Howard Rheingold

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

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

Because of the sharp focus on communications and information technologies at the highest levels of Japan's industrial policymakers, the question of Japan and the Net is perhaps the most important critical uncertainty in the shaping of tomorrow's Worldnet read on to 26-04-2012 21:45 howard rheingold's | the virtual community http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/6.html Chapter Seven: Japan and the Net Return to rheingold's brainstorms 22 de 22 26-04-2012 21:45 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 1 de 25 the electronic version of The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold "When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,' even though a more accurate title might be: 'People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'"

Many countries will soon face the conflict that Japanese and French telecommunications planners must address: to refuse to join the Net in its widest sense and face being left behind, or to join the Net and face social upheaval. read on to Chapter Nine: Electronic Frontiers 26-04-2012 21:45 howard rheingold's | the virtual community http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/8.html and Online Activists Return to rheingold's brainstorms 22 de 22 26-04-2012 21:45 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 1 de 36 the electronic version of The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold "When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,' even though a more accurate title might be: 'People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'"

howard rheingold's | the virtual community 1 de 18 the electronic version of The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold "When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, 'The Virtual Community,' even though a more accurate title might be: 'People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'" HLR http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html Introduction Chapter One: The Heart of the WELL Chapter Two: Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net Chapter Four: Grassroots Groupminds Chapter Five: Multi-user Dungeons and Alternate Identities Chapter Six: Real-time Tribes Chapter Seven: Japan and the Net Chapter Eight: Telematique and Messageries Rose: A Tale of Two Virtual Communities Chapter Nine: Electronic Frontiers and Online Activists Chapter Ten: Disinformocracy Bibliography We know the rules of community; we know the healing effect of community in terms of individual lives.


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

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

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Coercion, Media Virus, and Nothing Sacred, Professor, New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program “Howard Rheingold has always been about ten years ahead of the rest of us, but Smart Mobs may be his most visionary book yet. Anyone interested in the future of technology and society will find this book fascinating reading.” Steven Johnson, author of Emergence and Interface Culture “Smart Mobs is hot on the trail of a technology that is hot-wiring social networks around the world, with unexpected and fascinating implications for all of us.” David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto “I congratulate Howard Rheingold on his very thorough summary of one of the greatest transformations of human society—perhaps even more profound than the development of writing.”

Sir Arthur C. Clarke SMART MOBS The Next Social Revolution HOWARD RHEINGOLD To Hannah Geraldine Rheingold, my mother and teacher, who gave me permission to color outside the lines: Thank you, Mom. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and where Perseus Publishing was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters. Copyright © 2002 by Howard Rheingold All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

<http://nooper.co.jp/showcase/gallery.php?s=4&l=en> (24 January 2002). 2. Karlin Lillington, “Mobile but Without Direction,” Wired News, 21 September 2000, <http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,38921,00.html> (28 January 2002). 3. Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). 4. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993). 5. Arturo Bariuad, “Text Messaging Becomes a Menace in the Philippines,” Straits Times, 3 March 2001. 6. Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, “Dialing for Dollars,” Time Magazine 157 (22), 4 June 2001, <http://www.timeinc.net/time/interactive/business/money_np.html> (4 February 2002).


pages: 611 words: 188,732

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

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

Almost all the things that we’ve now come to see as a marked characteristic of this time emerged then, and we were dealing with it for the first time. Howard Rheingold: And in some ways it was a forecast of not just the best of what online community could offer but also the worst. You know, people who just like to snipe at you. Kevin Kelly: This was years into it but at one point Stewart basically quit The Well, because as the leader of this enterprise—he really wasn’t the leader but as the figurehead—he was just getting trolled. He was getting pounded and harassed. And it was no fun and so he thought, No fun? I’m out of here. Howard Rheingold: Stewart got irritated, and who can blame him? He created the place.

But it ossified… Fabrice Florin: And a lot of the intellectuals that were sharing ideas on The Well went on to branch out into different areas. But you can really trace back a lot of the origins of this new movement to The Well. A lot of the folks were there. Howard Rheingold: I remember I got a friend request on Facebook early from Steve Case and I said, “I know who you are. But why do you want to friend me?” And he said, “Oh, I lurked on The Well from the beginning.” So I think, yes, it did influence things. Larry Brilliant: Steve Jobs was on it—Steve had a fake name and he lurked. Howard Rheingold: Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Craig Newmark: They would all say that they were informed by their experiences on The Well. Fabrice Florin: The Well was the birthplace of the online community.

Tom Zimmerman: Then Young Harvill and Young’s wife, Ann, started working on these bodysuits instrumenting the whole body. David Levitt: People, of course, like new technology and they quickly said, “What are the sexual possibilities?” Howard Rheingold: A lot of it was, “Okay, we’re going to have sex at a distance through computers somehow.” David Levitt: The term teledildonics quickly became common. Howard Rheingold: I got so much weird attention for that one word. There were, I’ll tell you, journalists from all over the world wanted to talk about teledildonics for a little while. It was part of this cyberculture vision, the Mondo 2000 vision.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

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

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

Basch, “Living on the Net.” 34. Rheingold, “Slice of My Life in My Virtual Community,” 425; Howard Rheingold, “Da WELL Been Beddy, Beddy Goot to Me,” post 6, December 7, 1989. 35. humdog, “Pandora’s Vox,” 438 –39; Coate, “Cyberspace Innkeeping.” Marc Smith notes that in 1992, 50 percent of the contributions to the WELL came from 70 people—approximately 1 percent of the overall membership. See Smith, “Voices from the WELL,” 29. 36. Coate, “Cyberspace Innkeeping”; Basch, interview, August 8, 2004. 37. Howard Rheingold, interview, July 20, 2001; John Perry Barlow, interview, August 25, 2003; John Coate, interview, August 25, 2003. 38.

For all of their help, I’d like to thank Bob Albrecht, Dennis Allison, John Perry Barlow, Reva Basch, Keith Britton, Lois Britton, John Brockman, Michael Callahan, John Coate, Doug Engelbart, Bill English, Lee Felsenstein, Cliff Figallo, David Frohman, Asha Greer (formerly Barbara Durkee), Katie Hafner, Paul Hawken, Alan Kay, Kevin Kelly, Art Kleiner, Butler Lampson, Liza Loop, John Markoff, Jane Metcalfe, David Millen, Nancy Murphy, Richard Raymond, Danica Remy, Howard Rheingold, Louis Rossetto, Peter Schwartz, Mark Stahlman, Gerd Stern, Shirley Streshinsky, Larry Tesler, Paul Tough, Jim Warren, and Gail Williams. Most of all, I thank Stewart Brand, whose openness to this project has been a lesson in itself. I am also grateful to a number of people and institutions for permission to quote conversations and to reprint previously published material.

In 1968 Brand brought members of the two worlds together in the pages of one of the defining documents of the era, the Whole Earth Catalog. In 1985 he gathered them again on what would become perhaps the most influential computer conferencing system of the decade, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or the WELL. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brand and other members of the network, including Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and John Perry Barlow, became some of the most-quoted spokespeople for a countercultural vision of the Internet. In 1993 all would help create the magazine that, more than any other, depicted the emerging digital world in revolutionary terms: Wired. By recounting their history, this book reveals and helps to explain a complex intertwining of two legacies: that of the military-industrial research culture, which first appeared during World War II and flourished across the cold war era, and that of the American counterculture.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

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

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

Justin Hall, “Justin’s Links,” http://www.links.net/vita/web/story.html. 57. Author’s interviews with Justin Hall, Joan Hall. 58. Author’s interview with Howard Rheingold; Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (Perseus, 1993). 59. Author’s interviews with Justin Hall, Howard Rheingold; Gary Wolf, Wired—A Romance (Random House, 2003), 110. 60. Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything (Crown, 2009), 24. 61. Rosenberg, Say Everything, 44. 62. Justin Hall, “Exposing Myself,” posted by Howard Rheingold, http://www.well.com/~hlr/jam/justin/justinexposing.html. 63. Author’s interview with Arianna Huffington. 64. Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think (Penguin, 2013), 68. 65.

The display of his computer terminal was projected onto a twenty-foot screen behind him. “I hope you’ll go along with this rather unusual setting,” he began. He wore a microphone headset that a fighter pilot might use, and he spoke in a monotone, like a computer-generated voice trying to emulate the narrator in an old movie newsreel. Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture guru and chronicler, later said that he looked like “the Chuck Yeager of the computer cosmos, calmly putting the new system through its paces and reporting back to his astonished earthbound audience in a calm, quiet voice.”40 “If in your office,” Engelbart intoned, “you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you have, how much value could you derive from that?”

By 1987 the topics of its online forums, known as conferences, ranged from the Grateful Dead (the most popular) to UNIX programming, from art to parenting, aliens to software design. There was minimal hierarchy or control, so it evolved in a collaborative way. That made it both an addictive experience and a fascinating social experiment. Whole books were written about it, including ones by the influential tech chroniclers Howard Rheingold and Katie Hafner. “Just being on The Well, talking with people you might not consider befriending in any other context, was its own seduction,” Hafner wrote.7 In his book Rheingold explained, “It’s like having the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools waiting to take home and fresh graffiti and letters, except instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer, and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are.”8 When Rheingold discovered that his two-year-old daughter had a tick in her scalp, he found out how to treat it from a doctor on The WELL before his own physician had called him back.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

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

For example, an anti-draft crowd in New York City in 1863 turned into a mob when it threw stones, started fires, and looted. Before too long, it had lynched black men and torched the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue.10 So, it’s interesting that in the past few years we’ve grabbed onto the terms “crowd” and “mob” and applied them as positive characterizations of Internet sociality. Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs in 2003 applied the term to people connected through instantaneous digital communication,11 and James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds12 in 2004 pointed to ways that unassociated groups of people can come up with more accurate answers than can individuals. Both books—each excellent—had titles that played upon our negative feelings about groups of people who are sharing space.

If someone becomes uncivil beyond the norms for the group, the moderator may step in. On occasion, people are banned from the discussion for a cooling-off period—the conversational equivalent of a time-out. If the conversation steers off course, the moderator may remind people what they are there to discuss. Howard Rheingold, one of the founding parents of online discussion and a denizen of The WELL since 1985, urges community forums to have moderators. Even the mere presence of moderators—even if they never moderate a single posting—is enough to keep out the trolls, he says.13 Moderation does not have to occur through designated moderators.

Given the complexity and magnitude of the Net, it is remarkably easy to learn how to operate it. But knowing how to click buttons is the least of our concerns. The second task—learning how to evaluate knowledge claims—is never-ending. Now that the temple priests don’t control what we encounter, we need those critical-thinking skills more than ever. The Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold talks about these as “literacies.” For example, we need to get better at distinguishing lying crap from well-documented conclusions, becoming more open to new ideas, and learning how to participate in a multi-way, multi-cultural discussion.18 The journalist Dan Gillmor has been writing about the skills citizens need to make sense of—and participate in—the new media ecology.19 Ethan Zuckerman has been thinking deeply about our tendency toward a smug homophily (our preference for others like us) and about structural ways we might get ourselves interested in something other than our own echoes.20 We are just at the beginning of figuring out what behaviors and attitudes lead to a smarter network.


They Have a Word for It A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases-Sarabande Books (2000) by Howard Rheingold

Ayatollah Khomeini, clockwork universe, Easter island, fudge factor, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, junk bonds, Kula ring, Lao Tzu, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, The Home Computer Revolution, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons

A spirited r·cfcrcnn· book g uar«nteed to enrich your vocabulary, op e n )'Otrr eye, , a nd expa nd )0111· 1n i11d. T he writer's perfect tool. C"{J1,ry Have a W,ml Jori/ takes the reader to the far corners of the globe to discover words and phrases for which there arc no cquiva. . lcnts in English. From th e North Pole to New Guinea, from Ea5ter Island to libet, Howard Rheingold explores more than forty familiar and obscure languages to d iscover genuinely usefu l (rather than simply odd) words that can open up new ways of understanding and experiencing life. For example. th~ Japanese sec beauty in places we d o not, and describe their perceptions with great subtlety.

