apple’s Newest Store and the Perverse Logic of Philanthro-Capitalism,” May 21, 2019).

* * * Around the time of its first smartphone launch in 2007, it was possible, if unwise, to talk about Apple as an underdog, and adopt the corporation’s own narrative, a holdover since its famous 1984-inspired Super Bowl commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring a spry bleached blonde racing to attack “Big Brother” with a sledgehammer. In 2007, Apple was ranked 367 on Fortune’s Global 500. Ten years later, it was ninth on the list (between Berkshire Hathaway and Exxon Mobil). With the iPhone, Apple was off to the races: in 2010, Apple sold almost forty million devices, and by 2014, sales were just shy of 170 million. Now the figure is north of two hundred million new Apple phones each year.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Doug McMillon, “Advancing Our Work on Racial Equity,” Walmart.com, June 12, 2020, https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2020/06/12/advancing-our-work-on-racial-equity. 3. Rachel Lerman and Todd C. Frenkel, “Retailers and restaurants across the US close their doors amid protests,” WashingtonPost.com, June 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/01/retailers-restaurants-across-us-close-their-doors-amid-protests/. 4. Tim Cook, “Speaking up on racism,” Apple.com, https://www.apple.com/speaking-up-on-racism/. 5. Mitchell Schnurman, “‘Silence is not an option’: What CEOs are saying about racial violence in America,” DallasNews.com, June 7, 2020, https://www.dallasnews.com/business/commentary/2020/06/07/silence-is-not-an-option-what-ceos-are-saying-about-racial-violence-in-america/. 6.

McMillon pledged more minority hiring, “listening, learning and elevating the voices of our Black and African American associates,” and spending $100 million to “provide counsel across Walmart to increase understanding and improve efforts that promote equity and address the structural racism that persists in America.”2 The fact that Walmart had to close hundreds of stores due to the threat of BLM looting went unmentioned.3 Major corporations tripped over themselves to issue public statements denouncing racism—and, more broadly, America’s supposed systemic racism. Many of the corporations pledged to fund their own quasi-religious indulgences, which would alleviate their supposed complicity in the racist system. Tim Cook of Apple issued a letter stating that America’s racist past “is still present today—not only in the form of violence, but in the everyday experience of deeply rooted discrimination,” and offered funding for the Equal Justice Initiative,4 a progressive organization that blames historic racism for nearly every modern ill.

After the 2020 election, as big tech moved to stymie alternative media, conservatives jumped to Parler: Parler hit the top spot in Apple’s App Store, and jumped by more than 4.5 million members in one week. Parler’s chief selling point: it would not ban people based on political viewpoint. Parler’s CEO, John Matze, said, “We’re a community town square, an open town square, with no censorship. If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler.”52 Until you couldn’t. After the January 6 riots, based on vaguely sourced reports that Parler had been an organizing place for the rioters, Apple, Amazon, and Google all barred Parler. Apple’s App Store barred Parler on the basis that Parler’s processes were “insufficient” to “prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content.”


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Still in first place as of this writing is Apple, twenty years older, riding on the crest of the worldwide market for its coveted iPhones, but Google is aiming for the top spot with its free strategy. In 2006, it purchased Android, an open source operating system that is endowing companies around the globe, including itself, with the ability to compete with the iPhone. Apple is an old-style company, charging handsomely for everything it offers. Its CEO, Tim Cook, recall, is the author of the trenchant insight that “if the service is ‘free,’ you are not the customer but the product.” Apple stores make ten times more per square foot than any other retailer.

This self-learning software will also be capable of performing most of your jobs. The new digital world may not need you anymore. Don’t take offense. In all likelihood, you can retire on an income which we regard as satisfactory for you. Leading Silicon Valley employers, such as Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, deem most human beings unemployable because they are intellectually inferior to AI algorithms. Did you know that Google AI defeated the world Go champion in five straight contests? You do not even know what “Go” is? Go is an Asian game of strategy that AI researchers have long regarded as an intellectual challenge far exceeding chess in subtlety, degrees of freedom, and complexity.

With the ascendancy of Amazon, Apple, and other online emporia early in the twenty-first century, much of the Internet was occupied with transactions, and the industry retreated to the “cloud.” Abandoning the distributed Internet architecture, the leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs replaced it with centralized and segmented subscription systems, such as Paypal, Amazon, Apple’s iTunes, Facebook, and Google cloud. Uber, Airbnb, and other sequestered “unicorns” followed. These so-called “walled gardens” might have sufficed if they could have actually been walled off from the rest of the Internet. At Apple, Steve Jobs originally attempted to accomplish such a separation by barring third-party software applications (or “apps”).


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Think of Merck chief Kenneth Frazier’s resignation from Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council in response to the US leader’s handling of racial violence in Charlottesville. Or Unilever head Paul Polman’s leading a charge on climate change as the US government was pulling out of the Paris accord. Or any number of corporate leaders, from Apple’s Tim Cook to Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, threatening to move business out of US states that do not respect LGBT rights.24 Exciting times, but we should be wary of simply leaving it to companies to handle the great challenges of tomorrow. Listen to a former managing director of Larry Fink’s BlackRock.

The net result is that capitalist algorithms have increasingly driven yawning wealth divides and helped wipe something like 60% off the Living Planet Index, a measure of the vitality of Earth’s biosphere calculated by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).18 “We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it,” WWF UK CEO Tanya Steele told our Green Swan Day audience. Since the New Economy period, we have seen what we might inelegantly call the exponential algorithmicization of our economies. Indeed, leading CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook have spotlighted the dysfunctions of many of today’s algorithms—and of those who code them. Giving a commencement address at Stanford, he warned his Silicon Valley compatriots, “If you have built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos.”19 Some of these problems can be solved fairly quickly, but others—including the implications of the burgeoning surveillance state—represent intergenerational challenges.

How interesting, then, to see the media commentary around Ive’s announcement that he was leaving Apple. This marked a shifting in expectations of brands like Apple, as the Financial Times explained in a full-page article. Noting that it was no longer good enough for products to be beautiful and easy to use, the piece stressed, “The priorities of many consumers are changing. A new generation of environmentally conscious consumers may no longer fetishize a MacBook’s aluminum body or see the latest iPhone as less of a status symbol than their predecessors.”44 The newspaper noted that it is impossible to change the batteries in Apple’s AirPods, its tiny wireless headphones, because the components are glued together to keep their volume as small as possible.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

They ranged from creating sweeping new legislation to mirror Europe’s aggressive GDPR rules, to a proposal that would designate web platforms as information fiduciaries that would have to follow a prescribed code of conduct, not unlike law firms.78 Just a few months later, Apple CEO Tim Cook went on Twitter to post a screed about the future of privacy, the big tech giants, and America. On October 24, he wrote that companies should make the protection of user privacy paramount. “Companies should recognize that data belongs to users and we should make it easy for people to get a copy of their personal data, as well as correct and delete it,” he wrote, continuing with, “Everyone has a right to the security of their data.”79 Sensing that regulation is becoming a real possibility in the US, Apple has been promoting its data protection services and the privacy protections embedded in its mobile and computer operating systems.

Jordan Novet, “Why Tech Companies Are Racing Each Other to Make Their Own Custom AI Chips,” CNBC, April 21, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/21/alibaba-joins-google-others-in-making-custom-ai-chips.html. 78. The full paper can be accessed at https://graphics.axios.com/pdf/PlatformPolicyPaper.pdf?_ga=2.167458877.2075880604.1541172609-1964512884.1536872317. 79. Tweets can be accessed at https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1055035534769340418. CHAPTER 3: A THOUSAND PAPER CUTS: AI’S UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES 1. “‘An Owners’ Manual’ for Google’s Shareholders,” 2004 Founders’ IPO Letter, Alphabet Investor Relations, https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.html. 2. Ibid. 3. “Leadership Principles,” Amazon, https://www.amazon.jobs/principles. 4.

During our lifetimes, we’ve learned to recognize what an apple is through reinforcement learning—someone taught us what an apple looked like, its purpose, and what differentiates it from other fruit. Then, over time and without conscious awareness, our autonomous biological pattern recognition systems got really good at determining something was an apple, even if we only had a few of the necessary data points. If you see a black-and-white, two-dimensional outline of an apple, you know what it is—even though you’re missing the taste, smell, crunch, and all the other data that signals to your brain this is an apple. The way you and Alexa both learned about apples is more similar than you might realize.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Yet these features are useful only up to a point, as our IP addresses are still visible, which means that our internet service providers, our employers, and/or the government can still track our activity online. Ultimately, protecting ourselves from bias in the algorithms and lack of control over personal data requires changing the laws and then making sure they are enforced. Addressing the 2021 Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, forcefully called for far-reaching data privacy reforms to “send a universal, humanistic response to those who claim a right to users’ private information about what should not and will not be tolerated.”60 Sundar Pichai has also called for such regulation. In an op-ed published in the Financial Times in 2020, he insisted that regulation was needed and suggested that existing “rules such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation can serve as a strong foundation.”61 In 2016, the European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

(London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010). 57 Beth Kowitt, “Inside Google’s Civil War,” Fortune, January 29, 2020, https://fortune.com/longform/inside-googles-civil-war/. 58 Kate Conger, “Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism,” New York Times, January 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/technology/google-employees-union.html. 59 “Home,” Alphabet Workers Union, December 15, 2020, https://alphabetworkersunion.org/. 60 “LIVE: Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks at Brussels’ International Data Privacy Day,” Reuters (video), January 28, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug6tA6fhhdQ. 61 Sundar Pichai, “Why Google Thinks We Need to Regulate AI,” Financial Times, January 20, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/3467659a-386d-11ea-ac3c-f68c10993b04. 62 “What is GDRP, the EU’s New Data Protection Law?

To illustrate, consider the war that Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of game maker Epic Games, has waged against Apple and Google to fight what he sees as their abuse of power over computer game developers. Sweeney’s pushback escalated as the popularity of Epic’s flagship game, Fortnite, grew, giving him leverage over the tech companies. In 2018, he launched Fortnite outside Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store to get around what he saw as their disproportionate app fees. In 2020, Apple and Google responded in kind by banning Fortnite from their stores. in retaliation for Epic Games’ avoiding their payment systems.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But it seems to me that we are justified in saying that Apple is conscious in a way that is closer to being literally true than just metaphorical. By the way, here’s one more piece of evidence: When Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, spoke at MIT’s commencement, I told him I was writing a book that included the example you’ve just read. When I asked him whether he thought Apple was conscious, he considered the question very thoughtfully. Then, over the course of several minutes, he said he thought Apple was an organism like a person with values and goals and that, of course, it was conscious. You may not view this as conclusive evidence, but I think it’s a very interesting perspective from someone with a uniquely privileged view of the company.

And human hierarchies have been critical to our remarkable dominance over the other life forms on our planet.2 Of all the types of superminds, hierarchies are the easiest to recognize. A human hierarchy usually has a single person at its top, and that person speaks on behalf of the whole group.3 When Tim Cook at Apple says something publicly, he is speaking for the whole organization in a way that isn’t possible in any other form of supermind. Since a few people in a hierarchy usually make the most important decisions for the supermind as a whole, their individual human emotions, values, and limitations play a more influential role than in other types of superminds.

To explore this question, let’s consider a very specific example of a human group: Apple, Inc. IS APPLE CONSCIOUS? First, let’s define the supermind called Apple as including all the employees of Apple, Inc., along with all the machines, buildings, and other resources the employees use to do their work. Is this group conscious according to the definitions above? Awareness Apple certainly reacts to stimuli in the outside world. If you buy a song on iTunes, Apple will make it available for you to download. If you walk into an Apple store, someone will greet you and try to help you buy an Apple product. In 2007, Apple responded to a variety of changes in the markets for mobile phones, computers, and their components by introducing a widely acclaimed new product called the iPhone.


pages: 245 words: 71,886

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

Jules phoned me back about an hour later, to make sure he’d understood it all correctly. And, of course, to run through the usual things you’d expect anyone in his situation to say. Like, if Christiane or the children needed anything, they should let him know. I had a much longer conversation with Tim. Tim Cook is a consultant and professor in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine at the Royal United Hospitals in Bath, in south-west England. He is one of my closest friends, ever since we were thrown together 35 years ago during our clinical training at the now-vanished Westminster and Charing Cross Hospital.

As you will have seen on the news, Italy has now quarantined over a quarter of the population in the north of the country. The health, social, economic and political consequences of this are totally unknown. Italy, which cordoned off northern regions from late February, put a national lockdown in place on 9 March. I had already called Tim Cook in Bath, so he could get the word out to intensive care networks across the country. The dire situation in northern Italy focused minds in the next SAGE meeting on Tuesday 10 March. I relayed chilling status reports from my contacts there. It was battlefield medicine, deciding who to save and who to leave to die.

She has been married to Jeremy Farrar since 1998 and in 2011 they together established the Farrar Foundation to support young people in Vietnam and Nepal in education, health, science and recreational activities Francis Collins A physician, geneticist and expert on disease genetics, Collins headed the Human Genome Project before becoming director of the US National Institutes of Health. He founded the BioLogos Foundation, which promotes the view that belief in Christianity can be reconciled with acceptance of evolution and science. He was involved in early discussions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Tim Cook Consultant and professor in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine at the Royal United Hospitals in Bath. A long-time friend of Jeremy Farrar, who confided in him his suspicions of the origins of the virus. Dominic Cummings Political strategist who was special adviser to Michael Gove, then became Director of Vote Leave and chief adviser to Boris Johnson on the latter’s appointment as PM in 2019.


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

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

His death prompted an extraordinary outpouring of grief, not only from those who knew him personally but from the millions of Apple users who felt that they knew him nearly as well. “Steve was a dreamer and a doer,” one wrote in a tribute wall on the company’s website. “I am grateful for the gift he was in his creative genius,” wrote another. At Apple retail stores throughout the world, people brought flowers and personal notes in tribute.12 At the private memorial service held on Apple’s Cupertino campus a few weeks after his death, new CEO Tim Cook played a recording for the assembled crowd of company employees, celebrities, and Valley power players.

Tech firms further reduced their tax bills by writing off stock options, depreciation of facilities, and expenditures on R&D. The elaborate shell game—entirely permissible under IRS rules—made rich companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon even richer. Washington made spasmodic efforts to change the system in the Obama years, but it was hard to cast beloved tech brands as tax-dodging fat cats. “I love Apple!” rhapsodized Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill at a 2013 Senate hearing where Tim Cook was supposedly being called to account for his company’s creative accounting. Kentucky Republican Rand Paul berated his fellow Senators for “bullying” Cook and a company that was “one of America’s greatest success stories.”12 Facebook employees and alumni also joined the ranks of the breathtakingly wealthy.

Jesse Drucker, “Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments,” The New York Times, November 5, 2017; Michael Wolff, “How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way into Silicon Valley,” Wired, October 21, 2011. 12. Chris William Sanchirico, “As American as Apple Inc.: International Tax and Ownership Nationality,” Tax Law Review 68, no. 2 (2015): 207–74; Rebecca Greenfield, “Senators Turn Tim Cook’s Hearing into a Genius Bar Visit,” The Atlantic, May 21, 2013. 13. David Kirkpatrick, “Inside Sean Parker’s Wedding,” Vanity Fair, August 1, 2013. 14. “Yammer Raises $17 Million in Financing Round Led by The Social+Capital Partnerhip,” Marketwire, September 27, 2011. 15.


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Even though the rate of unemployment has begun to fall, jobs still remain scarce, and the pay of the bottom 90 percent continues to drop, adjusted for inflation. But CEO pay is still rising through the stratosphere. Among the CEOs who took in more than $50 million in 2011 were Qualcomm’s Paul Jacobs ($50.6 million), JCPenney’s Ron Johnson ($51.5 million), Starbucks’s Howard Schultz ($68.8 million), Tyco International’s Ed Breen ($68.9 million), and Apple’s Tim Cook ($378 million). The titans of Wall Street are doing even better. The super-rich are not investing in jobs and growth. They’re putting their bonanza into U.S. Treasury bills or investing it in Brazil or South Asia or anywhere else it can reap the highest return. The American economy is in trouble because so much income and wealth have been going to the top that the rest of us no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going.

Between 2009 and 2011, the thirty-five biggest U.S. companies added 113,000 American jobs but almost three times that many jobs (333,000) abroad, according to a survey by The Wall Street Journal. Nearly 60 percent of their revenue growth came from outside the United States. Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States but contracts with over 700,000 workers abroad. It makes iPhones in China both because wages are low there and because Apple’s Chinese contractor can quickly mobilize workers from company dormitories at almost any hour of the day or night. American companies aren’t creating just routine jobs overseas. They’re also creating good high-tech jobs there and doing more of their research and development abroad.

American corporations signed up for deals with China involving energy and aviation manufacturing, but much of the work would be done in China. American companies don’t care, as long as the deals help their bottom lines. An Apple executive told The New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” He might have added, and showing profits big enough to continually increase our share price. If Apple or any other big American company can make a product best and cheapest in China or anywhere else, then that’s where it’ll do it. I don’t blame the companies. American corporations are in business to make profits and boost their share value, not to create good American jobs.


pages: 459 words: 140,010

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

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

The two lines of processors battled for the lead in capability. Intel, though, held the lead in sales quite comfortably. Its microprocessors powered most of the IBM computers and clones, whereas Motorola had one primary customer for its processors—Apple. (Atari and Commodore, with their 680x0-based ST and Amiga computers, had to wait in line for chips behind Apple, foreshadowing Apple supply-chain strategies that would be solidified under Tim Cook as COO.) In 1989 “Moore’s law,” Intel cofounder Gordon Moore’s two-decade-old formulation that memory-chip capacity would double every 18 months, was proving to still roughly predict growth in many key aspects of the technology, including memory capacity and processor speed.

Leaving the Stage In 2011, at the age of 56, Steve Jobs died due to complications from pancreatic cancer. A few months earlier he had stepped down as CEO, telling the board, “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.” COO Tim Cook was named CEO. In 2013, Steve Ballmer retired as CEO of Microsoft. The company had been struggling to find its way in recent years, failing to secure a significant market share in the new product categories. Satya Nadella, a 22-year Microsoft veteran, would become only the third CEO in Microsoft’s history.

Meanwhile, without the singular vision of a Steve Wozniak, the Apple III project was floundering. Delays in the Apple III were soon causing concern in the marketing department. The young company was beginning to feel growing pains at last. When Apple was formed, the Apple II was already near completion. The Apple III was the first computer that Apple—as a company—had designed and built from scratch. The Apple III was also the first Apple not conceived by Steve Wozniak in pursuit of his personal dream machine. Instead the Apple III was a bit of a hodgepodge, pasted together by many hands and designed by committee.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

It was a bit like telling baseball fans that they could go to an event that included the national anthem, a hot dog eating contest, and the first game of the World Series. We all knew what brought us to Washington on that cold winter morning. An all-star cast of tech leaders arrived at the West Wing, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, and a dozen others. Most of us already knew each other. Eight of our companies—virtually all competitors—had just come together to create a new coalition, called Reform Government Surveillance, to work together on precisely the issues we were there to discuss.

Then we stepped into a large room for what reporters would call “the most memorable moment” of the state visit—not just at Microsoft or in Seattle, but for the entire six days across the country.5 The leaders of twenty-eight technology companies from both the United States and China had gathered for a photo opp. Flanking President Xi was a group that included Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Ginni Rometty, Mark Zuckerberg, and the CEOs of basically every household technology name in America. It was a photo that built on President Xi’s cybersecurity announcement during dinner the night before, one that made every other image of the trip pale in comparison. There was only one president from a country other than the United States who could command this audience.

While other American companies are present in China, only Apple with its iPhone has enjoyed success in the country on a level that is comparable to its leadership in the rest of the world. In recent years, Apple has earned three times as much revenue as Intel, which is the number two US tech company in China.6 When it comes to profits, the situation is likely starker. Apple may well generate more profits within China than the rest of the American tech sector put together. It’s a notable accomplishment but also a challenge for the company, given China’s large contribution to Apple’s global profitability. As we’ve found at Microsoft over time and more globally with products like Windows and Office, anytime you’re dependent on a particular source for a large share of revenue or profitability, it makes it difficult to contemplate changes in that area.


pages: 430 words: 135,418

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

It should come as no surprise then that Silicon Valley’s biggest player, Apple, had taken note. In 2014, the company had quietly begun work on its own electric car program, hiring a slew of experienced hands to launch the effort, dubbed Project Titan. But it quickly became clear that developing a car was harder than they first thought. So, with Tesla’s stock fallen from its previous highs and with its well-publicized struggles over the Model X, Apple CEO Tim Cook apparently saw an opening. Tesla and Apple had developed a complicated relationship. Musk admired Apple’s achievements and was eager to hire people with Apple on their résumés. His stores were explicitly modeled after Apple’s; his designs took inspiration from the iPhone.

They had grown accustomed to it in the dark days leading up to General Motors’ bankruptcy. The gravity of Tesla’s financial situation weighed on Musk. At one point, he thought aloud about how Apple and its war chest of $244 billion might help. By all accounts, the iPhone maker’s efforts to develop a car had been a struggle. Musk’s supposed bravado with CEO Tim Cook years earlier, when Tesla was last in trouble, may have ended a possible acquisition. This time, with his hat in his hand, Musk reached out to Cook about meeting for a possible deal. Perhaps Apple would be interested in acquiring Tesla for about $60 billion, or more than twice its value when Cook had originally inquired?

He wanted to be CEO of Apple. Cook, who since Steve Jobs’s death had shepherded Apple into the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, was gobsmacked by the request. “Fuck you,” Cook said, in Musk’s telling, before hanging up. (Apple declined to comment on the record.)*3 Whether or not this was an accurate recounting, it’s hard to imagine Musk was serious about wanting to be CEO of Apple. Rather, the story played into Musk’s vision of Tesla becoming on par with Apple. It also served a more immediate purpose: It told those senior managers hoping for salvation from Apple to think again.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

But one cannot seriously argue that these benefits should depend on our accepting the inevitability of a toxic competition in which the Gamemakers are always the winners and we have to agree to be the product. Just as US President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the creeping powers of the military industrial complex in his farewell address to the nation in 1961, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in 2018, warned against the dangers of the “data industrial complex” where “[o]ur own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. . . . We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them.”169 Cook also firmly endorsed the creation of “a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States” and went into some detail about what it should cover.

US44413318, November 2018, 13, https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/our-story/trends/files/idc-seagate-dataage-whitepaper.pdf. 166.Lara O’Reilly, “Walgreens Tests Digital Cooler Doors with Cameras to Target You with Ads,” Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/walgreens-tests-digital-cooler-doors-with-cameras-to-target-you-with-ads-11547206200. 167.Facebook, “About: Mission,” accessed May 2, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/pg/facebook/about/. 168.Google, “About Google,” accessed May 2, 2019, https://www.google.com/about/. 169.Tim Cook, “Remarks before the International Conference of Data Protection & Privacy Commissioners” (Brussels, October 24, 2018), https://www.privacy conference2018.org/system/files/2018-10/Tim%20Cook%20speech%20-%20ICDPPC2018.pdf. 170.Bundeskartellamt, “Bundeskartellamt Prohibits Facebook.” 171.Jennifer Valentino-DeVries et al., “How Game Apps That Captivate Kids Have Been Collecting Their Data,” New York Times, September 12, 2018, https://nyti.ms/2N90yFh. 172.The protection of that privacy law is very narrow: Tiny Lab is liable only if its games were directed to children under thirteen years old, or if Tiny Lab had actual knowledge that it was collecting personal information online from children under thirteen years of age.

., “Public Health Risk of Arsenic Species in Chicken Tissues from Live Poultry Markets of Guangdong Province, China,” Environmental Science & Technology, 51 (February, 2017): 3508, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.est.6b06258. 45.Richard Bilton, “Apple ‘Failing to Protect Chinese Factory Workers,’” BBC News, December 18, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-30532463; Marcus Wohlsen, “Apple Isn’t the Only One to Blame for Smartphone Labor Abuses,” Wired, December 19, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/12/apple-isnt-one-blame-smartphone-supply-chain-abuses/; Charles Arthur, “Samsung Accused of Exploiting Younger Workers in China,” Guardian (Manchester), September 5, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/sep/05/samsung-accused-exploiting-workers-china; Charles Arthur, “Samsung Finds Labour Violations at Dozens of Its Chinese Suppliers,” Guardian (Manchester), July 1, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/01/samsung-working-practice-breaches-chinese-suppliers. 46.Michelle Chen, “Was Your Smartphone Built in a Sweatshop?


pages: 716 words: 192,143

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Mounting evidence that influential CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook have the power to sway public opinion raises alarms because big company executives already wield disproportionate political power through their personal wealth, the financial clout of the corporations they lead, and the influence of lobbyists in their employ. Is it then good for society if they also exercise the considerable power of the bully pulpit that comes with their position? Moreover, when such power is used with regard to sensitive political or religious issues, it is unlikely to be universally appreciated. For example, when Tim Cook spoke in favor of gay marriage, his pronouncement was greeted positively by those on the left, but negatively by those on the right; similarly, when Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy took the opposite stand, the right cheered, and the left jeered.35 The issue is where to draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate use of executive bully pulpits.

