jimmy wales

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The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

Japanese Wikipedia remained something of a mysterious outlier to the community of global volunteers. A main motivation of global Wikipedians at Wikimania was to meet one another, and particularly the legendary founder Jimmy Wales they’d heard so much about. When Takashi Ota, one of the two Japanese Wikipedians who attended, and who edited anonymously, was told he must meet Jimmy Wales, he famously quipped, “Who’s Jimmy Wales?” The Japanese language is one of the tougher languages in the world to learn because it effectively has three different writing systems, used simultaneously and mixed in varying proportions. It consists of two syllabic scripts, katakana and hiragana, as well as kanji, which is based on modified logographic Chinese characters.

The Wikipedia REVOLUTION How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia Andrew Lih For my wife, Mei Contents Acknowledgments viii Foreword by Jimmy Wales xii Chapter 1_THE WIKI PHENOMENON 1 History 3 Chapter 2_ A NUPEDIA 13 What Is an Encyclopedia? 14 Alabama Rising 17 The Mother of All Directories 23 RMS 24 Linux on the Scene 28 Remember DMOZ 30 The Nupedia Idea 32 Nupedia’s Rules 36 The Nupedians 37 Chapter 3_WIKI ORIGINS 43 Ward’s Start 45 HyperCard’s Inspirations 51 A Web Browser 53 Viola 54 HyperCard Revisited 55 Chapter 4_WIKI INTRODUCED 61 Slashdotting 67 Contributing the Meaning of Everything 70 The GFDL 72 v _Contents UseMod Grows 73 Give Me More Space 75 Server Load 77 Chapter 5_COMMUNITY AT WORK (THE PIRANHA EFFECT) 81 Usenet’s Legacy 83 Lessons from Usenet 87 Growth 88 How Wikipedia Works 90 Urban Jungle 96 Signaling One Another 97 Then Came the Bots 99 Lots of Red Dots 106 Peer Production 108 Dot Map Obsession 109 Essays, Guidelines, and Policy 112 Fix It Yourself 114 What to Include 115 Gaming the Vote 121 Small Ball 122 Gdansk/Danzig Wars 122 Chapter 6_WIKIPEDIA GOES INTERNATIONAL 133 To Split or Not to Split 135 Spanish Wikipedia Fork 136 Making It Multilingual 139 Encoding Language 142 A Colossal Waste of Space 143 Japanese Wikipedia 145 German Wikipedia 147 Chinese Wikipedia 150 Serbian Wikipedia and Kazakh Wikipedia 155 African Languages 157 The Numbers Game 159 Contents_vi Chapter 7_TROLLS, VANDALS, AND SOCK PUPPETS, OH MY 169 Vandals and Sock Puppets 176 Jimbo Doesn’t Scale 179 Chapter 8_CRISIS OF COMMUNITY 183 Criticisms 188 The Seigenthaler Incident 191 The Essjay Controversy 194 Chapter 9_WIKIPEDIA MAKES WAVES 201 JewWatch 202 Microsoft Encarta’s Experiment 204 Wikitorials 205 Nature Study 208 Britannica Goes Free and Collaborative 209 Digital Universe and Citizendium 210 The Future 213 To the Afterword 217 Afterword 219 Notes 231 Index 237 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright Acknowledgments The idea for this book started in 2003, when I met Jerry Michalski for cof-fee at the top of the mountainside campus of the University of Hong Kong.

Also, fellow Wikipedia-oriented blog-gers and editors Ben Yates, Geoff Burling, Brianna Laugher, and Danny Wool were instrumental to my understanding of the community. The book would not have been possible without extensive interviews with the principal enablers of Wikipedia: Ward Cunningham, Larry Sanger, and Jimmy Wales. Michael Davis, Tim Shell, Terry Foote. Thanks to Wikimedia Foun- Ac know ledg ments_x dation board members Florence Devouard, Angela Beesley, and Michael Snow for discussions and insights. Smart folks who provided insight on the community and wikis included Re-becca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Benjamin Mako Hill, Sunir Shah, Mitch Kapor, Jason Calacanis, Ross Mayfield, and Joseph Reagle.


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

London: Sage. Commons talk:Sexual content. (2013, August 17). Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved August 22, 2013, from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Sexual _content/Archive_4 Commons:Deletion requests/file:Jimmy Wales by Pricasso.jpg. (2013, August 20). Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved August 22, 2013, from http://commons.wikimedia .org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Jimmy_Wales_by_Pricasso.jpg 2 4 6    R e f e r e n c e s Community Logo/Request for consultation. (2013, October 29). Wikimedia. Retrieved November 7, 2013, from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Logo/ Request_for_consultation Conlon, M.

Seven years, one million edits, zero dollars: Wikipedia’s flat broke superstar. Gizmodo. Retrieved from http://gizmodo.com/5903743/seven -years-one-million-edits-zero-dollars-wikipedias-flat-broke-superstar-editor Hough, A. (2012, March 11). Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia chief to advise Whitehall on policy. The Telegraph. Retrieved 2012 from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipe dia/9137339/Jimmy-Wales-Wikipedia-chief-to-advise-Whitehall-on-policy.html Hsieh, H. F., & Shannon, S. E. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15(9), 1277–1288. Humphreys, M., & Watson, T. J. (2009).

Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia. The Register. Retrieved from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/ Metz, C. (2008a, March 5). Ex-Wikipedia staffer harpoons Wales over expenses. The Register. Retrieved from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/05/jimmy_wales _and_danny_wool/ Metz, C. (2008b, March 6). Why you should care that Jimmy Wales ignores reality. The Register. Retrieved from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/06/a_model_wiki pedian/ Metz, C. (2010, May 9). Jimbo Wales exiles “porn” from Wikiland. The Register. Retrieved from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/09/wikimedia_pron_purge/ Meyer, J.


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

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

Tim Berners-Lee interview, Riptide Project, Schornstein Center, Harvard, 2013. 84. Kelly Kazek, “Wikipedia Founder, Huntsville Native Jimmy Wales, Finds Fame Really Cool,” News Courier (Athens, AL), Aug. 12, 2006. 85. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales. 86. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 585. 87. Marshall Poe, “The Hive,” Atlantic, Sept. 2006. 88. Jimmy Wales interview, conducted by Brian Lamb, C-SPAN, Sept. 25, 2005. 89. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” first presented in 1997, reprinted in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly Media, 1999). 90.

Nupedia, http://archive.is/IWDNq. 93. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 960. 94. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales. 95. Larry Sanger, “Origins of Wikipedia,” Sanger user page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Origins_of_Wikipedia; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 1049. 96. Ben Kovitz, “The Conversation at the Taco Stand,” Kovitz user page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz. 97. Jimmy Wales, “Re: Sanger’s Memoirs” thread, Apr. 2005, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021463.html. 98. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, “Re: Sanger’s Memoirs” thread, Apr. 2005, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021460.html, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021469.html, and subsequent.

See also Larry Sanger, “My Role in Wikipedia,” http://larrysanger.org/roleinwp.html; “User:Larry Sanger/Origins of Wikipedia,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Origins_of_Wikipedia; “History of Wikipedia” and its talk page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia, along with Jimmy Wales edit changes to the article, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jimmy_Wales&diff=next&oldid=29849184; Talk: Bomis, revisions made by Jimmy Wales, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=11139857. 99. Kovitz, “The Conversation at the Taco Stand.” 100. Larry Sanger, “Let’s Make a Wiki,” Nupedia message thread, Jan. 10, 2001, http://archive.is/yovNt. 101. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 1422. 102.


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The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom

Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Burning Man, creative destruction, disintermediation, experimental economics, Firefox, Francisco Pizarro, jimmy wales, Kibera, Lao Tzu, Network effects, peer-to-peer, pez dispenser, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing

When we heard about a new online encyclopedia, we expected a variation on Britannica—short articles written by experts, covering the basics on a variety of subjects. But then we found out that the entries were all user-contributed. A truly open model. Wikipedia has fascinating origins that in many ways capture the evolution of an open system. It started with Jimmy Wales, a successful options-trader-turned-Internet-entrepreneur-turnedphilanthropist. In 2000, Wales launched a free online encyclopedia to be used by children whose parents couldn't afford their own set. The project, called Nupedia, used peer review. But getting something published on Nupedia was a chore.

As the articles were slowly being churned out, Larry Sanger, Nupedia's editor-in-chief, learned about something called a wiki. Derived from the Hawaiian word for "quick," wiki is a technology that allows Web site users to easily (and quickly) edit the content of the site themselves. Sanger pitched the idea of using wiki technology at Nupedia. Taking a cue from Bill W, Jimmy Wales agreed, and Wikipedia was born. Just like AA, the project took off. Within five years, Wikipedia was available in two hundred languages and had extensive articles— more than one million in the English-language sec- THE STARFISH AND THE SPIDER tion alone—on a host of topics. And just like the AA offshoots, Wikipedia spawned Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews.

Bill W. let go of the reins and allowed AA to become its own entity. We see the same pattern with every decentralized organization: a catalyst gets a decentralized organization going and then cedes control to the members. Craig Newmark lets the users of craigslist decide which categories to list on the site. Jimmy Wales allows the members to take over the content of Wikipedia. Brian Behlendorf contributes his computer and lets the programmers take control of the Apache server program. The creator of eMule is the ultimate catalyst. No one knows who he or she is, and he or she has certainly ceded control: the source code for the program is right there for anyone to use.


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

But the site itself makes no guarantees about accuracy. So instead I asked Jimmy Wales,* the founder of Wikipedia, to define the wiki/open-source business model personally. “A wiki is a website that anyone can edit,” he says. “It’s a place where people can edit and share information. It has tools where people can monitor the quality and revert to older versions if anyone has done something bad.” Jimmy Wales is to encyclopedias what David Mancuso is to DJing. Both Mancuso and Wales changed the game, because they saw new possibilities in the idea of sharing. Jimmy Wales grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, close to where NASA’s team of rocket scientists were headquartered.

I’ve drawn on my own experiences growing up as a pirate DJ in London, at the flash point of emerging scenes, and my professional life immersed in the mainstream music, media, and advertising industries. Enter the Lollipop | 7 I’ve met with and interviewed legendary musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, and DJs who have changed things for the rest of us, often without us knowing. From hip-hop moguls such as Russell Simmons to media mavericks such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, I’ll tell the story of a world ruled by the Pirate’s Dilemma with the assistance of some of our best-known change agents. But I’ll also be introducing you to some extraordinary people who are telling their stories for the first time. You’ll meet the nun who helped invent dance music, and learn how the ideas she promoted in a children’s home in the 1940s are transforming the free market as we know it.

I loved following the links to other knowledge and learning different things.” Making money was not rocket science to Wales, who made a fortune in the 1990s as an options and futures trader in Chicago, and then decided to pursue his passion. “I’d seen the growth of open-source soft*I interviewed Jimmy Wales before a panel discussion at the Columbia School of Journalism in 2006. While he was talking, the dean of students purposely altered a Wikipedia entry on the screen behind him. Five minutes later, the dean rechecked the site. The mistake had already been corrected. 150 | THE PIRATE’S DILEMMA ware coming together online.


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Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/acta-the-internet-freedom-of-expression-privacy/, and map of June 2012 at European Green Party, ‘Europe-wide Demonstrations against ACTA’, 8 June 2012, http://perma.cc/37XC-3Q4B 173. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, explained the reasons and the impact at the Oxford launch of freespeechdebate.com, ‘Free Speech Debate Launch with Jimmy Wales’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/free-speech-debate-launch-with-jimmy-wales/ 174. I first made this point at an ‘Open Up?’ conference organised by the Omidyar Network; see video here: http://vimeo.com/111748146. The variegated representatives of NGOs did not seem all that keen to take it up 175. see, for example, the Twitris monitoring experiment: ‘Twitris’, http://perma.cc/TP6X-CYVL 176. see Amy Qin, ‘Wenzhou Train Collision’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/case/wenzhou-train-collision/ 177. see Hirschman 1970 178. see Kirkpatrick 2010, 246–50 179. see the accounts in Markoff 2005, 47–57.

, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/acta-the-internet-freedom-of-expression-privacy/, and Brian Pellot, ‘The Stop Online Piracy Act’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/case/the-stop-online-piracy-act/. See also ‘Free Speech Debate launch with Jimmy Wales’, Free Speech Debate, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/free-speech-debate-launch-with-jimmy-wales/ 36. The Harvard Library, ‘Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing’, http://perma.cc/WJD2-Y7H4 37. Janet Finch, ‘Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications’, Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, June 2012, http://perma.cc/HQ4X-6Z2E 38. see David Amsden, ‘The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz’, Rolling Stone, 15 February 2013, http://perma.cc/DZN2-GGUC.