The Iroquois on.dimumk will bring you in.sight into your innermost desires; the Hawai ian ho'opo,iqpt,110 may teach you someth ing about resolving your family problems; and an Arabic word, istiqo,0,, will give you practical assistance in ,nalting your drea,ns ,ool'k. Sarahande ~ Books Re fe re nce/ Humor/ Language THEY HAVE A WORD FOR IT ~ ALSO BY HOWARD RHEINGOLD Talking Tech: A Conversational Guide to Science and Technology with Howard Levine, 1982 The New Technology Coluring Book with Rita Aero and Scott Bartlett Higher Creativity with Willis Harman, 1984 Tools for Thought, 1985 The Cognitive Connection: Thought and Language in Man and Machine with Howard Levine, 1986 They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatab/,e Words and Phrases, 1988 Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind, 1988 Expluring the World of Lucid Dreaming with Stephen LaBerge, 1991 Virtual R.eality, 1991 The Virtual Community: Homestanding at the E/,ectronic Frontier, 1993 The Mil/,ennium lVho/,e Earth Catalog, 1994 ___ave a for It A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases HOWARD RHEING01D Sarabande [stl Books LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY Copyright© 1988 by Howard Rheingold This edition 2000 All rights reserved Reprinted by arrangement with Jeremy Tarcher / Putnam, a member of Penguin/Putnam Inc.

Sarahande ~ Books Re fe re nce/ Humor/ Language THEY HAVE A WORD FOR IT ~ ALSO BY HOWARD RHEINGOLD Talking Tech: A Conversational Guide to Science and Technology with Howard Levine, 1982 The New Technology Coluring Book with Rita Aero and Scott Bartlett Higher Creativity with Willis Harman, 1984 Tools for Thought, 1985 The Cognitive Connection: Thought and Language in Man and Machine with Howard Levine, 1986 They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatab/,e Words and Phrases, 1988 Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind, 1988 Expluring the World of Lucid Dreaming with Stephen LaBerge, 1991 Virtual R.eality, 1991 The Virtual Community: Homestanding at the E/,ectronic Frontier, 1993 The Mil/,ennium lVho/,e Earth Catalog, 1994 ___ave a for It A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases HOWARD RHEING01D Sarabande [stl Books LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY Copyright© 1988 by Howard Rheingold This edition 2000 All rights reserved Reprinted by arrangement with Jeremy Tarcher / Putnam, a member of Penguin/Putnam Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to: Managing Editor Sarabande Books, Inc. 2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200 Louisville, KY 40205 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Rheingold, Howard.


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

But right now, these big effects dominate our current and near-term landscape. In one sense, these three shifts—infinite memory, dot connecting, explosive publishing—are screamingly obvious to anyone who’s ever used a computer. Yet they also somehow constantly surprise us by producing ever-new “tools for thought” (to use the writer Howard Rheingold’s lovely phrase) that upend our mental habits in ways we never expected and often don’t apprehend even as they take hold. Indeed, these phenomena have already woven themselves so deeply into the lives of people around the globe that it’s difficult to stand back and take account of how much things have changed and why.

But I see them start to get really paranoid. They keep on asking, ‘Wait, wait, is this a content farm?’ And this is what you want. Most people in their lives aren’t going to be writing term papers, but they’re going to be looking for information their whole lives.” Crap detection, to use Howard Rheingold’s phrase, isn’t easy. Among other things, it’s easier to do if you already know about the world. For instance, Harris found that students had difficulty distinguishing a left-wing parody of the World Trade Organization’s Web site from the real WTO site. Why? Because you need to understand why someone would want to parody the WTO in the first place—knowledge the average eighth grader does not yet possess.

I’m grateful to everyone who gave me a glimpse into their lives. Behind the scenes, there are also dozens more who offered ideas, conversation, and feedback that shaped my work. That includes Tricia Wang, An Xiao Mina, Debbie Chachra, Liz Lawley, Zeynep Tufekci, Clay Shirky, Brooke Gladstone, Tom Igoe, Max Whitney, Terri Senft, Misha Tepper, Fred Kaplan, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Liz Lawley, Nick Bilton, Gary Marcus, Heidi Siwak, Ann Blair, Eli Pariser, Ethan Zuckerman, Ian Bogost, Fred Benenson, Heather Gold, Douglas Rushkoff, Rebecca MacKinnon, Cory Menscher, Mark Belinsky, Quinn Norton, Anil Dash, Cathy Marshall, Elizabeth Stock, Philip Howard, Denise Hand, Robin Sloan, Tim Carmody, Don Tapscott, Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly, Nina Khosla, Laura Fitton, Jillian York, Hilary Mason, Craig Mod, Bre Pettis, Glenn Kelman, Susan Cain, Noah Schachtman, Irin Carmon, Matthew Battles, Cathy Davidson, Linda Stone, Jess Kimball, Phil Libin, Kati London, Jim Marggraff, Dan Zalewski, Sasha Nemecek, Laura Miller, Brian McNely, Duncan Watts, Kenyatta Cheese, Nora Abousteit, Deanna Zandt, David Wallis, Nick Denton, Alissa Quart, Stan James, Andrew Hearst, Gary Stager, Evan Selinger, Steven Demmler, and Vint Cerf.


pages: 201 words: 21,180

Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

barriers to entry, classic study, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fail fast, Howard Rheingold, late fees, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommendation engine, social bookmarking, social software, social web, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Seth Godin, who consistently publishes small blog posts that have a big impact, including this one (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/2007/04/ not_settling.html), which was the final push I needed to pursue my passion and go out on my own. Clay Shirky, whose wonderful writing about the web got me blogging in the first place. Howard Rheingold, whom I rediscovered and found incredibly prescient on all social topics related to the web. Luke Wroblewski, who is a wonderful writer and teacher of design. Steve Krug, whose book Don’t Make Me Think set the bar for books in the web genre. iv Andrew Chak, whose under-appreciated book Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites was a big influence in my thinking about social design.

Designing an effective interface has always been tough, even when we were merely designing interfaces for one person to interact with content we controlled. But when we add the social aspect, things get even more difficult. Though we can see glimpses, we have little understanding of the overall effect of social software going forward. In 1985, Howard Rheingold, writing about the nascent personal computer revolution, foresaw social software’s massive challenge and potential for change: Nobody knows whether this will turn out to be the best or the worst thing the human race has done for itself, because the outcome of this empowerment will depend in large part on how we react to it and what we choose to do with it.

The human mind is not going to be replaced by a machine, at least not in the foreseeable future, but there is little doubt that the worldwide availability of fantasy amplifiers, intellectual toolkits, and interactive electronic communities will change the way people think, learn, and communicate.4 Just as humans are social, so our software must be as well. 4 Howard Rheingold’s books are wonderful: Tools for Thought (http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/) and Virtual Communities (http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/). Though they were written in 1985 and 1993, respectively, they were at least a decade ahead of their time. Probably two. 9 10 DESIGNING FOR THE SOCIAL WEB Social Software is a Forced Move The person shopping at Amazon in the opening of this chapter was relying on social connections to help her make a shopping decision.


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

In 1999 the Falun Gong, a Chinese religious organization, astonished and terrified the Chinese government by assembling ten thousand people in Zhongnanhai, a secure complex in Beijing where many of China’s leaders reside. The gathering was peaceful, but its execution stunned the Chinese government, as it had had no idea it was coming, having been organized by text messages via mobile phones. Howard Rheingold, in Smart Mobs, documented an event in the Philippines in which thousands of outraged citizens quickly coordinated a protest in Manila after President Joseph Estrada’s government voted to weaken his corruption trial. The rapid assembly of thousands of Filipinos in the streets, who had forwarded text messages advising people where to go and exhorting them to “Wear Blck,” convinced the government to let the trial go forward, thereby dooming Estrada.

., no budget from donations—but the unpredictability of that kind of effort makes it a signal of a kind of commitment that is hard for any ordinary membership organization to produce effectively. The story of the rapidly coordinated protest by ordinary citizens is one of the most durable stories we have about social media. Since Howard Rheingold’s descriptions of the political protest in the Philippines coordinated by text message, we’ve had countless examples, from the Belarusian flash mob kids to the Latino high school students in LA to the HSBC protesters in the UK. Despite the number of stories about collective action, though, they have one thing in common: they all rely on “stop energy,” on an attempt to get some other organization or group to capitulate to the demands of the collected group.

Small Groups as Complex Systems: Formation, Coordination, Development, and Adaptation, by Holly Arrow, Joseph E. McGrath, and Jennifer L. Berdahl, Sage (2000) provides a good review of work on small group dynamics, and Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation, by Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich, Oxford University Press (2007) provides a one for larger groups. Howard Rheingold, whose The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Basic Books (1993) was a critical early work on online community, is working on a multiyear study of cooperation in collaboration (www.cooperationcommons.com) with the Institute for the Future. Page 51: “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (3859), December 13, 1968, pp. 682-83.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

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

The stunned organizers received sixty abstracts from artists, technologists, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, architects, and sociologists, many of them WELL members, some from as far as Sweden and Italy. And the organizers were amazed again when these people actually arrived in Austin by plane, fresh out of cyberspace. Several of the fifty attendees would go on and shape the emerging debate, including the colorful author Howard Rheingold and science fiction legend Bruce Sterling, best known for Mirrorshades, an anthology that defined the cyberpunk genre. John Perry Barlow was one of the first to respond. He mailed in an abstract titled “Music in Cyberspace.” The cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist pointed out that his band had long been trying to blur the line between audience and performer.

Henceforth, Barlow and Rheingold and others would talk about “cyberspace” in metaphoric terms, just as the scholars at the conference had done. The conference volume was one of MIT’s best sellers for several years. Tightly coupling man and machine, of course, retained a nearly irresistible appeal. The most bizarre articulation of cyberspace must be Howard Rheingold’s vision of teledildonics. After hearing Stenger’s wild presentation in Austin, Rheingold articulated his own vision of future sex in the summer of 1990 in Mondo 2000. The first fully functional teledildonics system, Rheingold clarified at the outset, would not be “a fucking machine.” Users did not want to have intercourse with a cold piece of technology; they wanted to make love to other people.

It linked psychedelic drugs, virtual reality, and the rise of computer networks, as this typical illustration shows. The group attending Michael Benedikt’s Cyberconf, May 1990. Of note in this photo are John Perry Barlow (tall in the first row); to Barlow’s left, Sandy Stone; to Barlow’s right, Howard Rheingold, and then gaming theorist Brenda Laurel, followed by Michael and Amelie Benedikt. Behind the Benedikts stands Nicole Stenger, and behind her are Habitat pioneers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer. French virtual-reality artist Nicole Stenger, in VPL gear. Stenger gaveone of the most widely read presentations at Cyberconf: “Mind Isa Leaking Rainbow.”


pages: 407 words: 103,501

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

(Anonymous) 4 spoonman, The WELL, conference on virtual communities (vc.20.65), June 11, 1992. 5 Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (Basic Books, 1991). 6 bluefire (Bob Jacobson), The WELL, conference on virtual reality (vr.85.146), August 15, 1993. 7 The WELL, conference on virtual reality (vr.85.148), August 17, 1993. 8 Art Kleiner, The WELL, conference on virtual reality (vr.47.41), October 2, 1990. 9 Gergen, The Saturated Self, p. 6. 10 Ibid., p. 17. 11 hlr (Howard Rheingold), The WELL, conference on virtual reality (vr.47.351), February 2, 1993. 12 McKenzie Wark, The WELL, conference on virtual reality (vr.47.361), February 3, 1993. 13 hlr (Howard Rheingold), The WELL, conference on virtual reality (vr.47.362), February 3, 1993. 14 James M. Glass, Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World (Cornell University Press, 1993). 15 Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (Basic Books, 1993), p. 192. 16 Ibid., pp. 229–32. 17 See, for example, “Aion: Phenomenology of the Self,” in The Portable Jung, ed.

