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The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross

Albert Einstein, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, death of newspapers, distributed generation, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Livingstone, I presume, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, plutocrats, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, urban renewal, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers

William Preece, a telegraph engineer for the British Post Office, happened to pay a visit to Edison’s new Menlo Park laboratory in May 1877 when the rest of the world knew nothing about Edison’s existence, nor Menlo Park’s. The town was too small to merit its own identifying sign at the train stop, and Preece almost missed it, hurriedly hopping off the train after it was in motion again. When he did so, he found himself at a desolate station in rural New Jersey. It was a blazing hot day and no porters were on hand. Preece provides a unique account of one not-famous Englishman paying a call on a not-yet-famous American and fellow telegraphy expert. Before taking the train to Menlo Park, Preece had been most entertained in New York City by the nineteenth-century version of The Fast and the Furious, illegal street racing with lightly harnessed horses, roads lined with spectators, and frequent “collisions and rows” that brought unwanted attention from the police.

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Fortunately, Grosvenor Lowrey knew that this was the time to step forward and propose a modus vivendi that did not involve bribes, but did involve currying of favor from political operators. Lowrey obtained Edison’s consent to provide a special performance of the Menlo Park magic light show for the New York Board of Aldermen. It’s impossible to determine whether Lowrey was supernaturally savvy, or just plain lucky, but the evening he set for the demonstration in Menlo Park for New York’s City Fathers was 20 December, the very same evening that Broadway would be transformed into the Great White Way by Brush Electric. The aldermen missed the spectacle in New York, pulling in to Menlo Park on a private train provided by the Pennsylvania Railroad exactly at the moment when Brush Electric made its Broadway debut.

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In the age of the computer, different companies at different times—for example, Apple in the early 1980s, Microsoft in the early 1990s, Google in the first decade of the twenty-first century—inherited the temporary aura that once hovered over Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, attracting young talents who applied in impossibly large numbers, all seeking a role in the creation of the zeitgeist (and, like John Ott, at the same time open to a chance to become wealthy). The lucky ones got inside (Lawson got a position and worked on electric light). Menlo Park became the iconic site for American ingenuity, but it was a highly burnished image that floated free of the actual place. Edison did not stay in the actual Menlo Park for very long—only four years after the phonograph was invented in 1877, he moved to New York City to be close to the work on the electric light system and would never return.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

A frustrated Engelbart began to explore the idea of remotely connecting to the SDC computer from the Control Data minicomputer in Menlo Park using an early modem. Unfortunately his engineers were never able to make the system communicate reliably. As a result, for the next two years Engelbart’s fledgling Augmented Human Intellect Research Center began to build his system on a computer that had far less processing power than an Apple II of a decade and a half later. The Menlo Park computer used the magnetic-core memory that Engelbart, Crane, and English had all worked on improving in the fifties. It had a capacity of eight thousand twelve-bit characters—a little more than three pages of typed text—in its main memory.

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He also soon became the youngest researcher at the newly founded International Foundation for Advanced Study, Myron Stolaroff’s project for continuing his research on the uses of LSD. When Stolaroff and Harman set up shop in Menlo Park in March 1961, they weren’t the only ones on the Midpeninsula exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD. Experiments were already being conducted at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had also begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists, and even writers such as Allen Ginsberg, to psychedelic drugs.15 But the foundation was something new.

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Later, when the researcher told one of SRI’s accountants that he had ARPA’s blessing for the huge expense, he had been told that it was okay to go ahead, but if the venture failed, SRI planned to deny any knowledge of its approval. From his platform behind the audience, English served as the link between Engelbart onstage and the laboratory researchers who were connected from Menlo Park to the auditorium by two video microwave links and two modem lines. English served as the director, talking by telephone to Menlo Park and by a communication link to a speaker in Engelbart’s ear, cuing each part of the demonstration and controlling the camera views. The researchers had placed a truck at a strategic point on Skyline Boulevard, high above the Peninsula, to relay the microwave links to the city, and they had built two homebrew high-speed modems—1200 baud was high speed in 1968, and each modem carried data in only a single direction—to connect Engelbart’s keyboard, mouse, and key set to the SDS-940 in Menlo Park.

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

Edison soon realized that for his central station he needed a bigger dynamo and a better steam engine than the Porter-Allen version he had used for the Menlo Park demonstration. A Menlo Park veteran, Charles Dean, took charge of the work. For months experiments went on to improve the original large Menlo Park dynamo. The armature posed the thorniest problem; Jehl recalled that to reshape it took fifty-five men working eight solid days and nights. From their labors emerged the giant “C” model dynamo.29 The first tests took place in January 1881; a month later the machine succeeded in powering all 426 lamps at Menlo Park. Gleefully Edison led a late-night parade to the neighborhood saloon for a round or three of drinks.

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When Jehl received orders in May 1881 to move himself and his testing instruments to Goerck Street, it hit him like a bombshell. “I had always thought,” he recalled, “that Edison would never give up Menlo Park, that he would return when the urgencies of affairs in New York were over.”49 More than half a century later, through the mists of memory, Menlo Park’s image still evoked in Jehl a mixture of sorrow and pride. “Menlo Park with its laboratory was a shrine,” he wrote, “Edison was the high priest, and we ‘boys’ were his followers. I had devoted all my energies in loyal obedience to the cause.”50 Menlo Park faded into the realm between history and myth because Edison had outgrown it. Despite the demands of business, he never stopped being an inventor.

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During the summer of 1880 Maxim visited Menlo Park, where Edison devoted an entire day and evening to showing him the lamp and the works. It was a courtesy he showed any electrician who came to learn, but Maxim took more than the usual advantage of it. He sent an emissary back to Menlo Park to persuade Ludwig Boehm, Edison’s glassblower, to visit him secretly at his New York shop. When these trips were discovered by Edison’s men, Boehm abruptly left Menlo Park and turned up in the employment of Maxim. Humorless and forever the butt of practical jokes, Boehm had never been happy at Menlo Park. At United States Electric Lighting he became the invaluable informant that Maxim needed to emulate Edison’s lamp.5 In October 1880 Maxim announced his new lamp, which bore a striking resemblance to Edison’s 1879 version.

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

He had recently dived into Zen Buddhism, and he had been reading about its influence on art; he wrote that his increasing interest in Zen assumptions, approaches, and values was one of the reasons he wanted to try psychedelics. When, in March of 1961, Stolaroff and Harman set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study on a quiet street in downtown Menlo Park, just two miles from the Stanford campus, they weren’t the only ones exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD on the San Francisco Peninsula. Experiments were going on at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had already begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists and even poets such as Allen Ginsberg to psychedelic drugs. But the foundation was something new.

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He stood frozen as it receded, transforming itself into three separate dancing images. To the Menlo Park foundation researchers, Brand had proved a tough nut to crack. Their analysis was that he was stuck in here-and-now concepts and resistant to fully “letting go.” They saw him as the model of the uptight, intellectual guy who depended on logical analysis for emotional defense. Even the LSD injection “booster” had been unable to shake his defenses. Although he had been pushed into more inner-generated symbolism, he still kept “one foot on the ground.” It would only be later, during several follow-up sessions, that the Menlo Park psychologists noticed he softened, becoming less defensive, less concerned about how he was perceived, and more accessible and easier to be with.

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Like Brand, he had recently taken LSD. Kesey, who was three years older than Brand, had been introduced to the drug when, to supplement his income, he had participated in government studies at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. On a whim, Brand mailed some of the photographs he had taken in Oregon to Kesey, who was in the process of moving over the hill to the small mountain community of La Honda because his cottage on Perry Lane in Menlo Park was being torn down. Brand added a short note: “Pictures were taken this May on the first stage of a brochure job for the Warm Springs Indians. They’re spelling out what they plan to keep, not lose any more of.

AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War by Tom McNichol

computer age, electricity market, experimental subject, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Menlo Park, popular electronics, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thales of Miletus

In the week following Christmas 1889, hundreds of visitors made a pilgrimage to Menlo Park to see the marvel for themselves, so many that the railroad had to run extra trains to Menlo Park. On New Year’s Eve, the throng grew to several thousand, including a New York Tribune reporter, who described the scene: “By eight o’clock the laboratory was so crowded that it was almost impossible for the assistants to pass through. The exclamation, ‘There is Edison!’ invariably caused a rush that more than once threatened to break down the timbers of the building.” Those who came to Menlo Park never forgot the sight of the glowing lamps, even if many didn’t understand how they worked.

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Had he been born twenty years earlier, he would have found few opportunities as an inventor; had he come along twenty years later, he might have ended up a frustrated researcher at one of the large industrial corporations. Edison was at the right place at the right time with the right mind. In 1876, Edison built a state-of-the-art “invention factory” where he could continue his work. He set up shop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, about twenty miles outside New York City, constructing what could be considered the first modern research and development center in the world. The Menlo Park laboratory employed dozens of workers, and later hundreds, all toiling on various Edison projects. His men soon learned to adapt themselves to their boss’s trial-and-error methods. As one of his workers recalls, “Edison seemed pleased when he used to run up against a serious difficulty.

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For a more manageable introduction to the life and work of Edison, Matthew Josephson’s Edison: A Biography (Wiley, 1959) is the classic standard biography, and still holds up. It’s a bit uncritical in parts, but it does a nice job of capturing both Edison the man and his inventions. 187 bfurread.qxp 188 7/15/06 8:44 PM Page 188 FURTHER READINGS IN ELECTRICITY Francis Jehl’s Menlo Park Reminiscences (Edison Institute, 1938) is an endearingly fusty account by one of Edison’s laboratory assistants at Menlo Park. It’s not always reliable on chronology, but it offers a rare view over Edison’s shoulder as he works in his lab. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (Abbey, 1968) is a collection of articles Edison wrote for popular magazines and newspapers of the day, along with a brief diary extract from 1885.

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

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Visalia was predominantly a farming community with a large population of laborers but also a sizable number of professional, middle-class families. Menlo Park had a largely middle-class population but also a significant number of working-class and low-income households. The two cities were not identical—the typical resident of Menlo Park was somewhat better educated than the typical resident of Visalia and earned a slightly higher salary—but the differences were relatively small. In the late 1960s, the two cities had schools of comparable quality and similar crime rates, although Menlo Park had a higher incidence of violent crime, especially aggravated assault. The natural surroundings in both places were attractive.

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HD5706.M596 2012 331.10973—dc23 2012007933 Printed in the United States of America DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Ilaria Introduction Menlo park is a lively community in the heart of Silicon Valley, just minutes from Stanford University’s manicured campus and many of the Valley’s most dynamic high-tech companies. Surrounded by some of the wealthiest zip codes in California, its streets are lined with an eclectic mix of midcentury ranch houses side by side with newly built mini-mansions and low-rise apartment buildings. In 1969, David Breedlove was a young engineer with a beautiful wife and a house in Menlo Park. They were expecting their first child. Breedlove liked his job and had even turned down an offer from Hewlett-Packard, the iconic high-tech giant in the Valley.

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Breedlove liked his job and had even turned down an offer from Hewlett-Packard, the iconic high-tech giant in the Valley. Nevertheless, he was considering leaving Menlo Park to move to a medium-sized town called Visalia. About a three-hour drive from Menlo Park, Visalia sits on a flat, dry plain in the heart of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley. Its residential neighborhoods have the typical feel of many Southern California communities, with wide streets lined with one-story houses, lawns with shrubs and palm trees, and the occasional backyard pool. It’s hot in the summer, with a typical maximum temperature in July of ninety-four degrees, and cold in the winter.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

He assured her that he could handle the controversy by convening a meeting of top conservative media executives, think tank leaders, and pundits in Menlo Park. It was critical, however, that Zuckerberg agree to play a prominent role in the event. On May 18, sixteen prominent conservative media personalities and thought leaders—including Glenn Beck of Blaze TV, Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, and Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots—flew to Menlo Park for the afternoon gathering to air their concerns of political bias. Only Republican Facebook staff were allowed in the room, a former Facebook official said.

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These people provide a rare look inside a company whose stated mission is to create a connected world of open expression, but whose corporate culture demands secrecy and unqualified loyalty. While Zuckerberg and Sandberg initially told their communications staff that they wanted to make sure their perspectives were conveyed in this book, they refused repeated requests for interviews. On three occasions, Sandberg invited us to off-the-record conversations in Menlo Park and New York, with the promise that those conversations would lead to longer interviews for the record. When she learned about the critical nature of some of our reporting, she cut off direct communication. Apparently the unvarnished account of the Facebook story did not align with her vision of the company and her role as its second-in-command.