Trend One: An Emerging Generation of Enlightened and Effective Business Leaders My heart is drawn to evidence that a new generation of enlightened capitalists has emerged in recent years—a generation of men and women as committed to social engagement as their forbearers, but more sophisticated and skilled, and thus more likely to be able to create sustainable legacies. Among the contemporary chief executives often mentioned in this regard are Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Apple’s Tim Cook, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Campbell Soup’s Denise Morrison, Merck’s Kenneth Frazier, and, especially, Unilever’s Paul Polman and Whole Foods’ John Mackey. Because they all lead large, publicly traded corporations, optimists posit that those CEOs are on the verge of finally proving that shareholder capitalism and enlightened business practices are fully compatible.

In essence, we first must understand the tenets of business orthodoxy before we can appreciate our enlightened capitalists’ heresies. Received Wisdom: The Practice of Business Throughout Most of History COMMON TO ALL MANKIND, Adam Smith wrote, is “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange” goods. Indeed, at some point in prehistory, one of our ancestors may have swapped a bunch of apples for a joint of meat, and the species has been engaged in business ever since. Hence it might be said, contrary to competing claims, that the world’s oldest profession is business. If you think about business in terms of stories, as I do, one story is as old as human society itself: the one about the division of labor, and the trading of goods to meet the necessities of life.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

These days, when business leaders are challenged about the lengths they go to reduce their tax bills, for example, they frequently defend their actions by presenting themselves as ultra-smart contestants in the neoliberal game who are managing to reduce their liabilities whilst still cleverly playing within its rules. In 2016, a three-year investigation by the EU found that electronics company Apple Inc. had paid between 0.005 per cent and 1 per cent tax on their European profits. The commission found that their ‘sweetheart’ deal with Ireland, where they’d based their European HQ, amounted to a form of illegal state aid and attempted to claw back $13bn. Dismissing all this as ‘political crap’, Chief Executive Tim Cook defended Apple by explaining that they’d ‘played by the rules’. Similarly, following the financial crisis, some bankers in Wall Street saw their bailing out by the state as proof of their superior skill at the game.

‘Extremely poor’ neighbourhoods are here defined as ‘census tracts where 40 percent or more of the population lives below the federal poverty line.’ Back in 1981 the American Business Roundtable: Mirror, Mirror, Simon Blackburn (Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 97. In 2016, a three-year EU investigation . . . ‘political crap’: ‘Tim Cook condemns Apple tax ruling’, Julia Kollewe, Guardian, 1 September 2016. some bankers in Wall Street saw their bailing out: This American Life, WBEX Chicago, episode 415: ‘Crybabies’, originally aired 24 September 2010. As veteran tech reporter Dan Lyons has observed: Disrupted, Dan Lyons (Hachette, 2016), pp. 117–18.

We live in a world of things, he thought, and each of those things has unique properties that can be defined and categorized and acts predictably according to certain laws: an apple that falls to the ground does so under the force of gravity, he said, just as it floats on the sea under that of levity. His view of reality, and of change, was deeply optimistic. Historian Adrienne Mayor writes that Aristotle believed that ‘all things in nature moved towards achieving perfection of their potentials’. One thing in the world that undergoes change is a human. A person, like an apple, is an object in isolation that possesses its own unique properties. But what kind of thing is it?


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

The oligopsonists include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Google’s alphabetic Larry Page, Disney’s Robert Iger, Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, and Apple’s Tim Cook. None seems a good bet for a gaggle of gulls. What is really going on is the displacement of the open and rabble-run IPO market by an exclusive game of horse trading among the most exalted elite of “qualified investors,” the owners of the leviathans of the last generation of IPOs. Capped by such regulatory tolls and encumbrances as the accounting mazes of Sarbanes-Oxley, Fair Disclosure’s code of omertà, and the EPA’s “cautionary principle” barring innovative manufacturing, the new Silicon Valley confines ascendant companies beneath a glass ceiling. From Apple to Google, a few public giants dominate this private-company market since they are the only potential buyers.

The Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company charted learning curves across the entire capitalist economy, affecting everything from pins to cookies, insurance policies to phone calls, transistors to lines of code, pork bellies to bottles of milk, steel ingots to airplanes.2 Growing apace with output and sales is entrepreneurial learning, yielding new knowledge across companies and industries, bringing improvements to every facet of production, every manufacturing process, every detail of design, marketing, and management. Crucially, the curve extends to customers, who learn how to use the product and multiply applications as it drops in price. The proliferation of hundreds of thousands of applications for Apple’s iPhones, for example, represented the learning curve of the users as much as the learning curve at Apple. The most famous such curve is that described by Moore’s Law, which predicts a doubling of computer cost-effectiveness every twenty-four months. It has been recycled by the solar industry in the form of Swanson’s Law, showing the decline of the cost of silicon photovoltaic cells from seventy-six dollars per watt in 1977 to fifty cents per watt in 2014.

As we saw in chapter 2, it is the most thoroughly documented phenomenon in all enterprise, ordaining that the cost of producing any good or service drops by between 20 percent and 30 percent with every doubling of total units sold. Crucially, the curve extends to customers, who learn how to use the product and multiply applications as it drops in price. The proliferation of hundreds of thousands of applications for Apple’s iPhones, for example, represented the learning curve of the users as much as the learning curve at Apple. All these curves document the essential identity of growth and learning as a central rule of capitalist change. Sound management of money cannot focus on finding stable elements among existing goods and services that are endlessly multifarious and changing.


pages: 128 words: 38,187

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

And, while the salaries of US corporate executives have skyrocketed over the past two decades, the company has restrained executive pay to nineteen times the average pay of all team members ($18 an hour for full-time, permanent employees). By comparison, in 2011 Apple’s Tim Cook took home $378 million in salary, stock, and other benefits, which was 6,258 times the pay of an average Apple employee. How can Whole Foods do all these things and remain profitable in the cutthroat food industry, where most food retailers make profits of pennies on the dollar? Although Whole Foods saw a temporary dip in profits following the 2008 financial crisis, Mackey attributes the long-term prosperity of the company to its conscious growth model.


pages: 199 words: 56,243

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

., who had recently succumbed to cancer at the age of seventy-five. Bill had been a transcendent figure in the technology business since moving west in 1983, playing a critical role in the success of Apple, Google, Intuit, and numerous other companies. To say he was tremendously respected would be a gross understatement—loved is more like it. Among the audience that day were dozens of technology leaders—Larry Page. Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg. Sheryl Sandberg. Tim Cook. Jeff Bezos. Mary Meeker. John Doerr. Ruth Porat. Scott Cook. Brad Smith. Ben Horowitz. Marc Andreessen. Such a concentration of industry pioneers and power is rarely seen, at least not in Silicon Valley.

Going out to the wild, woolly west, where it was more a meritocracy, I would have a chance to move quickly and sit on the management team.”8 Move quickly, indeed. Within nine months of joining Apple, Bill was promoted to VP of sales and marketing and given the task of overseeing the launch of the highly anticipated Macintosh, Apple’s new computer that would replace the Apple II as the company’s flagship product. To kick off the launch, the company made a big move: it bought a slot to run a commercial during the Super Bowl, which would be played in Tampa, Florida, on January 22, 1984. Once the ad was produced, Bill and the team showed it to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. An allusion to George Orwell’s novel 1984, it showed a young woman running through a dark hallway, fleeing guards, and emerging into a chamber where hundreds of gray-clad, head-shaven men are listening, zombie-like, to a droning “big brother” figure on a large screen before them.

.* Although he did not know it at the time, he was about to enter the third chapter of his career, a return to coaching full-time, but not on a football field. When Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, Bill Campbell was one of the few leaders at the company who fought against the move. Dave Kinser, an Apple colleague of Bill’s at the time, recalls Bill saying that “we’ve got to keep Steve in the company. He’s way too talented to just let him leave!” Steve remembered that loyalty. When he returned to Apple and became its CEO in 1997, and most of the board members stepped down, Steve named Bill as one of the new directors.* (Bill served on the Apple board until 2014.) Steve and Bill became close friends, speaking frequently and spending many Sunday afternoons walking around their Palo Alto neighborhood discussing all sorts of topics.


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

Location In September 2012, Apple launched its own mobile maps. It took very little time for the public to realize that they were so awful as to be comedic. But the humor got lost if you were using them to find your way along a snowy road late at night. Apple Maps somehow managed to erase famous landmarks from their sites in the world’s major cities; others were relocated under bodies of water. Drivers reported that turn-by-turn voice directions were misguiding them, occasionally urging them to take abrupt turns mid-span on suspension bridges. The maps were so flawed that CEO Tim Cook soon publicly apologized, encouraging customers to use competing products, including Google Maps.

How could a company, universally acclaimed for unmatched product elegance, make such an unmitigated gaffe? Some pointed to a bitter and public divorce between Apple and Google. Steve Jobs had considered Google Android to be a direct rip-off of Apple’s iOS operating system. Could Apple Maps have simply been a crudely devised and poorly executed act of revenge against a powerful former ally? We think not. In our view, Apple made a huge mistake, but it was strategically motivated and not part of a petty Silicon Valley vendetta. Although Google and Apple historically had lots of good reasons to be allies, they were destined to become the rivals they now are.

Caterina Fake, CEO and founder of Findery, a location-based platform, explains it best in a statement that is simultaneously obvious and profound: “Without location, there is no context.” And for Apple, without context there will be no leadership. So Apple and Google divorced. Today Android and iOS compete for mobile operating system dominance, and thus Apple had little choice but to develop its own maps. Its big mistake was not in the play, but in being unprepared for the enormous challenges they faced on an unrealistically short timeline and then blindly plowing forward. By the time Apple Maps launched, Google had about 7000 employees working on its mobile maps. Matching that is nearly impossible for Apple, whose entire company has only 20,000 employees.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people live-blogging every passing phrase from a Steve Jobs or Tim Cook speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at the technological site Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceed anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers such as John Gruber and Donald Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user-interface issues. The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews in The New York Times, or Dow-Jones’s extended technology site, AllThingsD.

Tech critics such as Scott Rosenberg and Andrew Leonard at Salon wrote tens of thousands of words on the latest developments at Apple. (I wrote a few thousand myself at the online magazine I had founded, FEED.) Sometime around then, Apple launched its first official website; now I could get breaking news about the company directly from the source, the second they announced it. If my nineteen-year-old self could time-travel to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology—the iPhones and MacBook Airs—but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make it to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people live-blogging every passing phrase from a Steve Jobs or Tim Cook speech.

We need to be reminded of what life was like before the Web. I made my monthly pilgrimages to College Hill because I was interested in the Mac, which was, it should be said, a niche interest in 1987, though not that much of a niche. Apple was one of the world’s largest creators of personal computers, and by far the most innovative. But if you wanted to find out news about the Mac—new machines from Apple, the latest word on the upcoming System 7 or HyperCard, or any new releases from the thousands of software developers or peripheral manufacturers—if you wanted to keep up with any of this, there was just about one channel available to you, as a college student in Providence, Rhode Island.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

CNET.com, July 12, 2002, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-943519.xhtml. 210 iPod, boasting 100 million customers: Steven Levy, “Why We Went Nuts About the iPhone,” Newsweek, July 16, 2007. 210 Apple’s stock shot up 44 percent: Matt Krantz, “iPhone Powers up Apple’s Shares,” USA Today, June 28, 2007. 211 “four times the number of PCs that ship every year”: Morris, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out.” 211 Ericsson released the R380: Dave Conabree, “Ericsson Introduces the New R380e,” Mobile Magazine, September 25, 2001. 211 Palm followed up with its version: Sascha Segan, “Kyocera Launches First Smartphone in Years,” PC Magazine, March 23, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361664,00.asp#fbid=C81SVwKJIvh. 211 “one more entrant into an already very busy space”: “RIM Co-CEO Doesn’t See Threat from Apple’s iPhone,” InformationWeek, February 12, 2007. 212 the phone was exclusively available from only one carrier: In a handful of markets regulators ruled the exclusivity arrangement illegal. 212 “The bigger problem is the AT&T network”: David Pogue, “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype,” New York Times, June 27, 2007. 212 priced at a mere $99 in 2007: Kim Hart, “Rivals Ready for iPhone’s Entrance; Pricey Gadget May Alter Wireless Field,” Washington Post, June 24, 2007. 212 “cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software”: Apple, press release, September 24, 2007. 213 “I say I like our strategy”: Steve Ballmer interviewed on CNBC, January 17, 2007. 213 They ran out of the older model six weeks before the July 2008 launch: Tom Krazit, “The iPhone, One Year Later,” CNET.com, June 26, 2008, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9977572-37.xhtml. 213 60 percent went to buyers who already owned at least one iPod: Apple COO Tim Cook’s comments at Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, cited in JPMorgan analyst report, “Strolling Through the Apple Orchard: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Scenarios,” March 4, 2008. 215 the average iPhone user paid AT&T $2,000: Jenna Wortham, “Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T,” New York Times, September 2, 2009. 215 as high as $18 per user per month: Tom Krazit, “Piper Jaffray: AT&T Paying Apple $18 per iPhone, Per Month,” CNET.com, October 24, 2007, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.xhtml. 216 Apple announced its 10 billionth app download: Apple.com, “iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold,” February 25, 2010, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25iTunes-Store-Tops-10-Billion-Songs-Sold.xhtml.

But while we can see these three principles employed by scores of successful organizations, no recent firm is a better exemplar of their use than Apple. Apple’s Success in the New Millennium Everyone knows that Apple has been on an incredible run for the last decade. But while a great deal of attention has focused on Apple’s sleek product designs, what is often misunderstood is Apple’s systematic approach to its ecosystem strategy—its hidden source of advantage. Apple has no monopoly on great products, great interfaces, or a great brand. Apple’s product design is key, of course, but Apple’s rivals have been at its heels—behind but close—for years, even garnering praise for comparable design quality and better functionality.

,” EDN.com, June 25, 2001, http://www.edn.com/article/484332-Is_MP3_Here_to_Stay_.php. 145 “the hit of the holiday season”: Arik Hesseldahl, “iPod’s a Winner,” Forbes.com, December 7, 2001, http://www.forbes.com/2001/12/07/1207tentech.xhtml. 145 “revolutionary,” and “brilliant”: Eliot Van Buskirk, “How the iPod Will Change Computing,” CNET.com, November 2, 2001, http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-5020659-1.xhtml. 146 purchased over 600,000 iPods: “Apple Press Info,” Apple.com., 2011, http://www.apple.com/pr/products/ipodhistory/. Accessed July 23, 2011. 146 Apple held only 15 percent of the digital player market: Brian Garrity, “Digital Devices Get Smaller, Capacity Grows; Will Consumers Respond?,” Billboard, November 9, 2002. 146 “iTunes Music Store offers a groundbreaking solution”: Apple, “Apple Launches the iTunes Music Store,” press release, April 28, 2003. 146 200,000 songs from major labels: Ibid. 146 8 billion songs: William Blair & Company, “Apple Inc.,” equity research report, September 2, 2009. 146 operating margin of 10 percent: Estimate from report by Pacific Crest Securities analyst Andy Hargreaves, discussed in Eric Savitz, “Apple: Turns Out, iTunes Makes Money, Pacific Crest Says, Subscription Service Seems Inevitable,” Tech Trader Daily, April 23, 2007. 146 compatible with both FireWire and USB cables: Michelle Megna, “Apple’s Shining Moment: The Company Hits the Right Notes with Its New Online Music Store and Revamped iPods,” New York Daily News, May 11, 2003. 146 sales of portable CD players were still more than double: Christopher Walsh, “All They Want for Xmas Is the iPod,” Billboard, January 29, 2005. 147 sales of the iPod had leaped 616 percent: Mark Evans, “Apple’s iPod Is ‘the Kleenex’ of MP3 Players: Cultural Phenomenon Garnered Apple US$1.1-Billion in Q3,” National Post (Canada), July 15, 2005. 147 closest competitor with 8 percent market share: IDC data cited in William Blair & Company, “Apple Inc.,” equity research report., September 2, 2009. 147 “These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen”: Betsy Morris, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out,” Fortune, March 7, 2008. 147 “the Walkman of the early 21st century”: “Behind the Smiles at Sony,” Economist, March 12, 2005. 148 pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs: Peter N.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Apple is now taking its passive provision of goods a step further by strategically relaunching the production of one iMac line in Texas. As the CEO, Tim Cook, said in December 2013, “I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job. But I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs.”3 The distinction is important, because even though Apple will invest $100 million in repatriating assembly, Apple products are still largely made from foreign parts such as Samsung chips and Sharp screens that will have to be imported, and its longtime manufacturing partner, Taiwanese Foxconn, has facilities in Texas already.

In early 2015, the trading house Itochu made the largest Japanese foreign investment ever in China, buying (together with Thailand’s CP Group) a 10 percent stake in CITIC, one of China’s oldest and most respected conglomerates. CHAPTER 7: THE GREAT SUPPLY CHAIN WAR 1. Interview with author, July 18, 2015. 2. Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). 3. Josh Tyrangiel, “Tim Cook’s Freshman Year: The Apple CEO Speaks,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 6, 2012. 4. However, additive manufacturing and the sharing economy together do cause tremendous domestic dislocation. The construction sector is not tradable, but it can increasingly be automated as entire homes are designed, printed, and assembled out of 3-D printing kits, displacing contractors and builders across America and Europe. 5.

Even Silicon Valley’s technology companies increasingly make their products—and keep their money—in the cloud. There are fewer than five countries in the world whose GDP is larger than the more than $200 billion of liquid cash Apple Inc. holds in securities worldwide, meaning Apple could buy many countries’ combined output (minus their debt). Having sold almost two billion products to over one billion people, Apple not only has more money but also occupies greater mind share than most nations. Countries run by supply chains, cities that run themselves, communities that know no borders, and companies with more power than governments—all are evidence of the shift toward a new kind of pluralistic world system.


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

Believing that the iPhone used by one of the shooters might contain information that would illuminate just what had happened and thereby help prevent future attacks, the FBI filed suit to force Apple to unlock the phone. Apple pushed back. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, argued that his company could breach the phone’s security only by creating new software that would expose a so-called backdoor that anyone could then infiltrate. The FBI, in Apple’s view, was threatening data security by seeking to establish a precedent that the U.S. government could use to force any technology company to create software that would undermine the security of its products. Other technologists backed Apple’s position. Once again, Microsoft faced a difficult decision—one that weighed heavily on me personally.

I don’t see it that way. When done right, partnering grows the pie for everyone—for customers, yes, but also for each of the partners. Ultimately the consensus was that this partnership with Apple would help to ensure Office’s value was available to everyone, and Apple was committing to make its iOS really show off the great things Office can do, which would further solidify Microsoft as the top developer for Apple. On launch day, Apple’s Senior Vice President for Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, teased the audience as he set up the next demo at the iPad Pro launch. “We’ve been lucky to have some developers come in to work with us on professional productivity.

PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

That revenue is growing at 27 percent a year and represents more than half of Apple’s growth. And while its hardware business is seasonal and subject to wide peaks and troughs, its service business shows consistent, predictable growth quarter over quarter. But guess what? Some people still don’t get it! The Q&A session of that last earnings call was dominated by analyst questions around iPhone supply and demand. It’s enough to make you slam your forehead on your desk. Now, I understand that today Apple is doing just fine by selling expensive phones to affluent people. But just imagine what would happen at the next Apple keynote if Tim Cook announced a simple monthly Apple subscription plan that covered everything: network provider charges, automatic hardware upgrades, and add-on options for extra devices, music and video content, specialty software, gaming, etc.

If, as a result, Cupertino could deliver a financial statement similar to Salesforce’s noting that 80 percent of next year’s revenue was already in the bank, how fast do you think it would take for Apple to hit that trillion-dollar valuation? As each year passes, Apple cares less and less about how many iPhones it ships, and more about its revenue per Apple ID, lifetime value per Apple ID, and efficiency metrics toward growing the base and value of those Apple IDs. Apple has cleverly integrated those IDs into its retail experience as well. I can walk into any Apple store, give them my ID, and walk out with a product. That’s pretty amazing. Starbucks also has the ID. I can log in to Starbucks and look at all the coffees and lattes I’ve been drinking since I started using a Starbucks card and its mobile payment app.

But just imagine what would happen at the next Apple keynote if Tim Cook announced a simple monthly Apple subscription plan that covered everything: network provider charges, automatic hardware upgrades, and add-on options for extra devices, music and video content, specialty software, gaming, etc. Not just an upgrade program, but Apple as a Service. I have to admit, this isn’t my idea—it belongs to Goldman Sachs. Goldman analyst Jankowski has suggested an “Apple Prime” $50 monthly subscription that would include a guaranteed phone upgrade, Apple TV, and Apple Music. If, as a result, Cupertino could deliver a financial statement similar to Salesforce’s noting that 80 percent of next year’s revenue was already in the bank, how fast do you think it would take for Apple to hit that trillion-dollar valuation?


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, embraces the libertarian creed but has not taken the “don’t ask permission” route, has instead opened a new front: a relentless push to lower prices and commoditize content (especially books), which presents a different danger. And then there is Apple, the dissenter from the libertarian creed. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have been real allies to the content community, and their stance against the surveillance-marketing model that is at the core of Google’s and Facebook’s businesses—i.e., their support of ad blockers—puts them in direct opposition to the dominant search and social platforms.

Jobs went back to Cupertino and called a board meeting, saying he had to build a new computer based on the PARC architecture and that it should not be backward-compatible with the existing Apple II. The board thought he was crazy, but Jobs applied his charisma—his “reality distortion field”—and got his way. Xerox got its Apple shares, and in December of 1980, Apple went public at $22 per share. Xerox’s holdings were instantly worth millions. The first version of a computer using the PARC architecture, the Lisa, was a commercial failure, but when Jobs introduced the Macintosh in an iconic advertisement that aired during the 1984 Super Bowl, the long-awaited vision of the future arrived. The tragedy for Xerox was that two years later, the Xerox CFO sold all its Apple stock. Imagine what it would have meant to the company if it had held on to 5 percent of Apple, which would now be worth about $32 billion.

Brown explains: “Xerox built big complicated stuff that sold for $250,000 a unit and came with three-year guarantees. What was the chance that any of the PARC stuff could ever be sold through the Xerox channels? Zero.” So the decision was made to try to partner with Apple. Almost every version of the story of Steve Jobs visiting PARC for a demonstration in December of 1979 is wrong. It is usually said to epitomize the complete failure on Xerox’s part to understand what they had invented. A bit of background: Apple had successfully launched the Apple II computer in April of 1977. It was an instant hit, and between September of 1977 and September of 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533 percent.


pages: 223 words: 63,484

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky

centralized clearinghouse, index card, lone genius, market bubble, Merlin Mann, New Journalism, Results Only Work Environment, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, young professional

As we examine the history of spectacular creations and the leaders behind these accomplishments, some obvious examples of Doers, Dreamers, and Incrementalists stand out. Bill Bowerman, the former track coach who developed Nike’s running shoes, partnered with Phil Knight to transform his vision into a business. In the leadership of Apple, one might call Jonathan Ive (chief designer), Tim Cook (chief operating officer), and Steve Jobs (chief executive officer) Dreamer, Doer, and Incrementalist, respectively. In the world of fashion, the Dreamer Calvin Klein had Barry Schwartz, Ralph Lauren had Roger Farah, and Marc Jacobs had Robert Duffy—three fashion visionaries paired with a world-class Doer as a partner.

You also don’t want to create too much structure around when you can and cannot generate new ideas. However, you must be willing to kill ideas liberally—for the sake of fully pursuing others. In a rare interview in BusinessWeek on Apple’s system for innovation, CEO Steve Jobs explained that, in fact, there is no system at Apple—and that spontaneity is a crucial element for innovation, so long as it is paired with the ability to say no without hesitation: Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient. But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

Since 2004, AMR Research, a leading authority on supply chain research that serves numerous Fortune 500 companies, has published an annual list of the twenty-five companies with the best supply chain management. You might be surprised to learn that Apple debuted on the list at No. 2 in 2007, and overtook companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota to take the No. 1 slot in 2008. Why would Apple, a company known for new ideas and its ability to “think different,” also be one of the most organized companies on the planet? The answer is that—like it or not—organization is a major force for making ideas happen.


pages: 260 words: 76,223

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

And what this data indicates is that the one-screen world is not a possible trend but an inevitability that has already taken place, and that the growth continues at an exponential pace. When Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 7, 2012, many people were waiting to see both how Cook would handle the first major release from Apple in a post–Steve Jobs world and what the rumored iPad would be capable of, as the iPad 2 was still selling well. Beyond a smooth performance and a new iPad that featured Retina Display with a faster computer processor (dual-core A5X processor with quad-core graphics, thank you very much), few picked up on the staggering data point that Cook enlightened us all with. Apple sold over fifteen million iPads in the first quarter of 2012.

Ironically, other, scrappier startups have disrupted this traditional retail model with digital-only brands that are capturing the imagination (and money) of consumers all over the world. WHAT APPLE KNOWS. What happened prior to 2001 that made Apple go into the retail business? Whenever the topic of Apple and the Apple retail experience (aka Apple Store) is brought up, many media pundits roll their eyes as if the success of these sparse and crisp stores is some kind of anomaly in business lore. It’s not. Apple came to a conclusion in the 1990s that many businesses have yet to wake up to. They knew that if potential customers walked into a traditional consumer electronics goods store and became inundated with a massive selection of computers and laptops, they would, instinctively, defer to the first sales associate they could wrestle down.