The American scholar Elizabeth Daley has suggested that the ‘multimedia language of the screen’ may even supplant writing as the primary medium of mass communication online, as Latin was gradually overtaken by vernacular languages such as English, French and German after the spread of printing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.12 Emojis, GIFs and shared pictures are thrusting up beside text. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, told me that the most frequent and difficult controversies they had to deal with on Wikipedia related to images rather than words.13 When a Polish pole vaulter, Władysław Kozakiewicz, made a rude gesture to the mainly Russian crowd after winning a gold medal at the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, that was clearly self-expression.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Such is the opportunity of top ten Internet portals. Wikia, another wiki site, was launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Its aim is not to build an encyclopedia. Rather, its aim is to be a “platform for developing and hosting communitybased wikis. Specifically, Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. . . . Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content.”34 The site is enjoying the Jimmy Wales magic. With eight hundred thousand articles, it is actually growing faster than Wikipedia was at a comparable period.35 The site is already a treasury of human culture.

And the project was to be run by a volunteer community (though Sanger was originally a paid editor so long as Bomis’s funding continued). To assure that the volunteers felt they were part of a community, the rules had to be rules anyone could live by. Thus was born the “ignore all rules” rule, which Jimmy Wales explained to me as follows: “Ignore all rules” . . . is not an invitation to chaos. It is really more an idea of saying, “Look, whatever rules we have in Wikipedia, they ought to be, more or less, discernible by any normal, socially adept adult who thinks about what would be the ethical thing to do in this situation.

If you’re one of the seven people in the world who have not yet used Wikipedia, you might well wonder whether this experiment in collaboration can work. The answer is that it does, and surpris- 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 157 8/12/08 1:55:27 AM REMI X 158 ingly well—surprising even for Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales. As he explained to me: As people get experienced using Wikipedia and they’re reading it a lot, they begin to have this intuition that Wikipedia is pretty darn good about being neutral on very controversial subjects. And that’s a little bit surprising; I know certainly if you had asked me before Wikipedia what a big problem would be, I would have said, “Wow, I’m hoping that it’s not going to be incredibly biased on controversial subjects.


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The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

Millions and millions of blogs. <Katherine Mangu-Ward> wikipedia and beyond: jimmy wales’s sprawling vision Originally published in Reason magazine (June 2007). KATHERINE MANGU-WARD is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Previously, Mangu-Ward worked as a reporter for The Weekly Standard magazine and as a researcher on The New York Times op-ed page. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, New York Timesonline, and numerous other publications. She blogs at reason.com. JIMMY WALES, the founder of Wikipedia, lives in a house fit for a grandmother. The progenitor and public face of one of the ten most popular websites in the world beds down in a one-story bungalow on a cul-de-sac near St.

your brain is evolving right now section two - social life, personal life, school identity crisis they call me cyberboy the people’s net social currency the eight net gen norms love online we can’t ignore the influence of digital technologies virtual friendship and the new narcissism activists section three - the fate of culture nomadicity what is web 2.0: design patterns and business models for the next generation of software web squared: web 2.0 five years on web 2.0: the second generation of the internet has arrived and it’s worse than ... wikipedia and beyond: jimmy wales’s sprawling vision judgment: of molly’s gaze and taylor’s watch - why more is less in a ... a dream come true the end of solitude means credits index Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Copyright © 2011 by Mark Bauerlein All rights reserved.

Many of the comments, says Seigenthaler, are things he would not want his nine-year-old grandson to see. Seigenthaler says he never intended to sue (surprisingly, the site has never been sued), but he worries that Wales will eventually find himself in legal trouble unless he takes more action to control what appears on the site: “I said to Jimmy Wales, ‘You’re going to offend enough members of Congress that you’re going to get more regulation.’ I don’t want more regulation of the media, but once the Congress starts regulating they never stop.” Coverage of the scandal was largely anti-Wikipedia, focusing on the system’s lack of ethical editorial oversight.


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Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Comparisons to the Philippine-American War were inserted by some people and removed by others.17 And then, of course, there were the disgusting images repeatedly posted by vandals. Jeff Jarvis, an important voice for openness in the debate about the future of journalism, blogged that “[a] wikitorial is bound to turn into a tug-of-war” and suggested that an alternative wiki page be set up for those who disagreed with the editorial. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, responded that he had already done so, creating a “counterpoint” wiki on the Los Angeles Times site for those who differed from the newspaper’s view.18 “I’m not sure the LA Times wants me setting policy for their site,” wrote Wales, “but it is a wiki after all, and what was there made no sense.”19 No sense at all.

Ultimately, the decision was made to list them with minimal detail: Ryan Clark is listed as “senior in Psych/Biology/English” and Emily Hilscher as “freshman in Animal Sciences.” Only six of those listed have links to their own Wikipedia articles: five professors, and the murderer.10 The debate among “inclusionists” and “deletionists” at Wikipedia continues to this day. But the choice in this instance was made easier by a prior decision made by Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and its titular head. In September 2006, Wales added some language to one of the wiki pages that serves as a policy manual for Wikipedia: “What Wikipedia is not.”11 To negative descriptions such as that Wikipedia is “not a publisher of original thought,” is “not a soapbox or means of promotion,” and is “not a crystal ball,” Wales added that Wikipedia is not a newspaper “and especially not a tabloid newspaper.”12 Wales spoke and the policy was created, just like Jack Welch deciding that GE will no longer make nuclear reactors.

Over the years, Wikipedia has developed a set of policies and processes that enable the community—the network—to make and amend decisions. When the network cannot come to agreement, other processes kick in, including an arbitration committee, and then, rarely, the ultimate arbitration committee-of-one, Jimmy Wales. But those escalations up the chain of command are considered to be failures of the preferred system of bold action by individuals, reviewed and elaborated by the community. “In the early days, I made a lot of policy decisions,” Wales told me, “but that’s not really sustainable.”15 These days, most of his decisions are either essentially coin-tosses when the community is evenly split or judge-like applications of principles that all in the community accept.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution. Perhaps the most famous example of distributed collaboration today is Wikipedia, the collaboratively created encyclopedia that has become one of the most visited websites in the world. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001 as an experimental offshoot of their original idea, a free online encyclopedia of high quality called Nupedia. Nupedia was to be written, reviewed, and managed by experts volunteering their time. Wales had had a taste of collaboratively produced work while running Bomis, an internet company he’d helped found in 1996.

Sanger understood this objection and titled an early essay on the growth of Wikipedia “Wikipedia is wide open. Why is it growing so fast? Why isn’t it full of nonsense?” In that article he ascribed at least part of the answer to group editing:Wikipedia’s self-correction process (Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales calls it “self-healing”) is very robust. There is considerable value created by the public review process that is continually ongoing on Wikipedia—value that is very easy to underestimate, for those who have not experienced it adequately. One other fateful choice, which actually predates the founding of Wikipedia itself, was the name, or rather the “-pedia” suffix.

In 2002 the Spanish-language version was growing quickly, but the Spanish users were concerned that Wikipedia might opt for a commercial, ad-driven model. They threatened to take all of their contributions and start an alternate version (a process known as “forking”). This was enough to convince Jimmy Wales to formally forgo any future commercial plans for Wikipedia, and to move the site from Wikipedia.com to Wikipedia.org, in keeping with its nonprofit status. Similarly, he decided to adopt the GNU Free Documentation License for Wikipedia’s content. As with Linus Torvalds’s adoption of a GNU license for Linux, the GFDL assured contributors that their contributions would remain freely available, making them likelier to contribute.


pages: 158 words: 16,993

Citation Needed: The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing by Conor Lastowka, Josh Fruhlinger

airport security, citation needed, en.wikipedia.org, jimmy wales, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking

—Conor Lastowka & Josh Fruhlinger citationneeded.tumblr.com In barely one decade, Jimmy Wales has succeeded in establishing a worldwide network of knowledge. Wikipedia, his online encyclopaedia, accessible on the Internet for free, has become a symbol of a radical change in the media economy. Moreover, it revolutionized the access to knowledge as man’s most important resource and thus contributed to democratizing knowledge. —The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, awarding the 2011 Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales I saw the Beavis and Butt-Head episode that had Hogan’s “Real American” music on there.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

By the time the encyclopedia had 50 million users daily, the foundation had a payroll of eighteen people, including one in Germany, one in the Netherlands, one in Australia, and one lawyer, and everyone else was a volunteer: the millions of contributors, the thousand or more designated “administrators,” and, always a looming presence, the founder and self-described “spiritual leader,” Jimmy Wales. Wales did not plan initially the scrappy, chaotic, dilettantish, amateurish, upstart free-for-all that Wikipedia quickly became. The would-be encyclopedia began with a roster of experts, academic credentials, verification, and peer review. But the wiki idea took over, willy-nilly. A “wiki,” from a Hawaiian word for “quick,” was a web site that could be not just viewed but edited, by anyone.

Under Folklore: “(If you want to write about folklore, please come up with a list of folklore topics that are actually recognized as distinct, significant topics in folklore, a subject that you are not likely to know much about if all you’ve done along these lines is play Dungeons and Dragons, q.v.).”♦ Dungeons and Dragons was already well covered. Wikipedia was not looking for flotsam and jetsam but did not scorn them. Years later, in Alexandria, Jimmy Wales said: “All those people who are obsessively writing about Britney Spears or the Simpsons or Pokémon—it’s just not true that we should try to redirect them into writing about obscure concepts in physics. Wiki is not paper, and their time is not owned by us. We can’t say, ‘Why do we have these employees doing stuff that’s so useless?’

Some are familiar with a debate carried out by the German branch about the screw on the left rear brake pad of Ulrich Fuchs’s bicycle. Fuchs, as a Wikipedia editor, proposed the question, Does this item in the universe of objects merit its own Wikipedia entry? The screw was agreed to be small but real and specifiable. “This is an object in space, and I’ve seen it,”♦ said Jimmy Wales. Indeed, an article appeared in the German Meta-Wiki (that is, the Wikipedia about Wikipedia) titled “Die Schraube an der hinteren linken Bremsbacke am Fahrrad von Ulrich Fuchs.”♦ As Wales noted, the very existence of this article was “a meta-irony.” It was written by the very people who were arguing against its suitability.


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We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

This free, volunteer-created encyclopaedia is revered and denounced in equal measure: worshipped with fervour by its admirers as a wonder of collaborative creativity and pilloried by critics as a licence for anarchy, a platform for half-truths and a free ticket for ill-informed amateurs to gain credence they do not deserve at the expense of knowledgeable professionals. Wikipedia is the offspring of an ultimately ill-fated collaboration. In 2000, Jimmy Wales, a former options trader, employed Larry Sanger to create a free online encyclopaedia, Nupedia, which would allow anyone to submit an article to be reviewed by expert editors before being published.4 The seven-stage editorial review Sanger designed proved cumbersome and, as a result, Nupedia grew slowly.

Wikipedia is creating a global, public platform of useful knowledge that will be freely available to any school, college or family in the world, in their own language. In Africa, even where communities do not have access to the Internet, teachers are using copies of Wikipedia downloaded onto CDs. Wikipedia may get the odd thing wrong, but that misses the bigger picture. Jimmy Wales and his community have created a new way for us to share knowledge and ideas at scale, en masse, across the world. Wikipedia’s message is: the more we share, the richer we are. As Wikipedia spreads around the world not only does it carry knowledge, it teaches habits of participation, responsibility and sharing.

Without effective self-governance idealistic web communities, like so many communes and co-operatives before them, will collapse into an avalanche of diverse perspectives, rants, lies, gossip, falsehoods, truths and hearsay. It is also critical that the contributors do not immerse themselves so fully into the collective that they stop thinking individually. Wikipedia is not a cult. People do not have to read the collected works of Jimmy Wales and attend local cells to be educated in the Wikipedia way. We-Think emerges when diverse groups of independent individuals collaborate effectively. It is not group-think: submersion in a homogeneous, unthinking mass. Crowds and mobs are stupid as often as they are wise. It all depends on how the individual members combine participation and collaboration, diversity and shared values, independence of thought and community.


pages: 87 words: 25,823

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

But the analysis of cyberlibertarianism is getting at something subtler: the way that a set of slogans and beliefs associated with the spread of digital technology incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right. Certainly, many leaders in the digital technology industries, and quite a few leaders who do not work for corporations, openly declare their adherence to libertarian or other right-wing ideologies. Just a brief list of these includes figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Eric Raymond, Jimmy Wales, Eric Schmidt, and Travis Kalanick. Furthermore, the number of leaders who demur from such political points of view is small, and their demurrals are often shallow. But the group of people whose beliefs deserve to be labeled “cyberlibertarian” is much larger than this. The core tenet of cyberlibertarianism—the insistence that “governments should not regulate the internet”—appears to be compatible with a wide range of political viewpoints.