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But despite being household names, Zuckerberg and Sandberg remain enigmas to the public, and for good reason. They are fiercely protective of the images they’ve cultivated—he, the technology visionary and philanthropist; she, business icon and feminist—and have surrounded the inner workings of “MPK,” the shorthand employees use to describe the headquarters’ campus in Menlo Park, with its moat of loyalists and culture of secrecy. Many people regard Facebook as a company that lost its way: the classic Frankenstein story of a monster that broke free of its creator. We take a different point of view. From the moment Zuckerberg and Sandberg met at a Christmas party in December 2007, we believe, they sensed the potential to transform the company into the global power it is today.4 Through their partnership, they methodically built a business model that is unstoppable in its growth—with $85.9 billion in revenue in 2020 and a market value of $800 billion—and entirely deliberate in its design.5 We have chosen to focus on a five-year period, from one U.S. election to another, during which both the company’s failure to protect its users and its vulnerabilities as a powerful global platform were exposed.

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

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The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, September 1969. Brand, Stewart, Joe Bonner, and Ann Helmuth, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, January 1969. ———, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, July 1969. Brand, Stewart, Ann Helmuth, Joe Bonner, Tom Duckworth, Lois Brand, and Hal Hershey, eds. The Difficult but Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, March 1969. Brand, Stewart, Lloyd Kahn, and Sarah Kahn, eds.

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The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point Foundation, 1974. ———. “We Owe It All to the Hippies.” Time 145, special issue, Spring 1995. ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Spring 1969. B i b l i o g ra p h y [ 295 ] ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, Fall 1969. ———, ed. Whole Earth Catalog One Dollar. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, January 1971. ———, ed. Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point Foundation, 1974. ———. Whole Earth Software Catalog. Garden City, NY: Quantum Press/Doubleday, 1984. ———.

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In The Seven Laws of Money, edited by Michael Phillips, 121–27. Menlo Park, CA: Word Wheel; New York: Random House, 1974. Anderson, Philip W., Kenneth Joseph Arrow, David Pines, and Santa Fe Institute. The Economy as an Evolving Complex System: The Proceedings of the Evolutionary Paths of the Global Economy Workshop, Held September, 1987, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1988. Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Ashby, Gordon, ed. Whole Earth Catalog $1. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, July 1970. Aufderheide, Patricia.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

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

Instead, employees gathered in the mall of Facebook’s new Menlo Park campus, where Zuckerberg would ring the bell remotely. It was just as well he stayed in California. At the moment the stock was about go on sale, NASDAQ, which prides itself on being the tech-savvy alternative to its more prestigious rival, the New York Stock Exchange, had a computer meltdown. Despite several test runs in the previous few days, the volume of requests overwhelmed its system. NASDAQ postponed the opening, but even when the stock went on sale more than an hour late—to hugs and whoops of joy in Menlo Park—transactions were still delayed.

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Facebook claimed, “The errors we made in our 2014 filings were not intentional.” Zuckerberg kept pushing. In early 2017, he insisted that WhatsApp move to the Menlo Park campus. The move was as harmful to WhatsApp’s culture as Acton and Koum feared. The WhatsApp people were accustomed to a different atmosphere from the boisterous, close-quartered dorm-room spirit permeating Facebook’s offices. Porting WhatsApp’s more heads-down vibe to Menlo Park created friction. To Zuckerberg’s credit, he allowed WhatsApp employees to keep their larger desks, and even had the bathrooms remodeled to accommodate them—the privacy-obsessed WhatsApp folk wanted stall doors that reached the floor.

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Straight from the airport, he headed to the gritty Yaba neighborhood and CcHUB. The Lagos start-up culture careens between an improbable optimism and a gallows humor regarding the monumental obstacles to success or even survival. But these were the people Zuckerberg wanted to meet: nerds with dreams. In the giant headquarters he built in Menlo Park, California, among the posters festooning the walls like a giant confetti blast of techno-propaganda were dozens that read BE THE NERD. So while other tech magnates devoted their initial African venture to philanthropic themes, Zuckerberg scheduled no time to hug undernourished infants in remote villages.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

The canonical story goes something like this: after a triumphant start to his career inventing the phonograph and the stock ticker, a thirty-one-year-old Edison takes a few months off to tour the American West—perhaps not coincidentally, a region that was significantly darker at night than the gaslit streets of New York and New Jersey. Two days after returning to his lab in Menlo Park, in August 1878, he draws three diagrams in his notebook and titles them “Electric Light.” By 1879, he files a patent application for an “electric lamp” that displays all the main characteristics of the lightbulb we know today. By the end of 1882, Edison’s company is powering electric light for the entire Pearl Street district in Lower Manhattan. Thomas Edison It’s a thrilling story of invention: the young wizard of Menlo Park has a flash of inspiration, and within a few years his idea is lighting up the world.

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After a year of experimentation, bamboo emerged as the most durable substance, which set off one of the strangest chapters in the history of global commerce. Edison dispatched a series of Menlo Park emissaries to scour the globe for the most incandescent bamboo in the natural world. One representative paddled down two thousand miles of river in Brazil. Another headed to Cuba, where he was promptly struck down with yellow fever and died. A third representative named William Moore ventured to China and Japan, where he struck a deal with a local farmer for the strongest bamboo the Menlo Park wizards had encountered. The arrangement remained intact for many years, supplying the filaments that would illuminate rooms all over the world.

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The definitive history of Bell Labs, Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory, reveals the secret to the labs’ unrivaled success. It was not just the diversity of talent, and the tolerance of failure, and the willingness to make big bets—all of which were traits that Bell Labs shared with Edison’s famous lab at Menlo Park as well as other research labs around the world. What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted. Employees install the "red phone,” the legendary hotline that connected the White House to the Kremlin during the Cold War, in the White House, August 30, 1963, Washington, D.C.

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

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

“It’s great to be able to have conversations about threats and risk and people say, ‘Well, here’s how we think about threats: we talk about the capabilities and the motives of the actors, and we talk about the vulnerabilities,’” Lavin said. I had never before heard the words threats, vulnerabilities, and motives uttered in Menlo Park. Speaking of Menlo Park, Facebook has made it a point to hire people outside it, seeking to get away from the homogeneous thought and techno-optimism prevalent in Northern California. “We don’t actually have lunch together because most of us are not in California,” Lavin said. “We’re in Dublin, Singapore; I’m in Austin, Texas.

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The Leader of the Future “Something New Wouldn’t Hurt” The New Education Caring Watching the AI The Case for Thoughtful Invention Onward ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR To everyone out there trying to make it PREFACE THE ZUCKERBERG ENCOUNTER In February 2017, Mark Zuckerberg summoned me to his Menlo Park, California, headquarters for a meeting. It was my first time sitting down with the Facebook CEO, and it didn’t go as anticipated. His company, per usual, was enveloped in controversy. Pushing hard to grow its products but reluctant to moderate them, it had allowed them to fill with misinformation, sensationalism, and violent imagery.

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But look at Zuckerberg and his counterparts—Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft—and you’ll see trained engineers more eager to facilitate than to dictate. Instead of answers, they have questions. Instead of pitching, they listen and learn. Following that meeting in Menlo Park, I began digging into the tech giants’ inner workings more broadly—looking at their leadership practices, their cultures, their technology, and their processes—wondering if there was a link between their success and the unique way they operate. As common patterns emerged, that link became impossible to deny.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

By examining the data, BBN could sometimes predict that a line was about to go down. The phone company’s repair offices had never heard of such a thing and didn’t take to it well. When BBN’s loopback tests determined there was trouble on a line, say, between Menlo Park (Stanford) and Santa Barbara, one of Heart’s engineers in Cambridge picked up the phone and called Pacific Bell. ”You’re having trouble with your line between Menlo Park and Santa Barbara,” he’d say. “Are you calling from Menlo Park or Santa Barbara?” the Pacific Bell technician would ask. ”I’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” “Yeah, right.” Eventually, when BBN’s calls proved absolutely correct, the telephone company began sending repair teams out to fix whatever trouble BBN had spotted.

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., June 1990. BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation. “Annual Report of the Science Development Program.” Cambridge, Mass., 1988. Bhushan, A. K. “Comments on the File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 385. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., August 1972. ———.“The File Transfer Protocol.” Request for Comments 354. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., July 1972. Bhushan, Abhay, Ken Pogran, Ray Tomlinson, and Jim White. “Standardizing Network Mail Headers.” Request for Comments 561. MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 5 September 1973. Blue, Allan. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 12 June 1989.

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After all, if people were going to share resources, it was important to let everyone know what was available. At the Michigan meeting, Engelbart volunteered to put together the Network Information Center, which came to be known as the NIC (pronounced “nick”). Engelbart also knew that his research group back home in Menlo Park would be equally enthusiastic about the network. His colleagues were talented programmers who would recognize an interesting project when they saw it. The conversation with Scantlebury had clarified several points for Roberts. The Briton’s comments about packet-switching in particular helped steer Roberts closer to a detailed design.

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

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

Snapchat will keep experimenting, pivoting, and evolving as it figures out an ideal content strategy. But Snapchat is not the only tech company trying to convince media outlets that it is the future of publishing. Snapchat has competition from Facebook on every front. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE FEAR AND LOATHING IN MENLO PARK MARCH 2016 MENLO PARK, CA Just before Facebook went public in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had a bound red book titled Facebook Was Not Originally Created to Be a Company placed on every employee’s desk. The book’s penultimate page offered a grave rallying cry: If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.

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Duplan received some money from his parents and a $15,000 grant from a summer program at the venture capital firm Highland Capital. It had become quite easy for students to raise initial funding for their startup ideas. Venture capitalists were frequently on campus, often as professors or guest lecturers. Sand Hill Road, which runs from the 280 highway right past the edge of Stanford University in Menlo Park bordering Palo Alto, is home to the world’s major venture capital firms; think of it as Wall Street for venture capital. In the summer of 2011—the same summer that Evan, Reggie, and Bobby moved in to the Spiegels’ house to start Picaboo—Lucas and ten members of team Clinkle rented a house in Palo Alto to build the company’s first product.

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During his speech he again suggested to the students that if a venture capitalist offered “standard” terms, they should in turn offer merely standard performance. Afterward, he went to dinner with General Catalyst’s contingent (Bonatsos, Jon Teo, Hemant Taneja, and Joel Cutler) at the Dutch Goose, a dive bar and burger joint in Menlo Park that is as popular with venture capitalists as it was with Stanford frat guys. The evening went so well that the General Catalyst group left the Dutch Goose thinking they had won the deal. But the next morning, Evan called and told them he was going with Benchmark as the lead investor. Several partners from Benchmark, primarily Peter Fenton and Matt Cohler, had maintained a relationship with Evan and Snapchat since they passed on the seed round the previous winter.

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich

4chan, Asperger Syndrome, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Carl Icahn, contact tracing, data science, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, gamification, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Hyperloop, meme stock, Menlo Park, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, security theater, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Two Sigma, value at risk, wealth creators

And sometimes, to the outside observer, maybe it could appear that a similar attitude extended all the way to Menlo Park. You didn’t get more “arm’s length” from Silicon Valley than Orlando without hitting ocean. And the attitude made sense; you might carry on a pleasant conversation with the plumber while he was fixing your sink, but you didn’t often invite him to dinner afterward. But this past week—culminating in this crazy Friday afternoon—was one of those rare moments when the plumber hung around, at least until the main course. Jim had been on the phone with Menlo Park a number of times over the past few hours. What was going on in the market, and particularly on Robinhood, wasn’t an emergency—but it was concerning, and more than that, it was strange.

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Wall Street, simplified and digitized and shrunk down so small, you could fit it in your goddamn purse. Chapter Five Christ, I hate unicorns, Emma Jackson thought to herself as she tried to find a comfortable sitting position on the ultramodern sofa in the center of the vast waiting area of the shiny, absurdly modern, brand-spanking-new Menlo Park headquarters of one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley. It was a difficult task, considering that the sofa was way too short, which meant Emma’s knees were almost to her shoulders. She’d never thought a piece of furniture could be pretentious before she’d started working with Valley Internet companies, but by her sixth year in the rapidly growing fintech industry, she’d visited enough headquarters to know that anything—and she really meant anything—could be pretentious.

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Ceilings could be pretentious, like the vaulted wooden one above her head, with its exposed beams and deep tones that would have been more suited for a ranch-style country estate or a fancy beach house than a tech company’s lobby. Courtyards could be terrifyingly pretentious—like the one on the other side of those windows, paved in wood and cobbled in stone, complete with a fire pit surrounded by a phalanx of potted plants. Even so, Emma supposed, the Menlo Park offices were a step up from the company’s previous headquarters in Palo Alto, basically a carved-out shell squatting near a strip mall, just a stone’s throw from where the two young unicorn foals had been roommates at Stanford, before they’d grown their rainbow-spewing horns. Those offices had been warren-like and undoubtedly lower-rent—and yet somehow, Emma had been just as intimidated when she’d visited, back in early 2016.