Prior to becoming the CEO of JCPenney, Johnson was the senior vice president of retail operations at Apple. In short, he led the concept of both the Apple retail stores and the Genius Bar. His record at Apple is pristine. Within two years of the first store opening, the retail operation of Apple surpassed a billion dollars in annual sales (beating the record held by The Gap). Globally, Apple now has over three hundred stores, and their expansion plans continue to be as aggressive as their product launches. In November 2011, Johnson left Apple to lead JCPenney through this time of purgatory and reboot. His first big and bold moves made news as the 110-year-old company not only struggles to remain relevant but fights within the constraints of the traditional retail world—a place where being an anchor store at a highly coveted shopping mall was the difference between success and failure.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

China’s massive $9 trillion mobile payments market led by Alibaba and Tencent is light-years ahead of the United States.5,6 Nearly everyone in the country, about 900 million, uses their smartphone as a mobile wallet, Alipay or WeChat Pay, to scan items and pay instantly without banking and credit card fees. Cash is a thing of the past in China. Cash, checks, money orders, and credit and debit cards are still commonly used in the United States, and Apple Pay and Google Pay are not yet mainstream in the States.7 Breaking into China now isn’t an option for American financial brands, given the dominance of Alibaba and Tencent. Google’s app store is blocked, and Apple Pay has such limited traction that Apple CEO Tim Cook agreed to accept Alipay at Apple’s 41 retail stores in China. Master-Card and Visa have tried for years to break into China while American Express was recently approved, but it’s probably too late.

DJI’s new flashy home in Shenzhen is a futuristic twin skyscraper designed by Foster & Partners, the same architect as for Apple’s orbit-like base in Cupertino. The plush building features cantilevered floors, a sky bridge where drones will be tested, and even a robot-fighting ring. The Apple of Drones DJI has positioned itself as the Apple of drones. Rumors have popped up that Apple would buy DJI as the iPhone maker mulls an entry into the drone market. In a stroke of marketing genius, DJI has obtained a dedicated section of prime real estate space at Apple retail stores globally for a line of advanced consumer drones. Its drones are sold on Amazon, eBay, Alibaba’s online retail service AliExpress, DJI’s site, and retail stores.

CHAPTER 3 ________________ GAINING FAST: CHINA’S NEXT TECH TITANS The next group of up-and-comers is right behind China’s BAT and leading the future for smartphones that rival Apple, internet-connected smart homes, superapps for speedy on-demand takeout lunches, plus 15-second video thrills and AI-fed news. XIAOMI: The Apple of the East Chinese tech entrepreneur Lei Jun is sometimes called the Steve Jobs of Apple. An entrepreneur celebrity in China much as Jobs was in Silicon Valley, he launched China’s smartphone maker Xiaomi in the spirit of Jobs and copied his products and style down to blue jeans and black T-shirt attire and stage presentations for new iPhones and iPads, even once teasing an introduction with the adopted line “Just one more thing.”


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

If strategy involves doing something at the expense of something else, then in the AI space, few companies made a stronger, earlier commitment than Apple. Tim Cook wrote, in a special section devoted to privacy on Apple’s home page: “At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled.”11 He went on: A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.

Plain and simple.12 Apple did not make this decision due to a government regulation. Some claimed Apple made the decision because it was purportedly lagging behind Google and Facebook in developing AI. No company, certainly not Apple, could eschew AI. This commitment would make its job harder. It plans to do AI in a way that respects privacy. It is making a big strategic bet that consumers will want control over their own data. Whether for security or privacy, Apple has bet that its commitment will make consumers more, not less, likely to allow AI onto their devices.13 Apple isn’t alone in betting that protecting privacy will pay off.

Many other companies, including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have chosen a different path, telling users that they will use data to provide better products. Apple’s focus on privacy limits the products it can offer. For instance, both Apple and Google have face recognition built into their photo services. To be useful to consumers, the faces have to be tagged. Google does this, preserving the tags, regardless of device, since the recognition runs on Google servers. Apple, however, because of privacy concerns, has opted to have that recognition occur at the device level. That means if you tag faces of people you know on your Mac, the tags will not carry over to your iPhone or iPad.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

In one of my first addresses at Best Buy, I asked the company’s top leaders to imagine how the conversation would go if I were to call Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “How is the wind where you are sailing?” I would ask. “The wind is great! Great sailing. We’re having the time of our life,” they both would answer. So if they found the wind at their backs, I concluded, then the problem was not the wind. And if wind was not the problem, then we probably were. We could keep coming up with the best possible excuses and wait for the unlikely day when prizes would be handed out in that category. Or we could change tack. First, we had to regroup, which required some pruning.

We applied the same model with other suppliers, including Microsoft, Sony, LG, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Canon, Nikon, and Google. The strategy contributed to revitalizing Sony’s ailing TV business. Apple, with whom we had developed the first store-within-a-store experience back in 2007, also decided to double down and invest more in our space, even though they had their own flagship retail fleet. And in 2019, Apple announced that Best Buy would service Apple products, helping the many customers who do not live near an Apple store. Great for the customers, great for Apple, and great for Best Buy, as this meant another reason for customers to visit our stores. If Best Buy had remained a company whose mission was to sell electronics, showrooming might well have killed us, as more and more customers used us to look at products and then ordered them from Amazon.

So was the shift to online shopping and the fact that Amazon was not collecting sales tax. Apple Stores added to the headwinds. Prices on key products were deflating; the iPhone was making cameras, voice recorders, and music players redundant. Best Buy appeared to be the victim of a perfect storm of circumstances—even the best sailors cannot overcome such headwinds. But how could that be? All my previous jobs had been in industries where IT and electronics played a positive role. The likes of Amazon, Apple, and Samsung were doing very well. In one of my first addresses at Best Buy, I asked the company’s top leaders to imagine how the conversation would go if I were to call Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Though modern computer operating systems, including those from both Microsoft and Apple, come with free hard disk encryption tools built in, they are not turned on by default, and only a small minority of companies and a tiny percentage of consumers encrypt the data on their laptops or desktops. In fact, most consumers have no idea these security protocols even exist. In the wake of the celebrity iCloud hacking fiasco of 2014, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, acknowledged the company had to do more to ratchet up customers’ awareness of cyber-security matters. I thoroughly agree. In September 2014, Apple announced that its latest iPhone would encrypt all data on the device when a password was set, a move Google vowed to match with its forthcoming Android mobile phone operating system.

In September 2014, Apple announced that its latest iPhone would encrypt all data on the device when a password was set, a move Google vowed to match with its forthcoming Android mobile phone operating system. These are important steps forward in minimizing smartphone security risks, but given that 40 percent of users don’t even use a password on their mobile phones at all, Tim Cook was right: much more education and awareness are needed. Taking a Byte out of Cyber Crime: Education Is Essential Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. WELLS We have a literacy problem in the United States and around the world, and it’s not the one most think of.

By finally creating its own mobile app for users, Facebook devised not only a better user experience but also a new tool for grabbing voluminous amounts of data from a user’s mobile device. Pilfering Your Data? There’s an App for That An Apple iPhone commercial in 2009 famously introduced us to the phrase “there’s an app for that” as a means of demonstrating there is an iPhone application for every possible human need. A bold statement at the time, but perhaps Steve Jobs was right. Since its launch in 2008, there have been more than sixty-five billion downloads from Apple’s App Store, generating revenues of over $10 billion in 2013 alone. To compete with Apple, Google launched its own app store known as Google Play, and each company hosts more than a million separate applications available for download.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

For all the good that Jobs did for Apple, he was also a destructive force inside the company. He bullied employees; his attitudes around philanthropy and inclusiveness were small; his mercurial personality and megalomania kept Apple perpetually in borderline chaos. His death ended the company’s historic run of innovation, but it also let Apple, under Tim Cook, focus on predictability, profitability, and scale. You can see the results on the balance sheet: if profits are a sign of success, in fiscal year 2015 Apple was the most successful firm in history, registering $53.4 billion in net profit.9 If Apple were anything but a Fortune 500 tech darling, Congress would have implemented tax reforms.10 But most politicians, like other privileged classes around the world, feel a tiny rush when they pull out their iPhones.

Biography. http://www.biography.com/people/louis-vuitton-17112264. 21. Apple Newsroom. “‘Designed by Apple in Calfornia’ chronicles 20 years of Apple design.” https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/11/designed-by-apple-in-california-chronicles-20-years-of-apple-design/. 22. Ibid. 23. Norman, Don. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 24. Turner, Daniel. “The Secret of Apple Design.” MIT Technology Review, May 1, 2007. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407782/the-secret-of-apple-design/. 25. Munk, Nina. “Gap Gets It: Mickey Drexler Is Turning His Apparel Chain into a Global Brand.

The company’s former chief financial officer, Joseph Graziano, signaled disaster, telling Business Week that Jobs was insisting on “serving caviar in a world that seems content with cheese and crackers.”31 The stores, of course, changed the tech industry—and advanced Apple as a luxury company. The iPhone drove Apple’s share, but stores drove the brand and margin. Walk up Fifth Avenue or the Champs Élysées, and you see Vuitton, Cartier, Hermès, and Apple. These are captive channels. A $26,000 Cartier Ballon Bleu watch or a $5,000 suede Burberry trench coat would lose their luster on shelves at Macy’s. But stores operated by the brands become temples to the brand. Apple’s stores sell nearly $5,000 per square foot. Number 2 is a convenience store, which lags by 50 percent.32 It wasn’t the iPhone, but the Apple Store, that defined Apple’s success. 4.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

There would be disagreement and friction, which is a headache to manage. But the benefits of diversity outweigh these difficulties. Three years after Podolny started, Jobs passed away and his deputy, Tim Cook, took over as chief executive. Cook has long been an advocate of diversity in all its forms. His personal story may play a role, as he is one of the few bosses of a major company to come out as gay. Under his leadership, Apple would honor Jobs’s belief that diversity makes for better framers and more successful companies. A Mind-Set, Not a Method Think of mental diversity as you might carpentry tools.

The information was also compiled from conversations with Podolny when he was at Yale, interviews, firsthand experience, and written accounts, including: Jessica Guynn, “Steve Jobs’ Virtual DNA to Be Fostered in Apple University,” Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2011, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-oct-06-la-fi-apple-university-20111006-story.html; Brian X. Chen, “Simplifying the Bull: How Picasso Helps to Teach Apple’s Style,” New York Times, August 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples-internal-training-program-.html; Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works (New York: Business Plus, 2012). On insight problems: Marvin Levine, A Cognitive Theory of Learning: Research on Hypothesis Testing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1975); Janet Metcalfe and David Wiebe, “Intuition in Insight and Noninsight Problem Solving,” Memory & Cognition 15, no. 3 (May 1987): 238–46.

We make similar mistakes in our own day. In 2008 Nokia led the world in mobile phone sales. When Apple introduced the iPhone, few thought it would take off. The trend was to make handsets smaller and cheaper, but Apple’s was bulkier, pricier, and buggier. Nokia’s frame came from the conservative telecom industry, valuing practicality and reliability. Apple’s frame came from the breathlessly innovative computing industry, valuing ease of use and the extensibility of new features via software. That frame turned out to be a better fit for the needs and wants of consumers—and Apple dominated the market. Misapplying frames can have horrendous consequences.


pages: 271 words: 77,448

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Dunbar, “Rowers’ High: Behavioural Synchrony Is Correlated with Elevated Pain Thresholds,” Biology Letters 15, September 2009, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2009.0670. Nonetheless, by the time Jobs stepped down as CEO in August 2011 . . . See biographies at www.apple.com for the tenures as of August 2011 of Eddy Cue (twenty-two years), Phil Schiller (fourteen years), Jonathan Ive (nineteen years), Scott Forstall (nineteen years), and Tim Cook (thirteen years). To see how wrong things can go . . . “Why Teams Don’t Work: An interview with J. Richard Hackman by Diane Coutu,” Harvard Business Review, May 2009. Dr. John Noseworthy, CEO of the Mayo Clinic, told me about the considerable lengths to which he has gone . . .

We do not all bring the same social skills, and group effectiveness depends on building up social capital between group members through earning trust and helping one another. It all takes time. An important implication of these findings is that since highly effective teams are rare and valuable, not easily or quickly replicated, keeping them together, once formed, is worth a lot. Exhibit A was Apple’s top team under Steve Jobs. The conventional view of Apple’s success is that it derived from Jobs’s genius and dictatorial management, but Jobs knew that wasn’t nearly enough. He worked extraordinarily hard to assemble and keep a highly effective top team, which is an extremely difficult feat in a successful company. As the company prospers, other firms try to lure away its executives, usually with higher-level, higher-paying, more highly visible roles, and the temptation can be overwhelming.

You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.’” It all has to happen in person. That’s why Jobs famously designed the Pixar headquarters the way he did. Pixar is the animation studio that Jobs initially funded and eventually ran in the years before he returned to Apple and for several years thereafter. It’s arguably the most successful film studio ever, since it has never produced a flop. The Toy Story films, Finding Nemo, the Cars films—of the fourteen features it had produced through 2013, every one was a major financial winner. Jobs wanted to keep it that way, so he insisted that Pixar’s new headquarters be designed around a central atrium; he then placed the café, mailboxes, conference rooms, and other elements so as to force people to criss-cross it.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

And then there’s the fact that large American companies are much more globalized than ever before, and their supply chains are spread across a larger number of countries. Apple’s iPhone, for instance, relies on components and assembly from the United States, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, India, and China. A lot of Apple’s key innovation was not the technology behind the iPhone, much of which already was in place, but rather new ideas about how to build up and maintain such a supply chain. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook had to develop a great deal of knowledge about trade patterns, foreign direct investment, and the global economy more generally. In each of the countries in which it does business, Apple has faced unique institutional and regulatory obstacles.

Your real options are to find corners of the internet that will be interested in your ideas, and adjust accordingly. It’s still a far freer intellectual world than what we knew only a short time ago. To consider a third major tech company: Apple too continues to be a major innovator, in spite of its reputation to the contrary. Not only does Apple have three truly major developments under its belt—personal computers, smartphones, and smart tablets—but the company continues to try to drive further advances. The future of the Apple Watch remains uncertain, but at the very least it is a major achievement along the path of developing higher-quality and more practical internet-connected wearables; its millions of users already find it a convenient way to receive messages and track and measure certain aspects of their behavior.

For each copy of Microsoft Word that is sold, other copies are pirated or otherwise reproduced in a way that does not result in a traditional fee for sale at the price set by Microsoft. Apple is the company on this list that charges luxury prices, at least for its hardware. But before the iPhone, you couldn’t buy something like that at any price. And within a few years after the debut of the iPhone, there were plenty of cheaper smartphone models on the market, and since that time those models have gained most of the market share. As of this writing, smartphones are becoming cheaper yet, due to imports from China, and the quality of those products is likely to improve rapidly. Apple helped enable these cheaper products, whether it wanted to or not, and all along the company knew it would end up creating competitors.


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, friendshoring, 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

And the much-hyped Google Glasses are currently in the ‘Where are they now?’ file. Apple was the company that almost perished before Steve Jobs made a comeback, but even under his rule the company made some blunders, for example with the social network Ping, the stereo speaker iPod Hi-Fi, the smart speaker Home Pod and the connection Firewire, which admittedly could do more than USB but cost too much. Most embarrassing was probably the launch of Apple’s map app, which in its first incarnation was so buggy and incomplete that CEO Tim Cook had to apologize and recommend angry users to use its competitors’ products.

The average US region increased employment 1.3 per cent more annually than a hypothetical region that had no trade with China. As a result, 75 per cent of American workers got higher real wages.38 But why sacrifice any jobs at all? Just look at an iPhone. Donald Trump could not understand why Apple assembles its mobile phones on the other side of the globe. ‘China is the biggest beneficiary of Apple – not us,’ he complained in January 2019, urging Apple to ‘build their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries’. But is China really the biggest winner? Some researchers disassembled an iPhone 7 that sold for $649. They observed that the manufacturing cost of just over $237 (which looks like $237 of Chinese imports in the data tables) mostly consists of components that have previously been imported to China, such as American, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese microprocessors, memory chips and displays.

France has a law against planned obsolescence, and it has mostly shown how difficult it is to document a single case. Yes, it was heard all over the world that Apple was forced to pay a fine after older iPhones started working more slowly following a software update. But what few observed is that Apple was never considered guilty of planned obsolescence, only of not informing users of the change. The background was that many users’ iPhones crashed after an update of the operating system at the end of 2016. The reason was that older batteries could not cope with the power of all new applications when they were not sufficiently charged. To solve that problem, Apple introduced a feature in the next update that prevented phones from crashing when exposed to high workloads, by performing certain tasks over a longer period of time when they reached a peak.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

And for the first four years that the iPhone was on sale, it wasn’t even compatible with China Mobile, which accounted for 700 million customers. Since then, Apple has fixed those problems, and China is now arguably its most important market, having registered more iPhone sales than in the United States. In October 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook said China will be “Apple’s top market in the world.” Apple’s commitment to the country shows in its products. In particular, the large-format plus-size iPhones (starting with the iPhone 6 Plus) were perfect for China, where mobile phones serve as showpieces. The flashy Apple Watch is an equally powerful status item. There is little reason to suggest that Tesla can’t capitalize on the same dynamics.

Then there’s Apple. “They have hired people we’ve fired,” Musk told the German newspaper Handelsblatt in September 2015. Rumors that Apple was working on an electric car project had emerged that February, when an Apple employee allegedly e-mailed Business Insider to say that the Cupertino company was working on a project that would “give Tesla a run for its money.” Former Tesla people had been joining the company in droves. Musk had his own view of the situation. “We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard,’” he said. “If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.”

In fact, on reflection, it looked like Tesla was following a similar path to the one taken by Apple, which also got off to a rocky start in China. Apple launched the iPhone in China in 2009 but was struck by a series of criticisms early on, not the least of which were about working conditions in the Shenzhen factory where its devices were made. The factory owner, Foxconn, came under fire for several worker suicides. Meanwhile, Apple’s scalper problem was on another level. The scalpers were so bold as to buy iPhones in bulk and sell them right outside Apple stores. Apple was also slow to make the latest iPhones available in the country, with Chinese consumers typically getting them months after they went on sale in the United States.


pages: 271 words: 79,367

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All by Chris Goodall

3D printing, additive manufacturing, carbon tax, clean tech, decarbonisation, demand response, Easter island, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, gigafactory, Haber-Bosch Process, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Ken Thompson, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Negawatt, off grid, Peter Thiel, rewilding, Russell Ohl, smart meter, standardized shipping container, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons

There is indeed probably an element of window-dressing in the actions of some businesses. They are seeking to appeal to environmentally conscious customers, and possibly investors. But most businesses are driven primarily by a desire to save money and avoid future electricity price rises. Discussing Apple’s investments in renewable energy, CEO Tim Cook said recently that ‘we expect to have very significant savings’. Similarly, Walmart – not usually seen as an environmental do-gooder – stresses the financial benefits of PV as much as its other benefits: ‘Using the power of the sun and installing solar panels lowers our energy costs and is clearly good for the environment, but another benefit is that it keeps prices low for our customers.’

Among the most notable solar supporters is Apple, the world’s most valuable company, which has made a promise of carbon neutrality for its operations and manufacturing plants around the world. As well as investing in solar in the US, the business has started to commission PV farms in China. One series of investments in Inner Mongolia will produce 170 megawatts of peak output across three huge farms. To get a sense of the scale of this, a solar portfolio of this size will produce enough electricity to meet about one thousandth of the UK’s total annual power need. But to wipe out its entire carbon impact Apple will need to make investments of about ten times this size.

But to wipe out its entire carbon impact Apple will need to make investments of about ten times this size. For a company with $200bn of cash on its balance sheet, this represents little more than small change. Apple is not alone. Google has made renewable investment pledges totalling $2.5 billion in recent years including financing the largest US residential PV installer, SolarCity. Global retailer IKEA has put 700,000 panels on its stores and recently pledged another €100 million to solar as it promised to move to 100 per cent clean energy by 2020. The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has made similar investment on its own warehouses while in the UK Sainsbury’s has put over 100,000 panels on its roofs.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

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

For the sake of her own sanity, she delegated the management of her Facebook account to an employee. Many social industry and tech executives resist their own technologies. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook account is run by employees. Apple’s Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his children near an iPad, while his replacement, Tim Cook, doesn’t allow his nephew to use social networking sites. Apple’s design strategist Jony Ive warns that ‘constant use’ of tech is overuse.3 As always, tech is adept at producing profitable solutions to the problems it creates. Now smartphone users can trade in their addictive devices for a range of minimalist alternatives, with the limited texting and call-making functionality of a very old mobile phone.

Google resorted to internal encryption to evade surveillance when it was revealed that both the NSA and GCHQ had wiretapped the firm’s communications. Apple fought the FBI to a standstill over encryption on its phones. The FBI wanted to force Apple to unlock an iPhone belonging to Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters in the San Bernardino massacre in December 2015. Apple resisted in the courts, and ultimately the FBI backed off when it used third-party software to hack the phone, revealing nothing of pertinence. FBI director James Comey complained that Apple allowed ‘people to hold themselves beyond the law’.29 This was revealing, suggesting that he expected there to be no area of life not potentially scrutable by the law.

Increasingly, these abstractions are linked to an emerging web of ubiquitous computing technologies which Greenfield has presciently called ‘everyware’.76 Ostensibly designed to smooth the edges of life, this network connects smartphones, sensors, data collectors, cookies and platforms in a constant flow of information. In so doing, it quietly outsources important decisions. When you ask Alexa or Siri for a nearby restaurant or shoe shop, it will be Apple or Google or Amazon that determines your path of movement through the urban space on the basis of their commercial needs. Naturally, these structures can be used by political authority to promote governing norms, but they can also work as more insidious forms of control. The emerging ideal of the ‘smart city’, where sensors and data collectors determine the allocation of resources and assets, is a case in point.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

We know that innovation often involves investing in organizational change, such as creating a new business unit to sell a new product line. And it’s also possible to think of examples of companies that have invested to create valuable organizational assets outside their own firms. The remarkable Apple supply chain that Tim Cook was responsible for developing is clearly a long-term source of value for Apple, allowing it to bring products to market extraordinarily quickly. A valuable asset of so-called sharing-economy businesses like Uber or AirBnB is typically their network of committed suppliers—Uber’s drivers or AirBnB’s hosts. This too is an asset of lasting value that both companies have invested heavily to develop (and which they invest to protect, for example, against legal actions requiring them to treat their suppliers as employees).

Consider an expert designer at Apple, a company famed for, and to some extent reliant on, its good design. What stops that designer, from an economic point of view, demanding more and more money in return for not leaving for the competition or setting up a new, design-led start-up? One answer to the question is synergies. Apple’s design is especially valuable in the context of a whole set of intangible assets Apple owns: its technologies, its customer service, and the power of its brand and marketing channels. All of these things make an Apple designer more valuable to Apple than to an alternative employer, and they reduce the incentives to leave.

Oral Rehydration Therapy is a perfect example. But spillovers don’t just arise from R&D. After Apple released the iPhone, almost all smartphones started looking just like it. Apple’s investments in software, design, and supply chains (for example, creating the software supply chain we call the App Store) were adopted or imitated by its competitors as they sought to create phones like Apple’s. By creating what marketing experts would call the smartphone “category” (or more precisely, growing it significantly), Apple benefited not just themselves but other smartphone manufacturers. The iPhone also provides an example of marketing spillovers.


pages: 290 words: 73,000

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

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

Dunbar, A. (2006). Introducing Critical Race Theory to Archival Discourse: Getting the Conversation Started. Archival Science, 6, 109–129. Dyer, R. (1997). White. London: Routledge. Eddie, R., and Prigg, M. (2015, November 13). “This Does Not Represent Our Values”: Tim Cook Addresses Racism Claims after Seven Black Students Are Ejected from an Apple Store and Told They “Might Steal Something.” Daily Mail. Retrieved from www.dailymail.co.uk. Eglash, R. (2002). Race, Sex, and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters. Social Text, 20(2), 49–64. Eglash, R. (2007). Ethnocomputing with Native American Design.

See Hardenaug, 2001; Shah, 2010. 43. While less formal scholarship has been dedicated to this issue, considerable media attention in 2011 and 2012 has been focused on the labor conditions in parts of China where Apple manufactures its products. While some of the details of the journalistic reporting have been prone to factual error in location and dates, there is considerable evidence that labor conditions by Apple’s supplier Foxconn are precarious and rife with human-rights abuses. See Duhigg and Barboza, 2012. 44. See Fields, 2004. 45. Wallace, 1990, 98. 46. See Hobson, 2008. 47. See Harvey, 2005. 48.