Advocates are right that it is difficult to grasp the potential uses of such networks without seeing them in action, but on the surface they seem structured around promises that appeal to and reinforce rightist political ideologies. These are almost exclusively ideologies that are broadly libertarian in character. They follow Friedrich Hayek and his disciple Jimmy Wales in believing that markets (see Mirowski 2014, 82–83), not formal political structures, are the only valid means for power to be wielded, and that “the good will out” if we impose competitive market structures over parts of society, like the issuance of money, that governments have claimed as part of their domain.


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Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

The last diner I try hasn’t heard of the dish either, but I notice they offer a free wi-fi internet service, so I turn to trusty old Wikipedia: Chicken Maryland or Maryland Chicken is a dish with various interpretations, depending on the country of origin. It is not necessarily known in the U.S. state of Maryland, and is not considered a native dish thereof. Well, that explains it. Curse those school-dinner ladies. But thank you, internet. Which reminds me, I am late for an appointment with Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales. We are due to meet in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, Washington DC. WASHINGTON D.C. The Willard The Willard Hotel is a grand Washington institution. Martin Luther King wrote his ‘I have a dream’ speech in one of its bedrooms, in 1963. Abraham Lincoln stayed here before his inauguration and Ulysses S.

Grant used to retreat to the hotel lobby for tea and nibbles when he was President. He is said to have grown so annoyed with those hanging around and begging him for favours that he cursed them as ‘those damned lobbyists’. Now I happen to know that this explanation of the origin of the word ‘lobbyist’ is untrue, but I arrive for a meeting with Jimmy Wales hoping to catch out his remarkable creation. * * * WASHINGTON D.C. KEY FACTS Abbreviation: DC Nickname: The District Motto: Justitia omnibus (‘Justice for all’) Well-known residents and natives: Helen Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Chita Rivera, Frank Rich, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, Kate Smith, John Philip Sousa, John Foster Dulles, Al Gore, Edward Albee, Pat Buchanan, J.

On the one hand we have a man who did a master’s degree in finance and copped a bundle in the raw capitalist world of options trading and then repeated the trick with, if not pornography, certainly a trade which no one could regard as idealistic and on the other, we have a philanthropist the third act of whose career involves the creation of something wholly new, idealistic and (allowing for the natural flaws all human creations are likely suffer from) good. I sit with laptop perched atop lap as tea is brought. ‘Did you know,’ I say, ‘that “laptop machines” is an anagram of “Apple Macintosh”?’ ‘Yes,’ says Jimmy Wales. ‘Oh. Anyway. Hope you don’t mind, but I thought we’d test your creation?’ ‘Go right ahead.’ Wikipedia leaps the first hurdle straight away. Did the terms ‘lobbyist’ and ‘to lobby’ originate here? …this is probably false, as the verb to lobby is found decades earlier and did not originally refer to Washington politics.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

That is why they are so successful and powerful, running what The Times of London dubbed “the fastest growing company in the history of the world.” The same is true of a few disruptive capitalists and quasi-capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Craig Newmark, who calls himself founder and customer service representative—no joke—at craigslist; Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Kevin Rose, creator of Digg. They see a different world than the rest of us and make different decisions as a result, decisions that make no sense under old rules of old industries that are now blown apart thanks to these new ways and new thinkers.

It has spawned a for-profit search service called Wikia, where users are creating even the algorithms that power it. It has commercial competitors, such as Mahalo, a human-powered search and guide created by serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who pays his writers. At the 2008 Burda DLD conference in Munich, Calacanis tweaked Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, for not paying for content. Wales responded that nobody works for free. “What people do for free is have fun…. We don’t look at basketball games and people playing on the weekends and say these people are really suckers doing this for free.” People will contribute their intelligence and time if they know they can build something, have influence, gain control, help a fellow customer (more than a company), and claim ownership.

In no time, the quality of discourse around the first wikitorial descended to the level of that on a prison yard during a riot because the Times had made a fundamental error: A wiki is a tool used for collaboration, but there was no collaborating to be done on the topic of the Times’ wikitorial—the Iraq war. I saw things going to hell and blogged that the Times would have been wiser to have created two wikis—one pro and one con—structured like an Oxford debate. The challenge to the opposing crowds would have been: Give us your best shots and let readers judge. It so happened that Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, saw my post and agreed. He headed to the Times to propose “forking” the wikitorial into two, but by then it was too late. The Times put a stake through the heart of the wikitorial. Since then, when newspaper people talk about interactivity, somebody will point to the danger of the wikitorial.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/02/kickstarter-expects-to-provide-more-funding-to-the-arts-than-nea.php 222 Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization, Marcin Jakubowski. TED. http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html 223 Jimmy Wales interviewed by Miller, Rob ‘Roblimo’. Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds, 2004. Slashdot. http://slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-responds 224 Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, Clay Shirky, 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-10-16. http://replay.web.archive.org/20101016111844/http://www.herecomeseverybody.org//2008//04//looking-for-the-mouse.html 225 21 hours Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century, Anna Coote, Jane Franklin and Andrew Simms, 2010. new economics foundation.


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

This more personal approach (backed up with near real-time updates on the death toll) is much more likely to hit home with passing hikers. Back in the tech world, Jimmy Wales’ “personal appeal” to raise funds for Wikipedia has a positive effect on donations. Wikipedia runs annual fund raising drives, and in 2011 the banner ads it used to accompany the fund raising were crafted through a series of A/B comparison tests to ensure maximum click through, followed by appeal pages designed to tell a story that would maximize conversion and donation amounts. Wikipedia’s A/B tests allowed them to work out that the most effective messages came from Jimmy Wales (the founder and public face of Wikipedia) and included a trustable explanation as to why the donations were needed.

LightspeedResearch (lightspeedresearch.com). April 11, 2011. Retrieved December 2012. FTC guidelines: FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION 16 CFR Part 255 Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. Oct 2009. Personal messages hit home Hanakapiai Beach sign photos credit: Chris Nodder. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia appeal stats: “Fundraising 2011.” Wikimedia meta-wiki (meta.wikimedia.org). Retrieved November 2012. Facebook Sponsored Stories graphic: “Sponsored Stories in Marketplace” (PDF). Facebook for Business site (facebook.com/business). Retrieved November 2012. Gain public commitment to a decision Failing resolutions: John C.


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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

The web’s decentralized architecture has become intensely centralized. What was created to enrich democracy is enabling a tyranny of virulent trolls and other antidemocratic forces. “The internet is broken”: thus conclude digital pioneers such as Twitter cofounder Evan Williams and Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales.5 Like Williams and Wales, more and more technologists are recognizing that today’s networked transformation is writing us out of our own story. The internet might have been described as the “people’s platform,”6 these critics say, but in fact it has a people problem. Jaron Lanier, the inventor of virtual reality and Silicon Valley’s most poignant thinker, even admits to a nostalgia for that halcyon time in the last century when technology did, indeed, put people first.

Private Superpowers: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse In 2015, I published my third book, The Internet Is Not the Answer,15 a work that addressed the skewed distribution of power and wealth in the network age. The tragedy of today’s digital revolution, I argued, is that the ideals of digital pioneers like Norbert Wiener, Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle, and Jimmy Wales—democracy, equality, enlightenment, freedom, universality, transparency, accountability, above all public space—have not, so far at least, been realized. Instead of Berners-Lee’s public World Wide Web, the online revolution has been appropriated by Garton Ash’s private Silicon Valley superpowers.

Times, December 23, 2016. 4. “‘Irresistible’ by Design: It’s No Accident You Can’t Stop Looking at the Screen,” All Tech Considered, NPR, March 13, 2017. 5. See David Streitfield, “ ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It,” New York Times, May 20, 2017. Also Anthony Cuthbertson, “Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Believes He Can Fix Fake News with Wikitribune Product,” Newsweek, April 25, 2017. 6. Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books, 2014). 7. Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2013), 336. 8. Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer, 27–28. 9.


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Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The progressive watchdog Media Matters noted in mid-January 2012 that none of the major broadcast or cable news networks ever produced a segment on the SOPA/PIPA fight in their primetime coverage. That’s because ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN all supported the bill. Tiffiniy Cheng The Wikipedia community got closer and closer to approving a site-wide blackout on U.S. Wikipedia, with Jimmy Wales going public about his position in support of a SOPA protest: more and more people understood that SOPA would’ve been narrowly destructive of Wikipedia, but also would have undermined other efforts to use the Internet to broaden access to information. (One of the most extraordinary artifacts from the blackout would be the stream of tweets from jilted middle and high school students whose lack of access to the site stymied schoolwork for a day and provided a fleeting glimpse of what life was like in the prehistoric 1990s.)

Mozilla helped connect us to WordPress—a top 30 site—and we got a commitment from them that they’d participate. We heard that Craigslist—a top ten site—wanted to get involved. The Wikipedia community got closer and closer to approving a site-wide blackout on U.S. Wikipedia, with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales going public about his position in support of a SOPA protest: more and more people understood that SOPA would’ve been narrowly destructive of Wikipedia, but also would have undermined other efforts to use the Internet to broaden access to information. (One of the most extraordinary artifacts from the blackout would be the stream of tweets from jilted middle and high school students whose lack of access to the site stymied schoolwork for a day and provided a fleeting glimpse of what life was like in the prehistoric 1990s.)

On June 30th, 2010 United States law enforcement agencies seized TVShack.net and several other domains that were accused of violating United States copyright laws. In May of 2011, O’Dwyer was charged with conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and criminal infringement of copyright, and the United States government initiated the extradition process. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales initiated a series of public petitions in support of O’Dwyer’s cause. They were signed by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, including more than eighty thousand Demand Progress members. As of late fall of 2012, just after this interview was conducted, O’Dwyer had agreed to a “deferred prosecution” agreement that will let him avoid jail time.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

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

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

As if to confirm it, a voice asks me from the shadows – “can I help you?” “Sorry, I’m in the wrong place,” I stutter, and head back to the crowd outside. * * * Chapter 2: Courage is contagious “Somehow,” Rop tells me, “the Chaos Computer Club has managed to attract new debates and it’s been able to capture the new things that are going on. Jimmy Wales was here when Wikipedia was really young. Everybody understands that this club tries to find the new issues. And the people coming to the club are those interested in thinking five years ahead. What’s going to happen next?” What indeed. It’s day two of the conference, and I’m pretty sure that the talk I’m waiting to watch is the main event this year.

When information can be reproduced at zero marginal cost, and spread around the world in an instant, it would seem sensible to hope that more knowledge will be put in the hands of more people, and that as a consequence, those who have benefitted from an education might be that bit wiser, and those who have not might be able to remedy their situation. As Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, puts it, “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Thats what were doing.” When information is distributed not by an ever-shrinking group of global corporations guarding access to a one-way pipe, but by everyone, to everyone, so that it bursts like sunlight into every nook and cranny of the intellectual landscape, it would seem sensible to hope for a level of political and corporate transparency that might purge the world’s elites of their most unsavoury elements.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

. § 512 (2000); see also Wikipedia, Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability _Limitation_Act (providing a summary of the § 512 provisions of the DMCA) (as of June 1, 2007, 09:00 GMT); supra Ch. 5, note 83 and accompanying text. 70. RU Sirius, Jimmy Wales Will Destroy Google, 10 Zen Monkeys (Jan. 29, 2007), http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/01/29/wikipedia-jimmy-wales-rusirius-google-objectivism/. 71. Communitarianism is a social theory that rejects the devaluation of community. In asserting that family, friends, and social groups are important to the good life, communitarians focus on three themes: the importance of social context and tradition for meaning-making, the self’s social nature, and the community’s normative value.

The History Place, The Rise of Adolf Hitler, http://wwwhistoryplace.com/worldwar2/ riseofhitler/ (last visited June 1, 2007). 18. Cats That Look Like Hitler!, http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/ (last visited June 1, 2007) (using the term “kitlers” to describe cats that look like Hitler). 19. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales underscores that Bomis, his dot-com search engine business, was not directly involved in pornography, pointing out that its content was R-rated rather than X-rated, like Maxim magazine rather than Playboy. This came to light when Wired reported that he had edited his own Wikipedia entry to make it more precise on the matter.