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

And that seems to explain why the important principle of thermionic emission came to be known as the Edison Effect. Thermionic emission was observed for the first time in March 1883 in Thomas A. Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, when the inventor and his associates noticed something strange going on inside one of his first light bulbs. In addition to the electric current flowing through the carbon filament, there seemed to be another, separate current flowing through the vacuum inside the glass bulb—something quite impossible, under contemporary explanations of electricity. Nobody at Menlo Park understood what was happening (the current was eventually found to be a flow of electrons boiling off the white-hot filament).

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When the New York Daily Graphic reported that Edison had invented a machine that spun food and wine from mud and water, many newspapers failed to notice the April 1 dateline and ran the story straight—just one more miracle from Menlo Park. When Edison died, at eighty-four, in 1931, someone proposed that all the lights in the world be turned out for two minutes as a memorial. The idea was dropped on the ground that it would be impossible for the world to function that long without the electric light. Despite fame and fortune, Edison remained an uncouth hay-seed who flaunted his disdain for cleanliness, fashion, order, religion, and science. A journalist touring the famous Menlo Park laboratory in 1878 described the proprietor this way: “The hair, beginning to be touched with gray, falls over the forehead in a mop.

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Had the early work on these materials been continued, it is not too great a flight of fancy to suggest that the modern semiconductor revolution might have come a half century or more earlier than it did. But after the discovery of the Edison Effect, electronics research took a new direction—with dramatic results. The work at Menlo Park led, fourteen years later, to the experiment known as “the zero hour of modern physics”—the discovery of the electron—and from there, along a more or less straight line, to wireless telegraphy, radio, television, and the first generation of digital computers. It was all a digression, but a glorious one.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

Stross Copyright The Cast The Benchmark Partners Dave Beirne previously, founder of Ramsey Beirne Associates, an executive search firm in Ossining, New York Bruce Dunlevie previously, general partner at Merrill Pickard, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Bill Gurley previously, general partner at Hummer Winblad, a venture capital firm in San Francisco, California; joined Benchmark in 1999 Kevin Harvey previously, founder of Approach Software, in Redwood City, California Bob Kagle previously, general partner at Technology Venture Investors (TVI), a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Andy Rachleff previously, general partner at Merrill Pickard, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Selected Individuals Mentioned Bill Atalla son of TriStrata founder John Atalla John Atalla founder, TriStrata Louis Borders founder and CEO, Webvan Eric Greenberg founder, Scient Bob Howe CEO, Scient Jerry Kaplan CEO, Onsale Bill Lederer CEO, artuframe/Art.com Burt McMurtry general partner, Technology Venture Investors Pete Mountanos CEO, Charitableway Pierre Omidyar founder and chairman, eBay Tom Perkins retired general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Danny Shader Benchmark entrepreneur in residence; founder and CEO, Accept.com Rob Shaw founder, Newwatch/Ashford.com Jeff Skoll cofounder and vice president, eBay Paul Wahl CEO, TriStrata Jay Walker chairman, Priceline Steve Westly vice president, marketing, eBay James Whitcomb president, Newwatch/Ashford.com Meg Whitman president and CEO, eBay Selected Companies Mentioned (Partner representing Benchmark) Accept.com (Bruce Dunlevie) payment systems for electronic commerce Ariba (Bob Kagle) online ordering of materials and supplies for businesses Art.com [originally named artuframe] (Bob Kagle) posters and frames sold via the Web Ashford.com [originally named Newwatch] (Kevin Harvey) watches, pens, leather bags, and other luxury goods sold via the Web Charitableway (Andy Rachleff) online for-profit solicitor for nonprofit organizations Critical Path (Kevin Harvey) hosts e-mail services for large organizations eBay (Bob Kagle) online person-to-person auctions via the Web ePhysician (Dave Beirne) prescription ordering for doctors via a PalmPilot Juniper Networks (Andy Rachleff) manufacturer of high-speed routers for the Internet Newwatch [renamed Ashford.com; see above] Priceline (Dave Beirne) online bidding for airline tickets and hotel rooms Red Hat (Kevin Harvey) distributor of Linux, an alternative operating system to Windows Scient (Dave Beirne) technical consulting services to e-tailers Toysrus.com (Bruce Dunlevie) aborted joint venture to sell toys via the Web; to have been cofunded by, but organizationally separate from, Toys “R” Us TriStrata (Dave Beirne) security software for data networks within large corporations Webvan (Dave Beirne) groceries sold via the Web and delivered to the home Introduction When eBay, a small Internet auction company based in San Jose, California, sought venture capital, it had to pass an informal test administered by the venture guys before they would consider making an investment: Was there a reasonably good likelihood that the investors could make ten times their money within three years?

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So at least it seemed to me, a historian who was struck by how that moment appeared to mark the apotheosis of the entrepreneur, the first time since the arrival of Big Business in the post–Civil War years that small business, in the form of high-tech start-ups, had regained the preeminent position of status in the business world. This was new and piqued my curiosity. The offices of venture capitalists are concentrated in my hometown of Menlo Park, California, and I sought an inside vantage point so that I could observe at close range the financial alchemy at the heart of venture capital and determine which parts should be credited to human agency and which to impersonal forces at work in the larger financial environment—that is, sort out skill from luck.

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Xerox called, seeking help in its search for a new president. The retainer was a crisp million dollars—something of an improvement over the $5,000-a-pop contingency-fee business where he’d begun. At the same time that Ramsey Beirne’s business was flourishing, a group of three young venture capitalists in Menlo Park—Bruce Dunlevie, Bob Kagle, and Andy Rachleff—decided to step free of their old firms, and with software entrepreneur Kevin Harvey they set up Benchmark Capital. In the spring of 1997 Bruce Dunlevie, whom Dave Beirne had come to know in the course of search assignments, dropped by the Ramsey Beirne office in New York, ostensibly to meet the newly hired Ramsey Beirne associates.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The company was made up of about half suburban stiffs (older, married, childrened) who lived on the Peninsula, in “bedroom communities” like Menlo Park or Mountain View, depending on how early they had joined and how wealthy they were. The other half (young, hipster, fresh out of school) lived in the trendy and expensive parts of San Francisco. The latter were trucked in on company buses. That’s right, Facebook ran a pool of shuttles that carted people either the thirty miles from SF to Menlo Park, or from downtown Palo Alto.* These buses were a metaphor for what was happening in the Bay Area (and, I’d venture, the entire economy), a symbolism not lost on the antitechie protesters, given their penchant for smashing the buses’ windows occasionally.

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IPA > IPO The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world. —Stefan Zweig, Chess Story MAY 17, 2012 Time to call Jimmy. Jimmy was my exotic beer dealer at Willows, the local family-owned grocery store in Menlo Park, which had survived the chain-store assault of Whole Foods by developing a thriving sideline in craft beer. The market was on Willow Road, which started just outside 24-karat Palo Alto, then wended its way through equally gold-plated Menlo Park and past the VA hospital that Ken Kesey once worked in and that inspired One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Almost as if on an exotic safari, Willow Road then traversed East Palo Alto, the local slum that once had the highest murder rate in the Bay Area (two of the local schools are named after César Chávez and Ron McNair, an African American astronaut), before ending at Facebook’s entrance gate, complete with Like sign ringed by an ever-present scrum of tourists.

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I found us a cheap one-bedroom apartment to serve as an office three blocks west of Castro Street, the main drag in Mountain View. Other than serving as Google’s hometown, Mountain View is just one more in the string of towns dotting the 101 and the Caltrain line from San Francisco to San Jose. More down-market and working-class than posh Palo Alto or Menlo Park, it housed a couple of startups, as well as the law firm Fenwick & West, an entity we would, sadly, come to know well. Smack in the middle of downtown was Red Rock Coffee, about the most hacker and startup-y café on the Peninsula, whose weaponized sugar-and-caffeine mochas would keep us going through the coming weeks.* I had just moved out of my Mission bachelor pad in SF and in with British Trader and little Zoë (at this point our relationship situation was tenuous but hopeful), and had furniture to spare.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

See, for example, Edward A. Torrero, Next-Generation Computers, Spectrum Series (New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1985), 146.   45.   Peter E. Hart and Richard O. Duda, PROSPECTOR—A Computer Based Consultation System for Mineral Exploration (Menlo Park, Calif.: SRI International, 1977).   46.   Peter E. Hart, Artificial Intelligence (Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, 1976).   47.   Leslie, The Cold War and American Science, 252.   48.   Edwards, The Closed World, 18.   49.   Robert Trappl, Impacts of Artificial Intelligence (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1986), 6.   50.   

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The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. London: Minor Compositions, 2013. Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91. Hart, Peter E. Artificial Intelligence. Technical Note No. 126. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, February 1976. Hart, Peter E., and Richard O Duda. PROSPECTOR—A Computer Based Consultation System for Mineral Exploration. Technical Note No. 155. Menlo Park, Calif.: SRI International, October, 1977. Harwell, Drew. “Defense Department Pledges Billions Toward Artificial Intelligence Research.” Washington Post, September 7, 2018. Hassein, Nabil. “Against Black Inclusion in Facial Recognition.”

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Nilsson, Nils J. “Artificial Intelligence: Employment, and Income.” In Impacts of Artificial Intelligence, ed. Robert Trappl, 103–23. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1986. ________. Artificial Intelligence—Research and Applications. Vol. 2. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, May 1975. ________. A Mobile Automaton: An Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques. Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute, 1969. ________. The Quest for Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Noble, David F. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention New York: Knopf, 1997.

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

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

Engelbart pulled up an imaginary shopping list and showed how he could reorder and reorganize it with the click of a mouse. He opened a link to a map. About halfway through the presentation, he explained that he wanted to connect to his lab team at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. He had been remotely using the computer at the lab, an impressive feat in itself, and now he wanted to bring in video images. “Come in, Menlo Park,” he said. The entire audience could hear him inhale and hold his breath. Engelbart knew that connecting with Menlo Park required the perfect synchronization of two custom-built modem lines and two video microwave links relayed to San Francisco from a truck parked on a hilltop midway between the city and the laboratory.

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Only after a new image flickered onto the screen—a young man’s well-manicured right hand, grasping a mouse, hove into view—did Engelbart exhale and resume his talk: “Okay, there’s Don Andrew’s hand in Menlo Park.” And he was off again. He introduced the mouse (“I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize. It started that way, and we never did change it.”). He showed the hardware that was driving the system. He demonstrated how someone in Menlo Park could see the same document that Engelbart had on his screen and how, if the man in Menlo Park moved his mouse, the cursor (Engelbart called it a “tracking spot” or “bug”) moved on Engelbart’s own screen projected for the auditorium.

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NIELS REIMERS Some three hundred people, most of them Stanford students, had shown up by 7:30 on that May morning in 1969, determined to shut down a satellite office of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) a day after the People’s Park protests had rocked Berkeley. SRI’s much larger headquarters facility, where Doug Engelbart had done the work unveiled six months earlier in the Mother of All Demos, was four miles north, in Menlo Park. This satellite office, located only a few blocks from the southern edge of the Stanford campus, housed a computer that protesters claimed was analyzing activities of Communist insurgents in Southeast Asia. The protesters, many from a radical Stanford student organization called the April Third Movement, wanted that analysis—and any other work associated with the war in Vietnam—stopped.1 The group dragged signs, sawhorses, and a steel crane boom from a nearby construction site onto Oregon Expressway, a major east–west thoroughfare.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Recently became known as Silicon Valley: in 1971, the journalist Don Hoefler popularized the term “Silicon Valley” in a series of articles for Electronic News, an industry trade publication. 4, The first computer sat … The computer in the van was an LSI-11; the custom packet radio equipment was built by Collins Radio. The location of the repeaters in the Bay Area packet radio network is shown in a map provided by the Computer History Museum. The Menlo Park building was the headquarters of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). For a diagram that shows the path of the packets in the 1977 experiment, see Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 [1999]), 132. 4, In Menlo Park, the packets underwent … At the SRI headquarters in Menlo Park, the packets hopped from the Bay Area packet radio network (PRNET) to the ARPANET, and then traveled to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) facility in Kjeller, Norway.