With all of the aberrations and challenges that tech companies face in charges of data discrimination, the possibility of hiring recent graduates and advanced-degree holders in Black studies, ethnic studies, American Indian studies, gender and women’s studies, and Asian American studies with deep knowledge of history and critical theory could be a massive boon to working through the kinds of complex challenges facing society, if this is indeed the goal of the technocracy. From claims of Twitter’s racist trolling that drives people from its platform34 to charges that Airbnb’s owners openly discriminate against African Americans who rent their homes35 to racial profiling at Apple stores in Australia36 and Snapchat’s racist filters,37 there is no shortage of projects to take on in sophisticated ways by people far more qualified than untrained computer engineers, whom, through no fault of their own, are underexposed to the critical thinking and learning about history and culture afforded by the social sciences and humanities in most colleges of engineering nationwide.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The world’s giant internet companies are leading the way in decoupling from fossil fuels and reinvesting in green energy in the ICT sector, with Apple, Google, and Facebook setting the pace. In April 2018, Apple announced that all of its data centers worldwide are now powered by renewable energy. The company also announced that twenty-three of its key manufacturing partners around the world have agreed to power all of Apple’s production with 100 percent green energy. Commenting on this milestone, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, said, “We’re going to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the materials in our products, the way we recycle them, our facilities and our work with suppliers to establish new creative and forward-looking sources of renewable energy because we know the future depends on it.”19 Google achieved 100 percent renewable energy usage in its data centers in 2017 and is currently operating twenty renewable energy projects with a total investment of $3.5 billion in renewable energy infrastructure.20 In July 2017, Facebook announced that “all” of its new data centers from here on out will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy.21 The internet behemoths are out front in decoupling from the fossil fuel civilization, but many other leading ICT and telecom companies are running nearly apace.

., “Worldwide Energy Needs for ICT: The Rise of Power-Aware Networking,” paper presented at the 2008 International Conference on Advanced Networks and Telecommunication Systems, 2, doi:10.1109/ants.2008.4937762; Lotfi Belkhir and Ahmed Elmeligi, “Assessing ICT Global Emissions Footprint: Trends to 2040 & Recommendations,” Journal of Cleaner Production 177 (January 2, 2018): 448, doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.239. 17.  Belkhir and Elmeligi, “Assessing ICT Global Emissions Footprint,” 458. 18.  Ibid., 458–59. 19.  Apple, “Apple Now Globally Powered by 100 Percent Renewable Energy,” news release, April 9, 2018, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/04/apple-now-globally-powered-by-100-percent-renewable-energy/ (accessed January 15, 2019). 20.  Urs Hölzle, “100% Renewable Is Just the Beginning,” Google news release, December 12, 2016, https://sustainability.google/projects/announcement-100 (accessed February 7, 2019). 21.  

Africa North Africa power grid plans for solar and wind energy in South Africa Age of Progress Age of Resilience aggregate energy efficiency agriculture sector carbon farming digital operations effect of animal rearing on greenhouse gas emissions green electricity cooperatives Internet of Things infrastructure organic farming percentage of crops and land used for animal feed use of public land and vegetarian or vegan diets AIG Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Allianz Alphabet Inc.. See also Google American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) infrastructure report card apartheid divestment movement Apple apprenticeships, green Arias Cañete, Miguel artificial intelligence (AI) Ashton, Kevin AT&T autonomous (self-driving) electric vehicles AXA Balsillie, Jim Bank of America Bank of England Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) Barber, Randy Barbier, Edward Bernhard, Wolfgang Bernstein Research Big Data Bilicic, George bio-based materials biosphere consciousness Blair, Tony blockchain technology Bloomberg, Michael Bond, Kingsmill Booker, Cory Boston Tea Party Bowser, Muriel Brattle Group Brown, Jerry Buffett, Warren building sector decoupling from fossil fuel industry nodal IoT buildings retrofits Bulc, Violeta Burger King Burns, Larry Burrow, Sharan Buttigieg, Pete Byrd, Harry Caldecott, Ben Canada and liquefied natural gas (LNG) pipeline and natural gas Toronto waterfront smart city project capital market capital pension capital public capital social capital capitalism and near-zero marginal costs and pension capital pension fund divest/invest campaign and Sharing Economy social capitalism and socially responsible investment (SRI) carbon bubble carbon capture and storage and agriculture sector limitations of process of carbon tax Carbon Tracker Initiative Carney, Mark Castro, Julián Cavoukian, Ann Changing Wealth of Nations 2018: Building a Sustainable Future, The (World Bank report) China.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

Gap said it worked with two suppliers who used yarn from mills in Xinjiang and was sorting out and reviewing its relationships there.13 Apple was another American company that benefited. It had connections to at least three factories in its supply chain that employed Uyghur laborers forcibly transferred from the camps. ASPI found that, between April 28 and May 1, 2017, seven hundred Uyghurs were transferred to the city of Nanchang to work at a factory run by O-Film. O-Film made cameras for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. In December 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited another O-Film factory. According to an Apple press release, Cook praised O-Film for its “humane approach towards employees” during his visit.

He also said that workers seemed “able to gain growth at the company, and live happily.” Apple’s manufacturing partners expanded their use of Uyghur labor in September 2019, according to a local government document stating that 560 Uyghur workers had been transferred to the Foxconn factory that made half the world’s iPhones. Foxconn, a major Apple partner, had taken part in the Xinjiang Aid scheme.14 Apple said it launched an investigation into O-Film. “Apple is dedicated to ensuring everyone in our supply chain is treated with dignity and respect,” an Apple spokesman said in a statement. “We have found no evidence of any forced labor on Apple production lines and we plan to continue monitoring.”

“We have found no evidence of any forced labor on Apple production lines and we plan to continue monitoring.” In late 2020 or early 2021, Apple reportedly dropped O-Film as a components supplier over accusations of its involvement in forced labor.15 Another company that claimed to make components for an Apple supplier, Highbroad Advanced Material Company, signed an agreement with a local government to employ one thousand Uyghur workers each year for three years.16 Highbroad makes components for flat-panel displays, and counts among its other customers HP, Mercedes-Benz, Dell, LG, and Volkswagen.17 HP didn’t respond to media requests for comment after the report was released.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Anyone within that geofence (e.g., Apple’s app-review team) would see a different version of Uber’s app. (It’s a bit like if a company were to send a tech reporter a new smartwatch to test and review—under the pretense that it is their normal product—but the device sent to the reporter secretly includes a faster processor not available to everyone else, so that the tech reporter will give it a better grade.) In a meeting that took place years before the event became public knowledge, Apple CEO Tim Cook summoned a nervous Travis Kalanick to his office to discuss Uber’s willful disregard for Apple’s rules. Kalanick agreed to comply properly.

But in direct violation of these rules, Uber continued to track iPhone data even after users had deleted the ridehail app from their phones, as Mike Isaac reported for the New York Times.48 Normally, app developers who flout Apple’s app-store guidelines risk being cut from the app store, which in Uber’s case would have resulted in their losing access to millions of Apple customers. Given the stakes, Uber went to elaborate lengths to hide its noncompliance: the ridehail company purposefully set out to evade Apple’s fraud detection protocols by manipulating what Apple’s app-review team would see when approving the Uber app. Under orders from then-CEO Travis Kalanick, Uber’s engineers duped Apple for a time by building a “geofence” around Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California.

As privacy and legal scholar Woodrow Hartzog observes publicly on Twitter, “By not including a common option like “only while app is in use,” they [Uber] manipulate users into sharing by making privacy costly.”47 (Uber later revised the settings when Apple made it mandatory as a condition of hosting Uber and others in its app store, though Android users were still affected before Uber changed course.) Most consumers, who are generally further removed from Uber drama, accept data practices that are not in their best interests simply because they want a cheap taxi ride and a convenient service. It is clear that consumers can be taken advantage of through data exploits. And it’s not just individual consumers who are vulnerable—large companies can also get duped by sly data practices. Apple’s app store has specific privacy rules that all apps must follow, including the Uber app.


pages: 302 words: 74,878

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

Simpson Jared Cohen: director of Google Ideas Joel Cohen: population specialist, mathematical biologist Kat Cohen: university admissions counselor, author of The Truth About Getting In William Colby: CIA director, 1973–1976 Elizabeth Baron Cole: nutritionist Jim Collins: management consultant, expert on business and management, author of Good to Great Robert Collins: neurologist, former chairman of neurology at UCLA School of Medicine Sean Combs: musician, music producer, fashion designer, entrepreneur Richard Conniff: author who specializes in human and animal behavior Tim Cook: CEO of Apple, Inc. Tatiana Cooley-Marquardt: repeat winner of USA Memory Championship Anderson Cooper: journalist, author, TV personality, anchor of CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 Norman Cousins: medical guru, author of Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the Patient Jacques Cousteau: oceanographer, pioneered marine conservation Chris W.

Wilson: biologist, author, professor emeritus at Harvard University, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize Oprah Winfrey: founder and chairwoman of the Oprah Winfrey Network, actress, author George C. Wolfe: playwright, theater director, two-time winner of the Tony Award Steve Wozniak: cofounder of Apple Inc., designer of Apple I and Apple II computers, inventor John D. Wren: president and CEO of marketing and communications company Omnicom Will Wright: game designer, creator of Sim City and The Sims Steve Wynn: businessman, Las Vegas casino magnate Gideon Yago: writer, former correspondent for MTV News Eitan Yardeni: teacher and spiritual counselor at the Kabbalah Centre Daniel Yergin: economist, author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, winner of the Pulitzer Prize Dan York: chief content officer at DirecTV, former president of content and advertising sales, AT&T Michael W.

News & World Report, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting Jack Healey: human rights activist, former executive director of Amnesty International USA Thomas Heaton: seismologist, professor at California Institute of Technology, contributed to the development of earthquake early warning systems Peter Herbst: journalist, former editor of Premiere and New York magazines Danette Herman: talent executive for Academy Awards Seymour Hersh: investigative reporter, author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War Dave Hickey: art and cultural critic who has written for Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair Jim Hightower: progressive political activist, radio talk-show host Tommy Hilfiger: fashion designer, founder of lifestyle brand Christopher Hitchens: journalist and author who was a critic of politics and religion David Hockney: artist and major contributor to the Pop art movement in the 1960s Nancy Irwin: hypnotherapist Chris Isaak: musician, actor Michael Jackson: singer, songwriter, his 1982 album Thriller is the bestselling album of all time LeBron James: NBA basketball player Mort Janklow: literary agent, founder and chairman of the literary agency Janklow & Nesbit Associates Jay Z: musician, music producer, fashion designer, entrepreneur Wyclef Jean: musician, actor James Jebbia: CEO of the Supreme clothing brand Harry J. Jerison: paleoneurologist, professor emeritus at UCLA Steve Jobs: cofounder and former CEO of Apple Inc., cofounder and former CEO of Pixar Betsey Johnson: fashion designer Jamie Johnson: documentary filmmaker who directed Born Rich, heir to Johnson & Johnson fortune Larry C. Johnson: former analyst for the CIA, security and terrorism consultant Robert L. Johnson: businessman, media magnate, cofounder and former chairman of BET Sheila Johnson: cofounder of BET, first African American woman to be an owner/partner in three professional sports teams Steve Johnson: media theorist, popular science author, cocreated online magazine FEED Jackie Joyner-Kersee: Olympic gold medalist, track star Paul Kagame: president of Rwanda Michiko Kakutani: book critic for the New York Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism Sam Hall Kaplan: former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times Masoud Karkehabadi: wunderkind who graduated from college at age thirteen Patrick Keefe: author, staff writer for the New Yorker Gershon Kekst: founder of the corporate communications company Kekst and Co.


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

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

Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff. Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms—the financial decision makers shaping the future—are men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner.

Her first interview had been with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple. The founders invited double-e students to the LOTS computer center to hear a pitch about their three-year-old company. If the students liked what they heard, they could stay and be interviewed. Jobs, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and jeans, told Magdalena and the other double-e students that working for Apple would be like “an extension of college.” Magdalena was one of sixteen students who showed up for the interview. She loved the idea of working for Apple. Jobs had dropped out of college and spent time studying Hinduism and Buddhism in India.

When he was a teenager, he and a few friends started a company called Liberty Software to make adventure games for the Atari 800. He earned extra money going to people’s homes to repair antennas and CB radios, and he worked for Apple Computer the summer before his junior year at the University of Southern California. Largely unsupervised, Marc started writing software for a game about raiding IBM’s headquarters. His manager at Apple said the game wasn’t appropriate and later suggested Marc consider a job at Oracle. They had the best salespeople in the world, he was told. In his first year at Oracle, Benioff was named rookie of the year.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Stitch Fix built its online women’s clothing business around a smart algorithm that identifies which fashions its customers prefer. The impact that Bezonomics is having on society is just as profound. Some of the big tech companies are sowing discord with fake news, interfering with elections, and violating personal privacy. As Apple CEO Tim Cook put it: “If you’ve built a chaos factory, you can’t dodge responsibility for the chaos.” The global wealth gap has become so out of kilter that politicians in America and Europe have singled out Amazon and other big tech companies for blame. These wealth-creation machines have become so efficient at creating riches for their top employees and shareholders that they’re likely to engender more public outrage and become easy targets for regulators—perhaps in some cases even be broken up.

See also Alexa Bezos and development of, 49, 111 goal of becoming part of people’s lives with, 14–15 Internet of Things and, 123–24 introduction of, 26 Prime Video use with, 26 shopping assistance with, 115–16 Amazon Flex, 23, 172–73 Amazon 4-star stores, 24, 167 AmazonFresh, 170–71, 189 Amazon Go stores, 13, 24, 111, 139–41, 143, 167 Amazonia (Marcus), 41 Amazon Lending, 13, 233–34 Amazon Music, 10, 26, 80, 97, 98, 100, 220, 260 Amazon Pay, 234 Amazon Prime, 93–105, 109 addictive nature of, 98–99 AI flywheel and, 94, 99, 102, 115 Alexa and, 115 all-you-can-eat aspect of shipping and services with, 99 Amazon ecosystem around, 94 Amazon’s income from, 154 Amazon’s sale of its own products and, 153 annual fee for, 14 Bezos’s focus on shortening delivery time by, 22 corporate synergy with other Amazon services, 98 cross-category spending in, 100 customer data from, 101 customer service and selection in, 104–5 decision to launch, 95–96 free delivery options from, 4, 10, 14, 22, 80, 98, 101, 154, 171, 186 free services with, 97, 101–2 free shipping debate over, 96–97 growth in number of members of, 94 health-care purchases and, 226 household percentage having, 15 merchant’s expenses for, 146 naming of, 96 number of shoppers in, 14 1-Click design and, 18, 98, 232–33 Prime Video and new members in, 102–3 shopping behavior change with, 98 spending by members of, 95, 100 as stand-alone business within Amazon, 97–98 streaming music service with, 26 streaming video service with, 25 Whole Foods discount with, 97, 101, 168, 260 Amazon Prime Air, 179 Amazon Prime Now, 22, 171 Amazon Restaurants food delivery business, 64 Amazon Robotics Challenge, 138 Amazon Studios, 101–2 Amazon Visa card, 234 Amazon Web Services (AWS), 51–52 Bezos’s creation of, 7, 218 Bezos’s long-term vision for, 63–64 medical records using, 225 Prime with free storage space on, 97 profitability of, 25, 64, 65 small business use of, 10–11 ambient computing, 111 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 36 American Culture and Faith Institute, 240 Anderson, Chris, 18 Anderson, Joel, 186 Anderson, Sterling, 175 Andreessen, Marc, 248 Android operating system, 14, 64, 225 Android TV, 237 Ant Financial, 198, 234–35 antitrust law, 257–68, 271 academic arguments for breakup under, 258–59 Amazon lobbyists on, 247 congressional testimony on, 258 critics and proposed breakup of Amazon under, 255, 257–58, 261, 263–64, 266–67 Department of Justice review in, 257, 267 European investigations under, 259 evidence showing lack of violation of, 259–60 historical background to, 264–66 Apollo software platform, 176 Apple AI skills and customer knowledge of, 8, 114 brand value of, 16 corporate campus of, 75 economic power of, 265–66 global wealth gap and, 271 health-care innovation and, 90, 222, 225 identification with founder, 53 iOS operating system of, 225 iWatch from, 222 Jobs’s working culture at, 55 Siri voice assistant app from, 108 Apple Music, 26, 98 Apple Pay, 234, 235 Apple TV, 237 Arcadia Group, 223 Aronowitz, Nona Willis, 16–17 artificial intelligence (AI) Alexa and voice recognition and, 108–9, 111, 112–13 Amazon’s application of, 270 Amazon smart speakers and, 109–10 Bezonomics and companies’ adaptation to, 125 black box and, 91, 147 business plans driven by, 4, 6, 86, 125, 269–70 buying model and, 85–87 coining of term, 107 connected devices and, 124 disruptive nature of, 125 doctors’ diagnosis using, 27 early voice recognition and, 108 Echo’s use of, 26 expectations for future of, 112–13 flywheel model and, 5, 88.

Perhaps the company’s most public failure was the Amazon Fire Phone. Apple’s iPhone, launched in 2007, had become a huge success, and Google had its fast-growing Android operating system. Why not, thought Bezos, develop a phone that would appeal to Amazon’s Prime members? In 2014, Amazon launched the Fire Phone, a smart device that sold for $650, making it competitive with the iPhone and Samsung’s Android phones. The phone, however, didn’t support many popular apps, including Google Maps and Starbucks, and some users complained how awkward it was to import programs such as the Apple iTunes library. The phone never caught the public’s imagination, and soon after the product’s launch Amazon took a massive write-down on its unsold inventory.


pages: 332 words: 100,245

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

Like millions of consumers, da Silva buys movies through his Apple iTunes account. To his surprise one day, he found that three movies he’d bought had disappeared from his account. He contacted Apple, looking for an explanation. He didn’t like the customer service agent’s answer, so he tweeted a dramatized version of his unsatisfying exchange—which promptly went viral. As he wrote: Me: Hey Apple, three movies I bought disappeared from my iTunes library. Apple: Oh yes, those are not available anymore. Thank you for buying them. Here are two movie rentals on us! Me: Wait…WHAT?? @tim_cook when did this become acceptable?

Ownership rewards two types of labor: physical and intellectual. Tending an apple orchard is physical; creating an apple pie recipe is intellectual. Granting ownership for physical labor is time-tested—that’s the origin of the intuition behind You reap what you sow. For producers, ownership motivates them to grow more apples because they can charge for what they grow. Consumers benefit, too. Ownership provides a quick and easy way to decide who gets the apples: whoever pays the market price gets a bite. If one person eats an apple, another can’t. But this trade-off does not hold for consumers of intellectual labor.

@tim_cook when did this become acceptable?… Apple: You see, we are just a store front. Me: Store front? Apple: Yeah, we take your money, but we are not responsible for what is sold. And, we certainly do NOT guarantee you get to keep anything you buy in our store front. We only guarantee that we get to keep your money. Me: I see….So that “Buy” button is meaningless? It should maybe be called: “Feelin Lucky”? Apple: I see you are unhappy. Have two more rentals on us. Linn Nygaard felt the same frustration, but with Amazon instead of Apple. An information technology consultant based in Oslo, Nygaard is often on the road.


pages: 257 words: 90,857

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson

23andMe, Airbnb, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, feminist movement, Firefox, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, retail therapy, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft

Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” and the classic Ying Yang Twins rap lyric “Ay, bitch! Wait till you see my dick.” . . . Y’all, this is like when Apple hints there’s going to be a big announcement regarding the iPhone, so we all tune in to Tim Cook’s live stream of the product launch, and he’s just like, “The phone is slightly bigger,” and we’re all like, “Dat could’ve been a Post-it note message next to an empty bag of Chex Mix.” Ying Yang, your dicks are like practically all of the dicks that have ever been seen, so calm down.

For every one of these glaringly outrageous situations, there are thousands where going for the complaint case is just ignorant. Take, for example, that 2013 viral video of a lady going off on a Los Angeles Apple store employee because she thought she could roll in there sans an appointment and get replacement parts. Raise of hands if you’ve ever gone into an Apple store that wasn’t insanely crowded. For real, every time I go to Apple’s Genius Bar, I just see a line of Old Roses from Titanic who were formerly young hipsters, talking about how “it’s been eighty-four years” since they first walked into Apple, seeking help for their technology woes. Of course, waiting for something to be fixed when you weren’t planning on waiting can be annoying; however, losing your mind over something that insignificant is abuse of the complaint attaché case.

Then there was the De-Peening of 2017 aka very powerful men such as award-winning actor Kevin Spacey, legendary journalist Charlie Rose, comedian/auteur Louis C.K. watching their lives and careers implode following the uncovering of their sometimes decades-long sexual-deviant behavior, which ranged from harassment to sexual assault. And let’s not forget the murder of Harambe, the gorilla, at the Cincinnati Zoo; Apple removing the headphone jack from their iPhones because this company is hell-bent on being the Nurse Ratched of our time; or the first black bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay, incorrectly choosing Bryan over Peter, thus denying the world some cocoa, gap-teefed babies. Oh! And remember a few years ago when a dude in the US legit had Ebola and went bowling and ate chicken wings with friends instead of quarantining himself because #WhiteNonsense?


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

David Pinch, Jamie-James Medina, Seth Godin, Tom Curry, Susan Arciero and Milos Bang, Ryan Senser (for his idea of using a Venn diagram to illustrate the Pirate’s Dilemma), Sweet Joy Hachuela-Johansson, Corey Tatarczuk, Jacques DeJardin, Phoebe Eng and Zubin Schroff (for letting me hide out at their place in the Hamptons and get some serious writing done), my uncle Stephen Boyd, my uncle Graham Brown, Esther Gold, Chris Campion, Alex Donne Johnson, Fabio Scianna, Alicia Hansen, Mr. Richard Antwi, Kirk Vallis, Anthony Mouskoundi, Tim Cooke, Graeme Pretty, Jit Shergill, Dave McConachie, Rob Moore, Spencer Giles, Rob Marciano, Jon Allen, Gaby Marciano, Laura Sunley, Laurie Basannavar, Jeff Chang, Harold Anthony at jumpoff.tv, James Barrett, Dilia Baille, Shane Tomlinson, Marvin Lutrell, everyone at dissensus.com, all the staff at the Brooklyn Public Library, and Lynne D.

In May 2006 he financed a lawsuit that overturned New York legislation that banned anyone age eighteen to twenty from buying or carrying spray paint or broad-tipped marker pens, which effectively prohibited many art students from buying supplies for school, or even carrying them to class. Judge George B. Daniels granted a temporary injunction against the law, arguing, “That’s like telling me I can eat an apple, but I can’t buy an apple, no one can sell me an apple and I can’t bring it to work for lunch.” 110 | THE PIRATE’S DILEMMA hoax was spectacular* and his ongoing defense of street art and free speech is admirable, but some critics see nothing more than thinly veiled PR stunts for his multinational corporation. The one thing both artists proved for certain is that the media afterlife of a piece of graffiti can be way more powerful than its temporary terrestrial body.

If we also consider that over 800 million mobile phones are sold every year, which will all be able to receive music, and study the growth of new technologies and their application in the last century, the industry should be confident.” The jury is still out on Jenner’s solution, but EMI and Universal became the first major labels to begin selling MP3s without DRM encryption in 2007. That February, Apple’s Steve Jobs made a plea to all the record companies to abolish DRM completely, saying it was “clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.” John Kennedy, Boundaries | 161 the CEO of the IFPI (the International Federation of Phonograph Industries), summed up the music industry’s new position on the Pirate’s Dilemma it faced: “At long last the threat has become the opportunity.”


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

We have recently seen a spate of what seemed to be innovative companies fail in maintaining that aura in their products, and there is no guarantee that Apple will succeed despite Jobs’s assurances that his successor, Tim Cook, understands the need to have goals that transcend simply making a profit. Certainly Apple’s aura has been compromised because of labor conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer of iPads and iPhones, as well as the less than perfect launch of Apple Maps. The power of aura cannot be underestimated. I remember seeing a Ferrari designed by Italian firm Pininfarina at a conference in the mid-nineties that mesmerized me.

But the technology of our time—their improved features and lowered costs, their ability to make us all creators and not just passive users—can, in fact, connect people in ways that the films or photographs of seven decades ago could not. As with many of the Creative Intelligence competencies, the road leads back to Apple. Consumers call Apple products “cool” and “easy to use,” and more sophisticated business analysts applaud Apple’s “ecosystem” of integrated software and hardware. But none of those qualities alone explains why we feel the way we do about Apple products; it’s impossible to discuss Apple products without mentioning how they feel in the hand, look to the eye, and connect to our deep emotions. The story of how Apple began creating beautiful, easy-to-use products should be required reading for anyone interested in creating something that’s not just useful but meaningful.