The mass embrace of hypertext is like the Seinfeld “Betrayal” episode: a cultural form that was once exclusively limited to avant-garde sensibilities, now happily enjoyed by grandmothers and third graders worldwide. I won’t dwell on this point, because the premise that increased interactivity is good for the brain is not a new one. (A number of insightful critics—Kevin Kelly, Douglas Rushkoff, Janet Murray, Howard Rheingold, Henry Jenkins—have made variations on this argument over the past decade or so.) But let me say this much: The rise of the Internet has challenged our minds in three fundamental and related ways: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces, and by creating new channels for social interaction.

Crumb about “Which is the real R. Crumb?” He goes through four pages of incarnations, from successful businessman to street beggar, from media celebrity to gut-gnawing recluse, etc., etc. Then at the end he says: “Which is the real one?” . . . “It all depends on what mood I’m in!” We’re all like that online. 8 Howard Rheingold, the member of the WELL who began the discussion topic, also referred to Gergen’s notion of a “saturated self,” the idea that communication technologies have caused us to “colonize each other’s brains.” Gergen describes us as saturated with the many “voices of humankind—both harmonious and alien.”


pages: 205 words: 18,208

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

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

Barlow later recanted, calling it simply the most important discovery since fire. Nor was he the sole prophet acclaiming an egalitarian realm of unlimited opportunity for all, just around the corner. As the number of users grows geometrically, some anticipate that by 2008 the Net might encompass the entire world population. In his 1993 book Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold called for redefining the word community, since in the near future each sovereign individual may be able to sift among six or more billion souls, sorting by talent or avocation to find those compatible for consorting with at long range, via multimedia telepresence, in voluntary associations of shared interest.

Would another culture put up with the likes of Stewart Brand, always poking at stagnant structures, from state government to the stuffy profession of architecture? Would Steve Jobs or Andrew Grove be billionaires in an economy based on inherited advantage? Where else might happy magicians like Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly be more influential than establishment priests or scientists? Would important power brokers hang on the words of Esther Dyson, Sherry Turkle, and Dorothy Denning if this culture did not value original minds? Listening to such remarkable individuals, one can tell they know how lucky they are.

It is very doubtful in the short term that citizens will accept being hounded for pennies each time they photocopy a clipping, browse a Web page, or crib a brief quote from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to use in a speech before the local rotary club. What might happen if the conduit companies and content owners ever get together? Stranger things have happened. Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community , worries about this possibility when the Internet is commercialized. “If the company that carries the communication also creates the content, are they going to discriminate against competing content?” Rheingold believes they will if they are allowed to. It could be the worst possible combination of both worlds.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

p.186 ‘In another American high school . . .’ ‘3 Juveniles Accused of Sexually Exploiting Female Classmates’, http://www.newschannel5.com/story/21890716/3-juveniles-accused-of-sexually-exploiting-female-classmates. p.187 ‘In his famous 1990 article . . .’ Howard Rheingold, ‘Teledildonics: Reach out and Touch Someone’; http://janefader.com/teledildonics-by-howard-rheingold-mondo-2000-1990/. p.189 ‘“We’re not a community” . . .’ http://twitlonger.com/show/n_1s0rnva, by @thecultofleo. Chapter 7 The Werther Effect p.192 ‘Eighteen per cent of US . . .’ http://www.pewinternet.org/2011/02/28/peer-to-peer-health-care-2/.

For all the social panic about the ubiquity of hard-core porn on the net, there is something quite comforting about this. The net has always been accompanied by utopian dreams of sex without limits, of fantasies without boundaries. In his famous 1990 article about the future of sex in the magazine Mondo 2000, Howard Rheingold argued that ‘the definition of Eros’ would ‘soon be up for grabs’, because everyone will be as beautiful as they want and will be able to have virtual sex with anyone, anywhere. But most people don’t want fantastical sex with robots or supermodels. They want ordinary sex with real people. Yet something about the phrase ‘real girlfriend experience’ bothers me.


Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge PHD

Abraham Maslow, active measures, Albert Einstein, classic study, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, Menlo Park, tacit knowledge, the map is not the territory

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK LaBerge & H. Rheingold, (1990). Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. New York: Ballantine. ISBN 0-345-37410-X Contents The World of Lucid Dreaming p. 1 Preparation for Learning Lucid Dreaming p. 10 Waking Up in the Dream World p. 36 Falling Asleep Consciously p. 60 The Building of Dreams p. 74 Principles and Practice of Lucid Dreaming p. 86 Adventures and Explorations p. 103 Rehearsal for Living p. 114 Creative Problem Solving p. 125 Overcoming Nightmares p. 136 The Healing Dream p. 156 Life Is a Dream: Intimations of a Wider World p. 171 Afterword p. 186 Appendix p. 188 Notes p. 193 Exercises The World of Lucid Dreaming Your present state of consciousness p. 7 Preparation for Learning Lucid Dreaming Cataloging your dreamsigns p. 29 Goal setting for success p. 30 Scheduling time for lucid dreaming p. 32 Progressive relaxation p. 33 Sixty-one-point relaxation p. 34 Waking Up in the Dream World Critical state-testing technique p. 39 Power of resolution technique p. 41 Intention technique p. 43 Reflection-intention technique p. 44 Prospective memory training p. 47 MILD technique p. 49 Autosuggestion technique p. 51 Falling Asleep Consciously Hypnagogic imagery technique p. 62 Relaxed (““pot-shaped”) breathing p. 64 Power of visualization: White dot technique p. 65 Power of visualization: Black dot technique p. 65 Dream lotus and flame technique p. 66 Count yourself to sleep technique p. 67 The twin bodies technique p. 69 The one body technique p. 71 The no body technique p. 73 The Building of Dreams How schemas take us beyond the information given p. 77 Principles and Practice of Lucid Dreaming The spinning technique p. 88 The dream television p. 96 Lucid dream incubation p. 99 Spinning a new dream scene p. 101 Strike the set, change the channel p. 101 Adventures and Explorations How to script your own adventure p. 111 You are the hero p. 113 Rehearsal for Living Lucid dream workout p. 118 Playing to the dream audience p. 121 Creative Problem Solving Lucid dream problem solving p. 133 Building a lucid dream workshop p. 135 Overcoming Nightmares Conversing with dream characters p. 147 Redreaming recurrent nightmares p. 153 The Healing Dream Seeking opportunities for integration p. 162 Life Is a Dream: Intimations of a Wider World Seeking the ““Highest” p. 182 Appendix: Supplementary Exercises Understanding the value of the will p. 188 Strengthening your will p. 189 Candle concentration p. 191 Visualization training p. 191 Acknowledgments We cannot say how much we owe to our predecessors; without the efforts of countless others, this work could not have been accomplished.

In Lucid Dreaming, I collected the available knowledge on the subject from both ancient and modern sources. Since that book’s publication, some ten thousand people have written to me describing their experiences and discoveries, and requesting more practical information about lucid dreaming. In response to those requests, I decided to collaborate on a new book with Howard Rheingold. Howard has written extensively on topics such as creativity, consciousness, and dreamwork. Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is a self-teaching curriculum, a step-by- step method for learning to have and use lucid dreams. You can learn at your own pace, and to your own depth, how to explore your lucid dreams and use them to enrich your life.

In 1988, acting on his conviction that lucid dreaming offers many benefits to humanity, Dr. LaBerge founded the Lucidity Institute, a business whose mission is to advance research on the nature and potentials of consciousness and to apply the results of this research to the enhancement of human health and well-being. Howard Rheingold is the author of Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind and the coauthor of Higher Creativity and The Cognitive Connection. He currently resides in California.


pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

All that mattered was whether what I had to say had any credibility. I was now a full-fledged member of the group that NYU scholar Jay Rosen has dubbed “the people formerly known as the audience.”4 Being connected in real-time also meant that we, the ex-audience, had a new ability to talk back to the powers that be, or as digital visionary Howard Rheingold likes to say, to be “crap-detectors” and “call bullshit” when we see it.5 Nothing illustrates that better than a moment at the first Personal Democracy Forum in May 2004. Having caught the real-time interactivity bug from ETech, Andrew and I installed a similar online back channel at PdF. With the help of our friends David Isenberg and Greg Elin, we got the auditorium at the New School for Social Research wired for WiFi and set up a simple chat tool with a big screen on stage behind our panelists.

Sifry, “The Rise of Open Source Politics,” The Nation, November 22, 2004, www.thenation.com/article/rise-open-source-politics. 2 Interview with the author, June 2004. 3 See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4 Jay Rosen, “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” PressThink. org, June 27, 2006, http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr. html. 5 Howard Rheingold, “Crap Detection 101,” SFGate.com, June 30, 2009, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805. 6 Micah L. Sifry, “The Deaning of America,” The Nation, March 25, 2004, www.thenation.com/article/deaning-america. 7 See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), Chapter Seven: “Political Freedom, Part Two: The Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere,” for a detailed exploration of the Diebold case.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Some media theorists like Mark Poster and Jodi Dean are critical of efforts to associate a print-centered nostalgic phenomenon with the cacophony of cultural NOTES TO PAGES 137– 41 245 and political activities in global cyberspace. Others, like Yochai Benkler and Howard Rheingold, see the practice of “peer production” and the emergence of impressive and efficient organizational practices as a sign that Habermas’s dream could come true in the form of digital signals and democratic culture. See Mark Poster, “The Net as a Public Sphere?” Wired, November 1995; Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002); Craig J.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

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

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

My thinking on these issues has been greatly expanded—if not downright borrowed—from conversations with Beth Noveck, Yochai Benkler, Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Larry Lessig, Denise Caruso, John Mackey, John Geraci, Paul Miller, Roo Rogers, Rachel Botsman, Reid Hoffman, Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, Clay Shirky, Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Jon Schnur, Raj Sisodia, Gordon Wheeler, Nick Grossman, Jay Haynes, Eric Liftin, John Battelle, and my mother, Bev Johnson. Special thanks to the group who were generous enough to comment on the manuscript in draft: Bill Wasik, David Sloan Wilson, Dan Hill, Henry Farrell, and my father and longtime political sparring partner, Stan Johnson.

The key books and essays that have shaped my thinking on the power of peer networks and the framework of peer-progressive values include Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks; Beth Noveck’s WikiGovernment; Carne Ross’s The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century; Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs; Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations; Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations; Tim O’Reilly’s “The Architecture of Participation”; Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi’s “Cognitive Democracy”; and just about everything written by Manuel Castells, starting with The Rise of the Network Society.


pages: 210 words: 56,667

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

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

When I say ‘I’m gay,’ nobody is like ‘Oh, have you considered being straight?’ But they do say ‘Oh, what if you had stayed in school?’ ” The unschooling movement may be a niche, but alternative education is a growing marketplace. “Our education system was used to make industrial workers out of agricultural workers. It is no longer adequate,” Howard Rheingold told us. Rheingold, sixty-seven, is the former editor of Whole Earth Review. Founded in 1985, Whole Earth Review was a countercultural publication evolving out of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and rooted in “that old American tradition of self-reliance,” Rheingold shared, “building on that misfit streak started by Emerson.”

Rheingold is working to develop models of peer education in which students are no longer passive consumers of content but are able to co-learn with each other. It is provoking a similar ideal to Whole Earth, with the message “Take charge of your life; don’t depend on formal (educational) institutions, but do it yourself.” Howard Rheingold, Kio Stark, and Dale Stephens belong to a tribe of misfits who are provoking the education conversation: questioning dogmas and assumptions about how we learn and how we teach, and pioneering different approaches to education. As Rheingold told us, “We are in an era of extremely rapid change.


pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

As Schelling wrote, “People can often concert their intentions and expectations with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same.” This is a good thing because conversation isn’t always possible, and with large groups of people in particular it can be difficult or inefficient. (Howard Rheingold’s book Smart Mobs, though, makes a convincing case that new mobile technologies—from cell phones to mobile computing—make it much easier for large collections of people to communicate with each other and so coordinate their activities.) Second, the existence of Schelling points suggests that people’s experiences of the world are often surprisingly similar, which makes successful coordination easier.