See generally JAMES SUROWIECKI, THE WISDOM OF CROWDS (2004). 55. Centiare, Directory: MyWikiBiz, http://www.centiare.eom/Directory:MyWikiBiz (as of June 1, 2007, 09:05 GMT). 56. Id. 57. Wikipedia, User Talk:MyWikiBiz, http://en.wikipedia.Org/wild/User_talk:MyWikiBiz/Archive_1 (as of June 1, 2007, 09:05 GMT). 58. E-mail from Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia, to WikiEN-1 mailing list, about My WikiBiz (Aug. 9, 2006, 02:58 PM), http://www.nabble.com/MyWikiBiz-tf2080660.html 59. Wikipedia, User:Essjay/RFC, http://en.wikipedia.Org/wiki/User:Essjay/RFC (as of June 1, 2007, 09:00 GMT). 60. See Noam Cohen, After False Claim, Wikipedia to Check Degrees, N.Y.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

But is the current structure of digital media the only structure? Not necessarily. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to sketch glimmers of alternatives. Much of what has gone wrong is the result of antisocial system design. Better designs are possible. We know this, because such a design exists. In March 2000 a couple of entrepreneurs named Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched a radical new kind of encyclopedia, one which would harness digital technology to put knowledge of practically everything at practically everyone’s fingertips. The visionary experiment flopped. The articles in Nupedia, as it was called, were written, edited, and peer-reviewed by experts and professionals, as with any conventional encyclopedia, except that the experts and professionals were asked to work for free.

“Wikipedia succeeded even in the face of dire predictions that a knowledge source based on volunteers would be rife with errors and held hostage to those with an agenda,” writes the philosopher Lee McIntyre.25 “What actually happened, however, is that the many eyes looking at each entry soon sniffed out error and bias, resulting in a knowledge source that is astonishingly reliable, for what it is.” How? First, Wikipedia built a community, not just a platform. “Wikipedia isn’t a technological innovation at all; it’s a social innovation,” its co-founder and guiding spirit, Jimmy Wales, has written. “We discovered the basic idea of how to organize a community.” He continued: “We’re actually talking about very old-fashioned types of references. Good writing. Neutrality. Reliable sources. Verifiability. We’re talking about people’s behavior in the community. We’re not talking about some kind of magic process.

PEN America, Losing the News: The Decimation of Local Journalism and the Search for Solutions, November 20, 2019. 24. Richard Cooke, “Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet,” Wired, February 17, 2020. 25. Lee McIntyre, Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age (Routledge, 2015), p. 126. 26. Jimmy Wales, foreword to Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia (Hyperion, 2009), p. xvii. 27. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, p. 111. 28. Alex Pasternack, “Twitter Wants Your Help Fighting Falsehoods. It’s Risky, but It Just Might Work,” Fast Company, January 28, 2021. 29.


pages: 209 words: 63,649

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

Lee, Elon Musk, Peter Koechley & Eli Pariser, David Payne and Michael Tavani, Michael Bloomberg, Rachel Kleinfeld, John Mackey, Michael Pollan, Brad Neuberg, Chris Anderson, David Edinger, Scotty Martin, Dr. Regina Benjamin, Frank Perez, Al Gore, Zack Exley and Judith Freeman, Ben Goldhirsh, Adam Grant, David Javerbaum, Dr. Jon Kingsdale, Jane Jacobs, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Jorge Montalvo, Judge Jonathan Lippman, Justin Hall, Molla S. Donaldson, Karl D. Yordy, Kathleen N. Lohr, and Neal A. Vanselow, Peter Block INTRODUCTION I am 39 years old. As an American male, my life expectancy is 76. I’m already in the second half of my life, though I’m often still referred to as a “young leader.”

And as the dot-com sector regained its footing after the crash, we saw whole industries transformed, as well as the way most Americans communicated and engaged in society. So many of the pioneers in social entrepreneurship, social media, and sustainability are from Generation X and were in some way engaged with the dot-com boom. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger of Wikipedia, Max Levchin, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel of PayPal, and Chris Anderson of Wired and now 3DRobotics are just a few examples. The core leadership of the Purpose Economy today is from this often forgotten generation, who in many ways produced the architects and catalysts of the new economy. 4.


The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles by Astronaut Ron Garan, Muhammad Yunus

Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, book scanning, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, fake it until you make it, global village, Google Earth, Indoor air pollution, jimmy wales, low earth orbit, optical character recognition, overview effect, private spaceflight, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, Stephen Hawking, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber for X, web of trust

“If you look at some of the most successful initiatives in the last twenty-five to thirty years,” Cole said, “historically they are open systems.” She pointed out that the Internet began as a free, open network that people could build on, and that applications such as Wikipedia probably owe their success to their open source nature. “I think the success of cooperative models has been shown to be right.” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes that the gift economy is something that we’re just starting to understand. He pointed to the numerous websites and businesses that are built upon open source software and how this is transforming the world. “And we’ve just begun to scratch the surface, because of the tools we have today to bring people together.

Also, a big thanks to retired astronaut General Kevin Chilton for the expert lesson in geopolitics. Thanks to everyone who has added their voice to this book, including Al Holland, John McBrine, Bill Gerstenmaier, George Abbey, Mike O’Brien, Jeff Manber, Joan Johnson-Freese, Samantha Snabes, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, Marcelo Aliaga, Gopi Kallayil, Vic Gundotra, Jimmy Wales, Luis von Ahn, Willow Brugh, Wasfia Nazreen, Elena Maroko, Lily Cole, Evan Thomas, Daria Musk, Nick Skytland, Chris Gerty, Ali Llewellyn, Patrick Svenburg, Stu Gill, Rebecca Wright, Emmanuel Jal, Elizabeth Thompson, Amanda Lindhout, and Dan Irwin. Thanks to everyone who has provided moral support through my writing journey, including Chris and Nicole Stott, Ness Knight, Dom Dauster, Hans Reitz, Leland Melvin, Amy Moore-Benson, Maraia Hoffman, and Clay Morgan.


pages: 187 words: 62,861

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

What this means in terms of designing systems is that even if some rules or norms must be introduced or set from above, one should still try to build in as many mechanisms for self-governance, and offer as many opportunities for people to participate in reviewing and revising these rules, as possible. Circling back to Wikipedia, we see that this is exactly what Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Wales’s then employee and early cofounder) did; they set an initial policy but allowed people to discuss, debate, reinterpret, and enforce it on their own. In the 1990s, there was a surge of interest among legal scholars such as Larry Lessig and Dan Kahan in the question of just how norms can become so ingrained in a culture that people will voluntarily follow them without official regulation or enforcement.

Much more radical than the fact that it is free to consumers is the fact that Wikipedia, unlike television and radio, doesn’t pay a penny for its content; its content is produced by volunteers who write and edit it without wanting or seeking compensation, simply for the pleasure of writing, for the camaraderie of the community of Wikipedians. In short, for all the reasons we have been exploring in this book. The fruits of their collective authorship efforts is a process, not a product. A collaboration that incrementally and imperfectly improves itself over time. In February 2001, when Jimmy Wales first came up with this crazy idea for a web platform that relied entirely on volunteer contributions, anyone who predicted that the result would one day equal or surpass the hallowed Britannica would have been laughed out of the room. Critics claim that Wikipedia is less accurate and authoritative than Britannica and other published encyclopedias.


pages: 295 words: 66,912

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor by Glyn Moody

Aaron Swartz, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, connected car, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, non-fungible token, Open Library, optical character recognition, p-value, peer-to-peer, place-making, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, rent-seeking, text mining, the market place, TikTok, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

uri=CELEX%3A32000L0031&amp;from=en 460 https://web.archive.org/web/20220603094009/https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2011-11/cp110126en.pdf 461 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618190328/http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2021/08/09/youtube-and-cyando-injunctions-against-intermediaries-and-general-monitoring-obligations-any-movement/ 462 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701134156/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation 463 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618190351/https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/ 464 https://web.archive.org/web/20180713064910/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/20/eu-votes-for-copyright-law-that-would-make-internet-a-tool-for-control 465 https://web.archive.org/web/20220402115757/https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/copyright-email-to-MEPs.docx 466 https://web.archive.org/web/20220402115757/https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/copyright-email-to-MEPs.docx 467 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203153/https://copybuzz.com/copyright/meps-email-says-article-13-will-not-filter-the-internet-juri-meps-tweet-says-it-will/ 468 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701134919/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Music_Companies_Association 469 https://web.archive.org/web/20180704010146/http://impalamusic.org/content/copyright-say-no-scaremongering-and-yes-creators-getting-paid 470 https://web.archive.org/web/20220701135001/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kaye_%28academic%29 471 https://web.archive.org/web/20220428083157/https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Issues/Opinion/Legislation/OL-OTH-41-2018.pdf 472 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203237/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf 473 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203338/https://internethalloffame.org/vint-cerf 474 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203358/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee 475 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203414/https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ 476 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618203428/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales 477 https://web.archive.org/web/20220620000819/https://twitter.com/Jimmy_wales 478 https://web.archive.org/web/20180708003333/https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf 479 https://web.archive.org/web/20180708003333/https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf 480 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618213154/https://felixreda.eu/2018/09/ep-endorses-upload-filters/ 481 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618213222/https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20180906IPR12103/parliament-adopts-its-position-on-digital-copyright-rules 482 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214015/https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/12/legacy-copyright-industries-lobbying-hard-eu-copyright-directive-while-pretending-that-only-google-is-lobbying/ 483 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214015/https://www.techdirt.com/2018/12/12/legacy-copyright-industries-lobbying-hard-eu-copyright-directive-while-pretending-that-only-google-is-lobbying/ 484 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214041/https://corporateeurope.org/en/2018/12/copyright-directive-how-competing-big-business-lobbies-drowned-out-critical-voices 485 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214059/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Stihler 486 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214120/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons 487 https://web.archive.org/web/20220704134108/https://walledculture.org/interview-catherine-stihler-creative-commons-the-eu-copyright-directive-and-civil-societys-role/ 488 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214136/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_trilogue_meeting 489 https://web.archive.org/web/20220618214155/https://felixreda.eu/2018/11/eu-council-upload-filters/ 490 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Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

It is even probable than those comprising this assembly will on many matters combine great ignorance with many prejudices. . . . It follows that the more numerous the assembly, the more it will be exposed to the risk of making false decisions. —Condorcet, Selected Writings Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing. —Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia Contents / Introduction Dreams and Nightmares 3 Chapter 1 The (Occasional) Power of Numbers 21 Chapter 2 The Surprising Failures of Deliberating Groups 45 Chapter 3 Four Big Problems 75 Chapter 4 Money, Prices, and Prediction Markets 103 Chapter 5 Many Working Minds: Wikis, Open Source Software, and Blogs 147 Chapter 6 Implications and Reforms 197 Conclusion Realizing Promises 217 Appendix Prediction Markets 227 Notes 231 Index 259 !"

Such vandals can eventually be blocked by Wikipedia’s technology (allowing IP blocking or username blocking). Wikipedia works because the vandals are hopelessly outnumbered by those who want to make the project work. Why Wikis Work (or Not) / It is tempting and helpful to explain the success of Wikipedia through Hayek’s distinctive lens. Jimmy Wales himself has drawn the connection, saying, “Hayek’s work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project. Possibly one can understand Wikipedia 156 / Infotopia without understanding Hayek. . . . But one can’t understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek.”9 Certainly, Wikipedia entries often aggregate the information held by numerous people in a way that connects closely to Hayek’s claims about the price system.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

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

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

‘There are plenty of people who have given up, which is too bad. That’s my job, to try to convince people that giving up isn’t that great a thing.’ IF CINDY COHN represents a school of activism which operates by tackling the ills of the internet head-on, through activism and through litigation, Jimmy Wales exemplifies another kind of resistance – of building something that works very differently. Wales is one of the founders of Wikipedia, the fifth-most visited site on the internet,21 whose English-language version gets more than 8.2 billion page views per month.22 In English alone, Wikipedia’s encyclopedia now comprises more than 5.8 million articles, edited more than 880 million times, by more than 35 million registered users.23 It has reached this scale without raising any money from venture capital, without showing any adverts, and without making any money – it is a registered non-profit, it has encyclopedias in 301 different languages, and gets by on less than $100 million a year, which it raises through donations – for which it advertises for just a few weeks every few months.24 Wales, then, is a dotcom founder with many similarities to the others – a site operating on a global scale, with huge audience and numbers – and many differences.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This section can only open thanking all the people who gave generously of their time for interviews, whether on or off the record. That includes Albert Wenger, Ben Cos, Brian O’Kelley, Cindy Cohn, Emily Bell, Frank Eliason, Göran Marby, Jeff Greene, Jeff Jarvis – special thanks to him for his generosity with his contacts book – Jimmy Wales, John Borthwick, Steve Crocker, everyone at Symantec, Tom Daly, Tom Wheeler and Wael Ghonim. Bonus thanks to Brad White at ICANN for all his help, and Julia Powles for her wisdom. From my perspective – and hopefully from theirs – this book’s been a joy from a publishing side, thanks to great support from my agent Tracy Bohan at Wylie, and a great editing team at Bloomsbury in the shape of Alexis Kirschbaum, Jasmine Horsey, Katherine Fry and Lauren Whybrow.