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It transformed the words being typed on the terminal into discrete slices of data called “packets.” These packets were encoded as radio waves and transmitted from the van’s antennas to repeaters on nearby mountaintops, which amplified them. With this extra boost, they could make it all the way to Menlo Park, where an office building received them. In Menlo Park, the packets underwent a subtle metamorphosis. They shed their ethereal shape as radio waves and acquired a new form: electrical signals in copper telephone lines. Then they embarked on a long journey, riding those lines all the way to the East Coast before sailing via satellite over the Atlantic Ocean.

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This is the dream of a networked military using computing to project American power. This is the dream that produced the internet. ARPANET had been a major breakthrough. But it had a limitation: it wasn’t mobile. The computers on ARPANET were gigantic by today’s standards. That might work for DARPA researchers, who could sit at a terminal in Cambridge or Menlo Park—but it did little for soldiers deployed deep in enemy territory. For ARPANET to be useful to forces in the field, it had to be accessible anywhere in the world. This required doing two things. The first was building a wireless network that could relay packets of data among the widely dispersed cogs of the US war machine by radio or satellite.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

Thomas Bender, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York University Press, 2007), p. 83. 71. Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000), p. 50. See also Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, “Thomas Edison and Menlo Park,” 2009 (www.menloparkmuseum.org/thomas-edison-and-menlo-park). 72. Bender, The Unfinished City, p. 83. 73. See Edison Center at Menlo Park, “Thomas Edison and Menlo Park.” See also Bender, The Unfinished City, p. 87. CHAPTER 3 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The City in American History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (June 1940), p. 64. 2. Ibid., pp. 43–66. 3.

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Edison was not alone in exploiting the resources of the region. Between 1866 and 1886, 80 percent of the inventors with five or more telegraph-related patents resided in or within commuting distance of New York.70 Edison perfected the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb in 1879 in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. But his work in rural Menlo Park was the culmination of years of effort that started in New York City, where Edison had secured space in the Laws’ Gold Indicator 02-2151-2 ch2.indd 39 5/20/13 6:48 PM 40 NYC: INNOVATION AND THE NEXT ECONOMY Company in 1869, and continued in Newark, where Edison moved in 1870.71 The power of Edison’s light bulb was not just that it could illuminate but that it could do so on a grand, commercial scale.

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The early, highly recognizable model for networked workplaces is the newspaper newsroom, but these principles have been implemented in places ranging from Michael Bloomberg’s bullpen in New York’s city hall to the campuses of Silicon Valley technology firms. Facebook and Google, for example, have embraced “hackable buildings,” in the words of Randy Howder, a workplace strategist at the design and architecture firm Gensler, who led the design of Facebook’s recent Menlo Park, California, offices. These offices have open floor plans that can be easily reconfigured to create dense, collaborative spaces for new teams and projects.18 The line between private and public spaces is now blurred. When Zappos, the online retail giant that grew to scale in suburban Las Vegas, was looking for new headquarters in 2010, the company’s CEO Tony Hsieh decided to create a denser workplace to increase interaction and collaboration.

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

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

Another, Jay Last, came from a family of Pennsylvania schoolteachers. A third, Eugene Kleiner, arrived in the U.S. as a teenage refugee from war-torn Europe. Only one was actually from Northern California, the shy and detail-obsessed Gordon Moore, who had grown up in a modest clapboard cottage in nearby Menlo Park.22 The young recruits quickly concluded that Shockley was going about building his semiconductors in a wrong-headed way. He was committed to an expensive and laborious process called the four-layer diode, and refused to be persuaded that cheaper, simpler silicon chips were the way to go. Jim Gibbons showed up at the storefront just weeks before these Shockley lieutenants—Noyce, Last, Moore, Kleiner, plus four others—quit to start a company of their own called Fairchild Semiconductor, which quickly surpassed and outlasted Shockley’s operation.

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The decision disappointed the students, who had hoped that SRI would be shut down altogether.2 Had that happened, Stanford would have squelched an operation that was building an entirely new universe of connected, human-scale computing—the home of Shaky the Robot, of Dean Brown’s education lab, and of Doug Engelbart’s “research center for augmenting human intellect.” In Engelbart’s emphasis on networked collaboration, this low-key member of the Greatest Generation was completely in sync with the radical political currents swirling around the Stanford campus and the bland suburban storefronts of the South Bay. Just down the road from SRI’s Menlo Park facility was Kepler’s Books, which owner Roy Kepler had turned into an antiwar and countercultural salon. Beat poets, Joan Baez, and the Grateful Dead all made appearances at Kepler’s, and the store’s book talks and rap sessions became can’t-miss events for many in the local tech community. That included members of the Engelbart lab, who’d drop in on their way to catch the commuter train home.

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She should just start one herself. First, she embarked on her own crash course in building hardware and programming software. Her hands-on computer experience hadn’t gotten much further than keypunching those IBM cards at Cornell. She did all she could to learn on her own, subscribing to the PCC and going down to Menlo Park to visit the new “People’s Computer Center” that had spun off from Albrecht’s operation, where both adults and kids could come in to learn how to program and play. She learned BASIC. In order to draw the scattered and reclusive local population of hackers out of their basements and garages, she started her own group: the Sonoma County Computer Club.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Stanford alumni Jerry Yang and David Filo had already started Yahoo, a wildly popular compilation of searchable Web pages. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford graduate students fiddling with an algorithm that would soon become Google. The world’s leading venture capitalists, investors who make risky bets on unproven technology companies, nearly all had their offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, minutes from the Stanford campus. The proximity was no coincidence: the financiers recognized the value of staying close to the people dreaming up investable ideas at Stanford’s venerable computer science and engineering schools. This isn’t to say UCLA’s programs were an engineering backwater.

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“Then I could pay people again,” says Kalanick. And so it continued. In early 2002, Kalanick says he succeeded in attracting the interest of August Capital, which planned to invest $10 million in Red Swoosh. August was the type of firm Kalanick had long coveted. An established, pedigreed firm on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, August was best known for having made an early and extremely lucrative investment in Microsoft. Landing an investment from August would confer legitimacy on the upstart company. But August had two conditions in return for its investment. First, it wanted Red Swoosh to find another, similar firm to coinvest alongside it.

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These included Hewlett-Packard (in Palo Alto), Intel (Santa Clara), Apple (Cupertino), and Cisco Systems (San Jose). The first crop of major Internet companies hunted for engineering talent in its natural habitat, in “the Valley,” and they started there too. Yahoo (Sunnyvale), Google (Mountain View), and Facebook (Menlo Park) all followed this playbook. San Francisco wasn’t a complete tech wasteland. A large handful of smaller Internet companies, most with some connection to media or advertising technology, had formed in San Francisco during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Most vanished just as quickly. Then, in the depth of one of the tech industry’s periodic down cycles, something changed.

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

In 1960, the same year Leary tried psilocybin and launched his research project, Ken Kesey, the novelist, had his own mind-blowing LSD experience, a trip that would inspire him to spread the psychedelic word, and the drugs themselves, as widely and loudly as he could. It is one of the richer ironies of psychedelic history that Kesey had his first LSD experience courtesy of a government research program conducted at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, which paid him seventy-five dollars to try the experimental drug. Unbeknownst to Kesey, his first LSD trip was bought and paid for by the CIA, which had sponsored the Menlo Park research as part of its MK-Ultra program, the agency’s decade-long effort to discover whether LSD could somehow be weaponized. With Ken Kesey, the CIA had turned on exactly the wrong man. In what he aptly called “the revolt of the guinea pigs,” Kesey proceeded to organize with his band of Merry Pranksters a series of “Acid Tests” in which thousands of young people in the Bay Area were given LSD in an effort to change the mind of a generation.

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In his highly deliberate, slightly obsessive, and scrupulously polite way, Jesse contacted the region’s numerous “psychedelic elders”—the rich cast of characters who had been deeply involved in research and therapy in the years before most of the drugs were banned in 1970, with the passing of the Controlled Substances Act, and the classification of LSD and psilocybin as schedule 1 substances with a high potential for abuse and no recognized medical use. There was James Fadiman, the Stanford-trained psychologist who had done pioneering research on psychedelics and problem solving at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, until the FDA halted the group’s work in 1966. (In the early 1960s, there was at least as much psychedelic research going on around Stanford as there was at Harvard; it just didn’t have a character of the wattage of a Timothy Leary out talking about it.) Then there was Fadiman’s colleague at the institute Myron Stolaroff, a prominent Silicon Valley electrical engineer who worked as a senior executive at Ampex, the magnetic recording equipment maker, until an LSD trip inspired him to give up engineering (much like Bob Jesse) for a career as a psychedelic researcher and therapist.

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For Hubbard, psychedelic therapy was a form of philanthropy, and he drained his fortune advancing the cause. Al Hubbard moved between these far-flung centers of research like a kind of psychedelic honeybee, disseminating information, chemicals, and clinical expertise while building what became an extensive network across North America. In time, he would add Menlo Park and Cambridge to his circuit. But was Hubbard just spreading information, or was he also collecting it and passing it on to the CIA? Was the pollinator also a spy? It’s impossible to say for certain; some people who knew Hubbard (like James Fadiman) think it’s entirely plausible, while others aren’t so sure, pointing to the fact the Captain often criticized the CIA for using LSD as a weapon.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

The filament would be fragile, of course; but its lifetime could perhaps be extended and preserved by enclosing it in a vacuum in a specially blown glass bulb. Thus was born—allegedly, supposedly—the idea of the incandescent lightbulb, in the up-country wilds of Carbon County, Wyoming Territory, in the summer of 1878. But skeptics abound. Most suggest that the nation’s inventor-in-chief experimented in his laboratory in Menlo Park with scores of potential illuminating candidates—strands of burned baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, flax, and bamboo among them—before finally settling on the carbonized cotton thread from which he made his famous first-ever patented lightbulb in 1879. Bamboo was but one of some six thousand vegetable products that he tried.

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On his birthday each February, the speakers sound with encomiums to the man who, as they say in these parts, “invented today.” The motto of Edison Township is “Let there be light,” and not without reason. During the summer of 1879 he saw to it that lamps were erected along the byways of the township’s thirty-six acres of Menlo Park, where he had sited his laboratory. They were an exhibition of his abilities and his vision, an exhibition he would employ to persuade those who mattered in New York to allow him to use the city as his first test market for lightbulbs and for the generation and distribution of the electricity to illuminate them.

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Although everyone agreed that the security the lights offered to businesses and people late at night promoted the twenty-four-hour economy that still defines Manhattan today, no one liked arc lighting, not one bit. Edison hoped New Yorkers would turn instead to his smaller, softer, more human-scale incandescent vacuum-tube illuminations—bulbs his company promised would offer “milder” light. He consequently invited all manner of grandees over to Menlo Park to demonstrate what he had in mind. It was quite a show. On his thirty-six-acre spread, he had laid out whole streets, each lined with wooden poles topped with glass lanterns, inside each of which was an incandescent bulb. Imaginary houses, designed to look like those in lower Manhattan, were also staked out, and they were lighted, too, and this whole unreal New York City was connected to an array of batteries with feeder cables (which took the power to the streets), mains wires (which took it into the houses), and service wires (which went to the individual house lamps).

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation. —Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841 INTRODUCTION MAKE A DUCK On a Wednesday morning in June 2017, I find myself in Menlo Park, California, sharing a small table in a faux European coffee shop with a woman I’ll call Julia—and I’m making a duck out of Legos. Outside, it’s sunny and warm. A late-morning breeze ruffles the big bright-colored umbrellas above the tables in the plaza. Inside, young techies gaze up at the chalkboard menu above the counter and sit at tables clicking at laptops.

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They seem to believe that some magic elixir exists here, some recipe for innovation that floats in the air and can be absorbed if you drive around with your windows open, smelling the eucalyptus trees. They see people getting rich on things they don’t even understand. Blockchain? Ethereum? Initial coin offerings? So they fly out and have drinks at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where venture capitalists hang around, as do expensive “companions,” many with Eastern European accents. They eat lunch at the Battery, a members-only private club for social-climbing parvenus in San Francisco. They wangle an invitation to a Bitcoin party and rub shoulders with the scammers, hustlers, Ponzi schemers, and obnoxious knobs who are trying to cash in on a modern-day tulip mania based around a cryptocurrency that Warren Buffett describes as “rat poison squared.”