Arrow, The Limits of Organization (New York: Norton, 1974); and Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978). More recent, sophisticated takes on self-organization and the emergence of bottom-up order are Steven Johnson, Emergence (New York, Scribner, 2001); and Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs (Boston: Perseus, 2002). The account of John Craven’s success is taken from Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff (New York: Public Affairs, 1998): 146–50. Drew and Sontag also detail Craven’s success in using the same search method to find an H-bomb that had been lost in the ocean off Spain (58–60).

Ann M. Bell and William A. Sethares, “Avoiding Global Congestion Using Decentralized Adaptive Agents,” IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing 49 (2001): 2873–79. The Grand Central experiment is in Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960): 54–67. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs (Boston: Perseus Books, 2002). As the similarity in the titles suggests, there are obvious resonances between Rheingold’s book and this one—particularly in the possibilities for groups to cooperate and coordinate without top-down leadership. But the central concerns of the books are quite different.


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

What these suggest to us is a transition, as the capabilities of both systems converge, to widespread availability of the ability to register and communicate observations in text, audio, and video, wherever we are and whenever we wish. Drazen Pantic tells of how listeners of Internet-based Radio B-92 in Belgrade reported events in their neighborhoods after the broadcast station had been shut down by the Milosevic regime. Howard Rheingold describes in Smart Mobs how citizens of the Philippines used SMS to organize real-time movements and action to overthrow their government. In a complex modern society, where things that matter can happen anywhere and at any time, the capacities of people armed with the means of recording, rendering, and communicating their observations change their relationship to the events that surround them.

There may be some coordination and condensation points--like BoycottSBG.com or blackboxvoting.org. Like other integration platforms in peer-production systems, these condensation points provide a critical function. They do not, however, control the process. One manifestation of distributed coordination for political action is something Howard Rheingold has called "smart mobs"--large collections of individuals who are able to coordinate real-world action through widely distributed information and communications technology. He tells of the "People Power II" revolution in Manila in 2001, where demonstrations to oust then president Estrada were coordinated spontaneously through extensive text messaging. 93 Few images in the early twentyfirst century can convey this phenomenon more vividly than the demonstrations around the world on February 15, 2003.

Poster presented at the International Communication Association meetings, New York. 92. Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Case Program: " `Big Media' Meets `Bloggers': Coverage of Trent Lott's Remarks at Strom Thurmond's Birthday Party," http:// www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/Research_Publications/Case_Studies/1731_0.pdf. 93. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002). 94. Data taken from CIA World Fact Book (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2004). 95. Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung, "The Layers Principle: Internet Architecture and the Law" (working paper no. 55, University of San Diego School of Law, Public Law and Legal Theory, June 2003). 96.


The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, centre right, computer age, disinformation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, power law, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, telemarketer

The Well has promised its subscribers it would not turn over personal e-mail, but the FBI doesn't appear to care about the Well's commitment to protect subscribers' privacy. At 4:19 p.m. one of the Well's most prestigious subscribers, former board member Howard Rheingold, a celebrated author and columnist, uploads his current syndicated newspaper column to the thread, and asks whether the zealous manhunt threatens basic constitutional protections. #452 CIVIL LIBERTIES, VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES, AND HACKERS By Howard Rheingold The recent arrest of alleged super-hacker Kevin Mitnick has focused the attention of the public on the dangers of putting sensitive information online: communication networks, by their nature, will always be technically insecure....

The following publications, organizations, articles, transcripts, documents and book provided source material: Lewis De Payne tape recording of his conversation with Mitnick; All Things Considered radio broadcast; CBS Evening News; the New York Times; LeVord Burns's FBI affidavit; the FBI; radio transcript of Shimomura press conference; The Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling; federal statutes; The Nation, "Cyberscoop"; Wired; Communications Daily, "Immunity Needed, Markey Panel Sees Dark Side of Electronic Frontier"; "Civil Liberties, Virtual Communities, and Hackers," by Howard Rheingold; the Washington Post; the Hollywood Reporter; the Daily Variety; USA Today; the San Jose Mercury; Associated Press. Fair use or permitted quotations were made of public posts by: Patrizia DiLucchio, Larry Person, Bruce Katz, Mark Graham, HuaPei Chen, Claudia Stroud, Emmanuel Goldstein, Douglas Fine, Netta Gilboa, Mike Jennings, Devoto, Charles Piatt, Aaron Barnhart, Bruce Koball, David Lewis, Chip Bayers, Chris Goggans.


pages: 518 words: 49,555

Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

A Pattern Language, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, c2.com, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, ghettoisation, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, if you build it, they will come, information security, lolcat, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Network effects, Potemkin village, power law, recommendation engine, RFC: Request For Comment, semantic web, SETI@home, Skype, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, social web, source of truth, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, Yochai Benkler

To Robyn Tippins, YDN community manager and skilled blogger, for her insights on the community-building trifecta. Without the work of the numerous thinkers, designers, builders, and schemers who have been mapping the digital social product space for the past decade or more (cited for further reading throughout the book)—notably, Ward Cunningham, Howard Rheingold, Amy Jo Kim, Dave Winer, Marc Canter, David Weinberger, Gene Smith, Clay Shirky, Mary Hodder, Stewart Butterfield, Edward Vielmetti, Kevin Marks, Tom Coates, Jeremy Keith, Allen Tom, Brian Oberkirch, Liz Lawley, Lane Becker, Susan Mernit, Tara Hunt and many, many others—we could not have written this book.

., 2005 Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Harvard Business School Press, 2008 A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series), by Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, 1977 Social Media in Plain English, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE A Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander, Oxford University Press, 1979 The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, by Howard Rheingold, The MIT Press, 2000 The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community, by Katie Hafner, Carroll, Graf Publishers, 2001 Download at WoweBook.Com Chapter 2 Social to the Core The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy.

Download at WoweBook.Com Further Reading 397 Further Reading “Community Lessons from Flickr’s Heather Champ,” from Brian Oberkirch’s Only Connect blog, http://www.brianoberkirch.com/2008/03/07/ community-lessons-from-flickrs-heather-champ/ Derek Powazek’s posts on community, http://powazek.com/posts/category/community “The Virtual Community,” by Howard Rheingold, http://www.well.com/~hlr/vcbook/ Download at WoweBook.Com Download at WoweBook.Com Chapter 16 Where in the World? It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood. A beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine? —Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood TUBBS: I haven’t seen you before.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

These are the stories that have sustained the bulk of people’s interests in the history of computing. This is the history of computing as plutography, stories about money. There is another small but growing strain that locates the transformations of our world in the work of computing’s visionaries. As far back as Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought written in the mid-1980s, there has been an alternative narrative featuring people like the irrepressible hypertext impresario Ted Nelson and even drug guru turned cyberpundit Timothy Leary—an intellectual’s history of computing.2 For the scholars studying hypertext poetry, the students in new media departments, and those with a cultural interest in computing, these are stories of secular saints, a hagiography of sorts.

I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory,’ or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’” Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 192. 2. Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (1985; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); available at <http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/>. 3. See Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945). 4. For an analysis of this transformation, see Paul N.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

Meeting me in the reception area was a trim, avuncular man with gray hair and a welltrimmed beard. He was in shirtsleeves. His greeting was warm yet understated. Douglas C. Engelbart led me to his office, a cubicle in one corner of a sprawling room filled with file cabinets and similar warrens. The Moses of computers did not even rate an enclosed office. I later read in Howard Rheingold's book Tools for Thought what a friend had written of Engelbart: "When he smiles, his face is wistful and boyish, but once the energy of his forward motion is halted and he stops to ponder, his pale blue eyes seem to express sadness and loneliness. " Indeed, there was something sad about our visit.

To be sure, what was most impressive about that first exposure was the simple fact that more than one file could be displayed simultaneously-quite an advance from the one-at-a-time regimen most of us were used to, pre Macintosh. Windows are really quite profound. Using them implicitly reshapes our relationship to information itself. Information is what we see when we look through those windows-a digital peep show where we flick open the shutters to information. As Howard Rheingold would note, "The territory you see through the augmented window in your new vehicle is not the normal landscape of plains and trees and oceans, but an informationscape in which the features are words, numbers, graphs, images, concepts, paragraphs, arguments, relationships, formulas, diagrams, proofs, bodies of literature and schools of criticism."


Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

When considered in these terms, it is difficult to dismiss escape, whether in the form of 129 130 Rita Raley disappearance or disconnectivity, as merely a counterfantasy.39 Critical Art Ensemble’s injunction is to the point: “Avoid using any technology that records data facts unless it is essential.”40 Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg make a comparable case for “selective connectivity”: techniques by which we can “choose to extract ourselves from the electronic control grid from time to time and place to place.”41 Similarly, for MayerSchönberger, the solution lies in the adoption of a certain care in the management of one’s online interactions, practices of selective disclosure and revelation in order to limit “uncontrollable information flows through individual choice.”42 If we are able to opt out of a single company’s personalized retargeting scheme, that is, should we not also be able to opt out of all advertising databases or indeed out of the whole system of “cybernetic capitalism” itself?

John Poindexter’s plans for the Total Information Awareness Program (TIA) drew on Gelernter’s paradigm, endeavoring to use the principle of topsight to establish a terror network that could ostensibly be seen and disciplined, though not eliminated because of its regenerative ends. 37. Ibid., 112. 38. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin Books, [1973] 1995), 703. 39. See Irving Goh, “Prolegomenon to a Right to Disappear,” Cultural Politics 2, no. 1 (March 2006): 97–114. 40. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance, 135. 41. Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg, “Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside,” OPEN 11 Hybrid Space (Amsterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007), 32. 42. Mayer-Schönberger, Delete, 129. 43. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance, 132. 44. Rubinstein, Lee, and Schwartz, “Data Mining and Internet Profiling,” 277.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

These people who were not physically present could not perform every job and solve every problem, but they could certainly take care of many backchannel or behind-the-scenes duties—tasks requiring only connectivity rather than physical proximity, or perhaps donating a little bit of money. It added up quickly when the reach was so big. The @TahrirSupplies story is an example of the arrival of the “smart mobs” heralded by technology writer Howard Rheingold in 2003: groups of people congregating quickly to undertake a single action.13 However, it would be a mistake to see this tale as just one of a technical solution to organizational challenges. In much popular writing about social movements, the how of organizing is mentioned only as an afterthought.

Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action,” Information, Communication and Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 739–68. 4. “Egypt: The Legacy of Mohammed Mahmoud Street,” BBC News, November 19, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-20395260; also conceptually reintroduced in the context of social movements and digital technology by scholars of the early internet, including in the book Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold. 5. Abulkasim al-Jaberi, “Out of Sight, but Not out of Mind: Mohamed Mahmoud Remembered,” Egypt Independent, November 19, 2012, http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/out-sight-not-out-mind-mohamed-mahmoud-remembered. 6. Reem Abdellatif, “Back in Tahrir, Business Booms,” Daily News Egypt, November 25, 2011, http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2011/11/25/back-in-tahrir-business-booms/. 7.

Moment of Silence for All the Dead,” @TahrirSupplies (microblog), November 21, 2011, https://twitter.com/TahrirSupplies/status/138624142659420160. 10. al-Jaberi, “Out of Sight, but Not out of Mind.” 11. Ibid. 12. Farah El-Akkad, “The Square Effect,” Al-Ahram Weekly, June 6, 2013, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/1118/30/The-square-effect.aspx. 13. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2003). 14. I explore signaling of capacity to power in greater depth in chapter 8. 15. This movement has been richly documented by too many scholars to summarize in a few citations. However, for a book that highlights the capacity building of long-term organizing, see Kenneth T.