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

Founded in 2001, its business model and editorial strategy seem like nineties cyberspace holdovers, inheriting that generation’s optimism along with its blind spots. It carries the torch of John Perry Barlow’s principles in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” and in addition to what it is not, Wikipedia isn’t anticapitalist. The founder, Jimmy Wales, like many cyber-utopians, was a libertarian (albeit his Twitter feed now suggests that, like a lot of libertarians in the Clinton years, he’s since moved to the left). In the nineties, he organized a forum on Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, and he was interested in Austrian economics. His online encyclopedia experiment is libertarian without corruption, libertarianism as libertarians imagine liberty—an endeavor that is impossible to sustain as anything other than a thought experiment, except for this rare exception in internetland, and a massively imperfect one at that.

As Audrey Watters has remarked about the place where Barlow wrote his groundbreaking manifesto—Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum—“that’s neither a site nor an institution I’ve ever really associated with utopia” (“Invisible Labor and Digital Utopias,” Hack Education, May 4, 2018). An early profile of Wikipedia in The Atlantic, written by Marshall Poe, provided context (“The Hive,” September 1, 2006). “Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire,” according to a story by Amy Chozick in The New York Times (June 27, 2013). On her personal website, Sue Gardner’s blog post “Why Wikimedia’s New Revenue Strategy Makes Me Happy” explains the revenue model (July 25, 2010). According to The Boy Kings, Mark Zuckerberg first imagined building a Wikipedia for all people when he was at Harvard; except for-profit, probably, and—just as crucially—without Wikipedia’s editing and culling, for notability or otherwise (88).


pages: 88 words: 22,980

One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic by Lawrence Lessig

collapse of Lehman Brothers, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, jimmy wales, Occupy movement, Ronald Reagan, Yochai Benkler

Its aim must be to map the process by which we, #outsiders, defeat that enemy. Together. As one people, but not one network. As a federation, with radical differences among us, committed nonetheless to the one end we all must achieve: a government that we could have reason to trust. Our age has given us many different leaders, from Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) to Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) to Meckler and Martin (Tea Party Patriots). They reflect a diversity of networks, working on every important issue. They sometimes represent power enough to make the insiders listen. Let us learn how this diversity can act now as one network, as an inter-network, as a cooperating crowd, embracing the open-source principles that define our age, and using them to restore this Republic.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

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

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

Although the Linux kernel benefited from the contributions of thousands of programmers and had the outside appearance of democratic engagement, for many years it was Torvalds alone who signed off on the formal “commits” to the code. Linux was nominally open, but in its formative stages it was tightly controlled. In the early stages of Wikipedia’s development, the debate over the right amount of founder control split up co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Although Sanger couldn’t afford to continue working without funding, he and Wales also disagreed about how to handle the real-world challenges that arise when anyone, regardless of expertise, can edit anything; Sanger wanted to be more restrictive and limit the ability to author articles to people formally vetted as authorities.

“In economics,” according to the website Investopedia, “the free rider problem refers to a situation where some individuals in a population either consume more than their fair share of a common resource, or pay less than their fair share of the cost of a common resource.”6 But Nicholas Gruen, an economist who has worked closely with the Australian federal government—most recently on two task forces on innovation and Government 2.0—figured out that for this new class of companies, free rider opportunities were much larger than the cost of free rider problems. Wikipedia succeeded because Jimmy Wales believed that more people would contribute valuable articles to Wikipedia than would vandalize them. This is the Peers Inc paradigm at work: Opening assets up delivers more value and more innovation than keeping them under lockdown. New ways to address bad actors—reputation and trust systems—do change behavior and minimize negative contributions, as they did for eBay sellers, Airbnb hosts, and Uber drivers, who become more conscientious and professional in response to the potential for bad ratings.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

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

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

Under the bill, ISPs would have to route data via a “black box” that will separate “content” from “header data” and also have the capability to decrypt encrypted communications (such as transmissions over encrypted SSL – Secure Sockets Layer – channels). The bill has been widely criticized across the private sector, civil society, and inside the government itself. Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales threatened to encrypt all communications to the U.K., and stated: “It is not the sort of thing I’d expect from a Western democracy. It is the kind of thing I would expect from the Iranians or the Chinese.” Dominic Raab, a Conservative MP, said: “The use of data mining and black boxes to monitor everyone’s phone, email and web-based communications is a sobering thought that would give Britain the most intrusive surveillance regime in the West.”

Weber, “The Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 18, no.1 (2003). 10 would require ISPs and other telecommunication companies to store: The proposed Communications Data Bill has been profiled in “UK’s Data Communication Bill Faces Tough Criticism,” BBC, June 14, 2012, http​://www.​bbc.com​/news/t​echnolo​gy​-1843​9226; “Jimmy Wales, Tim Berners-Lee Slam UK’s Internet Snooping Plans,” ZDNet, September 6, 2012, http:/​/www.z​dnet.​com​/uk​/jimm​y-wales-timb​erne​rs-lee-slam-uks-​inter​net-snoo​ping-plan​s-70000​03829; “UK’s Web Monitoring Draft Bill Revealed: What You Need to Know,” ZDNet, June 14, 2012, http​://www.zdnet.com/​blog/lon​don/uks-we​b-monito​ring-draf​t-bill-reve​aled-what-you-n​eed-to-know​/5183; and Mark Townsend, “Security Services to Get More Access to Monitor Emails and Social Media,” Guardian, July 28, 2012, h​ttp://www.guar​dian.co.​uk/techn​ology/2012​/jul/28/​isecurity-ser​vices-emails-socia​l-media. 11 From documents released under federal access to information laws: See Christopher Parsons, “Canadian Social Media Surveillance: Today and Tomorrow,” Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets, May 28, 2012, http://www.c​hristo​pher-par​sons.c​om/blog​/tech​nology​/canad​ian-social-media-surve​illan​ce-today-and-tom​orrow/. 8: MEET KOOBFACE: A CYBER CRIME SNAPSHOT 1 Meet Koobface: A Cyber Crime Snapshot: Between April and November 2010, the Information Warfare Monitor, led by Nart Villeneuve, conducted an investigation into the operations and monetization strategies of the Koobface botnet.


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!

And in the unusual cases where this mostly amicable process doesn’t lead to a decision everyone accepts, some rarely used higher-level dispute resolution processes are also available. Wikipedia’s software also maintains records of what each contributor has done, an important part of building and recognizing reputations in this community. And, in some cases, Wikipedia bots make some of the simple editorial decisions automatically. Even though hardly anyone (including Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder) expected this online consensus process to really work, the combination of Wikipedia’s software and culture has somehow allowed it to work remarkably well.3 Could this process work in a face-to-face environment with large numbers of editors? I suspect not. Imagine, for instance, a football stadium with 70,000 people in it.

http://cci.mit.edu/superminds Praise for Superminds “Superminds is the first book I have seen that deeply explores the power of information technology to enable truly new forms of human organization. I really love the premise and thoughtfulness of the book, and I highly recommend it if you want to understand and make sense of what we are likely to see in the next few years!” —Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder “From the father of collective intelligence, a refreshingly realistic view of how computers will supercharge collective intelligence and how these superminds can help us tackle the most complex problems that face the world today.” —Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab “Thomas Malone was a decade ahead of most of the rest of us in thinking about the future of work.


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

When Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he carved on the hearts of generations of conservative lawmakers a maxim that is the basis of Hayek’s economics. In Hubbard’s class at Columbia, the students discussed Hayek’s 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which argues that central planning can never replace market forces, which reflect the sum total of the “decentralized knowledge” available to a society. Jimmy Wales has said that he read Hayek’s article as an undergraduate and it was central to his decision to create Wikipedia. Hubbard observed that, in the face of this pandemic, Keynes would have proposed vigorous government intervention and deficit spending. He believed that the creation of jobs, even digging holes and filling them in again, is fundamental to getting people back into the economic system, putting money in their pockets, awakening demand, and lifting the “animal spirits” of businesspeople to open their doors and start hiring.

“We are marshaling”: trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/​briefings-statements/​remarks-president-trump-address-nation/ “When Keynes saw”: R. Glenn Hubbard, “Ideas Are Shaping Responses to the Pandemic and a Business Path Forward,” lecture in the course “Highlights of Modern Political Economy,” Columbia Business School, Aug. 17, 2020. This section also relies on interviews with Hubbard. Jimmy Wales: Katherine Mangu-Warad, “Wikipedia and Beyond,” Reason, June 2007. “We went from”: Interview with Chris Coons. “If we told Alaska”: Kevin Hassett’s remarks come from a recording of Glenn Hubbard’s class, “Ideas Are Shaping Responses to the Pandemic and a Business Path Forward,” lecture in the course “Highlights of Modern Political Economy,” Columbia Business School, Aug. 17, 2020. 9.


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

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

Perhaps we could redesign curricula around discovery and experiment; move away from ticking boxes, and towards imagination and the free play of ideas. Look at the successes of Finnish education, now an exemplar, and its principles based on teaching things like transversal thinking. Schools could aim to incorporate more insights from Montessori Schools, which educated entrepreneurs including Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jimmy Wales.38 Their success hints at the potential in self- and peer-directed learning. In India a research programme showed how effectively school children learned on their own, unaided, when using and programming a computer. But the power of peer learning applies at university level as well. The Nobel laureate Carl Weiman was shocked to find that after seventeen years of education in which they had excelled, his graduate students were still clueless about how to run a research project.39 What happens next?

For a detailed review of the funding of people and not projects see Ricón (2020a). 31 For example Matt Clifford also powerfully made this point, and the organisation he co-founded, Entrepreneur First, is an excellent example in the startup world. 32 Szell, Ma and Sinatra (2018) 33 See for example Mulgan (2018), p. 55 34 Caplan (2018) 35 Ridley (2016), p. 180 36 Cummings (2013) 37 Biasi and Ma (2020). The authors also document the deleterious impact of this gap on those from poorer backgrounds. 38 Jimmy Wales did not attend a Montessori school, but his education was heavily influenced by their principles. 39 Weiman (2017) 40 Ricón (2019) 41 Ibid. 42 Merton (1996) 43 Beck (1992) 44 See for example Armstrong (2020) 45 See for example Bloom, Van Reenen and Williams (2019) or Hvide and Jones (2018).


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Some hints about where to look for other sources of credibility are given by Wikipedia, by far the most well-known case of a peer labour project outside the FOSS scene. Wikipedia is an Internet encyclopaedia edited by the readers. It began with a vision by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to create Nupedia, a freely accessible encyclopaedia on the Internet. They set out with a traditional approach, employing editors and demanding educational qualifications from writers. The project had only gathered a few hundred articles when it ran out of funding. The articles were published on a separate website named Wikipedia, and, since Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger had abandoned their aspirations for credibility, they invited visitors to edit the texts. Volunteers joined and the content grew exponentially.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

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

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

This is according to no less an authority than Lawrence Sanger, the cofounder (with Jimmy Wales) of Wikipedia! The problem, he notes, is that anyone—anyone—can edit a Wikipedia article, regardless of their knowledge or training. There is no central authority of credentialed experts who review the articles to ensure that they are factual or that they are being edited by someone with knowledge on the topic. As a reader of Wikipedia, you have no way to know whether you’re reading something accurate or not. And this isn’t an unwitting side effect; it was part of Wikipedia’s very design. Jimmy Wales has stated that experts should be accorded no more respect than novices, that there should be “no elite, and no hierarchy” of them to get in the way of newcomers who want to participate in Wikipedia.

Retrieved from http://www.kuro5hin.org To Wikipedia’s credit, it contains an article titled “Criticism of Wikipedia,” although that piece is, perhaps understandably, biased toward Wikipedia. Criticism of Wikipedia. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia Jimmy Wales has stated that experts User: Jimbo Wales. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 30, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales “Why would an expert bother contributing . . .” Dharma. (December 30, 2004). Comment on Sanger, L. (2004, December 31). Why Wikipedia must jettison its anti-elitism [Online forum comment].


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

This approach works well, by and large, and has allowed the crowd to grow enormously without being sabotaged by its worst members. Not all versions of the crowd are equally successful at this gentle policing. The year 2016 saw challenges to this approach in the form of “fake news” on Facebook and other social media, and large amounts of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and other despicable vitriol on Twitter. Jimmy Wales has argued that Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia that he cofounded, is relatively immune to fake news in part because of its governance methods. By adopting the right principles, norms, institutions, and technologies, the crowd can do a great deal to maintain quality standards, though there may be other trade-offs, like how easily or quickly participants can post new items, how quickly they are shared, who gets to see them, and, yes, how much profit can be earned from the content.