Browning, Steven Russolillo, and Jessica E. Vascellaro, “Apple Now Biggest-Ever U.S. Company,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2012, accessed October 22, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/ SB10000872396390443855804577601773524745182.html; “Apple Becomes the Most Valuable Company Ever,” CBS Money Watch, August 20, 2012, accessed October 22, 2012, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_ 162-57496461/apple-becomes-most-valuable-company-ever/. In inflation-adjusted dollars, Microsoft was valued at about $850 billion in 1999, higher than Apple in August 2012. Many Wall Street analysts are predicting that Apple’s stock would rise to $800 and perhaps even $1,000 over the next year or two, which would give it a market capitalization higher than Microsoft even when inflation is taken into account. 263 There are clear lessons: Japan’s great moment of innovation in the 1970s and 80s came from a small group of post–World War II entrepreneurs, such as Sony’s Akita Morita, who were not connected with the country’s giant zaibatsus, or conglomerates.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

No one had raised private capital in the 2010s as successfully as Neumann, and he became less concerned about the specifics of what WeWork could offer potential partners and more focused on pushing his fellow CEOs to commit to investing in his IPO. Even a token commitment from Salesforce or Apple would go a long way toward building support for the story Adam was telling to investors. In the spring, Adam secured a meeting with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. Neumann and Gross worked with Adrian Perica, Apple’s vice president of corporate development, and Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO, to develop a pitch to Cook on a collaboration that could lead Apple—which was already invested in WeWork through the Vision Fund—to invest in WeWork’s IPO. When he visited Cupertino, Adam wore a T-shirt under a blazer and brought his dad.

Jen Berrent, the company’s lawyer, got frustrated when one new tech hire came in with a spreadsheet laying out various kinds of equity payment schemes. “You have to trust us,” Berrent said. To build out the tech team, Adam poached Shiva Rajaraman, an engineer who had bounced among jobs at YouTube, Spotify, and Apple; Adam told Rajaraman he should leave Apple because what WeWork was building would be “bigger than the iPhone.” WeWork’s tech team had grown from half a dozen people in 2013 to more than two hundred, but the first task facing Rajaraman remained fixing Space Station and Space Man. The insistence that WeWork build and maintain its systems in-house rather than outsourcing to an established software provider had lingering consequences.

America was preparing to reelect a former community organizer as president. Occupy Wall Street took over a park in lower Manhattan, and a sense persisted that the old world order no longer served humanity’s needs. WeWork was premised on the idea that even the most iconoclastic entrepreneurs couldn’t build a business without help. With Jobs having left Apple to deal with pancreatic cancer, Adam seemed eager to position his company as a rising star of the new economy and himself as a candidate for America’s next entrepreneur in chief. “The next decade is the ‘We’ decade,” he told the Daily News. “If you look closely, we’re already in a revolution.” Many of WeWork’s first employees were bewildered by Adam’s bombast.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

I scrambled to find the appropriate editors to work on these projects in teams often co-led with the business side. I invited Thompson to accompany me on a trip to Silicon Valley. I had been invited to give a speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, to be the guest at one of Sheryl Sandberg’s monthly gatherings in her home for the most influential women in tech, and for lunch with Apple CEO Tim Cook, with whom I was trying to create better communication after he took umbrage over the Times’s series on his company. We chatted amiably through the three-day trip. He told me several times that he was developing a plan to restructure the leadership of the Times. I feared this didn’t bode well for the independence of the newsroom.

Two days after the election, Bezos tried to bury the hatchet, tweeting, “Congratulations to @realDonaldTrump. I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country.” Trump ended up inviting Bezos to attend a tech summit at the White House in June 2017 to discuss ways to modernize the government’s technology. Along with Apple’s Tim Cook and Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, Bezos was a member of Trump’s American Technology Council, sitting with an impassive look on his face just a seat away from the president. But the detente did not last long. Less than a week later, the President tweeted, “The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!”

Within 24 hours: Sarah Phillips, “A Brief History of Facebook,” Guardian, July 25, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia. “You had the underpinnings: Chris Cox, interviewed by Martin Nisenholtz, Digital Riptide, April 1, 2013, https://www.digitalriptide.org/person/chris-cox/. “iPhone is a revolutionary: “Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone,” Apple, Inc. (press release), January 9, 2007, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-the-Phone-with-iPhone/. The release date was set: “Where Would Jesus Queue?,” The Economist, July 5, 2007, https://www.economist.com/business/2007/07/05/where-would-jesus-queue. With seed funding: Tanner Greenring, Scott Lamb, Jack Shepherd, Matt Stopera, and Peggy Wang, interviewed by Jill Abramson and John Stillman, New York, June 26, 2015.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Between 1979 and 2005, around 70 percent of increases in income accrued to the top 0.1 percent of workers. In the 1950s, the average US chief executive officer was paid around twenty times the typical employee. Currently, the pay ratio of a CEO to an average employee is in excess of 200 times. In 2011, Apple CEO Tim Cook was paid US$378 million in salary, stock, and other benefits, over 6,000 times the earnings of an average Apple employee. At Walmart, the CEO earned 900 times the earnings of a typical worker. Deregulation, incentive-based remuneration, the use of equity options, managers’ bargaining powers, and their ability to convince remuneration committees of a shortage of talent all boosted compensation packages.

Ironically, China's new socialism did not unite the workers of the world, but divided them, triggering “the profoundest global reshuffle of people's economic positions since the Industrial Revolution.”4 Automation increased both corporate profits and income inequality. Apple's ubiquitous i-gadgets consist of components made in multiple countries and assembled in China, with the supply chain being managed in the US by Apple, which earns around 30–50 percent of the final price. The process favors skilled labor, reducing the share of revenue accruing to low-skilled workers. Similar complex and fragmented production processes apply to the products that constitute around 85 percent of global GDP.

By 2014, total cash balances worldwide were as much as US$7 trillion, roughly double the level of ten years earlier. American corporations held over US$1.7 trillion in cash. The five largest hoarders alone held around half a billion dollars in cash. Technology firms held around US$690 billion in cash, roughly double the levels of five years ago. Apple alone held over US$170 billion. Over 60 percent of this cash was held abroad. Interestingly, the large cash balances coexisted with elevated overall corporate debt levels. Many corporations borrowed at home to fund their spending, taking advantage of low interest rates and avoiding paying taxes on repatriated overseas profits.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

—David Ogilvy If Jon Mandel’s March 2015 speech to the ANA sparked a client revolt that year, by 2016 signs were growing of a wider and more ominous revolt, a revolt by consumers against all advertising, as mobile technology brought ads more intimately and insistently into people’s lives but at the same time gave them new tools to block them. The marketing community gulped when Apple, which three decades before had famously aired a TV ad that declared a rebellion against the ruling IBM computer Goliath, now seemed to want to smash most advertising. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, stood on a San Francisco stage late that summer and announced that Apple would offer a new operating system for iPhones and iPads that would contain apps empowering users to block ads. Apple, which received less than one percent of its revenues from advertising, was helping consumers seal their devices from ads.

The user experience must be paramount, Apple proclaimed. No, no, proclaimed Web sites, media companies, marketers, and ad-reliant companies like Facebook and Google: our ability to inform users and subsidize content is crippled by ad blockers. Those dependent on advertising accused Apple and ad blockers of murder. Apple and ad blocker advocates accused advertisers of committing suicide with mindless and intrusive ads. What neither Apple nor Google said publicly was that Apple’s maneuver was part of a raging war between Apple and Google for smartphone supremacy. Apple made its money selling hardware and software; Google made its money selling ads.

And their abundant data allows a peek into private lives, employing this information as a marketing tool. Apple raised its voice against Facebook and Google. With little reliance on advertising, in September 2017 Apple wielded privacy as a weapon against its digital competitors. For its upgraded Safari browser, Apple said it would limit how advertisers and websites could use cookies to track and target users. Apple was, once again, portraying itself as a company on the side of consumers and their privacy. Arrayed against Apple were the trade groups of the entire advertising universe—the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the ANA, and the 4A’s. In an open letter, they accused Apple of “sabotage,” insisting that the blocking of cookies could murder the advertising business.


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

That summer, Google made an eight-pound prototype of a computer meant to be worn on the face. To Ive, then unaware of Google’s plans, “the obvious and right place” for such a thing was the wrist. When he later saw Google Glass, Ive said, it was evident to him that the face “was the wrong place.” [Tim Cook, Apple’s C.E.O.] said, “We always thought that glasses were not a smart move, from a point of view that people would not really want to wear them. They were intrusive, instead of pushing technology to the background, as we’ve always believed.” Ian Parker on Jonathan Ive’s thinking about wearable notification devices20 As context becomes critical to better engagement, functionality is already shifting away from apps.

Contrary to popular belief, IBM wasn’t the first company to create a personal computer (PC). In the early 1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had been busy working on their own version of the personal computer. The result—the first Apple computer (retrospectively known as the Apple I)—actually preceded the IBM model6 by almost five years, and used a very different engineering approach. However, it wasn’t until Apple launched the Apple II that personal computing really became a “thing”. Figure 3.2: An original Apple I computer designed by Jobs and Wozniak and released in 19767 (Credit: Bonhams New York) Around the same time as Jobs and Wozniak’s development of the earliest form of PC, there was also a rapid downsizing of computers in the workplace.

Let’s dive deeper into this concept of adding years to our lives and life to our years, and building our brains while we are at it, before looking at how to activate the protection against linear decay, and upgrading ourselves. Figure 5.5: Apple’s HealthKit measures 67 different categories. (Credit: Apple) QS products started off as separate products and, by 2013, had reached over US$200 million a year in sales, primarily for devices that counted steps and calculated calories based on height, age and weight input by the user. Several apps have duplicated or emulated this functionality in iOS and Androids. Such an app functionality became part of the Apple iOS in 2015, in large part to increase the functionality and usefulness of the Apple Watch. Apple calls this particular app HealthKit. As you can see from the screen shot of Apple’s HealthKit app in figure 5.5, there are seven major categories (body measurements, fitness, me, nutrition, results, sleep and vitals) and 67 separate categories under All, ranging from active calories through to zinc levels.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Seeing a more inclusive workforce in Silicon Valley will encourage more girls and women studying computer science now. “People that just merely point to the pipeline issue, they don’t get it,” Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, told me at a 2017 fundraiser for a girls’ high school. “The tech companies have a lot to do ourselves. The truth is that in aggregate we all don’t do a good job retaining either.” Diversity matters at Apple, Cook said, because without that mixture of input it would be impossible to create the most desirable products on the planet. To be clear, Apple’s diversity numbers (which include its retail store employees) are also average by Silicon Valley standards, with women representing 32 percent of employees worldwide and 23 percent of tech roles.

“Of course I do”: Sheryl Sandberg, “Sheryl Sandberg: Bloomberg Studio 1.0 (Full Show),” interview by author, Bloomberg, Aug. 9, 2017, video, 24:16, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-10/sheryl-sandberg-bloomberg-studio-1-0-full-show-video. “broader group of employees”: “Uber Report: Eric Holder’s Recommendations for Change.” A true marvel: Steven Levy, “One More Thing: Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothership,” Wired, May 16, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus. “everything an Apple employee”: Beth Spotswood, “Apple’s Campus Has Everything—Oh, Except Daycare,” SFist, May 19, 2017, http://sfist.com/2017/05/19/apples_campus_has_everything_-_oh_e.php. Because child care has proven: Rose Marcario, “Patagonia’s CEO Explains How to Make On-Site Child Care Pay for Itself,” Fast Company, Aug. 15, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3062792/patagonias-ceo-explains-how-to-make-onsite-child-care-pay-for-itself.

Holder noted that an earlier dinner would allow a “broader group of employees” to utilize the benefit—including those who “have spouses or families waiting for them at home”—and signal an earlier end to the workday. Uber complied. In April 2017, as I was writing this book, Apple opened its new spare-no-expense, spaceship-like campus, Apple Park, at a cost of $5 billion. A true marvel, it includes four-story sliding glass doors, rotating elevators, and a 100,000-square-foot wellness center (plus a two-story yoga room), not to mention a carbon-fiber roof and nine thousand drought-resistant trees. One thing it doesn’t have is a child-care facility. One blogger quipped, Apple’s new campus has “everything an Apple employee could wish for, unless they have children in which case: tough.” Sure, child care might be hard to execute, but Silicon Valley has never claimed to be normal or shied away from hard problems.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Thank you to Alex Knight, Bobby Goodlatte, David Cardinal, Charles Grinstead, Jon Luini, Michael Tchao, Bill Joy, Bill Atkinson, Garrett Gruener, and Andrew Shapiro for ideas, encouragement, and thought-provoking questions. Many thanks to Satya Nadella, Peggy Johnson, and Bill Gates for taking the issues seriously. Thank you to Tim Cook and all of Apple for their commitment to protecting the privacy and freedom of customers. Bono provided invaluable counsel in the early stages of the work that led to this book. My thanks go out to Herb Sandler, Angelo Carusone, Melissa Ryan, Rebecca Lenn, Eric Feinberg, and Gentry Lane. Thank you to the Omidyar Network, the Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Ford Foundation for their support of the Center for Humane Technology.

I had successful surgery in early July 2001, but my recovery was very slow. It took me nearly a year to recover fully. During that time, Apple shipped the first iPod. I thought it was a sign of good things to come and reached out to Steve Jobs to see if he would be interested in recapitalizing Apple. At the time, Apple’s share price was about twelve dollars per share, which, thanks to stock splits, is equivalent to a bit more than one dollar per share today. The company had more than twelve dollars in cash per share, which meant investors were attributing zero value to Apple’s business. Most of the management options had been issued at forty dollars per share, so they were effectively worthless.

In this second phase of the web, Google emerged as the most important player, organizing and displaying what appeared to be all the world’s information. Apple broke the code on tech style—their products were a personal statement—and rode the consumer wave to a second life. Products like the iMac and iPod, and later the iPhone and iPad, restored Apple to its former glory and then some. At this writing, Apple is the most valuable company in the world. (Fortunately, Apple is also the industry leader in protecting user privacy, but I will get to that later.) In the early years of the new millennium, a game changing model challenged the page-centric architecture of the World Wide Web.


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Today it is sustainable energy, transportation, communications and virtual reality (VR) telecommuting systems. It is even advanced building materials systems, housing built by 3-D printers, and “smart” building systems designs. These state of the art sustainable products are not being promoted by bleeding heart liberal environmentalists but are being developed by today’s leading figures, such as Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook, Elon Musk of Tesla, and other forward-looking smart industrialists around the world. 3. Planetary Protection to Preserve Modern Infrastructure and Avoid Global Destruction. One of the keys to the future of human survival is for the world’s space agencies to finally recognize that their top strategic objective is to deploy space systems that would save Earth from massive destruction.

All of the companies now seeking to engage in space mining have also indicated that they would also want to do space processing and manufacturing as well. Spaceship EarthPlanet Earth is for humanity simply a 6 sextillion- ton spaceship that currently carries a very large crew of about 7.5 billion people and a lot of other flora and fauna as well. If Earth were a cosmic apple, the protective shielding we call the atmosphere is equivalent in size to the rind of the apple. The Van Allen Belts formed by Earth’s magnetic poles is all that protects us from destruction from periodic coronal mass ejections from the Sun. U. N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS)A committee that meets once a year in Vienna.

On change: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square hole—they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.” (Steve Jobs, founder of Apple.) On investing $275 million in New Space: “We seek to assist human exploration and the discovery of beneficial resources, whether in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), on the moon, in deep space or on Mars”. (Robert Bigelow, CEO of Budget Suites and Bigelow Aerospace.) On a space elevator providing low-cost access to space: “It’s a phenomenal enabling technology that would open up our Solar System to humankind.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Menell, “2014: Brand Totalitarianism” (UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper, University of California, September 4, 2013), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2318492; “Move Over, Big Brother,” Economist, December 2, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/3422918; Wojciech Borowicz, “Privacy in the Internet of Things Era,” Next Web, October 18, 2014, http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/10/18/privacy-internet-things-era-will-nsa-know-whats-fridge; Tom Sorell and Heather Draper, “Telecare, Surveillance, and the Welfare State,” American Journal of Bioethics 12, no. 9 (2012): 36–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2012.699137; Christina DesMarais, “This Smartphone Tracking Tech Will Give You the Creeps,” PCWorld, May 22, 2012, http://www.pcworld.com/article/255802/new_ways_to_track_you_via_your_mobile_devices_big_brother_or_good_business_.html; Rhys Blakely, “‘We Thought Google Was the Future but It’s Becoming Big Brother,’” Times, September 19, 2014, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/technology/internet/article4271776.ece; CPDP Conferences, Technological Totalitarianism, Politics and Democracy, 2016, http://www.internet-history.info/media-library/mediaitem/2389-technological-totalitarianism-politics-and-democracy.html; Julian Assange, “The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” New York Times, June 1, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html; Julian Assange, “Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society,” New York Times, December 4, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/julian-assange-on-living-in-a-surveillance-society.html; Michael Hirsh, “We Are All Big Brother Now,” Politico, July 23, 2015, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/big-brother-technology-trial-120477.html; “Apple CEO Tim Cook: Apple Pay Is Number One,” CBS News, October 28, 2014, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-apple-pay-is-number-one; Mathias Döpfner, “An Open Letter to Eric Schmidt: Why We Fear Google,” FAZ.net, April 17, 2014, http://www.faz.net/1.2900860; Sigmar Gabriel, “Sigmar Gabriel: Political Consequences of the Google Debate,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 20, 2014, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/sigmar-gabriel-consequences-of-the-google-debate-12948701-p6.html; Cory Doctorow, “Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism,” International Business Times, May 5, 2017, http://www.ibtimes.com/unchecked-surveillance-technology-leading-us-towards-totalitarianism-opinion-2535230; Martin Schulz, “Transcript of Keynote Speech at Cpdp2016 on Technological, Totalitarianism, Politics and Democracy,” Scribd, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/document/305093114/Keynote-Speech-at-Cpdp2016-on-Technological-Totalitarianism-Politics-and-Democracy. 2.

Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 1:67. CHAPTER TWO 1. Roben Farzad, “Apple’s Earnings Power Befuddles Wall Street,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 7, 2011, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-28/apple-s-earnings-power-befuddles-wall-street. 2. “iTunes Music Store Sells Over One Million Songs in First Week,” Apple Newsroom, March 9, 2018, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/05/05iTunes-Music-Store-Sells-Over-One-Million-Songs-in-First-Week. 3. Jeff Sommer, “The Best Investment Since 1926? Apple,” New York Times, September 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/business/apple-investment.html. 4. See Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin, The Support Economy: How Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 2002), 230. 5.

We relive that August day every day as in some ancient fable, doomed to retrace this looping path until the soul of our information civilization is finally shaped by democratic action, private power, ignorance, or drift. I. The Apple Hack Apple thundered onto the music scene in the midst of a pitched battle between demand and supply. On one side were young people whose enthusiasm for Napster and other forms of music file sharing expressed a new quality of demand: consumption my way, what I want, when I want it, where I want it. On the other side were music-industry executives who chose to instill fear and to crush that demand by hunting down and prosecuting some of Napster’s most-ardent users. Apple bridged the divide with a commercially and legally viable solution that aligned the company with the changing needs of individuals while working with industry incumbents.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

“Google Starts Testing Chrome’s Built-In Ad Blocker.” The Verge, August 1, 2017. https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/1/16074742/google-chrome-ad-blocker-canary-build-test. Waters, Richard. “Four Days That Shook the Digital Ad World.” Financial Times, July 29, 2016. . “Google Plays Down Impact of Data Rules.” Financial Times, April 25, 2018. . “Tim Cook Is Right to Kick Facebook over Its Data Privacy Failings.” Financial Times, March 30, 2018. Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Edited by Roth Guenther and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Weber, Steven. “Data, Development, and Growth.” Business and Politics 19, no. 3 (2017): 397–423.

As though in response, Apple, which makes vast profits through a walled garden of devices, proclaims its refusal to collect data on users via those devices.22 Yet Apple tracks its users for many purposes and so does not contradict the trend of data colonialism, except that its business model does not generally depend on the sale of this data. Indeed, Apple receives substantial sums from Google for allowing it privileged access to iPhone users.23 A controversy developed when Apple’s iOS and MacOS systems were shown to collect information on user location and search activity. Apple’s subsequent Privacy Policy states that collected data “will not be associated with [a user’s] IP address,”24 yet iPhone features still support the surveillance needs of marketers.

It is also a huge web-services provider, currently supplying 44 percent of the world’s cloud computing capacity, with clients ranging from Netflix to the CIA.37 Next there is Apple, which has become known for the high integration of its hardware and its software: its devices use only Apple’s operating system, and software from other providers runs on its devices only when Apple allows it. Such a degree of control is seen as authoritarian by some and as the epitome of good design by others. Regardless, this stance allows Apple to distinguish itself from its competitors by, for instance, building ad blockers right into its Safari web browser or claiming that they do not sell any of the data they collect from users.38 Even if this is the case, Apple must take some responsibility for the labor conditions under which its devices are manufactured, for its collusion with the media industry in ways that are not favorable to consumers,39 or for its innovative ways to avoid paying taxes: the company pays 9.8 percent in taxes, whereas global corporations typically pay around 24 percent.40 Facebook’s business model is premised entirely on its ability to capture data from its users and sell it to advertisers.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

Build eco-smart cities, grow steak in a petri dish from stem cells, and genetically engineer high-yield drought-resistant crops. Need to make education universal? Develop scalable software for children anywhere in the world to teach themselves reading, writing, and math online in eighteen months flat.76 But as Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said, “technology alone isn’t the solution. And sometimes it’s even part of the problem.” Because technology is, and always has been, a double-edged sword. The projectile weapon that we used to cooperatively hunt mammoths could also be used to kill our fellow humans. Nuclear power could be a critical solution to our energy crisis if we manage not to start a nuclear war.

There were the Japanese rape of Nanking, the Hungarian death marches, the Russian rape of Berlin, the Romanian pogroms. Psychologists could not account for it. It was convenient to assign most of the blame to a few psychopathic leaders, but the sheer scale of the carnage made it unlikely that it was the work of just a few bad apples. The field of social psychology emerged primarily to understand what made ordinary people do terrible things. Three dominant explanations came out of their work: prejudice, a desire to conform, and obedience to authority. Gordon Allport described prejudice as “an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization.”43 It starts young, he maintained, and is stubbornly persistent.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

Nature, 2017. 542(7639): pp. 36–38. 68. Esteva et al., “Dermatologist-Level Classification of Skin Cancer with Deep Neural Networks.” 69. Zakhem, G. A., C. C. Motosko, and R. S. Ho, “How Should Artificial Intelligence Screen for Skin Cancer and Deliver Diagnostic Predictions to Patients?” JAMA Dermatol, 2018. 70. Leswing, K., “Apple CEO Tim Cook Gave a Shout-Out to a $100-per-Year App for Doctors—Here’s What It Does,” Business Insider. 2017. CHAPTER 7: CLINICIANS WITHOUT PATTERNS 1. Gellert, G., and L. Webster. The Rise of the Medical Scribe Industry: Implications for Advancement of EHRs, in HiMSS 16. 2016. Las Vegas, NV. 2. Wang, M.

Gundotra, Petterson, and Prakash interview with Topol. 5. Comstock, J., “Apple, Stanford Launch Apple Heart Study to Improve Atrial Fibrillation Detection,” MobiHealthNews. 2017; Loftus, P., and T. Mickle, “Apple Delves Deeper into Health,” Wall Street Journal. 2017, p. B5. 6. Gonzalez, R., “The New ECG Apple Watch Could Do More Harm Than Good,” Wired. 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/ecg-apple-watch/; Dormehl, L., “Why We Should Be Wary of Apple Watch ‘Ultimate’ Health Guardian Claims,” Cult of Mac, 2018. https://www.cultofmac.com/577489 /why-we-should-be-wary-of-apple-watch-ultimate-health-guardian-claims/; Victory, J., “What Did Journalists Overlook About the Apple Watch ‘Heart Monitor’ Feature?”

His youthful appearance doesn’t jibe with a track record of twenty years of experience in product development, which included leading the Google Glass design project. He also worked at Apple for nine years, directly involved in the development of the first iPhone and iPad. That background might, in retrospect, be considered ironic. Meanwhile, a team of more than twenty engineers and computer scientists at Apple, located just six miles away, had its sights set on diagnosing atrial fibrillation via their watch. They benefited from Apple’s seemingly unlimited resources and strong corporate support: the company’s chief operating officer, Jeff Williams, responsible for the Apple Watch development and release, had articulated a strong vision for it as an essential medical device of the future.


pages: 411 words: 119,022

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

There always needs to be some kind of pressure-release valve. There always needs to be someone who can shake their head and give it to you straight. And if you do it right, you should never be a victim of your board. As CEO, you help to shape it. Boards always change based on the CEO—the board under Steve Jobs was different from the board under Tim Cook. Boards complement a CEO’s strengths and no two CEOs are alike. So when you’re choosing your board members, here’s what types of people you should be considering: Seed crystals: Just as you need seed crystals to grow your team, you want someone on the board who knows everyone, has done it before, and can suggest other amazing people to add to the board or to your company.

The following afternoon he had lunch with a colleague who worked at Apple. They mentioned they were kicking off a new project. Did he happen to know anyone with experience building handheld devices? I got a call from Apple the next day. Because you’ve picked up this book, the rest of the story is probably pretty familiar. I took a consulting gig with Apple at first, just hoping to make enough money to pay my employees or maybe leverage my job into a buyout for Fuse. Putting my hopes on Apple was a serious long shot. Steve Jobs was back at the helm then, but during the previous decade Apple had been in a death spiral, launching a slew of mediocre products that edged the company close to collapse.