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In fact, some of what ails us today actually began more than a century ago. CHAPTER THREE A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE (AND WHY YOU SHOULDN’T TRUST IT) Making a duck out of Legos may seem a perfect example of today’s workplace zeitgeist, but the exercise I was doing in that Menlo Park café was actually just a new manifestation of an old belief, one that sprang to life in the early years of the twentieth century and came to be known as management science. The term hinges on the belief that the art of managing people can be reduced to science. Nowadays management science is something you can get a degree in, at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

They came up with the answer down the road, in the heart of Silicon Valley—in a basement, in fact. Only Connect For a couple of years at the beginning of the millennium—during the quiet time after the Internet bubble burst but before it inflated again—I lived in Menlo Park, California, a supremely tidy suburb in the heart of Silicon Valley. Menlo Park is a place rich in a lot of things, Internet history among them. When Leonard Kleinrock recorded his first “host-to-host” communication—what he likes to call “the first breath of the Internet’s life”—the computer on the other end of the line was at the Stanford Research Institute, barely a mile from our apartment.

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Just as Wall Street, Broadway, or Sunset Boulevard each contain a dream, so too does this corner of Silicon Valley. Most often, that dream is to build a new piece of the Internet, preferably one worth a billion dollars. (Facebook, by the way, recently moved into a fifty-seven-acre campus, back in Menlo Park.) An economic geographer would describe all this as a “a business cluster.” Silicon Valley’s unique combination of talent, expertise, and money has created an atmosphere of astounding innovation—as well as what the local venture capitalist John Doerr once described as the “greatest legal accumulation of wealth in human history.”

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See Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange Gates, Bill, 57 Gilbert, John, 174–75, 176, 177–78, 179–80 Global Crossing, 125, 153, 183, 202–3, 208, 209–10, 253 Global Internet Geography “GIG” (TeleGeography), 14, 27 Global Switch, 183 globalization of “peering,” 125–26 undersea cables and, 197 Goldman Sachs, 261 Google Cerf at, 45 in China, 257 as content provider, 79 data centers/storage for, 229, 231, 234–35, 237–50, 254, 255, 257, 258, 261 and Internet as series of tubes, 5 invisibility of political borders and, 147 IPO for, 69–70 Menlo Park location of, 69 mission statement of, 248 as most-visited website, 127 NANOGers at, 120 New York City location of, 163–64, 172 number of daily searches on, 231 peering and, 122–23, 125–26 privacy issues at, 258 secrecy/security at, 242–50, 254, 257 Gore, Al, 63 government, Dutch, AMS–IX and, 147 government, US, role at MAE-East of, 62–63.

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

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

Picture my constrictions.’ They were to do this whilst singing, to the tune of ‘Row, Row Your Boat’, ‘Now let’s swim ourselves up and down my streams/Touch and rub and warm and melt the plaque that blocks my streams.’ It didn’t work. As the vote in the Senate was taking place, Vasco found himself in a bed in Menlo Park recovering from seven-way coronary bypass surgery. Unable to personally shepherd in all the votes, his dream failed. It was a time of anguish and blackness through which he was helped by Carl Rogers, who, following Vasco’s release from hospital, treated him to a seafood buffet at his favourite La Jolla restaurant then took him home, where the great psychologist listened to his tales of loneliness and depression.

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They had no idea he had, upon his desk that day, pieces of technology that were as if from a time machine. Engelbart was touching the future, and he was about to show them it. ‘I hope you’ll go along with this rather unusual setting and the fact that I remain seated when I get introduced,’ he said, up on the screen. ‘I should tell you I’m backed up by quite a staff of people between here and Menlo Park where Stanford Research is located, some thirty miles south of here and, er,’ he smiled anxiously and glanced upwards at some unseen person or thing, ‘if every one of us does our job well, it’ll all go very interesting.’ He looked up again. ‘I think.’ Another nervous pause. ‘The research programme that I’m going to describe to you is quickly characterizable by saying if, in your office, 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 responsible.’

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Even the experts in the Valley, many clustered around Stanford University, saw the future as one in which computers would replace humans, believing true artificial intelligence was coming soon. But Engelbart’s vision was radically different. And so was the technology he was about to demonstrate to the stunned crowd. The glare from his monitor glowed onto his face as he explained that they’d been developing this new form of computing at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park. ‘In my office I have a console like this and there are twelve others that have computers and we try, nowadays, to do our daily work on here.’ He smiled as if in acknowledgement of how eccentric all this sounded. ‘So this characterizes the way I could just sit and look at a completely blank piece of paper.

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

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

It turned out it was in a tiny building next to a laundromat in a shopping center. There were two or three rooms. All they had was a box full of parts.” He picked up some of those parts and returned to San Francisco. On April 16, 1975, Dompier reported on MITS at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, a pioneering microcomputer club in Menlo Park, California. Dompier drew an attentive audience. MITS, he told his listeners, had 4,000 orders and couldn’t even begin to fill them. The thousands of orders, more than anything else, sparked people’s interest. What they had been waiting for had happened. They were going to have their own computers.

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(Courtesy of Ted Nelson) Albrecht was a passionate promoter of computer power to the people. He wanted to teach children, in particular, about the machines. So, he split off from the Portola Institute to form Dymax, an organization dedicated to informing the general public about computers. Dymax gave rise to a walk-in computer center in Menlo Park and to the thoroughly irreverent PCC. Computers had been mainly used against people, PCC said. Now they were going to be used for people. Albrecht was never paid, and others worked for little. The 1960s values that pervaded the company exalted accomplishing something worthwhile beyond attaining money, power, or prestige.

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–Keith Britton, Homebrew Computer Club member Early in 1975, a number of counterculture information exchanges existed in the San Francisco Bay Area for people interested in computers. Community Memory was one, PCC was another, and there was the PCC spin-off, the Community Computer Center. Peace activist Fred Moore was running a noncomputerized information network out of the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, matching people with common interests about anything, not just computers. A Place to Come Together Moore became interested in computers when he realized he needed computing power. He talked to Bob Albrecht at PCC about getting both a computer and a base of operations. Soon Moore was teaching children about computers while learning about them himself.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Asilomar, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen

Lovell could point out in the most persuasive way how mundane character traits and minor hassles around Perry Lane fit into the richest, most complex metaphor of life ever devised, namely, Freud's... . And a little experimental gas . . . Yes. Lovell told him about some experiments the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park was running with "psychomimetic" drugs, drugs that brought on temporary states resembling psychoses. They were paying volunteers $75 a day. Kesey volunteered. It was all nicely calcimined and clinical. They would put him on a bed in a white room and give him a series of capsules without saying what they were.

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—see each muscle fiber decussate, pulling the poor jelly of his lip to the left and the fibers one by one leading back into infrared caverns of the body, through transistor-radio innards of nerve tangles, each one on Red Alert, the poor ninny's inner hooks desperately trying to make the little writhing bastards keep still in there, I am Doctor, this is a human specimen before me—the poor ninny has his own desert movie going on inside, only each horsehair A-rab is a threat—if only his lip, his face, would stay level, level like the honey bubble of the Official Plaster Man assured him it would— Miraculous! He could truly see into people for the first time— And yes, that little capsule sliding blissly down the gullet was LSD. VERY SOON IT WAS ALREADY TIME TO PUSH ON BEYOND another fantasy, the fantasy of the Menlo Park clinicians. The clinicians' fantasy was that the volunteers were laboratory animals that had to be dealt with objectively, quantitatively. It was well known that people who volunteered for drug experiments tended to be unstable anyway. So the doctors would come in in white smocks, with the clipboards, taking blood pressures and heart rates and urine specimens and having them try to solve simple problems in logic and mathematics, such as adding up columns of figures, and having them judge time and distances, although they did have them talk into tape recorders, too.

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It was quite a little secret to have stumbled onto, a hulking supersecret, in fact—the triumph of the guinea pigs! In a short time he and Lovell had tried the whole range of the drugs, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, IT-290 the superamphetamine, Ditran the bummer, morning-glory seeds. They were onto a discovery that the Menlo Park clinicians themselves never—mighty fine irony here: the White Smocks were supposedly using them. Instead the White Smocks had handed them the very key itself. And you don't even know, bub . .. with these drugs your perception is altered enough that you find yourself looking out of completely strange eyeholes.

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

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

The great transformation “Revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense…that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately” Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Seventeen years after Sergey Brin and Larry Page first launched Google in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California, HBO released the second season of Silicon Valley, its fictional comedy parodying the thriving industry that had grown out of those early garage start-ups. In the third episode, Gareth Belson – CEO of a company that has more than a few parallels with the one that Brin and Page had created – rather grandiosely likened Silicon Valley to Europe in the Renaissance.

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The rise of social economics 1. Generation why “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook When Sergey Brin and Larry Page first set-up Google in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park in the autumn of 1998, they were very clear why they were doing it: “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They also had a great tool to achieve this: a search engine they had developed while they were PhD students, which used very different algorithms to any other on the market.

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It created a very clear demarcation between its system and any commercial advertising, putting the wants and needs of its users above everything else. In 1999, Google’s revenues were $200,000. Two years later, they had increased to more than $700 million. Ten years after Brin and Page first moved Google into the garage in Menlo Park, the company’s revenues hit $21 billion. By 2018, they will exceed $100 billion. This is the power of social economics. 2. Your stand is your brand “I grew up in a society where everything you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched on. Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state – the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.

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

"So my deal with Hewlett-Packard was called off," Doug says, wrapping up the reminiscence with one of his famous wry smiles, adding: "the last time I looked they were number five in the world of computers." Doug kept looking for the right institutional base. In October, 1957, the very month of Sputnik, he received an offer from an organization in Menlo Park, "across the creek" from Palo Alto, then known as the Stanford Research Institute. They were interested in conducting research into scientific, military, and commercial applications of computers. One of the people who interviewed him for the SRI job had been a year or two ahead of Doug in the Ph.D. program at Berkeley, and Doug told him about his ideas of getting computers to interact with people, in order to augment their intellect.

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In a matter of months, the SRI Augmentation Research Center was due to become the Network Information Center for ARPA's experiment in long-distance linking of computers -- the fabled ARPAnet. In the fall of 1968, when a major gathering of the computer clans known as the Fall Joint Computer conference was scheduled in nearby San Francisco, Doug decided to stake the reputation of his long-sought augmentation laboratory in Menlo Park -- literally his life's work by that time -- on a demonstration so daring and direct that finally, after all these years, computer scientists would understand and embrace that vital clue that had eluded them for so long. Those who were in the audience at Civic Auditorium that afternoon remember how Doug's quiet voice managed to gently but irresistibly seize the attention of several thousand high-level hackers for nearly two hours, after which the audience did something rare in that particularly competitive and critical subculture -- they gave Doug and his colleagues a standing ovation.

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State-of-the-art audiovisual equipment was gathered from around the world at the behest of a presentation team that included Stewart Brand, whose experience in mind-altering multimedia shows was derived from his production of get-togethers a few years before this, held not too far from this same auditorium, known as "Acid Tests." Doug's control panel and screen were linked to the host computer and the rest of the team back at SRI via a temporary microwave antenna they had set up in the hills above Menlo Park. While Doug was up there alone in the cockpit, a dozen people under the direction of Bill English worked frantically behind the scenes to keep their delicately transplanted system together just long enough for this crucial test flight. For once, fate was on their side. Like a perfect space launch, all the minor random accidents canceled each other.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

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

* * * A few blocks away, around noon, a dozen Instagram employees slipped through their back door and walked down an alley to avoid the press out front. They boarded a shuttle bus that brought them thirty miles south to the vast parking lot encircling Facebook’s headquarters, at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park. The buildings were their own industrial island, abutted on one side by an eight-lane highway and on the other by salt marshes at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Marked by a giant blue thumbs-up “like” sign, the headquarters had so much employee traffic, it was funneled and directed by an army of valets and guards.

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People got booted from the suggested user list, for example, or had their accounts canceled without warning or explanation for violating ambiguous content rules. Few people realized that choosing to build a business on Instagram meant placing one’s future at the mercy of a small handful of people in Menlo Park, California, making decisions on the fly. The only way to be certain nothing bad would happen was to build a relationship with an Instagram employee like Porch or Toffey. As Facebook would say, the strategy didn’t scale. Instagram employees disliked their one automated machination of buzz, the “Popular” page, which circulated posts that got a higher-than-average number of likes and comments.

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Worse, Spiegel still felt pretty strongly that Facebook was inherently evil and uncreative. Khan decided to start with his Facebook counterpart, Sheryl Sandberg. He reached out asking if it was possible to repair the relationship, and she agreed to meet at Facebook’s headquarters. In the summer of 2016, Khan made the trip from LA to Menlo Park. Sandberg had made some arrangements up front to keep his visit confidential. He took a secret entrance, avoiding the general security check-in, so employees wouldn’t recognize him and get the wrong idea. That was perhaps the first sign that Facebook had a different agenda than he did. Sandberg had invited Dan Rose, Facebook’s partnerships head, to join the conversation.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

He finally fessed up to something that I've known a long time - that nobody really knows where the Silicon Valley is - or what it is. Abe grew up in Rochester and never came west until Microsoft. My reply: Silicon Valley Where/what is it? Its a backward J-shaped strand of cities, starting at the south of San Francisco and looping down the bay, east of San Jose: San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Ritos, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont. I used a map for this. They don’t actually MANUFACTURE much by way of silicon here anymore . . . the silicon chip factories are mostly a thing of the past . . . it's no longer a cost effective thing to do.