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

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

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

For the next three days, the WELL community went back and forth about Brand, whether he was to blame and what should be done. The tone of the conversation ran toward what the virtual world called cyberspace had become: sharp-edged, often strident statements full of certitude. Even empathy when it was in evidence felt hollow. A variety of people, including Howard Rheingold and Kelly, who posted a long description of how he would like to invent “WELL 2.0,” came to Brand’s defense, but the spirit of the conversation was exemplified by a user who went by the pseud Axon: Well, heaven forfend that i should bully saint stewart. i’m afraid that this latest exercise in obfuscation fails to sustain my interest. it’s just a lot of handwaving. now that i’ve been branded a Torturer i suppose i can die happy. my only intent is to help.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30 Chapter 9: Learning “Oil: The 30-Year Anniversary of the 1986 Collapse,” Oil & Gas 360, January 29, 2016, https://www.oilandgas360.com/oil-the-30-year-anniversary-of-the-1986-collapse/ BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020,” Wired, July 1997. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Howard Rheingold, “An Exercise in Perspective,” Deeper News, September 22, 1989. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Rheingold, “An Exercise in Perspective.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Stewart Brand with John Aiello, “The Rescue That Failed—Disorganization, Empty Hydrants Killed Janet Ray,” pt. 1 of series of 3, San Francisco Chronicle, April 16, 1990, 32.


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Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Belarus’s security services are often unsure about how to react. Yakub Kolas Square normally contains skateboarders, promenading couples, and grandmothers herding grandchildren. But on particular days, chosen by some mysterious process of consensus, the square fills to capacity. The park benches are suddenly all occupied. People perch on curbs. Howard Rheingold famously called these gatherings “smart mobs.”11 And at 8 P.M., a chorus of mobile phones goes off: chirps, chimes, and pop music come together to make a cacophony of absurd ringtones. The police are there, because they too can read the website where instructions for how to pull off this smart mob are posted.

Jarrett Murphy, “1 Billion Live in Slums,” CBS News, October 8, 2003, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/1-billion-live-in-slums/. 10. “Global Issues: Refugees,” UN Global Issues, accessed June 20, 2014, http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/refugees/; Imogen Foulkes, “Global Refugee Figures Highest Since WW2, UN Says,” News, June 20, 2014, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-27921938. 11. Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York: Basic, 2003). 12. F. Edwards, Philip N. Howard, and Mary Joyce, Digital Activism and Non-Violent Conflict (Seattle: Digital Activism Research Project, November 2013), accessed September 30, 2014, http://digital-activism.org/2013/11/report-on-digital-activism-and-non-violent-conflict/. 13.


pages: 791 words: 85,159

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

It can be enough for the innocent, too, as the former Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger showed when he slapped his personal warrant on a 'Net-borne conspiracy theory about flight TWA 800. More experienced users have learned to triangulate what comes across the 'Net in other ways. The celebrated "virtual community" that Howard Rheingold wrote about, for example, was backed up by a good deal of old-fashioned telephone calling, meeting, and conventional neighborliness.23 Many people buy only from companies with an established off-line existence. On-line auction houses suggest that bidders get in touch with suppliers to judge their reliability for themselves.

Books, scholarly dissertations, and miles of newsprint have considered these "virtual communities." Roger Fidler's Mediamorphosis noted how in France, enterprising freelancers turned the Minitel system, designed by the post Page 190 office to serve principally as an electronic phone book, into a messaging system and in the process created innumerable interest groups. Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community described the friendships and even marriages that sprang out of an early West Coast messaging system called the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), while Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life has made public his account of a digital community that developed through a computer running at PARC that anyone could reach from an Internet connection.


pages: 371 words: 93,570

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

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

These “hosts” had carte blanche to engineer the particular cultural atmospheres of their conferences. “Echo is Echo because of the hosts,” she wrote in 1998. “The relationships we have are formed by what we tell. Hosts get us to tell each other everything.” In order for Echo to thrive, Horn realized that it needed a core base of vocal, participatory users. Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier—a book about virtual communities that completely omits Echo, incidentally—documents this strategy at work across the network, from a BBS in France with paid “animateurs” culled from its most active users to The WELL hosts in his own backyard.

“Stacy was more of an autocrat”: Mittelmark, interview with the author, July 21, 2016. “he was, like, really subversive”: Bowe, interview with the author, July 26, 2016. “When the world that you’re in”: Ibid. “Echo is Echo because of the hosts”: Horn, Cyberville, 39. “animateurs” culled from: Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 235. “Hosts are the people”: Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 26. “front page of the Internet”: Adrian Chen, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” Wired, October 23, 2014, www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

It was not long after the Bank for International Settlements published a reassuring assessment of the threat e-money posed to monetary control that the first financial company in London, Currency Management Corporation, launched a currency trading service on the Internet. It opened without authorisation from the local regulator, the Securities and Futures Association, but is nevertheless perfectly free to trade. As Net expert Howard Rheingold points out,13 money is already an electronic abstraction. Of course we still use a lot of the crinkling and jangling stuff in everyday life, but the bulk of the developed world’s monetary transactions take place between computers. The technology for private currencies is already in place. Their emergence waits only for our monetary habits to change.

Danny Quah (October 1996) Discarding Non-stick Frying Pans for Economic Growth, Centrepiece, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, London. Gregory Rawlins (1996) Moths to the Flame, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Robert Reich (1991) The Work of Nations, Simon & Schuster, London. Howard Rheingold (1994) The Virtual Community, Secker & Warburg, London. David Ricardo (first published 1817) Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Jeremy Rifkin (1995) The End of Work, Tarcher/Putnam. Gillian Rose (1996) Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.


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

A nanometer is one billionth of a meter (the amount your fingernail grows in one second), and we already have computers that measure just thirty nanometers across. Computers have become so small and cheap to produce, they can be The Art of War | 131 both invisible and everywhere. “For the better part of a century,” writes Howard Rheingold in Smart Mobs, “people have lived among invisible electric motors and thought nothing of it. The time has come to consider the consequences of computers disappearing into the background the way motors did.” The consequences are what some people are referring to as “the Internet of things.” This is a world where objects are connected via tiny but widely distributed computers, such as radio-frequency identification chips (RFID), which cost less than 5 cents each and are already being used in products by Wal-Mart, Target, and Tesco to track goods.

Page 127 Kalle Lasn, interview by author, May 24, 2006 (other quotes from Lasn that appear throughout this chapter are taken from the same interview). Pages 128–129 Ji Lee, interview by author, June 29, 2006 (other quotes from Lee that appear throughout this chapter are taken from the same interview). Ji Lee, Talk Back: The Bubble Project (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2006). Page 130 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 88. Page 131 Elizabeth Biddlecombe, “UN predicts ‘Internet of things’,” BBC News, November 17, 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4440334.stm. Elliott Malkin, “Cemetery 2.0,” We Make Money Not Art, November 17, 2006. http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/009130.php.


pages: 103 words: 32,131

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, citizen journalism, cloud computing, digital map, East Village, financial innovation, Firefox, Future Shock, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the printing press, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, mirror neurons, peer-to-peer, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, WikiLeaks

To others, including me, You Own Your Own Words served as an ethical foundation: You, the human being on the other side of the modem, are responsible for what you say and do here. You are accountable. Given that the WELL was developed by farsighted cultural pioneers such as Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold, we shouldn’t be surprised that they sought to compensate for some of the disconnection online between people and their words. And that’s why, from the very beginning, I decided to be myself online. I’ve only used one name on the Internet: Rushkoff. I figured the only real danger was from government, corporations, or some other “big brother” out there using what I posted against me in some future McCarthy hearings.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Taleb Calling You on Your Crap: Sean Carroll How I Think About How I Think: Lera Boroditsky I Am Not Exactly a Thinking Person— I Am a Poet: Jonas Mekas Kayaks Versus Canoes: George Dyson The Upload Has Begun: Sam Harris Hell if I Know: Gregory Paul What I Notice: Brian Eno It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Can Find Out: Marissa Mayer When I’m on the Net, I Start to Think: Ai Weiwei The Internet Has Become Boring: Andrian Kreye The Dumb Butler: Joshua Greene Finding Stuff Remains a Challenge: Philip Campbell Attention, Crap Detection, and Network Awareness: Howard Rheingold Information Metabolism: Esther Dyson Ctrl + Click to Follow Link: George Church Replacing Experience with Facsimile: Eric Fischl and April Gornik Outsourcing the Mind: Gerd Gigerenzer A Prehistorian’s Perspective: Timothy Taylor The Fourth Phase of Homo sapiens: Scott Atran Transience Is Now Permanence: Douglas Coupland A Return to the Scarlet-Letter Savanna: Jesse Bering Take Love: Helen Fisher Internet Mating Strategies: David M.

Whatever works! Those wishing to promote the visibility and, dare one say, usefulness of their own work and of their disciplines should hotly pursue online availability of all types of substantive texts and, crucially, inclusive indexing. Attention, Crap Detection, and Network Awareness Howard Rheingold Communications expert; author, Smart Mobs Digital media and networks can empower only the people who learn how to use them—and pose dangers to those who don’t know what they are doing. Yes, it’s easy to drift into distraction, fall for misinformation, allow attention to fragment rather than focus, but those mental temptations pose dangers only for the untrained mind.


The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

'As far into the future as we can see, information will be playing the prima donna role in economic history that physical labour, stone, bronze, land, minerals, metals and energy once played.’ As information becomes that key resource, its unique features will shape a very different society. For our purposes, Harlan Cleveland and Howard Rheingold have made the best inventories of those characteristics: - Information is shared, not exchanged. With any of the previous focus resources from a flint spear-point to land, from a horse to a barrel of oil - if you acquired it from me, I lost it to you. After an exchange that involves information, both of us have it.

Besides the non-profit sector, the Mall of the Americas and other mainstream businesses are involved, including National City Bank which provides the accounting system and statements in C$Ds. Internet Money for Virtual Communities One of the most intriguing and encouraging aspects of Internet developments has been the mushrooming of virtual communities compellingly documented in Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Community has become such a scarce resource in our societies that the appearance of a new way to create it is indeed remarkable. Virtual communities versus a monopoly of national currencies on the Net The process by which this miracle has occurred is often not fully understood.


pages: 147 words: 37,622

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work, Navigating Life by Jim Benson, Tonianne Demaria Barry

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Bluma Zeigarnik, corporate governance, Howard Rheingold, intangible asset, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Ken Thompson, pattern recognition, performance metric, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Yogi Berra

Adding fuel to the fire are the regulars at Seattle Lean Coffee: Jeremy Lightsmith, Garth Tutor, Joe Justice, Wes Maldonado, Jon Bach, Dawn Hemminger, and Jesse Brown. And my friends and colleagues who, over the years, joined me for a stroll through an idea, provided that key epiphany-producing comment, or thoughtful redirection. They include Nancy White, Jay Fienberg, John and Susan von Seggern, Jerry Michalski, Howard Rheingold, Jon Ramer, Jeanine Anderson, Greg MacKinnon, Ken Thompson, Frank Provenzano, Ed Vielmetti, Kevin Jahne, Alan Cady, Bart Cima, Chad Nabity, Simon Bone, Christopher J. Zorn, Monte Page, Jessica Margolin and Trevor Blake. If you pick one thing to do, and do it completely, people will notice. ~ Trevor Blake For Tonianne: Duncan, who through hell, heaven, and all that lies between, has been my guide.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Tools For Thought by Howard Rheingold April, 2000: a revised edition of Tools for Thought is available from MIT Press, including a revised chapter with 1999 interviews of Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, Brenda Laurel, and Avron Barr. Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story. Yes, the tales of teenagers inventing new industries in their garages were good stories.