As businesses began adopting the iPhone, they reached out to Apple, asking to make applications for their employees and sales. If Apple wanted people to continue using their phones for work, they’d have to give the enterprise the ability to create its own apps. And so the App Store was born. Now Apple has separate teams to handle all of their B2B business, but the products are never defined to appease B2B customers. By keeping itself pure as a B2C company, Apple was able to tack on B2B without significantly altering its priorities or its marketing, or knocking its core business out of whack. After Steve set the rules, Apple followed them.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

Figure 1.2: Technology adoption rates over the last 100 years Ultimately new technologies and initiatives such as the iPod and Facebook are now being adopted by consumers en masse in a period measuring months, not years. To illustrate this shift, Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 alone than all the Macs it had ever sold in the 28 years prior. “This 55m [iPads sold to-date] is something no one would have guessed. Including us. To put it in context, it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs. It took us about 5 years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about 3 years to sell that many iPhones. And so, this thing is, as you said, it’s on a trajectory that’s off the charts . . .” —Tim Cook, Apple CEO during February 2012 reporting call Apple then sold more iPhone 4S devices in fiscal Q1 of 2012 than in the preceding 12 months.

However, the meet-and-greet component is important in providing a strong initial service offering, an appearance as a brand with the wish to engage the customer. Genius Bars and Pods Apple has been famous for its “genius bar” concept built into its Apple Stores. As per Apple’s own description, the Genius Bar gives high-touch technical support to Apple customers: “When you have questions or need hands-on technical support for your Mac, iPad, iPod, Apple TV, or iPhone, you can get friendly, expert advice at the Genius Bar in any Apple Retail Store. The Genius Bar is home to our resident Geniuses. Trained by Apple, they have extensive knowledge of Apple products and can answer all your technical questions. In fact, Geniuses can take care of everything from troubleshooting problems to actual repairs.”12 Banks are trying to replicate this concept by turning to having specialist advisors roam the floor, ready to engage in a wide range of technical and product discussions.

Even if you assume that the first interaction for a customer is in an Apple Store or in a branch, how do customers behave once they have purchased their first device or opened an account? Does the most excellent “store” experience drive them back to the store repeatedly over time? No. The average Apple Store makes approximately $34m in revenue annually, with $8.3m in operating income. However, if you examine the 10-K filing for Apple, revenue is split almost 50/50 between online and device-based store sales, and its retail presence split between resellers and its own stores.6 Since the Apple “App Store” opened on 10 July 2008, Apple has booked close to $6 billion in revenue just on apps.7 Cyber Monday is used as the benchmark for US online and mobile retail sales, and figures show that iPhones and iPads account for 7–10 per cent of all online sales activity on those days.8 What we know from all the data is this: Customers might start their relationship with Apple in-store, but they don’t have to, and increasingly they’re actually choosing not to.


pages: 572 words: 94,002

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

[175] 2,617 times a day: “We touch our phones 2,617 times a day, says study | Network World.” 7 Jul. 2016, toreset.me/175. [176] In a 2016 blog post: “How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Former... – Medium.” 18 May. 2016, toreset.me/176. [177] kids’ screen time: “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs limited screen time for... – Business Insider.” 10 Jan. 2018, toreset.me/177. [178] Cook: “Tim Cook – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/178. The Apple CEO. [179] Horvath: “Michael Horvath | LinkedIn.” toreset.me/179. The Strava co-founder. [180] RescueTime: “RescueTime.” toreset.me/180. [181] Unroll.Me: “Unroll.Me.” toreset.me/181. [182] (3% of people)?: “Sleep with your smartphone in hand? You’re not alone – CNET.” 30 Jun. 2015, toreset.me/182

A work IT department, speedy-service warranty, or a computer specialist who lives locally. That’s it. When you’re linking this together, you have three global behemoths vying for your attention: Microsoft, Google and Apple. Which you pick is up to you. I’m a Google man myself, with an Android smartphone and a subscription to its “brand of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products”, G Suite. I avoid Apple. Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud service is now good and by far the most widely used cloud-based productivity software. If you have neither G Suite nor Office 365 at work and are still storing everything on servers or your computer’s hard drive, speak to your boss and ask them to remedy this dysfunctional situation.

He doesn’t have time to look for the best electricity and gas provider, so signs up for another year. He rings his local car dealer and arranges a meeting to talk about a three-year contract hire on that new Audi he’s had his eye on. It’s got great boot space, and he’s had his current car five years. He deserves it. Months go by and suddenly Bren’s the apple of his young chief executive’s eye. (She’s ten years younger with five more letters after her name and a star that’s on the rise. And if he swallows enough shit, his will be, too.) May brings a pay rise. Ten thousand pounds (with strings attached). Bren’s having to take on more responsibility. As well as his own department, he’ll now head the internal transformational change team, looking at “cross-cutting new ways of working” across the local authority.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

Pence urging him to veto the measure, saying: As leaders of technology companies, we not only disagree with this legislation on a personal level, but (believe that) the RFRA will adversely impact our ability to recruit and retain the best and the brightest talent in the technology sector. Technology professionals are by their nature very progressive, and backward-looking legislation such as the RFRA will make the state of Indiana a less appealing place to live and work.38 Following the signing of the act, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple (the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to come out as gay) tweeted that he was “deeply disappointed” in the law. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman remarked, [It] is unconscionable to imagine that Yelp would create, maintain, or expand a significant business presence in any state that encouraged discrimination by businesses against our employees, or consumers at large.… These laws set a terrible precedent that will likely harm the broader economic health of the states where they have been adopted, the businesses currently operating in those states and, most importantly, the consumers who could be victimized under these laws.39 The CEOs of Anthem Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, Cummins, Emmis Communications, Roche Diagnostics, Indiana University Health, and Dow AgroSciences—all companies with significant operations in Indiana—called on the local Republican leadership to pass legislation to prevent “discrimination based upon sexual orientation or gender identity.”

My career has given me extensive firsthand experience of just how difficult it is to do things in new ways. For many years I worked with firms struggling to change. I worked with GM as it attempted to respond to Toyota. With Kodak, as the conventional film business collapsed in the face of digital photography. With Nokia—which at its peak sold more than half of the world’s cell phones—as Apple revolutionized the business.1 Transforming the world’s firms will be hard. Transforming the world’s social and political systems will be even harder. But it is eminently possible, and if you look around, you can see it happening. I am reminded of a moment some years ago when I was in Finland, facilitating a business retreat.

Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.”10 BlackRock has just under $7 trillion in assets under management, making it among the largest shareholders in every major publicly traded firm on the planet. It owns 4.6 percent of Exxon, 4.3 percent of Apple, and close to 7.0 percent of the shares of JPMorgan Chase, the world’s second-largest bank.11 For Fink to suggest that “companies must serve a social purpose” is the rough equivalent of Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to Wittenberg Castle’s church door.12 The week after his letter came out, a CEO friend reached out to me to confirm that surely he didn’t—really—mean it?


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

Were mass protests in the middle of a pandemic that was killing a lot of black people really a good way to save black lives? But those nuances didn’t stop media outlets from reporting a singular black-and-white narrative. And it didn’t stop corporations from pouncing on the opportunity to achieve their own ends. High-profile CEOs like Tim Cook of Apple and Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber rushed to issue staid statements of solidarity. Khosrowshahi stated that Uber was donating millions to fight racism and that “Uber stands in solidarity with the Black community and with peaceful protests against the injustice and racism that have plagued our nation for too long.”1 The company announced that it would promote black-owned businesses on its ride-sharing app and tie executive pay to “diversity goals.”

Antitrust law was designed to protect consumers from monopolies and cartels that use market power to limit consumer choice and charge higher prices. But today’s Big Tech titans—companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon—provide consumers with a wider range of products than ever before and for strikingly low prices. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are all free for users. Consumers can find pretty much anything they want on Amazon or at the Apple iTunes store. That’s why tech CEOs ran circles around the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee in hearings in August 2020. They’ll likely do the same thing in court if they’re charged with antitrust violations.

Of course, “diversity and perspectives” is different from a diversity of perspectives.7 Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, issued an open letter to CEOs describing a “Sustainability Accounting Standards Board” that would tackle issues ranging from labor practices to workforce diversity to climate change. Scores of others followed. If the turn of the decade was a tipping point, then the murder of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer in May 2020 broke the dam. Companies ranging from Apple to Uber to Novartis issued lengthy statements in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In a surprising about-face, L’Oréal rehired a model it had fired for her comments about “the racial violence of white people.” Well-respected companies like Coca-Cola implemented corporate programs teaching employees “to be less white” and that “to be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be more humble” and that “white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white.”8 Starbucks said it would mandate anti-bias training for executives and tie their compensation to increasing minority representation in its workforce.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

The company also has to hire and train its robot minders, find people qualified to maintain their fleet, and—this has lately become one of the biggest bottlenecks—figure out how to make enough of its robots, fast enough. Every hardware company must eventually confront the challenge of the vast gulf between making prototypes of its devices, usually built by hand, and making thousands or even millions of them. The former requires creativity, pluck, and a hacker mentality, while the latter requires, basically, Tim Cook. Apple’s CEO rose to his position as Steve Jobs’s anointed successor by being a master of the logistics of global manufacturing. Starship, meanwhile, is still manufacturing its robots a few dozen at a time in the same place it always has, in Estonia, where the company’s chief technology officer happens to live.

Mick was living off his savings, but he wasn’t exactly eating ramen and sleeping under his desk. Previously, he’d been an engineer at Motorola, where he learned how microchips—the most complicated and difficult-to-make objects on Earth—are manufactured. Then he was a product manager at Apple, on the Power Mac team, the Macintoshes that Apple sold from 1994 until 2006. After Apple, Mick went in an unexpected direction and made a decision that may one day be viewed by future historians as pivotal for the trajectory of e-commerce and the nature of work: Mick went to Webvan. People who were sentient during the first dot-com bubble of the late 1990s remember the delivery service Kozmo, because you could order literally anything: a can of Coke, a pack of gum, a CD.

Chapter 18 How Warehouse Work Injures The effects of automation are amply demonstrated by what are by now innumerable anecdotal accounts of former employees. Injury reports from within Amazon’s warehouses back up their accounts, even if Amazon can plausibly argue that these self-reported numbers may not allow for an apples-to-apples comparison with their competitors. But what about those other effects of warehouse work that aren’t accounted for in Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) statistics, such as repetitive stress injuries that might not show up on reports intended to track acute injuries, or the psychological impact of this kind of work?


pages: 309 words: 121,279

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

Quandary: Why There’s No Such Thing As “Built To Last”’, New Yorker, 14/07/2016. 22 Slade, Made to Break, p. 80. 23 Adam Minter, Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale (New York: Bloomsbury), 2019, p. 200. 24 Shara Tibken, ‘Here’s why Apple says it’s slowing down older iPhones’, CNET, 21/12/2017: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-slows-down-older-iphone-battery-issues/ 25 Chaim Gartenberg, ‘Apple says it could miss $9billion in iPhone sales due to weak demand’, The Verge, 02/01/2019: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/2/18165804/apple-iphone-sales-weak-demand-tim-cook-letter-revised-q1-estimate 26 Chance Miller, ‘Apple hit with another lawsuit over iPhone batterygate, seeking $73million in damages for users’, 9to5Mac, 25/01/2021: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/25/iphone-batterygate-lawsuit-italy/ 27 Although the shop owner, Henrik Huseby, never advertised the parts as real, the Norwegian High Court eventually ruled that the screens broke copyright law, and forced Huseby to pay Apple $23,000 in compensation. 28 Brian X.

The assertion is less one of fact than of feeling, but nonetheless has slowly but steadily accumulated, along with our rubbish. In 2017, for example, Apple admitted that it had been quietly using software to slow the performance of older iPhones. The company claimed the measure was to protect the devices from electrical issues associated with ageing lithium-ion batteries;24 critics argued that by hiding the problem, Apple had likely induced people to upgrade their phones early. This assertion was somewhat backed up by the fact that when Apple discounted battery replacement fees that year by way of apology, iPhone upgrade rates fell sharply.25 Apple, which has faced multiple lawsuits as a result of ‘Batterygate’ – including a $500 million civil action lawsuit that it settled in 2020 – eventually apologised.26 But it has also engaged in a pattern of behaviour that critics allege undermine its self-image as a sustainable business.

., The Global E-waste Monitor 2020: Quantities, flows, and the circular economy potential, United Nations University and United Nations Institute for Training and Research, 2020. 2 Simon O’Dea, ‘Number of smartphones sold to end users worldwide from 2007 to 2021 (in million units)’, Statista, 06/05/2022 (accessed: 24/06/2022): https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/ 3 ‘Global PC shipments pass 340 million in 2021 and 2022 is set to be even stronger’, Canalys, 12/01/2022: https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/global-pc-market-Q4-2021 4 Saranraj Mathivanan, ‘Global Headphones Market Shipped nearly 550 million units in 2021’, Futuresource Consulting (2022): https://www.futuresource-consulting.com/insights/global-headphones-market-shipped-nearly-550-million-units-in-2021 5 Calculated using Apple, ‘Environmental Responsibility Report: 2019 Progress Report, covering fiscal year 2018’, 2019: https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2019.pdf 6 Bianca Nogrady, ‘Your old phone is full of untapped precious metals’, BBC Future, 18/10/2016: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161017-your-old-phone-is-full-of-precious-metals 7 Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade (New York: Bloomsbury Press), 2013, p. 175. 8 World Economic Forum, ‘A New Circular Vision for Electronics: Time For A Global Reboot’, 2019, p. 5. 9 Lauren Joseph and James Pennington, ‘Tapping the economic value of e-waste’, China Daily, 29/10/2018: http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201810/29/WS5bd64e5aa310eff3032850ac.html 10 World Economic Forum, ‘A New Circular Vision’, p. 11. 11 Or $57 billion, according to Forti, Baldé et al., The Global E-waste Monitor 2020. 12 Originally, the company was called Computer Recyclers of America, but it rebranded and relaunched in 2005 as ERI. 13 ‘Nonferrous Scrap Terminology’, Recycling Today, 15/07/2001: https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/nonferrous-scrap-terminology/ 14 Richard Pallot, ‘Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses every year, ITV News investigation finds’, ITV News, 21/06/2021: https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millions-of-items-of-unsold-stock-in-one-of-its-uk-warehouses-every-year-itv-news-investigation-finds 15 Thomas Claburn, ‘Apple seeks damages from recycling firm that didn’t damage its devices: 100,000 iThings “resold” rather than broken up as expected’, The Register, 05/10/2020. 16 ‘Burberry burns bags, clothes and perfume worth millions’, BBC News, 19/07/2018: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44885983 17 Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

By February, the FBI was saying publicly that it could not open one of the iPhones used by the terrorists. The devices were set so that after a few failed attempts to open them with a PIN, the phones would wipe all data. FBI Director James Comey called upon Apple to develop software that could be used to bypass the PIN and unlock the devices. Apple CEO Tim Cook, correctly in our view, refused, saying that Apple could not be compelled to weaken the security of its own products. Comey took Cook to court. The backstory was that Comey had been campaigning inside the Obama administration for new legislation that would require companies that make encryption software to build in ways that the government could decrypt the code.

There were, however, hundreds of other iPhones involved in other cases that the FBI or local police could not open. What happened next tells you a lot about the value of encryption to cybersecurity. Far from supporting Comey and the FBI, former high-level national security officials came out of the woodwork to support Apple, including former CIA and NSA directors. We were part of that chorus. What we were all saying was that encryption is essential to secure private-sector networks and databases. If Apple created a way to break the encryption on its devices, malicious actors would find a way to use it too. In a heated debate at the RSA security conference in 2016, Dick Clarke asserted that the government was looking to create a bad precedent and that, in fact, it already had classified means to open the phone.

The NotPetya malware took billions from companies operating in Ukraine, Europe, and the United States, leading many to report the losses on their quarterly and annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Yet some, if not most, multinational corporations operating in Ukraine either were not impacted, were minimally impacted, or had some really good lawyers who argued the losses did not need to be reported (more on that later). Companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google, all companies that at one time saw concerns over cyber threats as overhyped, now have religion and are investing in cybersecurity with the zealotry of the converted. They view cybersecurity as a competitive advantage in a market where consumers are increasingly wary of doing business online.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

Until now, the company’s focus has been on the development of driver-assist technologies along the levels of automation. TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, described the challenge of building autonomous vehicles as the mother of all artificial intelligence projects. Plans to develop self-driving cars were not confirmed until mid-2017, prior to which the company had remained tight-lipped. However, the focus is less on the vehicles, and more on the development of the artificial intelligence. This technology could be provided in products from other industries to car manufacturers, who do not develop their own software for driverless cars. So far, Apple has tested its software and sensors with three Lexus vehicles in the streets around San Francisco.

This page intentionally left blank INDEX A9 autobahn in Germany, 134, 135, 407 ACCEL, 324 Accelerating, 8, 22, 27, 59, 78, 91, 122, 295, 296 Access Economy, 344 Acoustic signals, 108 Ad-hoc mobility solutions, 354 Ad-hoc networks, 133 Adaptive cruise control, 4, 51, 72 74, 78, 86, 96, 113, 116, 289, 297, 333 Aerospace industry, 153 Agenda for auto industry culture change, 396 increasing speed, 398 service-oriented business model, 397 398 V-to-home and V-to-business applications, 399 Agile operating models, 330 Agriculture, 154 productivity, 155 sector, 154 157 Air pollution, 27 AirBnB, 311 Airplane electronics, 144 Aisin, 9 Albert (head of design at Yahoo), 228 Alexandra (founder and owner of Powerful Minds), 228 Alibaba Alipay payment system, 372 Alternative fuels, autonomous vehicles enabling use of, 305 Altruistic mode (a-drive mode), 252 Amazon, 138, 141, 311 American Trucking Association, 68 Android operating system, 327 Anthropomorphise products, 290 Appel Logistics transports, 167 Apple, 9, 138, 327 CarPlay, 285 Apple Mac OS, 247 Apple-type model, 323 Application layer, 119 software, 118 Artificial intelligence, 115, 255, 291, 332 333 Artificial neuronal networks, 114 115 Asia projects, 371 374 Assembly Row, 386 Assessment of Safety Standards for Automotive Electronic Control Systems, 144 Assistance systems, 71 77 Audi, 5, 130, 134, 137, 179, 211, 301, 318, 322, 398 Driverless Race Car, 5 piloted driving, 286 piloted-parking technology, 386 387 Audi A7, 44, 198, 282 427 428 Audi A8 series-car, 79, 180 Audi AI traffic jam pilot, 79 Audi Fit Driver service, 318 319 Audi piloted driving lab, 227, 229 Audi Q7, 74 assistance systems in, 75 Audi RS7, 43, 44, 79 autonomous racing car, 179 driverless, 227 Audi TTS, 43 Audi Urban Future Initiative, 384 386, 406 Augmented reality, 279 vision and example, 279 280 Authorities and cities, 171 173 Auto ISAC, 146 Autolib, 317, 344 Autoliv, 285 Automakers’ bug-bounty programs, 146 Automated car, 233, 246, 264, 289, 384 Automated driving division of labour between driver and driving system, 48 examples, 51 53 image, 177 levels of, 47 51 scenarios for making use of travelling time, 52 strategies, 53 56 technology, 160 Automated vehicles, 9, 174, 246 Automated Vehicles Index, 367 368 Automatic car, 233, 244 Automatic pedestrian highlighting, 78 Automation ironies of, 76 responsibility with increasing, 235 Automobile, 3, 21 locations, 405 manufacturers, 311 Index Automotive design, 265 266 Automotive Ethernet, 126 Automotive incumbents operate, 330 Automotive industry, 332 335, 367, 379, 397 Automotive technology, 327 328 AutoNet2030 project, 369 Autonomous buses, 14, 81, 158, 159, 175, 302 Autonomous cars, 25, 126, 197, 205 206, 233, 244, 270 expected worldwide sales of, 85 savings effects from, 67 68 Autonomous driving, 3, 8, 39, 62, 94, 111, 116, 120, 121 123, 141, 160 162, 171, 173, 207 208, 217, 247, 252, 266, 332 333, 379 applications, 10 12, 160 aspects for, 93 Audi car, 5 autonomous Audi TTS on Way to Pikes Peak, 43 in combination with autonomous loading hubs, 166 driving to hub, 213 ecosystem, 18 20, 131 element, 243 facts about, 306 functions, 74 impression, 40 industry, 16 18 living room in Autonomous Mercedes F015, 44 milestones of automotive development, 4 NuTonomy, 6 projects, 41 45 real-world model of, 92 scenarios, 211 215 science fiction, 39 41 technology, 9 10, 92 Index time management, 215 218 vehicles, 12 16 See also Human driving Autonomous driving failure, 221 consequence, 221 222 decision conflict in autonomous car, 223 design options, 222 223 influencer, 223 224 Autonomous Mercedes F015, living room in, 44 Autonomous mobility, 12, 13, 16 17, 172, 405 establishment as industry of future, 404 405 resistance to, 171 172 Autonomous Robocars, 81 Autonomous sharp, 274 ‘Autonomous soft’ mode, 274 Autonomous trucks, 161 from Daimler, 163 savings effects from, 68 69 Autonomous vehicles, 26, 81, 99, 138, 155, 182, 221, 238, 249, 255, 353 354 enabling use of alternative fuels, 305 integration in cities, 406 promoting tests with, 407 uses, 153 AutoVots fleet, 350 Backup levels, 127 Baidu apps, 338, 372 Base layer, 119 Becker, Jan, 42 43 Behavioural law, 234 Being driven, 61, 63, 78, 342 343 Ben-Noon, Ofer, 142, 143, 145 Benz, Carl, 3, 4 Bertha (autonomous research vehicle), 42 Big data, 313, 332 333 BlaBlaCar, 359 429 Blackfriars bridge, lidar print cloud of, 104 Blind-spot detection, 78 Bloggers, 225 227 Blonde Salad, The, 226 Bluetooth, 130, 142, 154 BMW, 6, 130, 137, 174, 180, 316, 320, 322, 332 333, 372, 398 3-series cars, 338 BMW i3, 27 holoactive touch, 285 Boeing 777 development, 243 Boeing, 787, 261 Bosch, 9, 181 182 Bosch, Robert, 333 Bosch suppliers, 315 BosWash, metropolitan region, 384 Budii car, 272 273 Business models, 311, 353 355 automobile manufacturers, 311 content creators, 319 320 data creators, 320 322 examples, 312 hardware creators, 314 315 options, 312 314 passenger looks for new products, 321 passenger visits website, 321 service creators, 316 319 software creators, 315 316 strategic mix, 322 323 Business vehicle, 15 Business-to-consumer car sharing, 342 343 Cadillac, 180 California PATH Research Reports, 298 299 Cambot, 290 Cameras, 111, 126 CAN bus, 126, 143 Capsule, 33 Car and ride sharing, studies on, 348 430 Car dealers, repair shops and insurance companies, 173 174 Car manufacturers, 328, 396 397 business model, 312 Car-pooling efforts, 364 365 Car-sharing programs, 364 365 service, 383 Car-sharing, 206 Car2Go, 317, 345 Casey Neistat, 226 Castillo, Jose, 364 365 Celebrities and bloggers, 225 227 Central driver assistance control unit, 124 Central processing unit, 96, 124 zFAS, 125 Centre for Economic and Business Research in London, 189 Chevrolet, 40 app from General Motors, 316 Spark EV, 27 Cisco, 41 CityMobil project, 369, 406 CityMobil2, 14, 157 Cognitive distraction, 287 Coherent European framework, 246 Committee on Autonomous Road Transport for Singapore, 347 Communication, 198 200 investing in communication infrastructure, 403 404 technology, 261 Community, 341 detection algorithms, 389 Companion app, 316 Compelling force, 223 Competitiveness Iain Forbes, 368 369 projects in Asia, 371 374 Index projects in Europe and United States, 369 371 projects in Israel, 374 375 Computer operating systems, 247 Computer-driven driving, 108 Computerised information processing, 109 Congestion pricing, 296 Connected car, 129 ad-hoc networks, 133 connected driving, 137 138 connected mobility, 138 development of mobile communication networks, 130 digital ecosystems, 138 eCall, 136 137 online services, 136 137 permanent networks, 130 statement by telecommunications experts, 132 133 V-to-I communication, 134 135 V-to-V communication, 133 134 V-to-X communication, 135 136 See also Digitised car Connected mobility, 129, 138 Connected vehicles, 138 vulnerability of, 142 Connected-car services, 313 Connectivity of vehicles, 147 Consumer-electronics companies, 285 Container Terminal, 159 Content creators, 319 320 Continental (automotive suppliers), 9, 284, 315 Continuous feedback, 281 Convenience, 302 304, 306 Conventional breakthrough approach, 332 Index Conventional broadband applications, 132 Conventional car manufacturing, 10 Cook, Tim, 182 Cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS), 369 370 Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, 297 Cost(s), 187 192, 295 autonomous vehicles enabling use of alternative fuels, 305 fuel economy, 297 299 intelligent infrastructures, 299 301 land use, 304 operating costs, 301 302 relationship between road speed and road throughput, 296 vehicle throughput, 295 297 Croove app, 318 Culture, 330 change, 396 differences, 195 197 and organisational transformation, 395 Curtatone, Joseph, 387 Customers’ expectations attitudes, 204 207 incidents, 203 204 interview with 14 car dealers, 207 persuasion, 207 208 statements by two early adopters, 205 Cyber attacks, 141 Cyber hacking or failures in algorithms, 354 Cyber security, 141 146 Cyber-physical systems, 9 Daimler, 130 Data, 121 categories in vehicle, 147 creators, 320 322 431 from passengers, 94 95 privacy, 147 148 processing, 91 protection principles, 148 recorders, 239 Data-capturing technology, 103 Data-protection issues, 239 Database, 98 Decelerating, 91, 122 Decision-making mechanism, 369 Declaration of Amsterdam, 246 247 Deep learning, 115 Deep neural networks, 115 116 Deere, John, 154, 155 Deere, John, 154, 155, 263 Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), 41 Degree of autonomous driving, 53 Degree of autonomy, 262 Degree of market penetration, 84 Degree of not-invented-here arrogance, 332 Degree of vehicle’s automation, 233 234 Delhi municipal government, 21 22 Delphi, 9, 181 Delphi Automotive Systems, 6 Demise of Kodak, 111 Denner, Volkmar, 333 334 Denso, 9 Depreciation, 345 Destination control, 299, 300 Digital company development, 395 396 Digital economy, 225 Digital ecosystems, 138 Digital light-processing technology, 277, 279 Digital maps, 101 Digital products, 267 Digitised car algorithms, 113 117 432 backup levels, 127 car as digitised product, 111 112 data, 121 drive recorder, 125 126 drive-by-wire, 122 over-provisioning, 127 processor, 122 125 software, 117 121 See also Connected car Digitising and design of vehicle, 265 267 Dilemma situations, 61 Direct attacks, 141 Direct connectivity of vehicle, 130 Disruptions in mobility, 31, 34 arguments, 34 35 history, 32 33 OICA, 34 Disruptive technologies, 221, 223, 402 Document operation-relevant data, 263 Doll, Claus, 166 Dongles, 142 Drees, Joachim, 165 ‘Drive boost’ mode, 274 “Drive me” project, 370 Drive recorder, 125 126 ‘Drive relax’ mode, 274 Drive-by-wire, 122 DriveNow, 317, 345 Driver, 235 role, 235 238 Driver distraction, 55 causes and consequences, 278 Driver-assistance systems, 53, 71, 160, 174, 222, 298, 333, 353 Driverless cars, 3, 7, 27 28, 222, 233, 244 taxis, 302 vans, 406 vehicles, 168 Index Driverless Audi RS7, 227 229 Driverless Race Car of Audi, 5 Driving manoeuvres, 91 modes, 107 oneself, 342 343 Drunk driving, 303 Dvorak keyboard, 242 Dynamic patterns of movement in city of London, 390 eCall.