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* * * E-mail from Abe: Im re-reading all my old TinTin books, and I'm noticing that there are all of these things absent in the Boy Detective's life . . . religion, parents, politics, relationship, communion with nature, class, love, death, birth . . . it's a long list. And I find that while I still love TinTin, I'm getting currious about all of its invisible content. * * * The Valley is so career-o-centric. So much career energy! There must be a 65-ton crystal of osmium hexachloride buried 220 feet below the surface of Menlo Park, sucking in all of the career energy in the Bay Area and shooting it back down the Peninsula at twice light speed. It's science fiction here. * * * Mom's signed up for a ladies 50-to-60 swim meet. It's next week. * * * Susan bought a case load of premoistened towelettes at Price-Costco. She's mad at the rest of the Habitrail because it's such a pigsty.

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When nobody was looking, I hucked some fallen tangerines at the Valotas' house down below ours. Mr. Valota is this Gladys-Kravitz-from-Bewitched type guy who somehow taps into all of the misinformation, apocrypha, and bad memes floating about the Valley and feeds them back to Mom in the aisles of Draeger's in Menlo Park. He's always saying discouraging things about Oop! to Mom. Gee thanks, Mr. Valota. I liked hearing the tangerines go thunk as they hit the cedar shingles of his lanai. It's never the Mr. Valotas of this world whose houses burn down. I was breathing really hard as I was carrying the Rubbermaid Roughneck containers to the end of the driveway.

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

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

Every week, as I later learned, Zuckerberg gave a talk to his employees and sometimes, to close out the event, he would show a video of some regular person raving about one of Facebook’s products. Parse had been acquired by Facebook months before, and it was their turn to be featured—in my video, as it turned out. So, Zuckerberg streamed me in my pajamas to his entire company. In Menlo Park and Austin and Dallas and Seattle and London and all around the world, every single Facebook employee saw me talking about my app. I later learned from the Parse CEO, Ilya Sukhar, that Zuckerberg turned to him while the video was playing and said, “Hey, I think we should hire this kid.” Chapter 7 Big in Peru About a week after Zuckerberg saw my pajama video, I was sitting in my precalculus class, not listening to my teacher, when an email came in from Facebook, inviting me to apply for an internship.

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Days before the meeting, she’d quickly Googled Zuckerberg’s name; the only detail that stuck out to her was the fact that he was Jewish, like my father. We took an Uber straight from the airport to the campus, where we were met by a recruiter named Emily and two intern coordinators. Walking onto the Facebook campus in Menlo Park was like walking into Disney World, my favorite place on earth: there were colorful buildings; basketball courts; restaurants serving every kind of food; vending machines stocked with battery chargers, cables, headphones, and keyboards—all of it free for employees. There were gyms with personal trainers; complimentary dance, yoga, and aerobics classes; barbershops and hair salons offering high-end haircuts; on-campus doctors and dentists who could see you at any point during the day; and complimentary nutritionists to help you find a balanced diet.

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The rent was $1,350, which I thought sounded very steep, but I was getting anxious to nail down my living situation, so a week before heading back to California, I confirmed with the guy that I would like to move into the hacker house. One week later, I flew back to San Francisco and Ubered straight from the airport to my new home in the city at around ten p.m. It was in the center of the Castro District, a two-hour commute in rush-hour traffic to Facebook in Menlo Park. Most young Silicon Valley workers lived in the city and took the free Facebook and Google shuttles to and from work every day. I wasn’t looking forward to commuting, but I figured everyone my age lived in San Francisco for a reason, so it must be worth it. Regret kicked in the second I stepped out of the car.

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Goldblith, Science Journal, January, 1966, p. 41. 28 The Lynn study is reported briefly in "Our Accelerating Technological Change" by Frank Lynn, Management Review, March, 1967, pp. 67-70. See also: [64], pp. 3-4. 28 Young's work is found in "Product Growth Cycles—A Key to Growth Planning" by Robert B. Young, Menlo Park, Calif.: Stanford Research Institute. Undated. 30 Data on book production are drawn from [206], p. 21, [200], p. 74, and [207], article on Incunabuli. 31 The rate of discovery of new elements is given in [146], Document I, p, 21. 34 Erikson's statement appears in [105], p. 197. CHAPTER THREE 38 Data on the brain drain is from "Motivation Underlying the Brain Drain" [131], pp. 438, 447. 39 The passage of time as experienced by different age groups is discussed in "Subjective Time" by John Cohen in [342], p. 262. 40 Author's interviews with F.

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See also: Supplement to Chapter Five, "Les Moyens de Regulation de la Politique de l'Emploi" by Thérèse Join-Lambert and François Lagrange in Review Française du Travail, January-March, 1966, pp. 305-307. 81 Intra-US brain drain is examined in "An Exploratory Study of the Structure and Dynamics of the R&D Industry" by Albert Shapero, Richard P. Howell, and James R. Tombaugh. Menlo Park, California: Stanford Research Institute, June, 1964. 82 Whyte is quoted from [197], p. 269. 82 Jacobson story from Wall Street Journal, April 26, 1966. A more recent study of executive mobility has found that a middle manager can anticipate being moved once every two to five years. One executive reported moving 19 times in 25 years.

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., for the idea of occupational trajectories. 110 The quote from Rice is from "An Examination of the Boundaries of Part-Institutions" by A. K. Rice in Human Relations, vol. 4, #4, 1951, p. 400. 112 Job turnover among scientists and engineers discussed in "An Exploratory Study of the Structure and Dynamics of the R&D Industry" by Albert Shapero, Richard P. Howell, and James R. Tombaugh. Menlo Park, California: Stanford Research Institute, 1966, p. 117. 112 Westinghouse data from "Creativity: A Major Business Challenge" by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Columbia Journal of World Business, Fall, 1965, p. 32. 112 British advertising turnover rates from "The Rat Race" by W. W. Daniel in New Society, April 14, 1966, p. 7. 112 Leavitt quoted from "Are Managers Becoming Obsolete?"

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

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

In Proceedings of the AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference. New York: ACM Press, 1967. Anderson, M., S. L. Anderson, and C. Armen, eds. Machine Ethics Technical Report FS-05-06. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2005. Anderson, M., S. L. Anderson, and C. Armen. “An Approach to Computing Ethics.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 21, no. 4 (2006). . “MedE-thEx.” In Caring Machines Technical Report FS-05-02, edited by T. Bickmore. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2005. . “Towards Machine Ethics.” In Machine Ethics Technical Report FS-05-06. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2005. Anderson, S. L. “The Unacceptability of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics as a Basis for Machine Ethics.”

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Alibaba sold to 515 million customers in 2017 alone, and that year its Singles’ Day Festival—a sort of Black Friday meets the Academy Awards in China—saw $25 billion in online purchases from 812 million orders on a single day.40 China has the largest digital market in the world regardless of how you measure it: more than a trillion dollars spent annually, more than a billion people online, and $30 billion invested in venture deals in the world’s most important tech companies.41 Chinese investors were involved in 7–10% of all funding of tech startups in the United States between 2012 and 2017—that’s a significant concentration of wealth pouring in from just one region.42 The BAT are now well established in Seattle and Silicon Valley, operating out of satellite offices that include spaces along Menlo Park’s fabled Sand Hill Road. During the past five years, the BAT invested significant money in Tesla, Uber, Lyft, Magic Leap (the mixed-reality headset and platform maker), and more. Venture investment from BAT companies is attractive not just because they move quickly and have a lot of cash but because a BAT deal typically means a lucrative entrée into the Chinese market, which can otherwise be impossible to penetrate.

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Bell Telephone Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ Miller, George A. Memorial Hall Harvard University Cambridge, MA Harmon, Leon D. Bell Telephone Laboratories Murray Hill, NJ Holland, John H. E. R. I. University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI Holt, Anatol 7358 Rural Lane Philadelphia, PA Kautz, William H. Stanford Research Institute Menlo Park, CA Luce, R. D. 427 West 117th Street New York, NY MacKay, Donald Department of Physics University of London London, WC2, England McCarthy, John Dartmouth College Hanover, NH McCulloch, Warren S. R.L.E., MIT Cambridge, MA Melzak, Z. A. Mathematics Department University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI Minsky, M.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

She’s played a central role at Google from the start, even before becoming employee No. 16 and the company’s first marketing manager. In September 1998, days after Google was incorporated, Susan rented out her Menlo Park garage for the company’s first office. Eight years later, as analysts doubted that YouTube would survive, she was a leading voice in persuading Google’s board to acquire it. Susan had the vision to see that online video was about to disrupt network television—forever. Susan Wojcicki and her Menlo Park garage, where it all began. By 2012, YouTube had become a market leader and one of the biggest video platforms in the world. But its furious pace of innovation had slowed—and once you brake, it’s not easy to reaccelerate.

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Their PageRank algorithm was that much better than the competition, even in beta. I asked them, “How big do you think this could be?” I’d already made my private calculation: If everything broke right, Google might reach a market cap of $1 billion. But I wanted to gauge their dreams. Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google’s birthplace, the garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park, 1999. And Larry responded, “Ten billion dollars.” Just to be sure, I said, “You mean market cap, right?” And Larry shot back, “No, I don’t mean market cap. I mean revenue.” I was floored. Assuming a normal growth rate for a profitable tech firm, $10 billion in revenue would imply a $100 billion market capitalization.

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And so: On that balmy day in Mountain View, I came with my present for Google, a sharp-edged tool for world-class execution. I’d first used it in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where Andy Grove, the greatest manager of his or any era, ran the best-run company I had ever seen. Since joining Kleiner Perkins, the Menlo Park VC firm, I had proselytized Grove’s gospel far and wide, to fifty companies or more. To be clear, I have the utmost reverence for entrepreneurs. I’m an inveterate techie who worships at the altar of innovation. But I’d also watched too many start-ups struggle with growth and scale and getting the right things done.

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

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

It’s a reminder of Silicon Valley all-nighters during the late 1990s dotcom boom when China’s entrepreneurial boom was only percolating. “China and the US are at different points of economic development and motivation. China’s entrepreneurial culture does make Silicon Valley look sleepy,” says Hans Tung, managing partner at leading venture investment firm GGV Capital in Menlo Park. Mike Moritz, partner at top-tier Sequoia Capital, can’t help but agree. He points out that Chinese entrepreneurs who routinely work 80 hours per week are making their Silicon Valley peers look “lazy and entitled.” “China’s entrepreneurial culture does make Silicon Valley look sleepy.” —Hans Tung Managing partner, GGV Capital When traveling to China, as I’ve done more than 100 times for work, I’ll often have breakfast or lunch meetings on weekends in Beijing or Shanghai.

…

They’ve invested in US ride-hailing leaders Uber and Lyft, electric-carmaker Tesla, and augmented reality innovator Magic Leap. These Chinese tech titans have taken their cues directly from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They’ve scoured the Valley for promising startups and based their operations not far from Menlo Park’s storied Sand Hill Road firms that backed winners Google, Facebook, and eBay. Tencent opened an office in a converted church in tech-wealthy Palo Alto, home to Stanford University, and has expanded nearby to a much larger California base. Alibaba keeps an office in San Mateo on California byway El Camino Real, in sight of venture capitalist Tim Draper’s entrepreneurial school Draper University.

…

It may sound cushy, but it takes hard work, commitment, and determination. Crosscurrents and Synergy China’s Silicon Valley owes much of its initial magic to a reliance on the United States for a cross-border flow of ideas and capital. A two-way highway runs from Beijing’s Zhongguancun Software Park to Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road, raising capital and funding startups hinged from both coasts of the Pacific Ocean. This two-way channel creates synergy and speeds up startup launches, innovation, and scale across the United States and China, as well as globally. The tech investing pipeline from China into the United States has been increasing, even though tensions from Washington are rising.

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

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

In September, Shriram was asked to join Page and Brin as one of three Google directors, a seat he continues to hold on a board that now consists of ten members. For $1,700 a month, the just-formed company sublet new office space: the two-car Menlo Park garage and two downstairs spare rooms of an 1,800-square-foot house in Menlo Park. The owners were friends: Susan Wojcicki, an engineer at Intel, and her husband Dennis Troper, a product manager at a tech company. The newly constituted Google had found its way to them because Sergey had dated Susan’s roommate at Stanford Business School. The house was not located in the upscale sections of Menlo Park, near the Sand Hill Road offices made famous by the venture capitalists whose offices are there, or in nearby Atherton, where many of these venture capitalists live and in 2008 an acre of land could sell for $3 million.