My heartfelt thanks to Rita Aero, Avron Barr, John Brockman, Donald Day, Robert Eckhardt, Doug Engelbart, Brenda Lauel, Howard Levine, Judith Maas, Geraldine Rheingold, Alan Rinzler, Charles Silver, Marshall Smith, Bob Taylor, David Rodman, and Gloria Warner. And thanks to Alan Turner, who originally prepared my words for web publication. Tools for Thought ©1985 howard rheingold, all rights reserved worldwide. Chapter One: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet South of San Francisco and north of Silicon Valley, near the place where the pines on the horizon give way to the live oaks and radiotelescopes, an unlikely subculture has been creating a new medium for human thought.


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

John Frow, Time & Commodity Culture—Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 207. 29. Peter Wayner, Free for All—How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans, (New York: HarperBusiness 2000), 157, my emphasis. 30. Howard Rheingold coined the term ’virtual community’. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community—Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 31. Robert Ellickson has demonstrated the pivotal role of norms rather than law in upholding social order. For norms to regulate social behavior, however, a few conditions have to be met: “To achieve order without law, people must have continuing relationships, reliable information about past behavior, and effective countervailing power” Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbours Settle Disputes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 284. 32.


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

Robert Metcalf, founder of 3Com, argues the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of people in it. 9. Attempting to regulate these decentralized networks is certain to give bureaucrats ulcers— or worse. See, for example, Peter Maas, “Silicorn Valley,” Wired, September 1997: 131–38. 10. You can read about SETI in Howard Rheingold’s “You Got the Power,” Wired, August 2000: 176. Or go directly to www.seti.org/. 11. See www.fightaidsathome.com. 12. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. 1997 Annual Report: “Time Well Spent: The Declining Real Cost of Living in America.” 13. While the Internet has certainly changed the nature of shopping, it is still hard to go up against merchandising behemoths like Wal-Mart.


pages: 675 words: 141,667

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

For consistency, I will use “ARPA.” 7 The proper rendering of the network’s name is ARPANET, but I have chosen to use “Arpanet” for aesthetic purposes. 8 J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics Vol. HFE-1 (March 1960), 4–11; M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking, 2001); Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000 [1985]), 132–151. 9 David Hart, Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Public Policy in the United States, 1921–1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Bruce L.

Russell, “Ideological and Policy Origins of the Internet, 1957–1969,” paper presented to TPRC 2001, the 29th Research Conference on Communication, Information, and Internet Policy, Washington, DC, October 28, 2001. 10 Fubini, as director of defense research and engineering, was the only step in the chain of command between the director of ARPA and the secretary of defense. Ruina was ARPA director between February 1961 and September 1963. Jack Ruina, oral history interview by William Aspray, April 20, 1989, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 11 Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought, 138. The evocative language of “religious conversion” also appears in J. C. R. Licklider, oral history interview by William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg, October 28, 1988, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and John A.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

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

The book’s layout was done by Nancy Resnick and the index compiled by Cohen Carruth, Inc. The following readers endured the first draft of this book and provided me with valuable and constructive feedback: Russ Mitchell, Michael Dowd, Peter Schwartz, Charles Platt, Andreas Lloyd, Gary Wolf, and Howard Rheingold. During the course of researching this book I interviewed, spoke with, or corresponded with the smartest people I know. Listed in alphabetical order, each of these experts lent their valuable time and insight for my project. Of course, any errors in transmitting their thoughts are mine. Chris Anderson Gordon Bell Katy Borner Stewart Brand Eric Brende David Brin Rob Carlson James Carse Jamais Cascio Richard Dawkins Eric Drexler Freeman Dyson George Dyson Niles Eldredge Brian Eno Joel Garreau Paul Hawken Danny Hillis Piet Hut Derrick Jensen Bill Joy Stuart Kauffman Donald Kraybill Mark Kryder Ray Kurzweil Jaron Lanier Pierre Lemonnier Seth Lloyd Lori Marino Max More Simon Conway Morris Nathan Myhrvold Howard Rheingold Paul Saffo Kirkpatrick Sale Tim Sauder Peter Schwartz John Smart Lee Smolin Alex Steffen Steve Talbot Edward Tenner Sherry Turkle Hal Varian Vernor Vinge Jay Walker Peter Warshall Robert Wright Annotated Reading List Of the hundreds of books I consulted for this project, I found the following selected ones to be the most useful for my purposes.

Chris Anderson Gordon Bell Katy Borner Stewart Brand Eric Brende David Brin Rob Carlson James Carse Jamais Cascio Richard Dawkins Eric Drexler Freeman Dyson George Dyson Niles Eldredge Brian Eno Joel Garreau Paul Hawken Danny Hillis Piet Hut Derrick Jensen Bill Joy Stuart Kauffman Donald Kraybill Mark Kryder Ray Kurzweil Jaron Lanier Pierre Lemonnier Seth Lloyd Lori Marino Max More Simon Conway Morris Nathan Myhrvold Howard Rheingold Paul Saffo Kirkpatrick Sale Tim Sauder Peter Schwartz John Smart Lee Smolin Alex Steffen Steve Talbot Edward Tenner Sherry Turkle Hal Varian Vernor Vinge Jay Walker Peter Warshall Robert Wright Annotated Reading List Of the hundreds of books I consulted for this project, I found the following selected ones to be the most useful for my purposes.


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

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

Begun in 1979, it enabled people to post messages to groups dedicated to specific topics. It functions to this day. In 1985, Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, and a couple of others launched an electronic bulletin board called The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or Well, in San Francisco. In 1987, Howard Rheingold, a big user of the Well, published an essay in which he coined the term virtual community to describe this new experience. “A virtual community is a group of people who may or may not meet one another face to face,” Rheingold wrote, “and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks.”

Social Networking and the Internet Page 66 In a 1968 essay by J. C. R. Licklider: J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology (April 1968), http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0353.html (accessed December 11, 2009). 67 “A virtual community is a group of people”: Howard Rheingold, “Virtual Communities—Exchanging Ideas Through Computer Bulletin Boards,” Whole Earth Review (Winter 1987), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n57/ai_6203867/ (accessed November 15, 2009). 67 Two Internet sociologists, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison: danah boyd and Nicole Ellison, “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, And Scholarship,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2007), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html (accessed November 15, 2009). 69 Nonetheless, by 1999 sixdegrees had reached: Details about sixdegrees from interview and email followup with Andrew Weinreich, 2009. 74 But, according to Stealing MySpace: Julia Angwin, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (New York: Random House, 2009), 52. 76 In 2003, Angwin notes, the percentage of Americans: Ibid. 77 Buyukkokten himself once bragged: Luke O’Brien, “Poking Facebook,” 02138 Magazine (November 2007), www.02138mag.com/magazine/article/1724.html (accessed November 28, 2009). 80 Previously they’d won a gold medal: Ibid. 83 The civil lawsuit filed on behalf of the three alleges: ConnectU, Inc. v.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Computers were fearsome creatures, the size of rooms, jealously guarded by companies and government agencies. Their main function was mass-produced arithmetic—“data processing.” The archetype was the IBM AN/FSQ-7, the largest computer in human history, an electronic version of the Flying Fortress. As the scholar of media Howard Rheingold describes it, “the computers weighed three hundred tons, took up twenty thousand feet of floor space, and were delivered in eighteen large vans apiece. Ultimately, the air force bought fifty-six of them.”3 There could be no Internet as we know it without a concept of the computer as something beyond an adding machine—this had to come first.

Peter Alesso and Craig Forsythe Smith, Connections: Patterns of Discovery (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2008), 60; for his life, M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Penguin, 2002). 3. For Rheingold’s description of the AN/FSQ-7, see Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 142–44. 4. J.C.R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1 (1960): 4. 5. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005), 9. 6.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The computers simply process the data as instructed by the organizing machine, and the processed data is then shipped back to the organizing machine. From the user's perspective, the nature of the data being processed could be completely obscure. The point is that the idle time of the machine could be harnessed to the end of getting something done. 30 As Howard Rheingold describes it: At its most basic level, distributed processing is a way of harvesting a resource that until now has been squandered on a massive scale: unused CPU cycles. Even if you type two characters per second on your keyboard, you're using only a fraction of your machine's power. [Distributed computing bands together millions of computers] on the Net to create, with their downtime, ad hoc supercomputers.31 The potential of peer-to-peer technologies reaches far beyond simple file transfer or the sharing of processing cycles.

(Beijing and Cambridge, Mass: O'Reilly, 2001), 3-15 (describing how the original Internet was “fundamentally designed as a peer-to-peer system” but became increasingly client/server oriented over time owing to Web browser applications, firewalls, and other factors). 28 For background on SETI, see “History of SETI,” at http://www.seti-inst.edu/ general/history.html; Eric Korpela et al., “SETI@home: Massively Distributed Computing for SETI,” at http://www.computer.org/cise/articles/seti.htm. 29 Howard Rheingold, “You Got the Power,” Wired (August 2001), at http://www.wired. com/wired/archive/8.08/comcomp.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=. 30 For a useful survey of issues related to P2P, see Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Benefits of a Disruptive Technology, Andrew Oram, ed. (Beijing and Cambridge, Mass.: O'Reilly, 2001).


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

When a tsunami struck Japan in 2011, triggering the shutdown of most of the nation’s nuclear generators, the multistory digital screens of Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing—the Asian equivalent of Manhattan’s Times Square—went dark for weeks. Normally crisscrossed by mobile phone–toting “smart mobs,” as author Howard Rheingold dubbed them, it is a place that lives in my memory as the paragon of future urbanism. Tokyo survived its digital lobotomy—there’s still enough of the conventional infrastructure in place to live life manually, so to speak. But in future cities even the most mundane tasks will draw upon sensors, computers, and communications networks scattered across the cloud.

As Red Burns, the cofounder of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, once described the curriculum’s goal: “we are training a new kind of professional—one who is comfortable with both analytical and creative modes of thinking.”35 Similarly, it won’t be enough to just put together teams with both planners and programmers. Smart-city designers will also need to be transdisciplinary—able to think across disciplines inside their own minds. As author Howard Rheingold describes it, transdisciplinarity “means educating researchers who can speak languages of multiple disciplines—biologists who have an understanding of mathematics, mathematicians who understand biology.”36 Architects and engineers of smart cities will need to draw on both informatics and urbanism simultaneously.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

They carefully designed a representative system with checks, balances and periodic elections that would delegate authority upwards and serve as a check on the confusion and fury of the multitude. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes on Twitter would recognise Charles Mackay’s definition. The modern technologist, however, doesn’t believe the mob is faceless and mad, but rather wise and just: he reads books like Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs and talks endlessly about ‘crowd sourcing’ solutions and ‘the wisdom of the crowd’. He trusts the ‘hive mind’. Crowds certainly are wise when it comes to solving technical, non-value based problems like fixing computer bugs, but politics is very different.4 Humans were perfectly good at killing each other because of politics long before the iPhone turned up.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

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

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

While they may be crying all the way to the bank, these millionaire turncoats do a good job of explaining how their platforms surveilled users and then leveraged the information they collected to turn people into more extreme versions of themselves. Of course, most of them were making arguments lifted from the works of people like Sherry Turkle, Cliff Nass, Howard Rheingold, Andrew Keen, Evgeny Morozov, Astra Taylor, Richard Barbrook, Jerry Mander, Cory Doctorow, Marina Gorbis, dana boyd, Nick Carr, Mark Bauerlain, and even Raffi. Tech critics have been writing about the impact of social media manipulation on our psyche and society for decades. It’s great that the developers responsible for these misdeeds are finally agreeing with these assessments, even if they need to feel as if they’ve discovered the downsides all by themselves—like brand-new intellectual property.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

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

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

But in 1989 something weird happened. The notion of the “hacker ethic” became a contested trope. It started with an online forum on the WELL organized by Harper’s Magazine. The subject was hacking, and Paul Tough, a Harper’s editor, had recruited Brand and a few of his most important WELL members, including Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, and John Perry Barlow, to participate. Barlow, a shaggy, bearded man with a fondness for colorful cowboy shirts, is a true American character. He is a failed Wyoming rancher, a former Catholic mystic, and a former Grateful Dead lyricist. He was also an early proponent of cyberspace as the new American frontier—as lawless as Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone.


pages: 229 words: 68,426

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

See also everyware; ubicomp breakdowns/failures literature on modularity opting out of seamlessness Unified Modeling Language (UML) Uniform resource Identifier (URI) UPC numbers user experience (UX) users, See also human body; people UWB (ultra-wideband) technology V voice-recognition W wall screens Want, Roy wearable computing Web standards. See also Internet Weiser, Mark Wi-Fi technology Wikipedia WiMaX standard X Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (ParC) XML (eXtensible Markup Language) Acknowledgments The three greatest friends this book ever had have been Liz Danzico, Howard Rheingold and Christina Wodtke. very simply, Everyware would not exist without their influence; my gratitude to them is immense. I would also like to thank Peter Morville and Jeffrey Zeldman for their crucial early enthusiasm. At Peachpit, Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel showed extraordinary faith in my vision for this book, affording me leeway few authors ever enjoy; I was both moved and inspired.