Some Is Not Enough: The Story of a Nearly Failed Experiment What happens when a collaborative online effort follows only some of these principles? How successful will it be? A lot of research would be needed to answer this question definitively, of course, but a fascinating and illuminating experiment occurred in the early years of the web when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started an effort to build a free and open, universally accessible online encyclopedia. Encyclopedias have a long history—one of the first was Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, published in the first century CE—and lofty goals. Ephraim Chambers said that his 1728 Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences contained the “sum of all human knowledge.”# They tended to be very expensive, however, and thus reserved for society’s elites.


pages: 467 words: 116,094

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That by Ben Goldacre

Aaron Swartz, call centre, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Desert Island Discs, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Helicobacter pylori, jimmy wales, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, meta-analysis, moral panic, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), seminal paper, Simon Singh, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Fry, sugar pill, the scientific method, Turing test, two and twenty, WikiLeaks

For example, there was a long-standing debate about which of two competing models of ‘microfinance’ schemes was best at getting people out of poverty in India, whilst ensuring that the money was paid back, so it could be re-used in other villages: a randomised trial compared the two models, and established which was best. At the top of the page at Wikipedia, when it is having a funding drive, you can see the smiling face of Jimmy Wales, the founder, on a fundraising advert. He’s a fairly shy person, and didn’t want his face to be on these banners. But Wikipedia ran a randomised trial, assigning visitors to different adverts: some saw an advert with a child from the developing world (‘She could have access to all of human knowledge if you donate …’); some saw an attractive young intern; some saw Jimmy Wales. The adverts with Wales got more clicks and more donations than the rest, so they were used universally. It’s easy to imagine that there are ways around the inconvenience of randomly assigning people, or schools, to one intervention or another: surely, you might think, we could just look at the people who are already getting one intervention, or another, and simply monitor their outcomes to find out which is the best.


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

But unlike Google and others, when Wikipedia came to its own fork in the road, gaining enough traffic to rival or exceed that of nearly any other site, save the search engines, it chose the other path; deciding to remain free of advertising, it effectively forsook billions in potential revenue. The founder, Jimmy Wales, officially explained the decision as follows: “I think of Wikipedia as I do a library or a school—and commercial advertising is not right in that space….Maximizing revenue is not our goal.”8 Subscribing to the same basic philosophy as the bloggers and Wikipedia was a new company named YouTube, which launched in 2005; based on user-generated video along with a fair number of clips borrowed from other sources, its purpose was to facilitate the sharing of such content.

David Weinberger, “What Blogging Was,” Joho the Blog, January 8, 2014, http://www.hyperorg.com/​blogger/​2014/​01/​08/​what-blogging-was/. 7. Erin Venema developed the word “escribitionist” in 1999 to distinguish between web journal authors and those who kept their diaries on paper. See www.escribitionist.org, a webpage containing a copy of the email in which Venema first used the word. 8. Jimmy Wales, February 7, 2011, answer to “Why does Wikipedia ask for donations rather than having ads?,” Quora, https://www.quora.com/​Why-does-Wikipedia-ask-for-donations-rather-than-having-ads. 9. Virginia Heffernan, The Medium: The Way We Watch Now (blog), http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com//. 10. See Allan J.


pages: 188 words: 9,226

Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Ease of amendment combined with preservation of previous versions (the key qualities of wikis in general) enable both highly granular levels of participation and an effective selfdefense mechanism against destructive users who defect from the goal. At the core of the project lies a group who actively self-identify themselves as wikipedians, and dedicate time to developing and promoting community norms especially around the arbitration of conflicts. Jimmy Wales, the project’s founder, remains the titular head of wikipedia, and although there have been some conflicts between him and the community, he has in general conceded authority, but the tension remains without conclusive resolution. (8) FLOSSmanuals, the organization that facilitated the writing of this text you are reading, was originally established to produce documentation for free so ware projects, a historically weak point of the FS community.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Twenty years ago I could easily have found myself sitting around doing nothing, when the question might suddenly come to me: “What is a quasar, anyway?” It is almost certain that at that time I would have quickly abandoned my curiosity, hoping perhaps that I might some day happen upon an answer, but not being quite interested enough, typically, to seek one out. Today it is second nature for me to immediately turn to Jimmy Wales’s infinite encyclopedia. The consequences of this reflexive habit for my general knowledge of the world are profound. I am convinced that I know vastly more than I would have had this resource not been available to me. In this respect, Wikipedia is the full realization of the dream of the authors of the Encyclopédie in the late eighteenth century, who were themselves building upon projects, dating back to the Renaissance, for the schematization and orderly presentation of all of the branches of human knowledge.


pages: 232 words: 63,846

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares

Airbnb, content marketing, Firefox, Hacker News, if you build it, they will come, jimmy wales, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Salesforce, side project, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, software as a service, TechCrunch disrupt, the long tail, the payments system, Uber for X, Virgin Galactic, web application, working poor, Y Combinator

Bootstrap off an existing audience. Find initial evangelists by sharing your mission with complementary communities online and at offline events. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, we want to thank everyone who shared their traction stories and tips with us. Without you this book would not be possible: Jimmy Wales, Cofounder of Wikipedia Alexis Ohanian, Cofounder of reddit Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz Noah Kagan, Founder of AppSumo Patrick McKenzie, CEO of Bingo Card Creator Sam Yagan, Cofounder of OkCupid Andrew Chen, Investor in 500 Startups Dharmesh Shah, Founder of HubSpot Justin Kan, Founder of Justin.tv Mark Cramer, CEO of Surf Canyon Colin Nederkoorn, CEO of Customer.io Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine Chris Fralic, Partner at First Round Capital Paul English, CEO of Kayak Rob Walling, Founder of MicroConf Brian Riley, Cofounder of SureStop Steve Welch, Cofounder of DreamIt Jason Kincaid, Blogger at TechCrunch Nikhil Sethi, Founder of Adaptly Rick Perreault, CEO of Unbounce Alex Pachikov, Evernote Founding Team David Skok, Partner at Matrix Ashish Kundra, CEO of myZamana David Hauser, Founder of Grasshopper Matt Monahan, CEO of Inflection Jeff Atwood, Cofounder of Discourse Dan Martell, CEO of Clarity Chris McCann, Founder of Startup Digest Ryan Holiday, Exec at American Apparel Todd Vollmer, Enterprise Sales Veteran Sandi MacPherson, Founder of Quibb Andrew Warner, Founder of Mixergy Sean Murphy, Founder of SKMurphy Satish Dharmaraj, Partner at Redpoint Ventures Garry Tan, Partner at Y Combinator Steve Barsh, CEO of PackLate Michael Bodekaer, Cofounder of Smartlaunch Each of you played a critical role in shaping this book and making it a useful resource.


pages: 246 words: 70,404

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

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

At his apartment we made a survey of military contracting businesses, prepping a new business plan for DEFCAD. It was going to be a search engine built as enterprise software and sold to military bases. “Like it or not, we’re talking about Department of Defense here,” Varol said, adding “Dee-oh-Dee. “Otherwise,” he went on, “the best you can be is like the Jimmy Wales of the gun movement,” referring to the co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia. “Which is something,” Varol continued. “But come on! That’s not what you’re looking for.” At sometime past nine that night we left his place and walked across a wide intersection to a restaurant in a shopping center.


pages: 224 words: 64,156

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

We already have the ideology in its new digital packaging, and it’s entirely possible we could face dangerously traumatic economic shocks in the coming decades. An Ideology of Violation The internet has come to be saturated with an ideology of violation. For instance, when some of the more charismatic figures in the online world, including Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, and Tim O’Reilly, the coiner of the term “web 2.0,” proposed a voluntary code of conduct in the wake of the bullying of Kathy Sierra, there was a widespread outcry, and the proposals went nowhere. The ideology of violation does not radiate from the lowest depths of trolldom, but from the highest heights of academia.


pages: 208 words: 67,582

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

At the dawn of the digital age, Microsoft had a brilliant idea: it would create a digital encyclopaedia, partly on CD-ROM, partly online, that would exploit the full potential of multimedia. Experts around the globe were enlisted; IT specialists wrote programs; a small fortune was invested in the project; and high hopes were entertained of its success. Things worked out differently, and in 2008 the Encarta project died a death. Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales and a handful of volunteers had started up Wikipedia. The rest is history. All over the world, enthusiastic Wikipedians (‘And proud to be one’) work without pay to produce entries whose quality has become extremely high. These days, scientists and academics are as proud as Punch when their work is cited on Wikipedia.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

“What Game Are You Playing?” Of course, not all engineers and geeks have the views about democracy and freedom that Peter Thiel does—he’s surely an outlier. Craig Newmark, the founder of the free Web site craigslist, spends most of his time arguing for “geek values” that include service and public-spiritedness. Jimmy Wales and the editors at Wikipedia work to make human knowledge free to everyone. The filtering goliaths make huge contributions here as well: The democratic ideal of an enlightened, capable citizenry is well served by the broader set of relationships Facebook allows me to manage and the mountains of formerly hard-to-access research papers and other public information that Google has freed.


pages: 259 words: 73,193

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

Heilman continued to fight for his own version of the truth, one aligned with the traditional scientific method, and ended up looking for a dodge around Wikipedia’s voting system. Although the vast majority of Wikipedia disputes are settled by popular vote, there is one group that could be called a higher authority: the Arbitration Committee. Two years after founding the Web site, Jimmy Wales invented the committee—he chose a dozen people (there are now fifteen)—to settle intractable disputes among editors. Heilman brought his Transcendental Meditation case before this court of last resort on two occasions. To no effect. “The Arbitration Committee,” explains Heilman, “only judges behavioral issues, not factual issues.”


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

Distinguished followers of these writers include some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet:20 Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple; the Koch brothers, one the chairman and the other the EVP of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the US21; Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp; Politicians Donald Trump,22 Rex Tillerson, Ron and Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan in the US, and Daniel Hannan and Sajid Javid in the UK; Pay-Pal co-founder, Peter Thiel and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. These are serious people. And they wield untold influence. Politicians respond to this influence. It is easy for a politician to attack people on benefits; it is very risky for them to attack wealthy tax-avoiders. It is easy to propose cuts in public spending; it requires enormous courage to propose an increase.


pages: 288 words: 85,073

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

Mattias Lindgren for compiling most of the Gapminder historic time series for the economy and demography. All my students and doctoral students, from whom I learned so much, all the teachers and students who welcomed us to their schools to help us test our materials, all the amazing consultants around the world who have helped us, Jimmy Wales and the voluntary editors on Wikipedia, and all the Dollar Street families and photographers. The previous and current board members of the Gapminder Foundation for their wise and stable support: Hans Wigzell, Christer Gunnarsson, Bo Sundgren, Gun-Britt Andersson, and Helena Nordenstedt (who also helped with fact-checking).


pages: 255 words: 76,495

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff by Clara Shih

Benchmark Capital, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, glass ceiling, jimmy wales, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, pets.com, pre–internet, rolodex, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social web, software as a service, tacit knowledge, Tony Hsieh, web application

We are still in the very early days of VRM, but it poses interesting new possibilities for the online social graph and identity management across different web sites and applications. From the Library of Kerri Ross This page intentionally left blank From the Library of Kerri Ross 2 “We help the Internet not suck.” —Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia The Evolution of Digital Media ach digital revolution enables new forms of media. Just look, for example, at how encyclopedias have evolved. In two decades, we have gone from heavy, leather-bound World Book volumes, to the Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM, to online, user-generated Wikipedia, to Aardvark.im, a real-time messaging service that connects people seeking information with knowledgeable experts in their network.


pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

This nature of the hyperleader qua founder is a type of authority that is not of the charismatic, but rather of the traditional type, as its legitimacy is based on the past and on the act of foundation. There are obvious similarities between the hyperleader and the figure of the ‘benevolent dictator’ seen in several digital personalities, such as Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, or Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux.278 As is the case with these figures, the hyperleader presents himself as the ultimate guarantor of the party and its founding principles. This type of leadership is informed by a libertarian distrust for any form of authority and intermediation between the individuals and their collective action.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Nearly every single one of the most transformational new approaches to coordinating human interaction over the last ten years could not have happened without the Internet: the political organizing and fund-raising of MoveOn, blogs, and Obama for America, just to name a few. Wikipedia provides a genuinely new form of authority during a time when traditional sources of authority have suffered a historic decline in trust. This is no small accomplishment. In his eccentricity and slightly quixotic zeal, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales is something of a Francis Townsend for this age. The crucial difference being that while Townsend hoped to have the government implement his vision, Ayn Rand devotee Wales was able to implement his “plan” without having to convince a single legislator of its efficacy. We can imagine and hope that organic, Internet-facilitated cooperation can create new institutions that disrupt and break the monopolies of the old ones.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