…

He enjoyed a privileged childhood—Collegiate, Phillips Exeter, Yale philosophy major—that suggested a life on Wall Street, or the CIA. His ponytail did not. He cut it, though, for his first job as an analyst for Morgan Stanley’s Capital Markets group, in 1994. But computers and technology were what really inspired him. He moved the next year to the technology group in Menlo Park, under Frank Quattrone. He worked on the 1995 Netscape IPO, going on the road with cofounders Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, and with CEO James Barksdale. In October 1995, he joined Netscape as their chief deal maker and Wall Street liaison. He helplessly watched as Microsoft bundled the free Internet Explorer browser in with its dominant operating system, weakening Netscape.

…

Likewise, most traditional media companies in the Google era concentrated more on defending their turf rather than extending it. Belatedly, most have begun to dip their toes, and in some cases entire feet, into new media efforts, hoping that technology could also be their friend. In the summer of 2008, CBS became the first full-scale traditional media company to open a Silicon Valley office in Menlo Park. Quincy Smith, who had been promoted to CEO of CBS Interactive, supervised the office and averaged two days a week there. Under his prodding, CBS made a number of digital acquisitions. The biggest was the $1.8 billion CBS spent to acquire CNET, whose online networks generated revenues of $400 million.

Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney

Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dematerialisation, fudge factor, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, scientific management, VTOL

At the time, Edison was spread uncomfortably thin, even for a genius. He had opened the Edison Machine Works on Goerck Street and the Edison Electric Light Company at 65 Fifth Avenue. His generating station at 255–57 Pearl Street was serving the whole Wall Street and East River area. And he had a big research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, where a large number of men were employed and where the most astonishing things could happen. Sometimes Edison himself could be seen there, dancing around “a little iron monster of a locomotive” that got its direct current from a generating station behind the laboratory, and which had once flown off the rails at a speed of forty miles per hour to the delight of its creator.1 To this laboratory, also, Sarah Bernhardt had come to have her voice immortalized on Edison’s phonograph.

…

In addition to redesigning the twenty-four dynamos completely and making major improvements to them, he installed automatic controls, using an original concept for which patents were obtained. The personality differences between the two men doomed their relationship from the start. Edison disliked Tesla for being an egghead, a theoretician, and cultured. Ninety-nine percent of genius, according to the Wizard of Menlo Park, was “knowing the things that would not work.” Hence he himself approached each problem with an elaborate process of elimination. Of these “empirical dragnets” Tesla later would say amusedly, “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.

…

Of the circumstances in which his widowed mother then lived or whether he ever contributed to her support once he began to earn money in America, unfortunately no records have been found. That she often dominated his thoughts, however, future events were to disclose. Edison felt a flood of outrage when he first heard the news of Tesla’s deal with Westinghouse for his alternating-current system. At last the lines were clearly drawn. Soon his propaganda machine at Menlo Park began grinding out a barrage of alarmist material about the alleged dangers of alternating current.4 As Edison saw it, accidents caused by AC must, if they could not be found, be manufactured, and the public alerted to the hazards. Not only were fortunes at stake in the War of the Currents but also the personal pride of an egocentric genius.

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

He’d also been involved with some very successful online dating and gaming sites and business software companies. The public résumé, though, did not really explain how he’d made enough money to bankroll a rocket company or provide many clues to what type of man Polyakov was. My initial visit to Polyakov’s office in Menlo Park revealed a man in his early forties of slightly above average build with a dad paunch, closely cropped light brown hair, and a face that oscillated between cherubic and mischievous. Polyakov greeted me at the door and showed me around his building. The man clearly liked sci-fi art and had a sense of humor.

…

“You just wake up and you feel the energy that you shall do something, right?” he said. “But you shall do something for good. For better.” Chapter Thirty-One These Rockets: They’re Expensive A couple months after our 2018 trip to Ukraine, Polyakov threw an Oktoberfest party at his house in Menlo Park, California. Many of his business lieutenants were there. So were some space people. And so were some neighbors from what’s one of the wealthiest suburbs in Silicon Valley—and thus one of the wealthiest suburbs in the world. Polyakov had bought the mansion a few years earlier on a whim. He’d wanted to move his family to California and had hired a real estate agent to scout some Silicon Valley locations.

…

Drive and warned the Polyakovs that real estate moved fast in the Valley. Max had told him to buy it at whatever price seemed appropriate and then rushed to the airport to catch a flight back to Ukraine with his wife. A couple days later, the deal had gone through, and a story had appeared in Palo Alto Weekly: “Home Sells for $7.6 Million, Record for Menlo Park.” The real estate agent had failed to tell Polyakov that he would be setting the market rate for an entire city. The house looked like a minicastle. It had a huge backyard with a pool and guest quarters. Still, Polyakov wanted more privacy and convinced an older woman who owned the house next door to sell him her house, too.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

In July 2017, Facebook, facing pressure from employees who were exhausted from long commutes and from neighbors in East Menlo Park who’d grown fed up with congestion around its growing campus, proposed developing a campus extension. The “village,” designed by star architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA New York, would link new offices with housing, retail outlets, parkland, and, crucially, a grocery store for an area that, despite Facebook’s massive presence, remains a food desert. Zuckerberg hopes to open the extension by 2021, but—if the comments they’ve made in public forums and news articles are any indication—residents of East Menlo Park would prefer that the municipal government slow down and address their concerns first.

…

What can Facebook do to make sure that its plans are good for the community, and not just the company? Does Facebook really care? Facebook’s attempt to win over local support for its new developments has been unsuccessful in part because the company has done so little to improve the local social infrastructure since it moved into Menlo Park. Although people who purchased houses before the tech companies arrived would surely profit if they wanted to sell and move out of the region, rising real estate prices don’t do anything to improve the lives of residents and workers. For them, the biggest daily impact of being close to corporations like Facebook is being stuck in traffic, often behind the private buses that shuttle workers to and from campus.

…

When our children were little we made a habit of taking them to a place in the Flatiron District called Books of Wonder, which, for good or ill, sold cupcakes and coffee along with every picture book we wanted. As they got older we took them on outings to places where they couldn’t help but notice that the world is full of people who love books—and bookshops—as much as we do: the Strand in Greenwich Village, McNally Jackson in SoHo, Kepler’s during our sabbatical year in Menlo Park. The visits could be expensive, but there aren’t many more worthwhile ways of spending what we have. These days, of course, there are cheaper and more efficient ways to buy books (and everything else), and my family is hardly immune to their appeal. No matter how much we love bookshops, we often opt to make purchases on the Internet when we’re in a hurry or looking for a better price.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

But they wanted some deal partners with real-world experience instead of just fancy MBAs, and Calbert fit the bill. Once on board, he started ginning up retail ideas, the highest-profile being the 2005 takeover of Toys R Us, with Bain Capital and Vornado. The Dollar General deal was percolating inside KKR for at least a year before the company sprang its offer in the fall of 2006. From his perch at KKR’s Menlo Park office, Calbert marshaled a group of analysts to come up with a thesis around dollar stores. Running numbers only gets you so far, so Calbert went on the road himself. He enlisted industry contacts, including former Dollar General executives, to visit stores with him, usually down South, where Dollar General stores were concentrated.

…

“There’s no agenda between Henry and me,” he said. “That reinforces everything we’re trying to do at the firm.” With two long-standing founders so in synch, and still firmly in control of their creation, the culture is thus undoubtedly a reflection of them. And that culture is a serious, driven one, with 9 West, Menlo Park, and every KKR office living shrines to overachievement. They preach discipline, and “relentless” is a word I heard over and over again. While the RJR deal turned out to be an outlier in terms of size for that period, the notion of Doing The Big Deal is quintessential KKR. The firm has underscored that in the decades hence by buying big-ticket, high-profile companies.

…

The gift was designated to fund the construction of a new home for the business school, part of a $6.3 billion project to create a new Columbia campus in West Harlem.2 Kravis told me he’s opted to focus his philanthropy on groups tied to education, culture, and medicine, three categories that obviously give him a huge set of options. He’s increasingly interested in applying lessons learned in his day job to charity. “I love starting something new or fixing something,” he said. KKR’s Menlo Park office sits in a tidy low-rise building along Sand Hill Road, the thoroughfare where the world’s best-known venture capital firms are tucked into similarly unassuming structures, minutes from Stanford University, and less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco. The echoes of 9 West are unmistakable throughout, the office itself feels like the more relaxed California cousin to its New York counterpart.

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

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

So it’s important to remember that psychedelics were once invested with the hopes of a generation as a serious, mind-expanding, “technology”. In 1968, Brand had been one of over 150 test subjects detailed in the first-ever published research into the effects of LSD produced by the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS), Myron Stolaroff’s Menlo Park-based research centre. But it was a different kind of research that was going on in sixties West Coast America that ultimately turned Brand’s head. “The difference between drugs and computers,” Brand tells me, “was that drugs levelled off and computers didn’t. I mean, technology is supposed to come in S-curves.

…

Engelbart’s voice echoes across the fuzz of the broadcast audio, giving him an Orson Welles quality which is only augmented by the vision of his disembodied head, cradled in a headset and microphone, fading in and out of the main camera shot which is pointed directly at the computer screen he has projected in front of the audience. Shots too, of his team, including Brand, stationed live at Menlo Park, orchestrating parts of the demonstration, fade in and out. Because it’s the sixties, the whole film has a sci-fi quality to it, a feeling which must have been shared by the audience at the time, but for opposite reasons. On occasion, the film shows only a flat blinking cursor, awaiting commands while a second green-on-black dot flits around the screen, controlled by Engelbart’s mechanical mouse, which he directs with his right hand.

…

For Brand, and for the hippies who bought into his “Whole Earth” enthusiasm, the idea of the earth as a system was a powerful one. And it was also seductive: it certainly looked like a better system than the military industrial complex they had fled back to the land from. Later in 1968, back in Menlo Park, Brand began preparations for the first print run of the Whole Earth Catalog, a Sears catalogue for hippy communards that juxtaposed practical advice and tools for back-to-the-landers with intellectual stimulation in the form of reviews of books Brand and his fellow editors thought should be informing the ideals of their peers.

A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asilomar, butterfly effect, California gold rush, content marketing, Easter island, Elisha Otis, Golden Gate Park, index card, indoor plumbing, lateral thinking, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, place-making, risk tolerance, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, supervolcano, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

Once the rock had ruptured the shocks then travelled, and at a fantastic speed, in a north-westerly direction, disturbing people – Mr Miller and Miss Gieseke among them – in the myriad ways that a shock as impressive as this one can. The formal classifying number of the event (or the eq, as such happenings are generally known in the seismological community) was NC51147892, with the NC being the internationally recognized two-letter code for the Northern California Regional Seismic Network, based at the USGS headquarters at Menlo Park, at the upper end of Silicon Valley. The regional moment magnitude of the quake, which is what is usually calculated and released to the press, was 6.0.* No one was hurt by it, nor was there any but the most mildly inconvenient damage. In normal circumstances, and in most places, this would merely have been a moderately significant event.

…

A photocopied guide handed to visitors relates the kind of thing: ‘on your right, look for a 4' × 4' × 4' structure… this contains a seismometer’, ‘on the south side of the road there is a piece of PVC pipe sticking out of the ground with the letters JPL-GPS – this belong to the Jet Propulsion Lab’, ‘on the left side is a USGS creep-meter… do not touch the thin metal wire’. The information gathered by the machines is broadcast to thousands out in the seismically fascinated world. Some is sent via tiny satellite aerials over to Colorado, some goes to a university near San Diego, still more to the Geological Survey’s regional headquarters at Menlo Park, while other parcels of information are 12. Drilling equipment in a rancher’s field outside Parkfield, California. Measuring devices being placed at the base of the drill hole are expected to give vital information about what exactly happens at the very edge of the earthquake-triggering San Andreas Fault.

…

Wolfeboro, NH: Bowers and Marina Galleries, 1987 Lockwood, Charles. Suddenly San Francisco: The Early Years of an Instant City. San Francisco: The San Francisco Examiner Division of the Hearst Corporation, 1978 Longstreet, Stephen. The Wilder Shore. New York: Doubleday, 1968 McDowell, Jack (ed.). San Francisco. Menlo Park, CA: Lane Publishing, 1977 McGroarty, John S. California: Its History and Romance. Los Angeles: Grafton Publishing, 1911 McLeod, Alexander. Pigtails and Gold Dust. Caldwell, ID: The Caxton Printers, 1947 McPhee, John. Assembling California. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993 —Annals of the Former World.