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

The metaphor also seemed to stick in hypertext theory for many years; Joyce (1998), Dickey (1995), Landow (1992), Nunes (1999) and Johnson-Eilola (1994), to name but a few of the ‘first wave’ theorists, explicitly conjure images of exploration and mapmaking to describe the aesthetics of hypertext, due in no small part to Storyspace and to Bolter’s book Writing Space. Some ideas, as Howard Rheingold wrote in Tools for Thought more than 20 years ago, are like viruses: if they are released at the right moment, they can infect an entire culture (Rheingold 1985, 128). At the time he started working with Bolter, Joyce had ambitions of his own: he wanted to write a book that changed with each reading, as we have seen.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

What if all of humanity could be brought into a single network of communication and information? Could such a technology make cities’ ancient role as loci of community redundant, and allow people to finally come together and stop defining the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’? Not too long ago, many had such utopian hopes of the internet. In 1993, the writer Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community, in which he described with breathless enthusiasm the emergence of The WELL – short for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link – a type of embryonic social network that allowed members to connect with one another over the internet and build shared interest groups. In 1996, journalist and cyber optimist John Perry Barlow published his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he described his vision for the internet as ‘a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded to race, economic power, military force, or station of birth … where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity’.1 The fact that key figures like Stewart Brand, who founded The WELL, were also central participants in the 1960s counterculture, with its egalitarian and universalist ethos, helps explain some of this utopian hyperbole.


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Also see Edmund Burke and Graham Kendall, “Applying Ant Algorithms and the No Fit Polygon to the Nesting Problem,” University of Nottingham Working Paper, 1999, http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/publications/pdf/gk_ai99.pdf. 5 See Iowa Electronic Markets Web site, http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem. 6 James Surowiecki, “Decisions, Decisions,” The New Yorker, March 28, 2003, available from http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/24/030324ta_talk_surowiecki. 7 See Hollywood Stock Exchange Web site, http://www.hsx.com. 8 See Betfair Web site, http://www.betfair.com. 9 Alfred Rappaport and Michael J. Mauboussin, Expectations Investing (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001), 132-34. 10 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (New York: Perseus, 2002). 11 Ken Brown, “Stocks March to the Beat of War, Weak Economy,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2003. 30. Vox Populi 1 Michael Idinopulos and Lee Kempler, “Do You Know Who Your Experts Are?” The McKinsey Quarterly 4 (2003): 60-69; see http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_abstract.asp?


pages: 313 words: 84,312

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

Many other classical electric guitar videos have had several million hits. 2 For more on the likes of charlieissocoollike see Celia Hannon, Peter Bradwell, Charlie Tims, Video Republic, Demos, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/user/ charlieissocoollike 3 The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill, Penguin, 1972 Chapter 1 1 Thomas Homer-Dixon (2006), The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilisation (Souvenir Press Ltd, 2007) 2 Jane McGonigal, ‘Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming’, February 2007. Available from http://www.avantgame.com/McGonigal_ WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf 3 In April 2007, for example, about 4,000 flash mobbers took over the main concourse of Victoria Station in London, armed with personal stereos, to dance for two hours, in the middle of the afternoon. See Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs (Perseus Books, 2002) 4 Sanger’s work was funded by a company called Bomis, of which Wales was one of the directors. 5 Larry Sanger, ‘The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia’, in Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper and Mark Stone (Eds), Open Sources 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2006) 6 The most famous example was when an article alleged that a former aide to Robert Kennedy was involved in President John F.


pages: 317 words: 84,400

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Charles Gillespie, Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), p. 468. 41. Robert Bradley, Leonhard Euler, p. 412. 42. David Richeson, Euler’s Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 86. 43. Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 39. 44. Ivor Grattan-Guinness and Gérard Bornet, eds., George Boole: Selected Manuscripts on Logic and Its Philosophy (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997), p. xiv. 45. Margaret A.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

The advent of personal computing and the communicability of networks spurred the development of bulletin board systems (BBS), first in the United States, then worldwide. Bulletin board systems did not need sophisticated computer networks, just PCs, modems, and the telephone line. Thus, they became the electronic notice-boards of all kinds of interests and affinities, creating what Howard Rheingold named “virtual communities.”52 In the late 1980s, several million computer users were using computer-mediated communication in cooperative or commercial networks that were not part of the Internet. Often, these networks used protocols that were not compatible, so they shifted to Internet protocols, a move that, in the 1990s, assured their integration into the Internet and thus the expansion of the Internet itself.

This is particularly the case for the question that dominated the debate on the social dimensions of the Internet during the 1990s: does the Internet favor the development of new communities, virtual communities, or, instead, is it inducing personal isolation, severing people’s ties with society, and ultimately, with their “real” world? Howard Rheingold, in his pioneering book Virtual Communities marked the tone of the debate by forcefully arguing for the birth of a new form of community, bringing people together on-line around shared values and interests.85 Furthermore, on the basis of his own experience with WELL, a cooperative computer network in the San Francisco Bay area, he proposed the notion that communities built on-line could develop, as in his own case, into physical meetings, friendly parties, and material support for members of their virtual community.


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

I am grateful to every person who asked a question at a talk, e-mailed me about your situation, called in to a radio show, raised your hand in class, commented on an article, or tweeted me a link. Don’t stop. I am: http://rushkoff.com, douglas@rushkoff.com, and @rushkoff on Twitter. 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.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

Because each topic area attracted a smaller subset of the overall population, visiting each one felt like returning to an old block in a familiar part of town, and running into the same cast of characters that you had found there the last time you visited. ECHO and the Well had a certain homeostatic balance in those early years—powerfully captured in Howard Rheingold’s book The Virtual Community—and part of that balance came from the community’s own powers of self-organization. But neither was a pure example of bottom-up behavior: the topic areas, for instance, were central-planning affairs, created by fiat and not by footprints; both communities benefited from the strong top-down leadership of their founders.


pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

no-ist 10Much illuminating information about the video game industry can be found at the website of the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Available at: http://www.esrb.org/about/video-game-industry-statistics.jsp 11An early and entertaining account of teledildonics titled “Teledildonics: Reach Out and Touch Someone” was written by Howard Rheingold in the journal Mondo 2000 (Summer, 1990). The article, complete with an opening cheeky limerick, is available in the book Arthur Berger (Ed.), The Postmodern Presence: Readings on Postmodernism in American Culture and Society (Rowman Altamira, New York, 1998). 12Project Syria and the virtual Aleppo experience is described at the Immersive Journalism website at: http://www.immersivejournalism.com/ 13The article by Rosenberg, Baughman and Bailenson describing the virtual superhero effect, titled “Virtual Superheroes: Using Superpowers in Virtual Reality to Encourage Prosocial Behavior,” was published in the journal PLOS One (2013, Volume 8, pages 1–9). 14George Stratton’s description of the inverting goggles experiments can be found in an ancient paper titled “Some Preliminary Experiments on Vision Without Inversion of the Retinal Image,” in the journal Psychological Review, (1896, Volume 3, pages 611–617).


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

But it also makes the web perilous for businesses being talked about—unless they have the facility to listen to and join the conversation as it happens. Mobs form in a flash In this live connection machine, people of similar interests and goals—call them communities or call them mobs—can find each other, coalesce, organize, and act in an instant. Howard Rheingold dubbed them Smart Mobs in the title of his 2002 book. Rheingold chronicled the fall of Philippine president Joseph Estrada at the hands of a smart mob of tens of thousands who were gathered together in only an hour by SMS messages on phones that told them to “Go 2 EDSA,” an address in Manila, and to “Wear blck.”


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

—Frederic Mazzella, OuiShare magazine interview, January 14, 2013 The Internet has existed as space for commercial exchange for over two decades. Now well into the new millennium, it is easy to forget that in the mid to late 1990s, the Internet was both a scene of frenzied excitement and a site of deep apprehension, fear, and moral panic. After all, although some Internet enthusiasts like Howard Rheingold were staking out the “virtual frontier” of the Internet, others were warning people that the Internet was a potential minefield of illicit affairs, pornography, and (of course) fraudulent activities. Over the past two decades, as both the utopian speculations and paranoid misconceptions about the Internet have receded, it has become an integral part of our everyday lives.


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

In Britain, where the web was expanding rapidly, it was noted that the dire warnings of social catastrophe were matched by cyber-evangelists proclaiming the reverse. ‘The most transforming technological event since the capture of fire’ was how John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and digital rights activist, described the development of the Internet. The writer Howard Rheingold, one of the first to log on to an online community in San Francisco in the mid-1980s, claimed to have been ‘participating in the self-design of a new kind of culture’. In his book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Rheingold wrote of how he had plugged his computer into his telephone and made contact with the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a very early email network.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

“Half or more of computer science is heads” (meaning, roughly, hippies), wrote Stewart Brand in a landmark profile of the Bay Area computer science scene for Rolling Stone magazine.17 Imbued with an ethos of individual freedom and self-expression, many of the early acolytes of the digital revolution—like Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and others—came of age during this period when top-down schemes were seen as tools of suppression and control, administered by “the Man.” Those counterculture idealists all opposed war and believed in the possibility of emerging technologies to usher in a new age of planetary consciousness and spiritual enlightenment.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Having their adventure ahead served as a light at the end of the long tunnel. Many people have engaged with me about the ideas in this book. These ideas are as much yours as they are mine. You are, in an order that makes sense to me on a fractalnoid level, Dr. Mark Filippi, Ryan Freilino, Jerry Michalski, Kevin Slavin, Curtis Faith, Howard Rheingold, Terence McKenna, Stewart Brand, Ken Goldberg, Clay Shirky, Amber Case, Cintra Wilson, Jonathan Lethem, Samantha Hinds, David Bennahum, Walter Kirn, Steven Bender, Jeff Newelt, Barak Goodman, Rachel Dretzin, David Pescovitz, Janet Sternberg, Lance Strate, Mark Stahlman, Paul Levinson, Alan Burdick, Renee Hobbs, Nathalis Wamba, and Hermenauts everywhere.


pages: 193 words: 98,671

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

Hildebrand, Laurie Hills, Peter Hirshberg, Larry Keeley, Gary Kratkin, Deborah Kurata, Tom Lafleur, Paul Laughton, Ellen Levy, Steven List, T.C. Mangan, David Maister, Robert May, Don McKinney, Kathryn Meadows, Lisa Mitchell, Geoffrey Moore, Bruce Mowery, Nate Myers, Ed Niehaus, Constance Petersen, Keith Pleas, Robert Reimann, John Rivlin, Howard Rheingold, Heidi Roizen, Neil Rubenking, Paul Saffo, Josh Seiden, Russ Siegelman, Donna Slote, Linda Stone, Toni Walker, Kevin Weeks, Kevin Welch, Dan Willis, Heather Winkle, Stephen Wildstrom, Terry Winograd, John Zicker, and Pierluigi Zappacosta. This "year long" project took 20 months, and my family showed great patience with me.