If you haven’t tried to contribute to Wikipedia yet, you should! I emphasize Wikipedia in this context because I interpret it broadly as a model for how we might reconstitute expertise and cultural authority in the digital age. It’s not a perfect model, but at least it provides a possible path to authority and knowledge. Jimmy Wales, a cofounder of the collaboratively built online encyclopedia, describes the site’s ethos as “Ignore all rules,” which is further clarified to mean, “If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.” The site dramatically ignores hierarchy, keeping every decision as open to the entire community as possible.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

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

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

The list of examples of brands and industries that got whipped out by side-winding newbies is long, and it’s only going to get longer. Do you think the market-leader incumbents saw these competitors coming? Wikipedia. It’s clear that Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book would not have seen this coming. No-one did. Not even the founder, Jimmy Wales, whose first email message to friends upon launching Wikipedia asking them to make a wiki entry said, ‘Humour me and please write an entry about something you have some expertise in’. Not only did they do it, it turns out the crowd knows more than the experts. Wikipedia is not only more up to date, but more accurate than encyclopedias.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

For implanting the dream of how a digital society and economy might function, I thank Internet cultural pioneers including Howard Rheingold, Mark Pesce, David Pescovitz, Mark Frauenfelder, Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, John Barlow, Jaron Lanier, RU Sirius, Andrew Mayer, Richard Metzger, Evan Williams, everyone on the Well, Richard Stallman, George P’or, Neal Gorenflo, Marina Gorbis, and Michel Bauwens. For leading digital enterprises in ways worth writing about, thanks to Scott Heiferman, Ben Knight, Zach Sims, Slava Rubin, the Robin Hood Cooperative, Enspiral, and Jimmy Wales. For sharing with me some of the perils of growth-based business and being open to discuss alternative possibilities, I thank Frank Cooper, Gerry Laybourne, Sara Levinson, Bonin Bough, Jon Kinderlerer, William Lohse, Ken Miller, and Judson Green. Thanks to my publisher, Adrian Zackheim, for recognizing the single most important and counterintuitive assertion I’m making here, and to my editor, Niki Papadopoulos, for making sure it comes through loud and clear.


pages: 330 words: 88,445

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

University of Virginia psychologist Angeline Lillard: Angeline Lillard and Nicole Else-Quest, “The Early Years: Evaluating Montessori Education,” Science, September 29, 2006, 313(5795), pp. 1893–94. When professor Jeffrey Dyer…and Hal Gregersen: The innovators Dyer and Gregersen are referring to include everyone from high-tech pioneers like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SimCity creator Will Wright, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to culture-shaping creatives like rapper/entrepreneur Sean Combs, chef/entrepreneur Julia Child, and Nobel laureate author Gabriel García Márquez. In 2004, when Barbara Walters interviewed Page and Brin, she asked if the fact that their parents were both college professors was the major reason for their success.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

More recent work that’s been done in Reggio Emilia and Waldorf schools has added to the richness and variety of the education models that exist at the elementary level. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on several of our country’s most successful innovators: Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Julia Child, Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. The article suggested the Montessori School experience was the most important aspect of these influencers’ education, setting them on a life path of creativity, passion, self-direction, and comfort with failure and ambiguity. The Google founders were featured on a Barbara Walters/ABC special.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Benedict and discovered its author to be a network-savvy, evidence-based social innovator. “Each monastery is a sovereign institution, with no hierarchy among them,” Cottica explained in the Edgeryders’ online discussions. “The Rule acts as a communication protocol across monasteries.” He compared Benedict to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and Linus Torvalds, creator of the open-source operating system Linux. “The rule was—still is—good, solid, open-source software.” In Brussels, Cottica learned about Matera’s bid to be declared a European Capital of Culture by the European Union and saw an opportunity for his fellow Edgeryders.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Montessori classrooms emphasize self-directed learning, hands-on engagement with a wide variety of materials (including plants and animals), and a largely unstructured school day. And in recent years they’ve produced alumni including the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales). These examples appear to be part of a broader trend. Management researchers Jeffrey Dyer and Hal Gregersen interviewed five hundred prominent innovators and found that a disproportionate number of them also went to Montessori schools, where “they learned to follow their curiosity.” As a Wall Street Journal blog post by Peter Sims put it, “the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia.”


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

And what a track record Montessori has. Today, so many former students of this private-school system (which only teaches as high as eighth grade) are now running major companies in the tech sector that these alumni have become known as the Montessori Mafia.24 Their ranks include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and the cofounders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. (The former Google executive Marissa Mayer—now the head of Yahoo!25—has said that Brin’s and Page’s Montessori schooling, though long ago, remained a defining influence. “You can’t understand Google unless you know that Larry and Sergey were both Montessori kids,” according to Mayer.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Wikipedia’s lifeblood is its community of editors, who enable the platform to operate as a nonprofit while providing more than 36 million articles in 291 languages.49 The English version of Wikipedia alone is enough to fill 7,473 encyclopedia-length volumes.50 Even with such a large community, the platform operates without formal rules. In fact, one of Wikipedia’s original pillars was “Wikipedia does not have firm rules.” As the platform grew, its community took over for its founder, Jimmy Wales, who could no longer personally manage all of the activity as a “benevolent dictator.”51 Today, the community on Wikipedia creates and dictates the implicit rules and social mores that govern the network. They also are the ones who enforce these community standards by handling important administrative functions, such as deleting and blocking users who repeatedly make fraudulent or deceitful changes and protecting pages from underhanded editing.


Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

That's CSSD for short. ("Schwartz" refers to another social choice theorist, Thomas Schwartz.) Condorcet voting, often the CSSD variety, has been widely adopted by other online communities. Among them is the online reference Wikipedia, which uses approval voting as well. Wikipedia founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales dealt with issues that do not exist as acutely with Linux. A Linux contributor has to know how to write code. A Wikipedia contributor can be totally ignorant. "Trolls" is the term for Wikipedia contributors who can't accept criticism and keep reversing edits and reposting articles that others have deleted.


pages: 325 words: 99,983

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

In this ‘new new world’, the internet could now become a forum for worldwide communities to share information electronically. Enter the ‘people’s encyclopedia.’ Wikipedia marries a Hawaiian word meaning ‘quick’ (wiki) and the classical Greek for ‘education’ (paideia). This project was a creature of the new millennium. It began when Jimmy Wales, the founder of a now-abandoned plan to produce a free encyclopedia, began to discuss with Larry Sanger ways of supplementing his brainchild Nupedia with a more open system of contributions. The upshot was Nupedia’s first wiki, which went online in January 2000. Within three years, Wikipedia was scoring 2–3 billion hits a month.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

Because human being as such is terrifically mutable— especially on an anti-essentialist, poststructuralist account like the one endorsed here—there is little doubt that the more we imagine ourselves to be like computers, the more computer-like we will become; conversely, the more we imagine computers can take over sociopolitical functions, the more we will give up our own influence over those phenomena—and the more they will pass into the domain of exactly the powerful agents (states, transnational corporations, and capital itself) that already dominate so much of social life. I agree with the efforts of critics like Alex Galloway and McKenzie Wark and digital activists like Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Eric Raymond, and Jimmy Wales, that those of us involved in the creation of computer resources need to keep agitating not merely for open source and free software, but also against the development of regimes of corporate ownership not merely of “intellectual property” but of what T The Cultural Logic of Computation p 222 must be understood as simultaneously inventions and discoveries.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

They’re not creating the content they distribute—that’s done by publishers in the case of search engines, or by individual members in the case of social networks. Rather, they’re simply gathering the information and arranging it in a useful form. This view, tirelessly promoted by Google—and used by the company as a defense in the Costeja case—has been embraced by much of the public. It has become the default view. When Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, in criticizing the European court’s decision, said, “Google just helps us to find the things that are online,” he was not only mouthing the company line, he was expressing the popular conception of internet businesses. The court took a different view. Online aggregation is not a neutral act, it ruled, but a transformative one.


pages: 571 words: 106,255

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

Unlike highly theoretical, inconsequential, and esoteric modern academic research that is read by nobody, the 11 pages of this paper continue to be read widely 70 years after its publication, and have had a lasting impact on the lives and businesses of many people worldwide, perhaps none as significant as its role in the founding of one of the most important websites on the Internet, and the largest single body of knowledge assembled in human history. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, has stated that the idea for establishing Wikipedia came to him after he read this paper by Hayek and his explanation of knowledge. Hayek explained that contrary to popular and elementary treatments of the topic, the economic problem is not merely the problem of allocating resources and products, but more accurately, the problem of allocating them using knowledge that is not given in its totality to any single individual or entity.


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 both went to Montessori School,” Page said, “and I think it was part of that training of . . . questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a bit differently.” Montessori schools use games to teach children how to discover knowledge. It’s perhaps no accident then that Montessori alums include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Sims video game creator Will Wright, and rap mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. Other entrepreneurs with educational backgrounds in art, design, and music where play is intrinsic to learning have founded a whole slew of new companies, including Kickstarter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Vimeo, Android, and, of course, Apple.


Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

I got to thinking that if visual art is largely about space, then writing is largely about time—so then maybe people collect books differently than they do art. Do they? No, they don’t. Book hoarding tends to be just as intense as art hoarding, if not worse. It’s called bibliomania and, like generic hoarding, is also a recognized psychological issue. Enter Wikipedia once again (and thank you, Jimmy Wales [1966–]): “Bibliomania is a disorder involving the collecting or hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged. It is one of several psychological disorders associated with books, such as bibliophagy (book eating) or bibliokleptomania (book thievery).” Bibliomania, though, is almost universally viewed as quirky and cute, the way kunstmania (my coinage) is seen as glamorous and cool in a Bond villain kind of way.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

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

“All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent,” said Dave Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth. That is a formula for paralysis. (I can imagine Dave responding, “A little paralysis might do a world of good about now.”) • Hear now “The Fable of the Steak Knives,” as told by the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. His software engineers were spending a lot of their time imagining problems that would occur on Wikipedia and then devising software solutions to head off the problems. He explained why that is the wrong approach:You want to design a restaurant, and you think to yourself, “Well, in this restaurant we’re going to be serving steak.


pages: 397 words: 110,130

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

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

It turns out that the type of people in the group and the way they interact spell the difference between success and failure. Wikipedia is perhaps the most famous collaborative project. The real secret to its success, though, isn’t merely its millions of volunteers. It is, as communications professor Joseph Reagle dubs it, the culture of “good faith collaboration” that Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales labored to put in place—a commitment to Quaker-level civility. Not long after launching Wikipedia, Wales penned an open letter to all potential contributors (by which he meant the entire planet), arguing that the project would only work if the contributors struggled constantly to remain polite to one another.


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

Throughout their complicated legal ordeal, including one conviction, its overturning by a second court, and another conviction, these self-appointed editors continually revised the page to eliminate any potentially exculpating evidence and to emphasize the likelihood of guilt. The controversy over the entry grew so intense that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales got involved. Wales studied the matter and issued a statement: “I just read the entire article from top to bottom, and I have concerns that most serious criticism of the trial from reliable sources has been excluded or presented in a negative fashion.” Shortly thereafter, he wrote, “I am concerned that, since I raised the issue, even I have been attacked as being something like a ‘conspiracy theorist.’”


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

Lakhman, ‘Mother Russia does a slow dance with the net’, The New York Times, 7 October 1997, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/euro/100797euro.html 39Soldatov and Borogan, p. 52. 40Soldatov and Borogan, pp. 65–6. 41Soldatov and Borogan, p. 89. Chapter 23 1‘Pavel Durov in conversation with Jimmy Wales’ [video], DLD12, 24 January 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHd4HbOLYM 2R. Hutt, ‘The world’s most popular social networks, mapped’, World Economic Forum, 20 March 2017, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/03/most-popular-social-networks-mapped/ 3E. Avriel, ‘The richest Israelis got NIS 10 billion richer in 2013’, Haaretz, 5 June 2013, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/.premium-israel-s-super-rich-really-are-different-1.5273638 4C.