The former 118 Autonomous Driving makes sure that the processor, memory and input/output devices are managed and are available to the application software (iOS from Apple, Android from Google). In digitised vehicles, special operating systems developed by the individual automobile manufacturers are currently in use for infotainment systems. Application software relies on the operating system and makes functions available that interest the user (e.g. receiving and sending e-mails). Application software has to be programmed so that it is compatible with the operating system. For example, if a car manufacturer decides on iOS Car Play from Apple as an operating system, only those apps can be used that were programmed for this operating system.


pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

He’d earned a marketing position as McFarland’s number two at Magnises in 2014 after cold emailing Billy an overly detailed business plan of all the things he thought Magnises had been doing wrong, and ended up serving as the vice president of marketing and branding for the company for two years before negotiating his way to become Fyre’s CMO. Margolin seemed to envision himself as the Tim Cook to Billy’s Steve Jobs. But when they got together, critics say, it was more like Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott from The Office. “I was very surprised he ended up with Billy because he’s kind of the one that brought Magnises more down-market,” the publicist said. “Billy’s whole thing was his bling, and he wanted it to be very trendsetting and then [with Margolin] he got more down to business, you know, he wanted to get just a lot of people joining, and that’s when it really changed.”

According to Rachel Kurzius, a reporter for DCist, Magnises used the same language Fyre would later use, blaming unforeseen circumstances.87 But not all was lost: the rapper Wale, a cardholder who had performed at the Magnises clubhouse for a reported “ten minutes” in 2013 (an attendee told the New York Daily News, “The mic didn’t work for the first couple,” which was just as well since the party was shut down by the NYPD not long after), stepped in and performed in Ja Rule’s place.88 The DC launch wasn’t a total bust, but by July of that summer, McFarland was still desperate enough for new members to resort to his old Spling tricks. “Want a free Apple Watch?” one Facebook post read. “Magnises is giving away a free Apple Watch to each member who successfully refers 5 new members by July 7th. Refer away!”89 By August, the company fully pivoted from an event-and-membership club to a lifestyle blog in the vein of Guest of a Guest, with the dubious bonus of a concierge app. Not long after, the company gave up on the membership-club aspect altogether.

(Ostensibly, I could have spoken up about the canine sex act happening on my side of the solid rosewood cube anchoring the living room—the podcast wasn’t live—but before we started recording, Bernstein told me she prefers not to have to edit the episodes. She would, in fact, upload the recording to Apple within seconds of us finishing our conversation, without removing a single second.) It was a trippy experience, overall, going from Instagram to IRL with Bernstein. Just from following the WeWoreWhat Instagram page, for example, I knew her coffee table was one of Bernstein’s first designer-furniture purchases, that it was recommended to her by her “friend Maggie from Claude Home,” an Instagram-based home-decor brand, and that she would soon release a $195 deep brown wood-print suit as part of a swim line, again for Onia, “inspired by pieces in my home.”


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

If Americans believe that government is unfair—that ours is a government of the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, and by the 1 percent—then faith in our democracy will surely perish. ______________ * New York Times, April 14, 2013. GLOBALIZATION ISN’T JUST ABOUT PROFITS. IT’S ABOUT TAXES TOO.* THE WORLD LOOKED ON AGOG AS TIM COOK, THE HEAD OF Apple, said his company had paid all the taxes owed—seeming to say that it paid all the taxes it should have paid. There is, of course, a big difference between the two. It’s no surprise that a company with the resources and ingenuity of Apple would do what it could to avoid paying as much tax as it could within the law. While the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United case, seems to have said that corporations are people, with all the rights attendant thereto, this legal fiction didn’t endow corporations with a sense of moral responsibility; and they have the Plastic Man capacity to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time—to be everywhere when it comes to selling their products, and nowhere when it comes to reporting the profits derived from those sales.

These articles were written before the scandals of tax avoidance on a global scale were exposed. At that time, GE was the shining example of a corporate leader that had managed to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. But then the Apple and Google scandals broke out—these Silicon Valley companies, long noted for their ingenuity in technology, had displayed the same ingenuity in tax avoidance. They took advantage of globalization—the ability to move money around the world. Apple claimed that its profits could really be attributed to a few people working in Ireland! Honesty—let alone a sense of fair play—seems a rarer commodity than ingenuity. These companies were willing to take but not to give back: after all, their success depends on the Internet, which was created by government spending.

The problem of multinational corporate tax avoidance is deeper, and requires more profound reform, including dealing with tax havens that shelter money for tax evaders and facilitate money-laundering. Google and Apple hire the most talented lawyers, who know how to avoid taxes staying within the law. But there should be no room in our system for countries that are complicitous in tax avoidance. Why should taxpayers in Germany help bail out citizens in a country whose business model was based on tax avoidance and a race to the bottom—and why should citizens in any country allow their companies to take advantage of these predatory countries? To say that Apple or Google simply took advantage of the current system is to let them off the hook too easily: the system didn’t just come into being on its own.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

He has resisted governments’ requests to hand over data or build back doors into Telegram’s infrastructure. In the wake of Edward Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, and the release of Netflix’s The Great Hack, the reasons behind Telegram’s meteoric rise seem obvious. Individuals around the world are clamoring for privacy, security, and freedom from surveillance. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, was applauded when he resisted the government’s request to crack the San Bernardino shooter’s private iPhone data, and there are certainly important values and protections that must be preserved in privacy rights and data security. But as we found out on November 13, 2015, unrestricted, private, and anonymous communication can aid and abet the darkness in social media as well.

More developers wrote software for Windows, and the indirect network effect created by Windows’ large installed base was evident in CompUSA’s endless rows of Windows software that dwarfed the tiny corner devoted to Apple. By 2013, however, the tables had turned. Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 and everyone wanted one. Apple built so much innovation into the iPhone that its intrinsic value alone was enough to get people to buy iPhones en masse. Software was added to the iPhone through applications, or “apps,” and Apple launched the App Store in 2008. As more people bought the iPhone, developers had more incentive to write apps for it. As a result, the iPhone’s adoption curve looks like Mount Everest. The first iPhone was sold in 2007 and by 2013 Apple had sold 400 million of them.

If the user base is like a platform’s mass, and network effects are like gravity, Apple’s gravity increased as the iPhone’s mass increased and consumers flocked to the now iconic brand. In contrast, Microsoft’s share of the cell phone market in 2013 was like Apple’s share of CompUSA’s shelves in the 1980s—minuscule. Developers had very little incentive to write apps for Windows phones. Instead, they wrote for Apple. In 2013 there were over five times as many apps for the iPhone as there were for Windows phones. In fact, Apple’s installed base advantage was so large that while developers were clamoring to write apps for the iPhone for free, Microsoft was paying developers over $100,000 a pop for apps written for Windows phones.


pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, bank run, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, buy low sell high, carbon tax, carried interest, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, move fast and break things, Peter Thiel, power law, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steven Levy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, work culture , Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

This is an astounding idea. Not just some information, not just most information, but all information, of all kinds, is somehow instantaneously gathered and beamed into the stock price of a company as soon as it emerges. Apple earned higher profits this year than last? Already incorporated. It’s planning to release a bigger, more powerful iPhone in September? Already incorporated. Tim Cook has a headache this morning and is not responding to his emails? Already incorporated. One of the most important ramifications of the efficient markets theory is that no investor can accurately predict where stock prices will go in the future.

But stocks have one great merit and one great flaw. The merit is that they grant their holders limited liability. This is a marvelous power. You own a company, but you are not responsible for what it does. If Apple makes a phone that catches fire, its shareholders don’t have to reimburse the victims. If Apple is found to have violated privacy laws, the shareholders don’t have to pay the fines. If Apple doesn’t pay back its lenders, the shareholders don’t have to make them whole. From the perspective of a capitalist looking to put his money to work, it is hard to beat stocks. You get none of the risk and all of the upside.

“It is settled beyond all doubt,” Marx said, “that there is in India a permanent financial deficit, a regular over-supply of wars, and no supply at all of public works, an abominable system of taxation, and a no less abominable state of justice and law, that these five items constitute, as it were, the five points of the East Indian Charter.” To Marx, these evils were not the result of bad apples in the company or mismanagement by its executives. They were the inevitable result of the structure of stocks themselves. “On looking deeper into the framework of this anomalous government, we find at its bottom a third power, more supreme than either the Board [of Control] or the Court [of Directors], more irresponsible, and more concealed from and guarded against the superintendence of public opinion.”


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

It is good for great innovators to get rich. Making is not the same as taking. It is not inequality itself that is unfair but rather the process that generates it. The people who are being left behind care about their own falling living standards and loss of community, not about Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) or Tim Cook (of Apple) being rich. Yet when they think the inequality comes from cheating or from special favors, the situation becomes intolerable. The financial crisis has much to answer for. Before it, many believed that the bankers knew what they were doing and that their salaries were being earned in the public interest.

These local monopolies are today being challenged by internet streaming; long-standing monopolies are often challenged by new technology. More common than monopoly is oligopoly, where there are only a few sellers, each of which has some control over price. There may be only one Toyota dealer nearby, but dealers of other brands provide imperfect competition. Apple is not the only producer of cell phones, but it has a large number of loyal customers who are unlikely to switch to Samsung, and this enables Apple to set the price of an iPhone far above what it costs to make. Airlines have frequent-flyer schemes designed to make customers reluctant to switch carriers when prices are raised. Oligopolists sometimes collude to keep prices up, implicitly or explicitly.

Globalization has aided the shift, both weakening unions and empowering employers,17 and American institutions have helped push this further than elsewhere. Corporations have become more powerful as unions have weakened, and as politics has become more favorable to them. In part, this comes from the phenomenal growth of high-tech firms, such as Apple and Google, that employ few workers for their size and have high profits per worker. This is good for productivity and for national income, but little of the gain is shared by labor, especially by less educated labor. Less positively, consolidation in some American industries—hospitals and airlines are just two of many examples—has brought an increase in market power in some product markets so that it is possible for firms to raise prices above what they would be in a freely competitive market.


pages: 339 words: 103,546

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Pecker’s relationship to Trump, rather than the grand plans of the prince, became the focal point for many US pundits. Grine, who preferred to operate on the fringes, was now in the center of an embarrassing uproar that brought lots of publicity and no money. Mohammed continued his visit, meeting executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Apple’s Tim Cook. He ate dinner with Jeff Bezos and was photographed with Google founder Sergey Brin wearing his Silicon Valley best: a blazer, dress shoes, and a button-down shirt tucked into dark jeans belted across his broad belly. He sat with Oprah Winfrey, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and the CEOs of Disney, Uber, and Lockheed.

Alwaleed delighted in that image and in representations of his own image, showing visitors to his offices in Riyadh, Paris, and New York thick stacks of magazines with his face on the cover or long interviews about his business career. Some rooms in his homes contained more than a dozen photos or paintings of Alwaleed at different stages of his life. He liked drinking tea from a mug with his face on it. The prince was a force in American business, buying stakes in Citibank, Apple, and Twitter. In a partnership with Bill Gates, Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holding Company owned a chunk of the Four Seasons hotel chain, famed for its luxury accommodations. When he traveled, he brought along a two-dozen-person retinue, including cooks, cleaners, butlers, and business advisors. Yet here he was on a cool November night in 2017, feeling a chill down his spine as he got dressed at his desert retreat for the meeting with the king.

A third, a Saudi, was “a professional” who used encryption to conceal his identity, though once he signed in without encryption, and Alzabarah was able to track his IP address. The Twitter engineer realized he was providing valuable information to Mohammed’s men—some of the accounts he was accessing were, the Royal Court suspected, connected to terrorism, and Saudi officials announced a $1.9 million reward to anyone who helped avert an attack. In his private Apple Notes account, Alzabarah drafted language to ask Asaker about whether he could claim that money. Alzabarah spoke by phone with Asaker on June 18 and the next day accessed the Twitter account of Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi man who had obtained asylum in Canada after the kingdom cut off his schooling in retribution for public critiques of the government and who would form a strong bond with a Saudi journalist and regime critic named Jamal Khashoggi.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Accessed on 24 January 2020 at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2018#local-population-change 28 Jonathan Wadsworth, ‘Mustn’t Grumble: Immigration, Health and Health Service Use in the UK and Germany’, Fiscal Studies, 34:1, 2013, pp. 55–82. https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/6628 29 Carlos Vargas-Silva, Osea Giuntella and Catia Nicodemo, ‘The effects of immigration on NHS waiting times’, Journal of Health Economics, 58, March 2018, pp. 123–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2018.02.001 30 Charlotte Geay, Sandra McNally and Shqiponja Telhaj, ‘Non-Native Speakers of English in the Classroom: What are the Effects on Pupil Performance’, Centre for the Economics of Education discussion paper 137, 2012. http://cee.lse.ac.uk/ceedps/ceedp137.pdf 31 Simon Burgess, ‘Understanding the success of London’s schools’, CMPO Working Paper 14/333, October 2014. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmpo/migrated/documents/wp333.pdf 32 Jennifer Hunt, ‘The Impact of Immigration on the Educational Attainment of Natives’, Journal of Human Resources, 52:4, Fall 2017, pp. 1060–118. http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/52/4/1060.short 33 Asako Ohinata and Jan C. van Ours, ‘Spillover Effects of Studying with Immigrant Students: A Quantile Regression Approach’, IZA Discussion Paper 7720, November 2013. http://ftp.iza.org/dp7720.pdf 34 In 2012, 37 percent of pharmacists, 35 percent of medical practitioners, 35 percent of dental practitioners and 22 percent of nurses in the UK were foreign-born, according to ONS data reported in World Health Organisation, ‘Migration of Health Workers’, 2014. http://www.who.int/hrh/migration/14075_MigrationofHealth_Workers.pdf#page=173 35 Marie Mccullough, ‘Nearly 1 in 3 US physicians were born abroad’, Medical Xpress, 5 December 2018. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-12-physicians-born.html 36 World Health Organisation, ‘Migration of Health Workers’, 2014. https://www.who.int/hrh/migration/14075_MigrationofHealth_Workers.pdf?ua=1 37 Joel Negin, Aneuryn Rozea, Ben Cloyd and Alexandra LC Martiniuk, ‘Foreign-born health workers in Australia: an analysis of census data’, Human Resources for Health, 11:69, 2013. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3882294/ 38 Tim Cook, Emira Kursumovic and Simon Lennane, ‘Exclusive: deaths of NHS staff from covid-19 analysed’, HSJ, 22 April 2020. https://www.hsj.co.uk/exclusive-deaths-of-nhs-staff-from-covid-19-analysed/7027471.article 14 Development Dividend 1 ‘HBO History Makers Series with Mo Ibrahim’, Council on Foreign Relations, 9 October 2013. https://www.cfr.org/event/hbo-history-makers-series-mo-ibrahim 2 London Business School, ‘Profile: Mo Ibrahim, Chairman and Founder, Mo Ibrahim Foundation & Celtel International’, YouTube, 24 June 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

And as skilled workers both compete and collaborate, spread ideas and spark new ones, so productivity, pay and profits tend to prosper. Chapter 10 looks in more detail at how diverse workplaces stimulate innovation, generating a diversity dividend. Such virtuous circles are what make open cities and regions thrive. In Silicon Valley, the home of Apple, Google, Facebook and so many other companies that epitomise America’s technological prowess, six in ten highly skilled technology workers are foreign-born.12 Apple’s iconic iPhone was designed by a Brit, Jony Ive. Hugo Barra, who led Google’s Android mobile phone operating system division and now runs Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality division, is Brazilian. Ajay Bhatt, the chief technologist at chipmaker Intel and co-inventor of USB (Universal Serial Bus, a standard computer interface), was born in India.

As of 2016, immigrants had also co-founded more than half of the US’s eighty-seven unicorns, as start-ups valued at $1 billion (£770 million) or more are known.2 One unicorn, valued at $13 billion (£10 billion), is DoorDash, the country’s fastest-growing meal-delivery app and a lifeline for millions of Americans during coronavirus lockdowns, which was founded by Tony Wu, who moved to the US from China as a child.3 Across the entire US, nearly three in eight new businesses have at least one immigrant founder.4 Newcomers’ children have an outsized impact too. Apple’s Steve Jobs had a Syrian-born father. Fourteen of America’s twenty-five most valuable tech companies were co-founded by migrants or their children.5 Overall, immigrants co-founded 101 of the Fortune 500 most valuable listed companies in the US and their children 122, so an astonishing 45 percent in total.6 Those firms had $6.1 trillion (£4.7 trillion) in revenues and employed 13.5 million people.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Neoliberal capitalism, with its ‘minimum state, maximum markets’ approach, has never provided assurances on either. And this isn’t just a project for government – businesses and their leaders also need to step up. Indeed, it was partly in recognition of this that in August 2019 the Business Roundtable, a group of influential chief executives of leading US corporations including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Citigroup’s Michael Corbat,22 jettisoned Milton Friedman’s longstanding principle that the only business of business was to serve its shareholders,23 pledging instead to serve all its stakeholders – shareholders, yes, but also suppliers, communities and employees who it promised to ‘compensat[e] fairly and provid[e] important benefits’, as well as foster ‘diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect’.24 Whilst I welcome this sentiment and hope that such rhetoric will translate into meaningful action, the reality is that unless the pressure on companies to generate short-term financial returns is alleviated and their executives’ incentives not tied to this, the focus on narrowly defined ‘return to shareholders’ will likely continue to dominate, especially in the case of publicly traded companies.

Collis, ‘Dogs as catalysts for social interactions: Robustness of the Effect’, British Journal of Psychology 91, no. 1 (February 2000), 61–70, https://doi.org/10.1348/000712600 161673. 40 Abha Bhattarai, ‘Apple wants its stores to become “town squares.” But skeptics are calling it a “branding fantasy”’, Washington Post, 13 September 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/09/13/apple-wants-its-stores-to-become-town-squares-but-skeptics-call-it-a-branding-fantasy/. 41 Andrew Hill, ‘Apple stores are not “town squares” and never should be’, Financial Times, 17 September 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/8c5d4aec-988f-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b. 42 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Pepsi pulls Kendall Jenner ad ridiculed for co-opting protest movements’, Guardian, 6 April 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/05/pepsi-kendall-jenner-pepsi-apology-ad-protest. 43 See original tweet at: https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/849656699464056832?

And although big corporations are starting to recognise the value of community as a brand proposition, the authenticity of their offerings can at times be highly questionable. In 2017, for example, Apple rebranded its shops as ‘Town Squares’.40 Sounds good in theory yet all that seems to mean in practice is renaming its product aisles ‘avenues’, its presentation spaces ‘forums’ and its technician desks ‘groves’: a ‘lexical takeover’ that doesn’t just co-opt the actual civic spaces those words represent, but marks a concerning trend away from true public ownership of those types of spaces, as Andrew Hill of the Financial Times points out. ‘The very nature of how people use most Apple products – head down, AirPods in – is at odds with the look-up, look-around, listen-out ethos of the town square,’ he writes.41 That same year, critics pounced on the similarly misguided blending of capitalist and activist premises in the now-infamous TV advert that featured a denim-clad Kendall Jenner diffusing police-protester tension with a can of Pepsi.42 ‘If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi,’ Bernice King, the daughter of US civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. tweeted sarcastically.43 Pepsi initially insisted that the advert was meant to highlight ‘people from different walks of life coming together in a spirit of harmony’, but in appropriating the language and even the aesthetic of communities engaged in protest the company showed that in reality it had no idea what those communities were fighting for, nor did it care.44 It just wanted to sell more Pepsi.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Seriously. Nothing is holding you or anyone else back. Especially not straight white men. Not only are minorities some of the most famous and successful players in Hollywood, they are also among the most powerful people in our country’s leading industries. Take, for instance, openly gay CEO of Apple Tim Cook (net worth $500 million); female CEO of YouTube Susan Wojcicki (net worth $500 million); and CEO of General Motors Mary Barra (net worth $60 million). This is part of why Jay-Z (a black man, in case you’d forgotten) is now hip-hop’s first billionaire and why Rihanna (a black immigrant from Barbados) was recently named the world’s richest female musician with a wealth of $600 million.


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

At that moment, HBO would not, as the saying goes, learn to code. On the morning of March 9, 2015, inside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Apple CEO Tim Cook strode onto the stage. In front of a packed crowd of hooting Apple supporters, he took a moment to praise the cantilevered second floor of a new Apple store in Hangzhou, China. “It’s absolutely breathtaking,” Cook said. A few minutes later he noted that Apple TV was adding more programming from “all of the leading content providers,” including a new channel from HBO. Plepler walked out onstage. He was wearing a dark suit and crisp white shirt, spread wide open at the neckline.

A few days later, Brindle and her colleague Bernadette Aulestia, a top HBO executive in distribution, met with MLB Advanced Media at their offices in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market—the former home to HBO’s Oz, which in recent years had been transformed into a posh hub of New York City’s growing tech scene. There, Gersh and CEO Robert Bowman delivered their pitch. “We walked out and were like, yep, that’s our solution,” Brindle says. Meanwhile, Plepler was drifting further away from his Seattle team and into the gravitational pull of the Apple-centric universe, at one point meeting with Eddy Cue, the head of Apple’s digital media business. Together, they hatched a dramatic plan for bringing HBO’s new direct-to-consumer experience into the world. In early December, HBO confirmed reports that it was scrapping Project Halley and hiring MLB Advanced Media. The plan was to ensure that HBO Now would be ready to stream the opening day of Game of Thrones in the spring.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The company ended 2005: Gina Keating, Netflixed (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2012), 163–64. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT companies including Amazon: Elizabeth M. Gillespie, “Amazon.com Launches Long-Awaited TV, Movie Download Service,” Associated Press, September 8, 2006. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT and Apple preparing: Byron Acohido, “Apple Beats Amazon to Punch with Movie Downloads,” USA Today, September 6, 2006. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Netflix looked vulnerable: Michael Liedtke, “Netflix Lowers Its Online Video Rental Fees,” Associated Press, July 22, 2007. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT By any measure, Comcast: The Lazard Report, Time Warner Inc., February 1, 2006.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Even more important, just-in-time production avoids the possibility of being stuck with piles of outdated cell phones, laptops, or sneakers in what are essentially fashion industries. Tim Cook—the Apple executive who masterminded the company’s shift from in-house production to contracting out before succeeding Steve Jobs as CEO—once called inventory “fundamentally evil.” “You kind of want to manage it like you’re in the dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.”44 Foxconn and Pegatron keep Apple’s milk fresh by rapidly mobilizing hundreds of thousands of young, poorly paid Chinese workers, often under harsh conditions (perhaps closer to evil than inventory).

Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing,” 230 (Nishimura quote); Marcelo Prince and Willa Plank, “A Short History of Apple’s Manufacturing in the U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/06/a-short-history-of-apples-manufacturing-in-the-u-s/; Peter Burrows, “Apple’s Cook Kicks Off ‘Made in USA’ Push with Mac Pro,” Dec. 19, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-18/apple-s-cook-kicks-off-made-in-usa-push-with-mac-pro; G. Clay Whittaker, “Why Trump’s Idea to Move Apple Product Manufacturing to the U.S. Makes No Sense,” Popular Science, Jan. 26, 2016, http://www.popsci.com/why-trumps-idea-to-move-apple-product-manufacturing-to-us-makes-no-sense; Klein, No Logo, 198–99. 40.Vanderbilt, Sneaker Book, 90–99; New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997; Klein, No Logo, 197–98, 365–79; Donald L.

Steele, “As Apple Grew, American Workers Left Behind,” Nov. 16, 2011, http://americawhatwentwrong.org/story/as-apple-grew-american-workers-left-behind/; David Pogue, “What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found,” Feb. 23, 2012, http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/what-cameras-inside-foxconn-found/. 41.Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing,” 231, 234, 236–37; Boy Lüthje, Stefanie Hürtgen, Peter Pawlicki, and Martina Sproll, From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen: Global Production and Work in the IT Industry (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 69–149; Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors,” 71–72. 42.For the container revolution, see Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 43.David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City”; Oliver Wainwright, “Santa’s Real Workshop: The Town in China That Makes the World’s Christmas Decorations,” The Guardian, Dec. 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/dec/19/santas-real-workshop-the-town-in-china-that-makes-the-worlds-christmas-decorations. 44.Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 169; Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2014; Adam Starariano and Peter Burrows, “Apple’s Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 3, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-03/apples-supply-chain-secret-hoard-lasers; and Adam Lashinsky, “Apple: The Genius Behind Steve,” Fortune, Nov. 24, 2008, http://fortune.com/2008/11/24/apple-the-genius-behind-steve/ (Cook quote). 45.In 2004, Foxconn employed five thousand engineers in Shenzhen alone.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

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

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

Design: The Invention of Desire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Henwood, Doug. 2015. “What the Sharing Economy Takes.” The Nation, January 27. Higgins, Michelle. 2013. “The Get-into-School Card.” New York Times, May 3. Higgins, Tim, Joseph Ciolli, and Callie Bost. 2014. “Apple Inc. Market Cap Tops US$700B, Double What It Was When Tim Cook Took Over as CEO.” Bloomberg News, November 25. Hill, Steven. 2015a. Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. ———. 2015b. “The Unsavory Side of Airbnb.” American Prospect, October 15. Hirsch, Barry T., and Edward J.

All gig economy workers would be employees. A worker on Upwork, who is monitored via webcam or keystroke software, would not be covered by the pajama rule and so would be an employee. This model is not revolutionary: even in the tech industry, full-time and part-time workers for Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are hired as employees with workplace protections and benefits. The default in many fields is to be hired as an employee, with some entrepreneurial individuals seeking to go into business for themselves as independent consultants and contractors. Even workplaces that are part of the gig economy, such as Uber, TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Munchery, and Kitchensurfing, pay their professional workers as employees.

“Taxi Cab Syndrome: A Review of the Extensive Genitourinary Pathology Experienced by Taxi Cab Drivers and What We Can Do to Help.” Review of Urology 16(3):99–104. Mathews, Joe. 2014. “The Sharing Economy Boom Is about to Bust.” Time, June 27. http://time.com/2924778/airbnb-uber-sharing-economy/. May, Patrick. 2015. “Apple Says It’s Created 1 Million Jobs, App Store Is Going Gangbusters.” San Jose Mercury News, January 8. McAfee, Andrew. N.d. “The Great Decoupling of the US Economy.” Andrew McAfee (website). http://andrewmcafee.org/2012/12/the-great-decoupling-of-the-us-economy/. McAfee, Andrew, and Erik Brynjolfsson. 2017.


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Cisco Systems signed a preliminary agreement to upgrade the kingdom’s digital infrastructure. Microsoft signed on to a program to train young Saudis. Dow Chemical received a license, billed as the first ever, allowing it to operate in the kingdom without a Saudi partner. MBS got sit-downs with Tim Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Photos of the young prince in jeans and a sport coat trying out a virtual reality headset at Facebook headquarters zinged around the kingdom, convincing many young Saudis that this prince was indeed different from the others. In his meetings, MBS pitched a bright future for Saudi Arabia and argued that authoritarianism would help bring it about.

MBS has never publicly discussed when he began plotting his political career, but he has talked about his desire to be a new kind of ruler, one who disrupted the old order like the giants of Silicon Valley, instead of one who followed the traditional ways. “There’s a big difference,” he said. “The first, he can create Apple. The second can become a successful employee. I had elements that were much more than what Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates had. If I work according to their methods, what will I create? All of this was in my head when I was young.” King Abdullah, however, saw MBS as an upstart whose experience fell far short of his ambitions.

Salman was dressed like “a Wall Street banker,” Westphal recalled, and made sure that those giving the tour explained everything to his son, who jotted down copious notes on a small pad. That was MBS, and Westphal was intrigued. “There is something very special about this young guy,” he thought. “There was no question that he was the apple of his father’s eye.” King Abdullah was busy and often ill, so Westphal frequently visited Salman and noticed MBS, usually standing to the side but never speaking. So Westphal requested a meeting with the young prince and got the impression that MBS was excited, because no one as prominent as a U.S. ambassador had ever asked to meet him before.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The Republican congressman who wrote the Patriot Act declared himself appalled it should have been used in ways he never intended. Jim Sensenbrenner54 wrote that the Act was never intended to hand the US government the kind of powers Snowden revealed it had awarded itself. Silicon Valley chief executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook, visited the Guardian to discuss the issue. There was also a memorable Guardian private dinner in Davos attended by Eric Schmidt from Google; inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee; the boss of Vodafone, Vittori Colao; former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt; the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman; and Fadi Chehadé, CEO of the body charged with co-ordinating the internet.

The editor, Andy Coulson, had resigned – he was now on his way to Downing Street as the media adviser to David Cameron – and the official story from News International was that Goodman had been a rotten apple: his phone hacking was a one-off. Nick was here to tell me this story was not true. He’d been contacted by a source who had met him in a hotel room. This person told him that the idea that Goodman was the only person to hack phones was a joke. Loads of reporters were at it: it was how the News of the World had won so many awards. Hacking phones was the system, not an aberration. I listened with interest and a faintly raised heartbeat. Nick’s voice lowered more. The police knew this at the time Goodman had been singled out as a rotten apple, but had done nothing about it.

This one was not necessarily mad, but it was heartfelt. The digital world was going to divide between open and closed. We were at a fork in the road. The tech world could see it in the differing approaches of Google versus Apple: for them it was an article of faith that open would always beat closed. The Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu was to write about this argument later, questioning whether (in the wake of a golden period by Apple) it was still true. His conclusion: ‘closed can beat open, but you have to be genius. Under normal conditions, in an unpredictable industry, and given regular levels of human error, open still beats closed.’


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

*5 At the beginning of the Great Depression, when the young Burns taught economics at Rutgers University, one of his most devoted students was Milton Friedman. *6 Not-so-fun fact: In 2019, nearly half a century after the Business Roundtable formed, no less than 83 percent of its 182 CEO members—among them its chairman Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Michael Dell, and Stephen Schwarzman—were still white men. *7 Not until 1994 did the Times run an article all about the Kochs, and then almost entirely about their business—it included just two paragraphs (of sixty) about their two decades of world-changing political work. *8 The majority opinion in this second case, First National Bank of Boston v.

The one genuinely new pop cultural genre, hip-hop, made an explicit, unapologetic point of quoting old songs. Science fiction, the cultural genre that is all about imagining the future, got a new subgenre in the 1990s that was considered supercool because it was set in the past—steampunk. And commercialized futurism also became oddly familiar and nostalgic. Apple devices of the twenty-first century and glassy, supersleek Apple stores feel “contemporary” in the sense that they’re like props and back-on-Earth sets from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 2000s as they were envisioned in the ’60s, the moment before nostalgia took over everything. The nostalgia division of the fantasy-industrial complex began merchandising in precincts beyond entertainment, from fake-old cars like Miatas and PT Cruisers to retail chains like Restoration Hardware selling stylish fake-old things.

In 1962, when GM made most of the cars sold in America and AT&T manufactured and operated all the telephones, the two together employed more than a million people, one out of sixty American workers, each of whom generated revenues for the companies equivalent to $170,000. Today Apple and Google have revenues and profit margins twice as high as GM and AT&T had in 1962, but together employ only a quarter-million people, just one out of six hundred American workers. Thus those newer companies, in constant dollars, collect twelve times as much revenue per employee, and they earn twenty times as much profit in all. The market value of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft combined is nearly 10 percent of the value of all public companies, yet those four employ only a small fraction of one percent of the U.S. workforce.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

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

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

It wasn’t like one of those things where everybody really has their shit together. It was a really small, very eclectic group: Bob Iger was there, he spoke; Lee Clow read “The Crazy Ones”; Steve’s biological sister Mona Simpson was there; all his children were there; Laurene was there; the only Apple people I recall were Jony Ives, Eddy Cue, and Tim Cook. George Riley was kind of running the show. Larry Brilliant was there. Larry Brilliant: We read something from the Bhagavad Gita, but we’re not going to talk about that. Mike Slade: It was in the cemetery and his coffin was right there. We all formed a semicircle around the casket and then anybody who wanted to speak could speak.

Hello, I’m Macintosh It sure is great to get out of that bag While Atari was having its troubles, so was Apple. By the early ’80s the Apple II was starting to show its age. Other competitors, including Atari but most importantly IBM, were coming out with newer, sleeker machines. Apple was trying to counter, first with the Apple III and then with the Lisa, but both machines were flops. The next machine in line to be released was the Macintosh, and it would make or break the company. The Mac was Jobs’s exclusive turf. Although Jobs was the public face of Apple, he did not have actual control of the company. Jobs contented himself with being the (nonexecutive) chairman of Apple’s board and directing what was, in 1980, a minor research effort: an experiment in making a computer for the common man.

John Couch: I don’t think he asked Jef’s permission; Steve just took it over. Randy Wigginton: Steve hijacked it. Andy Hertzfeld: When the Mac started, the big projects in Apple’s future were the Lisa on the one hand and the Apple III on the other hand. Even the Apple II was diminished in their minds, not thinking it would last as long as it did. Randy Wigginton: Remember Steve always had this insecurity about the Apple II, because he didn’t actually make the Apple II, right? And Steve’s idea for the Mac was basically the next-generation Apple II for the rest of the world. Andy Hertzfeld: The Mac was going for well more than a year before it found what it really was: the volks-Lisa.


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

We suspect that this shift in operations reflects the influence of ongoing military reforms, widespread exposure of Chinese cyber operations, and actions taken by the U.S. government,” the cybersecurity firm FireEye concluded in one report.5 In December 2014, even as inside government we were struggling to respond to the Sony attack, China’s head internet official, Lu Wei, had come to the United States. During his visit, he had received a personal tour from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook’s headquarters and had met with Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook—meetings that publicly had them all smiling, given the business opportunity Lu, the gatekeeper to the Chinese internet, offered. But he also had tense meetings in Washington with officials from the National Security Council.6 In a public address at George Washington University, Lu offered that he felt China and the United States had become “one community of common interest” when it came to internet policy and that they should follow “common rules.”

Yet the moment when computers would be a real part of daily life still seemed far away; the computers he knew at the time were the “size of the side of a barn.” Then, Gibson passed a bus stop with an advertisement for Apple Computers, the upstart technology firm led by wunderkind Steve Jobs. He stopped again and stared at the life-sized businessman in the ad. As Gibson recalled, the businessman’s neatly cuffed arm was holding an Apple II computer, which was vastly smaller than the side of a barn. “‘Everyone is going to have one of these,’ I thought, and ‘everyone is going to want to live inside them,’” he recalled. “Somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.”

When in 2008 he was asked by the National Science Foundation to imagine a new internet, he put at the top of his list of goals one thing: security.14 America’s early lead online allowed us to remain at the forefront of technology; the world’s technology titans—and the largest companies of the last ten years—are, for now, still mostly US companies—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and others. Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating systems dominate nearly all of the world’s cell phones. Yet, today, the internet is increasingly global—two out of every five users today are in Asia, with hundreds of millions more in China and India still waiting to be connected. By 2008, China could lay claim to being the internet’s largest online user base, with nearly a quarter million new Chinese users joining the digital age each day; in 2017, official estimates held that over 50 percent of the country, about 731 million people, had access to the internet.15 China’s online shopping powerhouse Alibaba did $25 billion in business in 2017 on the country’s Singles’ Day, its equivalent of Black Friday.16 China is leading aggressively on new just-around-the-corner technologies, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computers, each of which will herald both new economic opportunities and huge security risks.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

As Peter Orszag, Obama’s former director of management and budget, now at Citigroup, and Jason Furman, serving as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, reported in a research paper, two thirds of the nonfinancial firms that had managed to achieve a return on invested capital of 45 percent or more between 2010 and 2014 “were in either the health care or information technology sectors.”38 What allowed such gigantic profits and enormous salaries to be concentrated in these sectors were market power, IP protection and government-licensed pricing.39 Silicon Valley saw no need to apologize. Theirs was the great technological and entrepreneurial success story of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Antitrust, data protection and intrusive tax investigations were, as far as Tim Cook of Apple was concerned, nothing more than “political crap,” antiquated road bumps on the highway to the future.40 As tech oligarch Peter Thiel told audiences and readers: “Creating value isn’t enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create.” That depended on market power. “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines,” but Thiel knew better.

Orszag, “A Firm-Level Perspective on the Role of Rents in the Rise of Inequality” (presentation at “A Just Society” Centennial Event in Honor of Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia University, October 16, 2015), http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/teaching/FurmanOrszag15.pdf. 39. H. M. Schwartz, “Wealth and Secular Stagnation: The Role of Industrial Organization and Intellectual Property Rights,” Russell Sage Foundation Journal 2.6 (2016): 226–249. 40. J. Kollewe, “‘Political Crap’: Tim Cook Condemns Apple Tax Ruling,” Guardian, September 1, 2016. 41. P. Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014. 42. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 43. R. Reich, “Income Inequality in the United States” (testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, January 16, 2014). 44.

And not first and foremost as a result of missing eurozone institutions, but as a result of choices made by business leaders, dogmatic central bankers and conservatively minded politicians. Of course, we may not welcome a world organized this way. Europeans may warm to the spectacle of the European Commission as a consumer champion taking on global monopolists like Google and challenging Apple’s tax evasion.42 But the fines levied on Silicon Valley are a tiny portion of those firms’ cash hoards. A rather different vision of the balance of power is suggested by those moments in 2016 when the financial world waited with bated breath to learn the size of the settlement that the US Department of Justice was going to impose on Deutsche Bank for mortgage fraud.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The juxtaposition between the superior performance of older workers and the discrimination against them in the workplace just really makes no sense.”63 Between 2012 and 2017, the average age of new CEOs at the largest companies in the United States increased from 45 to 50 years. Yes, it’s true that older people cannot work physically the same way they did when they were 20, but when it comes to management and leadership, it’s the opposite. Consider some examples of leadership: Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is currently 58; Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder, is 63; Indra Noori, who recently stepped down as CEO of PepsiCo and now sits on Amazon’s board, is 63; and Warren Buffett, the CEO of the investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, is 87. These people are not what you’d call technophobes. It’s bad enough when companies allow themselves to be deprived of great workers because of untrue stereotypes.

The ears of corn you see at the grocery store look nothing like the wild plant from which modern corn came; over the course of nine thousand years, the spindly finger-length grass known as teosinte was cultivated to evolve larger cobs and more rows of plump, soft, sugary kernels, a process of modification that significantly altered the plant’s genome.34 The apples we’ve grown accustomed to eating have a bit more resemblance to their small, wild ancestors, but good luck finding one of those ancestors; they have been nearly wiped off the planet, and that’s no great loss to our diet, since the biggest genetic contributor to modern apples, Malus sylvestris, is so tart it’s darn near inedible.35 In 2016, the National Academy of Sciences, in a sweeping report on genetically engineered crops, noted that lab-modified plants could be vital for feeding the planet’s growing human population if global warming threatens traditional farm products.

Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Scientists Engineer Shortcut for Photosynthetic Glitch, Boost Crop Growth 40%,” Science Daily, January 3, 2019, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190103142306.htm. 34. P. Mirocha, and A. Mirocha, “What the Ancestors Ate,” Edible Baja Arizona, September/October 2015, http://ediblebajaarizona.com/what-the-ancestors-ate. 35. J. Wenz, “The Mother of All Apples Is Disappearing,” Discover, June 8, 2017, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2017/06/08/original-wild-apple-going-extinct/#.W_3i8ZNKjOQ. 36. “Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness and increases the risk of death from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhoea,” according to a late-2017 UNICEF report. It stated that vitamin A had been shown to “reduce all-cause mortality by 12 to 24 percent, and is therefore an important programme in support of efforts to reduce child mortality.”


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Finally, on the international stage, the consumer-driven, neoliberal Boomer culture has unleashed vast environmental and social problems, and just because some of these manifest offshore does not mean they vanish from the moral equation. The sociopathic society of consumption depends heavily on goods turned out by dismal sweatshops (e.g., Boomer Kathie Lee’s/Wal-Mart’s Dickensian workshops, Boomers Steve Jobs’/Tim Cook’s subcontracted factories, so depressing that they feature suicide nets to prevent employees from leaping to their deaths).23 Asking other countries to improve their labor conditions would not only be ethical, it would improve America’s competitive position. The only thing Boomers really ask for now, however, is that their purchases be cheap and the moral quandaries offshored.

White House, Council of Economic Advisors. Issue Brief. “Gender Pay Gap: Recent Trends and Explanations,” April 2015, p. 1, www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/equal_pay_issue_brief_final.pdf. 23. Cooper, Rob. “Inside Apple’s Chinese ‘Sweatshop’ Factory Where Workers Are Paid Just £1.12 Per Hour to Produce iPhones and iPads for the West.” Daily Mail, 25 Jan. 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103798/Revealed-Inside-Apples-Chinese-sweatshop-factory-workers-paid-just-1-12-hour.html (based on reporting originally conducted by Nightline). 24. Hillenbrand. 2015 Annual Report, p. 3, s1.q4cdn.com/966021326/files/doc_financials/annual/hillenbrand-ar-2015.pdf. 25.

Recent wars have featured occasional outrages like Abu Ghraib, but nothing at the scale of My Lai or, at least, nothing not ordered by senior officials (many of them Boomers). The Legacy: All Harm, No Foul They generally fail to compensate or make amends for their behavior. —DSM-V The scope of misconduct during Vietnam rules out the few-bad-apple theories; the conduct was systemic, and given the nature of the draft and the composition of those involved, it was also generational. However, it’s important to note that the consequences were social, not strategic. The war was a lost cause from the beginning, as Ho Chi Minh made clear to the French in 1946, saying to them that “you can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours… but even at those odds you will lose and I will win.”48 As the French were dispatched, so were the Americans; there were too many Vietnamese guerrillas and not enough reasons to be in Vietnam.


A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

Hunter, as quoted in Canada in the Great World War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 1918), 70. 90 “What we saw was total death”: Siebert’s account is part of the collection of In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, Belgium. 90 Four days after the first attack: Goodman, Suffer and Survive. J. S. wrote an account of his time as well, located in the National Library of Scotland collection, as part of Acc. 9589. 91 “Piss on your handkerchiefs”: Quoted in Tim Cook, No Place to Run, 25. 91 Jack was reunited with his father: See Haldane, Why I Am a Cooperator, and Haldane’s essay Callinicus. 91 The uproar engulfed him: Haldane wrote about the injury in detail in an unpublished set of notes, now held at the National Library of Scotland as part of Acc. 10306.

—Any sermon and then proceeded to show how Darwinism was, in fact, vital and alive. It was a prototypical Haldane tract, stocked with casual nods to the Book of Daniel and William Blake and Vladimir Lenin and with untranslated German verse, ranging easily over the history of the world but pausing just long enough on practical examples involving primroses or apples. The book was an ode to the power of Darwinian selection. “However small may be the selective advantage,” Haldane wrote, “the new character will spread, provided it is present in enough individuals of the population to prevent its disappearance by mere random extinction.” This single sentence could have been the creed of the modern synthesis.

That autumn, he was paid a visit by Ivan Glushchenko, part of a Soviet delegation touring Britain. Glushchenko was a plant geneticist; Maynard Smith called him Lysenko’s hatchet man. To British scientists, Glushchenko seemed vapid and unimpressive, prattling on about how the Soviet Union had produced apples that looked like pears. He came to University College, Maynard Smith recalled later, with a couple of goons: And he and the goons . . . were actually closeted in Haldane’s office for about three hours, trying to persuade Haldane how right Lysenko was. And Haldane was absolutely unapproachable for two or three days afterwards.


pages: 686 words: 201,972

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

., p. 36. 358 “talked with great voices”: Ibid., p. 37. 358 “All the no-saying and no-preaching”: Ibid., p. 115. 358 “The trouble I had with the stuff ”: Ibid., p. 202. 358 “The only rational thing”: Ibid., p. 115. 27 IN THE CHALK TRENCHES OF CHAMPAGNE 360 “the individual man is in all cases free”: “Rum in the Trenches,” Tim Cook, Legion Magazine, Defence Today, September/October 2002. 360 “It surprises me when”: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Siegfried Sassoon, Faber and Faber, London, 1997, p. 18. 360 “Under the spell of ”: Cook. 361 “to take the taste of dead men”: Ibid. 361 “The gas was phosgene”: Williams, p. 187. 361 “the ‘No Rum Division’”: Sassoon, p. 122. 361 “estaminets”: Her Privates We, Frederic Manning (1929), Serpent’s Tail edition, London, 1999. 362 “We have the right to get”: Under Fire, Henri Barbusse (1916), Penguin Classics edition, Trans.

In 1637 he “set up a brew house at his great charge, & very commodious for this part of the countrey.” The drinks list in New England was supplemented by cider, whose manufacture grew to be a cottage industry, analogous to ale brewing in medieval England. Indeed, the drink came to be identified with the place—fermented apple juice 16 was more American than apple pie. The first orchard in Massachusetts was planted in 1623 by William Blaxton—an eccentric clergyman, who for a number of years was the only English resident of Boston—on his farm on Beacon Hill. Cider orchards were also planted in Virginia and in New Amsterdam, an American settlement founded by the Dutch, in imitation of their English Protestant cousins.

Once they had possession of Manhattan, the Dutch completed their fort, whose southern limit was marked by Wall Street, and laid out farms. They were as fond of their booze as the English, and in 1632 their West India Company built a brewery on a lane that became known as “Brouwers Straet.” They also planted vineyards, gathered wild hops from the woods, and Peter Stuyvesant, who became governor in 1647, cultivated cider apple trees imported from Holland on his farm in what is now the Bowery district of Manhattan. As had been the case with other European settlers in North America, the Dutch noted that the Indians with whom they traded for land and furs had no prior acquaintance with alcoholic drinks. In his Description of the New Netherlands (c. 1642) Adriaen van der Donck observed that while the local tribes drank fresh grape juice, “They never make wine or beer.


pages: 521 words: 136,802

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, estate planning, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Michael Milken, power law, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, éminence grise

But the court hadn’t set a trial date until October—far too late to offer Dauman any immediate protection. * * * — Shari was nervous about the prospect of that year’s Allen & Company media summit, which was held every year in Sun Valley, Idaho, and informally known as the “billionaires’ summer camp.” With participants Justin Trudeau, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Warren Buffett on the guest list, it would have been intimidating under any circumstances, especially since she was one of just a handful of women who weren’t attending as “significant others.” As usual, she’d be traveling alone. Adding to her anxiety: both Moonves and Dauman were supposed to be there.

Shari looked over at Klieger in surprise: even though Gordon had told her something about a discussion of “the industry,” such a strategic review wasn’t on the agenda. Centerview’s list of potential partners included the usual suspects: MGM, Sony Entertainment, and Lionsgate were companies CBS might acquire; Verizon, Amazon, Apple—perhaps even Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway—were among the larger companies that might want to acquire CBS. There was a glaring omission. Viacom was barely mentioned, dismissed as largely irrelevant, even though it had just surprised Wall Street with better earnings than expected, suggesting that Bakish’s strategy was yielding results.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Daniel Markovits calculates that more than half the richest 1 per cent of households include someone who works more than fifty hours a week – a far higher incidence of overwork than you find in the rest of the population.39 Prominent businesspeople have taken to giving absurd interviews to the press about how they get up at 4 a.m. (Indra Nooyi, boss of PepsiCo), immediately leap on an exercise bike, work out furiously in the gym (Tim Cook of Apple), and then spend their days in a whirlwind of activity.40 Before it took over the world, meritocracy was the rallying cry of the oppressed and marginalized everywhere. Feminists demanded that they should be allowed to compete for jobs and educational distinctions and judged by the same standards as men.