pages: 345 words: 105,722

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

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

Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers Conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new possibilities of digital counterculture. CoEvolution Quarterlyfolded its teepee, replaced by Whole Earth Software Review and eventually by Whole Earth Review (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard Rheingold). 1985 saw the birth of the "WELL"—the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link." The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system. As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning, and remained one. It was local to San Francisco. It was huge, with multiple phonelines and enormous files of commentary.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

Available: http://ajr.newslink.org/ajrjdsept98.html (July 25, 1999); USWeb and Rick E. Bruner, Net Results: Web Marketing That Works (Indianapolis: Hayden Books, 1998), 245, 274, 303; Nicholas Stein, “New Media, Old Values,” Columbia Journalism Review (July 1999). Available: http://www.cjr.org/year/99/4/ona.asp (July 25, 1999). 49. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993). 50. USWeb and Bruner, Net Results, 159–62, 270–71. 51. Shapiro and Varian, Information Rules, 35. 52. USWeb and Bruner, Net Results, 283. 53. Ibid., 40. 54. Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 150–56. 55.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

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

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

As innovation expert Larry Keeley once observed: “No one is as smart as everyone.” Or as Clay Shirky puts it: “Here comes everybody!” Should we simply let the “everyone” in the audience create the online magazine themselves? Should editors step back and just approve what the wisdom of the crowd creates? Howard Rheingold, a writer and editor who had been living online for a decade before Wired, was one of many pundits who argued that it was now possible to forget the editor. Go with the crowd. Rheingold was at the forefront of the then totally radical belief that content could be assembled entirely from the collective action of amateurs and the audience.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

Quite how people who make a living from the professional exercise of their skills will distinguish their own craft from the efforts of millions of others is a big, wide-open, gaping question. CRAP DETECTION ‘The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap, a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception.’ This was from Howard Rheingold’s 2009 essay ‘Crap Detection 101’, which itself was an homage to Ernest Hemingway’s dictum: ‘The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.’ ‘Learning to be a critical consumer of Web info is not rocket science,’ continued Rheingold. ‘It’s not even algebra.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

The most comprehensive work on Engelbart is Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). The demonstration is viewable at https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com ​/­watch​?­v ​= y­ JDv​-­z dhzMY. Many works describe it, including Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The P ­ eople and Ideas ­behind the Next Computer Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture ­Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 98. Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk,” in History of Programming Languages II, ed.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

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

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

If you pay attention, you’ll find cameos of me in early cyberpunk novels. My head might float by. Flattering Mirror Fiction about VR has mostly been quite dark ever since cyberpunk. The Matrix movies; Inception. Meanwhile, norms for tech journalism became hell-bent on positivity. VR engaged a new generation of journalists, like Steven Levy, Howard Rheingold, Luc Sante, and Mondo 2000’s Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius. I’ll highlight two figures who were particularly influential as well as dear to me: Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow. Kevin is a fine example of a trusted friend with whom I disagree completely. When I met him, he was editing and writing in publications connected to Stewart Brand’s world, post–Whole Earth Catalog; he later became the first editor in chief of Wired.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

It is available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush. My account of Douglas Engelbart’s work draws on readings from his work collected at the Bootstrap Institute Web site at http://www.bootstrap.org/, as well as the accounts in Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping (Stanford University Press, 2000); Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (Simon & Schuster, 1985); and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005). The video of Engelbart’s 1968 demo is at http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.htm. “store ideas, study them”: From the Invisible Revolution Web site, devoted to Engelbart’s ideas, at http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/nls.htm.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

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

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

National Center on Education Statistics, “Table 318.30: Bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by sex of student and discipline division: 2011–12.” 19. Off-the-record interview with Columbia University student for this book. 20. Author interview with Lutz for this book. 21. Robert S. Kaplan, “The Topic of Quality in Business School Education and Research,” Selections (Autumn 1991): 13–22; Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York: Summit Books, 2001). 22. John R. Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, and Shivaram Rajgopal, “Value Destruction and Financial Reporting Decisions,” Financial Analysts Journal 62, no. 6 (December 2006): 8. 23. Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton, Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006). 24.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Katinka Matson Richard Metzger John Brockman Jay Babcock Will Murphy Steven Johnson Dan Hind Eamon Dolan Shawn Kittelsen Amy Hertz Janine Saunders Gillian Blake Sally Marvin Bálazs Szekfü Ramona Pringle Media-Squatters Nick Hasty Suzan Eraslan Lian Amaris David Lanphier, Jr. Ari Wallach Felipe Ribeiro Andrew Mayer Fernando Cervantes Bernard Lietaer Armanda Lewis Howard Rheingold David Pescovitz John Merryman Jonathan Taylor Propaganda Lance Strate John Leland John Rogers Darren Sharp Jules Marshall Amy Sohn Christina Amini Jason Liszkiewicz Jeff Newelt Kevin Werbach Xeni Jardin Timothy Mohn Anaid Gomez-Ortigoza Matthew Burton Max Brockman Josh Klein Russel Weinberger Jeff Gordiner Helen Churko Getachew Mengistie Courtney Turco Justin Vogt Joost Raessens Nancy Hechinger Rachel Dretzen Benjamin Kirshbaum Barak Goodman Ken Miller Naomi Klein David Feuer Kate Norris and, most of all, Barbara and Mamie Rushkoff NOTES CHAPTER ONE Once Removed: The Corporate Life-Form 4 Most history books recount For the best descriptions of late Middle Ages and Renaissance life and commerce, see Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), and Carlo M.


Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

T h e w o r l d M c L u h a n f o r e t o l d b a c k in t h e a g e of ' e l e c t r i c m e d i a ' h a s b e c o m e i m m e n s e l y m o r e c o m p l i c a t e d in t o d a y ' s m a n y to-many, converged, remixed and m a s h e d - u p , digital, mobile, a l w a y s - o n m e d i a environment. you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, e n t r e p r e n e u r , or a m e d i a industry e x e c u t i v e , y o u n e e d t o u n d e r s t a n d c o n v e r g e n c e culture. If an And you will only after r e a d i n g H e n r y J e n k i n s . " — HOWARD RHEINGOLD, a u t h o r of Smart "I s i m p l y c o u l d n o t put t h i s b o o k d o w n ! new media intersects powerful ways. Culture old m e d i a and Mobs: The Next Social Revolution H e n r y J e n k i n s p r o v i d e s a f a s c i n a t i n g a c c o u n t of h o w e n g a g e s the imagination of f a n s in m o r e E d u c a t o r s , m e d i a s p e c i a l i s t s , policy m a k e r s a n d p a r e n t s will find and more Convergence both lively a n d e n l i g h t e n i n g . " — J O H N SEELY BROWN, Former Chief Scientist, Xerox C o r p & director of Xerox P A R C W I N N E R O F T H E 2007 S O C I E T Y STUDIES KATHERINE SINGER FOR CINEMA KOVACS AND BOOK MEDIA AWARD Media Studies / Cultural Studies NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS W a s h i n g t o n S q u a r e / N e w York, N Y 10003 www.nyupress.org


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

Stewart Brand received his own baptism in Hubbard LSD at IFAS in 1962, with James Fadiman presiding as his guide. His first experience with LSD “was kind of a bum trip,” he recalls, but it led to a series of other journeys that reshaped his worldview and, indirectly, all of ours. The Whole Earth Network Brand would subsequently gather together (which included Peter Schwartz, Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and John Perry Barlow) and play a key role in redefining what computers meant and did, helping to transform them from a top-down tool of the military-industrial complex—with the computer punch card a handy symbol of Organization Man—into a tool of personal liberation and virtual community, with a distinctly countercultural vibe.


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

See Ross Rubin, Players Scramble for Consumer Market, INTERACTIVE HOME, Sept. 1, 1996; Steve Kovsky & Paula Rooney, Online Service Providers Upgrade UIs, PC WEEK, June 24, 1996, at 14. 18. A Little Microcomputer BBS History, http://www.portcommodore.com/bbshist.php?path=main-cbmidx-bbsidx (last visited June 1, 2007). 19. See HOWARD RHEINGOLD, THE VIRTUAL COMMUNITY, at xxiii-xxiv (1993), available at http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html; Jack Rickard, Home-Grown BB$, WIRED, Sept.—Oct. 1993, at 42, available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/ 1.04/bbs.html. 20. See Tom Jennings, Fido and FidoNet, http://www.wps.com/FidoNet/index.html (last visited June 1, 2007); Living Internet, Bulletin Board Systems & FidoNet, http://www.livinginternet.eom/u/ui_fidonet.htm (last visited June 1, 2007). 21.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

For Schumpeter’s theory of crisis, see also “The Analysis of Economic Change,” Review of Economic Statistics 17, (May 1935): 2-10; and “Theoretical Problems of Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic History 7 (November 1947): 1-9. 119 See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003). 120 Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 1999). For another technology-based analysis of how people are increasingly able to create collaboratively in networks, see Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs (New York: Basic, 2002). 121 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Siverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapter 14. 122 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 136, translation modified. 123 Ward Churchill argues against pacifist politics but assumes that the only alternative to pacifism is armed struggle in traditional form.


pages: 542 words: 161,731

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

One of them was a 17 year old boy.’” See Fantz, “Forgive Us Father.” 8 Ray Oldenberg. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Ships, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989). On virtual environments as communities, see Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1993). 9 There is, too, the word “world.” Sociologist William Bainbridge, a student of World of Warcraft, takes its title seriously and talks of the game as a world. See William Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

What brought so many together was a rapid exchange of several million texts reading Go 2 EDSA, wear Blk. The very act of treating such a text as legitimate required trust that those forwarding it were coequals. That day saw the reverse dominance hierarchy firmly back in control in the form of what futurist Howard Rheingold calls a “smart mob.”31 THE ADVANTAGES OF SOCIETIES FOR HUMANS: LIVING IN BANDS Just about every boon of membership in an animal society applies to our species also, in how societies both provide for and protect their members. Consider the matter from the perspective of a band society.


pages: 636 words: 202,284

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

It did not take users long to testify that they felt themselves approaching the McLuhanite dream of having the psyche merge into a global electronic net. More influential language for articulating online communities, however, evoked concepts of community and frontier. Their principal exponent, Howard Rheingold, was a WELL veteran who came up with the expression “virtual community” in 1987 in a successor volume to the Whole Earth Catalog. Rheingold’s representation of an emergent frontier domain – at once a village full of diverse skills, bound together by an “informal, unwritten social contract,” and an unsettled landscape of new stakes and homesteads – became probably the most widely adopted model for these pseudosocieties.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

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

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

Unfortunately, at the time the sophomore had received his “free” laptop, he was too young to have yet studied the prophetic warning about Greeks bearing gifts, a topic he would likely cover two years later when assigned Virgil’s Aeneid in his senior English class. Candid Camera You can’t assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible. HOWARD RHEINGOLD When a public school district, an organ of the state, has the ability to spy on us in our homes at will and without warrant, it is clear the age of pervasive universal surveillance has upon us. From London to New York and Chicago to Beijing, massive video surveillance, or CCTV, networks have been installed to protect us from threats, real and imagined.


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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

The other population was smaller, tighter, and deeply interconnected: authors and instructors, professors and their grad students, administrators, operators, managers, systems staff, and anyone else with an author signon. This smaller group comprised one of the most vibrant, diverse, and early examples of what writer Howard Rheingold would later call a “virtual community.” It was certainly one of the earliest. Tragically, in one of what would be many cases of the saltwater view denying the freshwater view a chance to be known, the PLATO story went unmentioned in his essential 1993 book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

He was working at a good job at Ames Research in California, where he did electrical engineering for one of NASA's ancestors, the National Advisory Com- mittee on Aeronautics. He had met a girl there. And that very weekend, the two of them had decided to get married. And yet, as Engelbart explained to Howard Rheingold for the latter's 1985 book, Toolsfor Thought, "the Monday after we got engaged, I was driving to work when I was hit with the shocking realization that I no longer had any goals. As a kid who had grown up in the Depression, I was imbued with three goals: get an education, get a steady job, get married.