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

At the start of the twentieth century, Britannica was—ironically, given its name—acquired by an American firm and continued to grow in eminence, with contributing authors including Nobel Prize winners such as Milton Friedman and Albert Einstein. With the advent of the internet, it was only natural that Britannica would go online. In 2012, the print version was discontinued, and now only digital versions are sold. Presaging the demise of Britannica’s print run, in January 2001 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, inspired by the open-source software movement, created Wikipedia, an organically grown online encyclopedia. Wikipedia was meant to provide a free, up-to-date source of information built by the user community and—in contrast to sources such as Britannica—free from the control of a central authority.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

There has been a tremendous burst of nonprofit and noncommercial Internet sites and free or open software and applications—Yochai Benkler puts the number in the thousands—that have become a central part of the digital realm as experienced by many online.49 Wikipedia is the most striking example. As John Naughton puts it, amateurs “have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced.”50 Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales understood from the outset that it could not be credible and successful if it was commercial, and Wikipedia still has a stance toward advertising that conjures up the Net’s salad days.51 At their best, these noncommercial cooperative ventures hark back to what Internet celebrants have most extolled about the technology’s virtues and potential.52 The most prominent of these developments have found a niche that sits comfortably with the dominant commercial players.


pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

As it is the fifth most visited site on the Internet, that means it leaves about $150 million on the table every year.29 As a believer in Wikipedia, and the values of Wikipedians, this is a hard fact for me to swallow. The good (at least from my perspective) that could be done with $150 million a year is not trivial. So what is the good that the world gets in exchange for Wikipedia’s abstemiousness? As Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, described it to me, “[W]e do care that… the general public looks to Wikipedia in all of its glories and all of its flaws, which are numerous of course. But the one thing they don’t say is, ‘Well, I don’t trust Wikipedia because it’s all basically advertising fluff.’ ”30 So the Wikipedia community spends $150 million each year to secure the site’s independence from apparent commercial bias.


pages: 457 words: 126,996

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

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

In the end, CBS News described the number of participants as “staggering”: 4.5 million people signed a petition circulated by Google; 350,000 citizens wrote to their representatives via SopaStrike.com and AmericanCensorship.org; and over 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets were written on January 18.11 An online White House petition garnered 103,785 names; in its response to the petition, the government officially announced the bill’s demise: “Moving forward, we will continue to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis on legislation that provides new tools needed in the global fight against piracy and counterfeiting, while vigorously defending an open Internet based on the values of free expression, privacy, security and innovation.”12 Corporate giants like Google, respected Internet personalities like Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, and civil liberties organizations like the EFF were all integral to the victory. But the grassroots geek and hacker contingent was also present—including, of course, Anonymous. They churned out videos and propaganda posters, and provided constant updates on several prominent Twitter accounts. When the blackout ended, corporate players naturally receded from the limelight.


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

It is held annually in Austin, Texas. Haven’t heard of SXSW? Have you heard of Twitter? Of course . . . Well, Twitter wasn’t launched at SXSW, but its “buzz” and rapid growth are often attributed to its appearance at SXSW in 2007. Foursquare launched at SXSW, along with a bunch of other start-ups and apps. In 2006, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Craig Newmark from Craigslist were the primary speakers. In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook took the stage, and in 2010, Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, was the primary personality on the interactive stage. Figure 8.11: PanelPicker at SXSW is a great example of structured crowdsourcing (Credit: SXSW) However, SXSW uses crowdsourcing to select most of the topics for its interactive week.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

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

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

I said no over and over, and as time went by, he became angrier and angrier with me. I was working with an arts organization during those years, and we ended up kicking him out of our machine shop,” she wrote. “Jake had sexually targeted a female friend of mine. Her and I were going to a large tech party in December; I think it was a Wikimedia party, and Jimmy Wales was there. My friend was feeling hunted by Jake, and early in the party she said he was trying to isolate her, and told me she was scared. She is not a big or strong girl, nor is she loud, and he was trying to convince her to go into a stairwell with him. The convincing turned into trying to pull her away physically, grabbing at her hands.”


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Open source is a great organizing principle but it’s not a modus operandi for moving forward. As much as open source has transformed many institutions in society, we still need coordination, organization, and leadership. Open source projects like Wikipedia and Linux, despite their meritocratic principles, still have benevolent dictators in Jimmy Wales and Linus Torvalds. To his credit, Satoshi Nakamoto aligned stakeholder incentives by coding principles of distributed power, networked integrity, indisputable value, stakeholder rights (including privacy, security, and ownership), and inclusiveness into the technology. As a result, the technology has been able to thrive in the early years, blossoming into the ecosystem we know today.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

Steve Jobs launched Apple’s iTunes application, and within seven years, iPod owners had purchased and downloaded five billion songs. Already reeling from piracy, the big four music companies felt compelled to allow individual songs to be sold at a price Apple chose (ninety-nine cents), inevitably undermining the sale of entire CDs, the centerpiece of their business model. That same January, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia. Within seven years this nonprofit effort would contain ten million entries in 253 languages, changing the way people gathered information. Wikipedia and iTunes were reminders, as if any were needed, that we had entered the dawn of a new digital democracy that granted more power to individuals.


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

Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program, December 1974, Network Working Group, Request for Comments 65 (RFC65), https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675. 2. Most often cited as among these politicians and business elites are Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, and Peter Theil. But even Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is listed as having been interested in Rand. Not all information on Wikipedia is reliable information! “List of People Influenced by Ayn Rand,” Wikipedia, accessed 2 July 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_influenced_by_Ayn_Rand. 3. René Descartes, “Letter to Balzac,” 5 May 1631, in Selected Correspondence, 22, http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1619_1.pdf. 4.


pages: 470 words: 128,328

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, citizen journalism, clean water, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, G4S, game design, hedonic treadmill, hobby farmer, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, mass immigration, Merlin Mann, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, science of happiness, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart meter, Stewart Brand, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, We are as Gods, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and coeditor of Boing Boing “Jane McGonigal’s groundbreaking research offers a surprising solution to how we can build stronger communities and collaborate at extreme scales: by playing bigger and better games. And no one knows more about how to design world-changing games than McGonigal. Reality Is Broken is essential reading for anyone who wants to play a hand in inventing a better future.” —Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia “Wonder why we love games? McGonigal has written the best take yet on the deep joys of play—and how to use that force for good. Reality Is Broken is a rare beast: a book that’s both philosophically rich and completely practical. It will change the way you see the world.”


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

I’d say Maria Bartiromo and Jim Cramer are two that actually really do, I think, have impact because they’re both extremely well plugged in, and because everything’s happening in real time.” A former U.S. official who served in the top tier of government for over four decades recalled listening to a panel of tech experts, including Google head Eric Schmidt, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, then chief of Yahoo! Terry Semel, CEO of InterActiveCorp Barry Diller, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. “An amazing panel, and they all were talking about these technologies, and everyone was on the edge of their seats. And I thought this was all irrelevant, that none of these guys were the actual inventors. They’re the CEOs who are administering them. The next generation is being invented now by some nerd, who can’t get a date, in his garage.


pages: 514 words: 152,903

The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

Once again, the technologists—and the technocratic agencies they are enlisted to support—are presented as objective, independent, and free of any ideological leanings. Nowhere do we learn that Tim O’Reilly runs a profitable corporation that might stand to benefit from the government’s embrace of open-data platforms, or that Craig Newmark is a committed cyber-libertarian who used to worship Ayn Rand. Or that Jimmy Wales, who is advising the British government, is so enthralled with Rand and objectivism that he named his daughter after one of the characters in a Rand novel. Nor do the Khannas tell us that the public embrace of “open-data platforms” is often accompanied by an increase in government secrecy or a growing reluctance to fund public journalism.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

And back in 2008 Britannica had announced that it would begin to accept unsolicited user content, which, upon acceptance by Britannica editors, would be published on a dedicated portion of the Britannica website. Shifting to exist only online and accepting some content from users represented tacit acceptance of the model of what had become the most popular encyclopedia in the world: Wikipedia. Wikipedia (combining the Hawaiian term wiki, meaning “quick,” with encyclopedia) was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. Wikipedia is based almost exclusively on volunteer labor—it is essentially a platform for user writing, reading, and editing. This model facilitated the very low-cost creation of a comprehensive encyclopedia in short order, sharply contrasting with the expensive, multi-decade efforts involved in producing print encyclopedias.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The collision between the two in the 1990s brought the power of the individual computer together with the power of huge networks: people sitting at their desks (or, with the arrival of laptops and smartphones, sitting in Starbucks) could search the world’s information and communicate with other internet users. Entrepreneurs designed new browsers to “read” the web. Jim Clark became the first internet billionaire when he took Netscape public in August 1995. Jimmy Wales created the world’s biggest encyclopedia in the form of Wikipedia: written entirely by volunteers, it constantly evolved as people posted improvements and weeded out errors. Google was the most successful of the new generation of internet companies, and a perfect example of what makes Silicon Valley so special.


pages: 527 words: 147,690

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

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

Steve Jobs remains secure in his perch as an industry icon, his example now posthumous and unimpeachable. The industry’s triumphant individualism has been augmented by the introduction of Ayn Rand as Silicon Valley’s de facto house philosopher; her atavistic arguments for the virtues of selfishness and unfettered enterprise have found supporters from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales to Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Unabashed cyber-libertarianism, combined with an avaricious and wholly unconflicted brand of consumerism, permeates America’s digital elite. Evgeny Morozov, a fierce critic of the industry, highlighted two important strains of belief in his recent books: the congenital utopianism of Silicon Valley moguls and their attendant faith in technological solutionism.


pages: 495 words: 144,101

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Her novels touted anew by Rush Limbaugh, Rand was once more a foundation of the right-wing worldview.10 Even as she was reclaimed by her most avid fans, Rand’s work transcended contemporary politics. One of the many ironies of Rand’s career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans is Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seem to both embody and defy Rand’s beliefs.


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

If you vetted material in advance of publication you assumed a greater legal responsibility for the posting because it implied some sort of endorsement. Did we trust 23-year-old mods to make fine judgements about defamation or to be sufficiently attuned to language around Israel/Palestine? It seemed inevitable that we would have to hire more moderators – maybe many of them. At one point – inspired by talking to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia – we toyed with the idea of training an army of Guardian readers to be volunteer (or even paid) moderators. The union wrinkled their noses. There still seemed mileage in a ‘traffic light’ system of ranking users by quality or, alternatively, nuisance value. Reddit had devised a system of notional ‘rewards’ granting greater or lesser visibility.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

One Redditor condemned GoDaddy for lobbying to support the acts, saying he would be transferring his fifty-one domain names and suggesting that other Redditors use December 29 as Move Your Domain Day. GoDaddy withdrew its support for the bills that day. By the turn of the new year, moderators were pondering more significant protests, such as putting up banners over their subreddits or blacking them out. Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia had proposed an official online blackout date. On r/AskReddit, moderator andrewsmith1986 wrote, “Let’s discuss SOPA, Askreddit.” He explained that he’d been discussing with other moderators whether they should shut down for twenty-four hours. “We aren’t admins so we cannot close all of Reddit but we can shut down our respective playgrounds.”


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Communities that are creating things develop their own rules (written and unwritten) that govern issues such as communications, appropriation, and the form and manner of contribution. The Wikipedia community, for example, has so far resisted the idea of advertising, and it has become such a potent force that Jimmy Wales has backed away from adopting an advertising model, despite the potential for a windfall. In the Linux community, Torvalds is careful to respond constructively to criticisms from other developers. This is typical of many open-source communities. Issues are debated publicly on e-mail lists and Web sites, which helps build consensus for final decisions on, for example, which code and features to include in official releases of programs.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

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

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

Or take Wikipedia, which is easily the solutionists’ favorite template for rebuilding the world; books with titles like Wikinomics and Wiki Government are a testament to the role this one website plays in solutionists’ imaginations. The problem with using Wikipedia as a model is that nobody—not even its founder, Jimmy Wales—really knows how it works. To assume that we can distill life-changing lessons from it and then apply them in completely different fields seems arrogant to say the least. Worst of all, Wikipedia is itself subject to many myths, which might result in Wikipedia-inspired solutions that misrepresent its spirit.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

As we shall see, some of the solutions can themselves be peer produced, and some solutions are emerging as a function of the speed of computation and communication, which enables more efficient technological solutions. 140 Encyclopedic and almanac-type information emerges on the Web out of the coordinate but entirely independent action of millions of users. This type of information also provides the focus on one of the most successful collaborative enterprises that has developed in the first five years of the twenty-first century, Wikipedia. Wikipedia was founded by an Internet entrepreneur, Jimmy Wales. Wales had earlier tried to organize an encyclopedia named Nupedia, which was built on a traditional production model, but whose outputs were to be released freely: its contributors were to be PhDs, using a formal, peer-reviewed process. That project appears to have failed to generate a sufficient number of high-quality contributions, but its outputs were used in Wikipedia as the seeds for a radically new form of encyclopedia writing.