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

Since Ferenc had been a lieutenant in the Hussars, the light cavalry unit in which his uncle Pavle served, Tesla asked his uncle to recommend him to Ferenc so that he could get a job helping to build the new exchange.31 The Puskás family was part of the Transylvanian nobility, and Tivadar had studied law and technical subjects as a young man. A promoter and entrepreneur, Tivadar had traveled to America looking for opportunities. After trying his hand at gold mining in Colorado, he became interested in the telegraph and telephone.32 In 1877, Puskás visited Edison at Menlo Park where he made quite an impression, arriving in a fancy carriage and flashing a roll of thousand-dollar bills. Edison took a liking to Puskás and showed him all of his current inventions, including the phonograph. Thrilled with everything he saw, Puskás offered to take out patents in Europe for Edison’s telephone and phonograph at his own expense in return for a one-twentieth interest.33 With such a deal, one wonders whether Puskás was hustling Edison or Edison was hustling Puskás.

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In this chapter we will look at how Tesla, with the help of his friends, shaped his reputation. He now cultivated an image of being a brilliant, even eccentric, genius. Tesla delighted in showing off his wireless lamps, and after dinners at Delmonico’s he would invite celebrities to late-night demonstrations in his laboratory. Just as newspaper reporters had covered Edison’s exploits at Menlo Park in the 1870s, they flocked to Tesla’s laboratory in the 1890s to cover his sensational discoveries. Like Edison, Tesla delighted in telling lively stories and promising great results for his inventions. T. C. MARTIN AND THE BOOK Tesla’s efforts at promotion were strongly shaped by his friendship with Thomas Commerford Martin (1856–1924), the editor of Electrical Engineer, one of the leading weekly electrical journals.

…

Martin functioned as Tesla’s publicity manager in the mid-1890s and did more than anyone else to help Tesla establish his reputation. Born in England, Martin spent part of his boyhood traveling aboard the massive steamship Great Eastern while his father helped lay the transatlantic telegraph cable. After studying theology, Martin immigrated to the United States to work with Edison at Menlo Park. Noticing that Martin had a gift for writing, Edison encouraged the young Englishman to publish stories about the telephone and phonograph in the New York newspapers. In 1882 he became an editor at the telegraph journal The Operator, which was soon renamed Electrical World. Along with his editorial work, Martin helped found the American Institute of Electrical Engineering in 1884 and served as the institute’s president in 1887–88.4 As we have seen, Martin first became acquainted with Tesla’s work in April 1888 when he was invited to see a demonstration of Tesla’s AC motor in the Liberty Street laboratory (see Chapter 5).

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

Although as tech VCs he and his brother weren’t going to be coming up with the next Facebook themselves, maybe they would find it. Maybe they would even find it here; Cameron could feel a familiar thrill rising inside of him. They were opening a new chapter in their lives, and he could think of no better starting place than Oasis, the hamburger joint right smack in the center of Menlo Park. He knew that Tyler, sliding out of the taxi behind him, carrying the folder stuffed with business plans of companies looking for venture cash, would have told him to take a breath, temper his optimism. Although most people thought the Winklevoss brothers were completely identical, in fact, they were mirror image twins, the result of a fertilized egg splitting later than usual in the process, around the ninth day, and then developing as two separate embryos.

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In California, they launched revolutions from garages: Jobs and Woz building personal computers next to a rack of pocket wrenches in a garage in Los Altos, Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard making oscillators behind barn-like doors in a garage in Palo Alto, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin inventing Google as Stanford grad students in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. But in Brooklyn, there weren’t many garages; there were basements. And in the part of Brooklyn where Charlie grew up, those basements were crowded, dark, dingy, and usually smelled a little bit like brisket. From above, the urban neighborhood of narrow streets spanning Avenue I to Avenue V, Nostrand to West Sixth Street, might have looked like any other section of the borough, but in reality, Charlie’s home sat right in the center of the seventy-five-thousand-member-strong Syrian Orthodox Jewish community—an ethnic, religious, and cultural island unto itself.

…

His brother was ready with a line of his own: “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars … in bitcoin.” Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had just officially become the world’s first known Bitcoin billionaires. 31 FROM DUMAS TO BALZAC January 4, 2018. 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California. A state-of-the-art campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, the headquarters of one of the biggest companies on earth. One might imagine a brightly lit corner of a vast, open floor of cubicles. A boyish man edging toward his midthirties. An expressionless face beneath a mop of slightly curly, auburn hair, caught in the glow of a laptop computer.

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

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

ISBN 9780525573920 Ebook ISBN 9780525573937 Cover design: Lucas Heinrich Cover image: (gradient) A-Star/Shutterstock v5.4 ep To my mother, Connie Guthrie, an original Alpha Girl CONTENTS Prologue PART ONE: The Valley of Dreams PART TWO: Getting in the Game PART THREE: The Outsiders Inside PART FOUR: Survival of the Fittest PART FIVE: Girl Power Photo Insert PART SIX: Marriage, Motherhood, and Moneymaking PART SEVEN: Life, Death, and Picassos PART EIGHT: The Days of Reckoning PART NINE: The Awakening Author’s Note Acknowledgments PROLOGUE SAND HILL ROAD MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA Mary Jane Elmore was giddy as she looked down at the rusted-out floorboards of her old green Ford Pinto. She could see the road rushing by below. But she wasn’t driving on just any road. She was making her way up Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, about to start a new life intent on changing the world.

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But the two were trying to save money, given that she was working for stock rather than salary. And she didn’t mind the bicoastal arrangement. Not having a husband around to worry about gave her more time to work. And that’s exactly what she did in her new job at the start-up Release, which had office space on the second floor of an old building called Casa Mills in Menlo Park. The company’s goal was to become the largest software distributor over the Internet. The building at 250 Middlefield Road frequently had brownouts, and a good Internet connection was as elusive as sleep. Theresia and the gang resorted to drilling a hole in the floor to siphon power for their servers from their neighbors below, who had the MacDaddy of high-speed Internet, T1 lines carrying digital data at 1.544 Mbps.

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Trulia, one of the more recent companies Theresia had invested in, was in the news as it was being acquired by Zillow for $3.5 billion. Theresia and Jennifer planned to start by investing their own money, then raise funds from limited partners. They opened offices in San Francisco’s South of Market district and in Menlo Park. When the story on the founding of Aspect broke, Theresia told a reporter she wanted to invest in great companies, regardless of whether they were founded by men or by women. But she also said she wanted to be a part of creating more stories of successful women who raised capital and built companies.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

After a meeting at the startup’s provisional headquarters in Menlo Park, Straubel agreed to incorporate his new electric car project into the company and was hired as its chief technology officer. Straubel in turn brought in several talented people he had met at Stanford and around Silicon Valley, adding to the team; Eberhard had previously talked a small but deeply talented group of engineers into joining the company while giving them exhilarating rides in his yellow tzero. The growing company moved from its tiny office space in Menlo Park to a workshop in San Carlos, and began converting a Lotus Elise into its first development prototype.

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As a result, its earliest hires were predominantly talented young engineers from top schools, generally with little or no manufacturing or operational experience. A member of Tesla’s Roadster production team, let’s call him Frank, was surprised to find that he was one of the few who did have prior auto manufacturing experience when he started building cars at the company’s Menlo Park facility. Stranger still, his colleagues didn’t show much interest in developing the TPS culture he had learned at his previous assembly line job. The brilliant young engineers tasked with building Tesla’s Roadsters were eager to throw themselves into finding creative solutions to problems, but they were far less interested in adopting Frank’s deliberate, process-driven approach.

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Edwards, 56 Department of Energy (DOE) loans from, 68–89, 118, 120, 121 as shareholder of Tesla, 82–86, 90 detractors, 102–108 Detroit, Michigan, 2, 4 Detroit Auto Show, 68 disruptive innovator, Tesla as, 195–197 DOE. see Department of Energy doors falcon-wing, 137–141 gull-wing, 136–137 Downey, California, 76 Drori, Ze’ev, 49–50, 65 Dunlay, Jim, 58 E Eberhard, Martin as advocate of Tesla, 67 founding of Tesla by, 21–24, 27–31, 35, 37–40 ouster of, 44–48, 50, 79 EBITDA, 215 Eisner, Michael, 45 Electrek, 97–101 electric vehicles (EVs), 3, 12–14, 24, 77, 202, 207 Energy Independence and Security Act, 67 Enron, 105 environmental issues, 112–113, 119 Esquire, 61 e-tron quattro, 203 EV1, 13, 24, 34 EVs. see electric vehicles F Facebook, 41 Falcon One, 28 falcon-wing doors, 137–141 FCW (Forward Collision Warning), 125 Ferrari, 60, 200–201 Fiat, 11, 34 financial crisis (2008), 75–76, 105 fixed costs, 54 Flextronics, 47 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), 72, 131 Ford, Henry, 56, 194 Ford Focus, 159 Ford Fusion, 75 Ford Motor Company, 3, 4, 56, 75, 181, 194, 204, 216 Forward Collision Warning (FCW), 125 Founders Edition Roadster, 215 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 72, 131 Fremont, California, 53, 206, 218 funding (fundraising), 29, 40, 44–47, 50, 69–71, 85 G Gage, Tom, 27–29 Galileo Galilei, 105 Gao Yaning, 128 Gartner, 175 gas prices, 11, 14 General Motors (GM). see also specific models bankruptcy and bailout of, 2–3, 88 and electric cars, 11–13, 34 Impact concept car, 24 and Lotus, 36, 37, 53 OnStar system, 194 Germany, 203, 204 Ghosn, Carlos, 197–200 Gigafactory, 77, 183–184, 189, 218 GM. see General Motors G170J1-LE1 screens, 228 Goodwill Agreements, 149 Google, 44, 120–124, 171 Graham, Paul, 41 “A Grain of Salt” (blog post), 152–153 Grant, Charley, 100 “green car” companies, 11 GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT), 95–97 gull-wing doors, 136–137 H Harrigan, Mike, 30 Harris Ranch, 115–116, 119 Harvard Business School, 195 herd mentality, 96 Hethel, England, 49 Hoerbiger, 138–140 Holzhausen, Franz von, 137 Honda, 201 “How to Be Silicon Valley” (speech by Paul Graham), 41 Hyperloop, 16, 88, 217 I IDEO, 38 IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor), 49 Impact concept car, 13, 24 imperfection, 55 incumbent companies, 196–197 innovation, 193–210 by Citroën, 193–195 disruptive, 195–197 by Carlos Ghosn, 197–200 by Tesla, 201–210 “Innovation Killers: How Financial Tools Destroy Your Capacity to Do New Things” (Christensen), 196–197 The Innovator’s Dilemma, 197 insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), 49 internal conflict, 29–32 InvestorsHub, 99 Israel, 4, 12 J Jaguar I-PACE, 202–203 Jivan, Jon, 98 Jonas, Adam, 172 K kaizen, 58, 60 Krafcik, John, 176 L Lambert, Fred, 98–101 Lamborghini, 204 Land Rover, 60 lead-acid batteries, 23–24, 197 Leech, Keith, 146–147, 156 Level 4 autonomous cars, 175–176 Level 5 autonomous cars, 170, 172, 175–176, 178 Lexus, 204 lithium-ion batteries, 22–24, 26, 34 “long tailpipe,” 110 losses, 11 Lotus, 36–37, 38, 43, 44, 49, 59 Lotus Elise, 28, 36, 37, 38, 40, 43 Lotus Evora, 59 “Ludicrous Mode,” 16 Lyons, Dave, 64 M Mac, Ryan, 218 Magna Powertrain, 48–49 Magna Steyr, 202 manufacturing, 180–192 of batteries, 183–184, 188–189 and continuous reiteration of Model 3s, 182–192 Elon Musk on, 180–182 preproduction as, 187–188 Marchionne, Sergio, 11 market saturation, 10 Marks, Michael, 47, 48, 50 Mars, 25 “Master Plan, Part Deux” (blog post), 164 McLaren F1, 25–26, 39 media hype, 88, 90–91, 93–95, 97–102, 130, 211–224 and base version of Model 3, 220–224 Elon Musk as cause of, 217–224 at Semi/Roadster unveiling, 211–215 as stock price stimulant, 215–216 Menlo Park, California, 28, 58 Michelin, 194 Miles, 11 Mobileye, 167–170 mobility technology, 11 Model 3, 8–10, 180–182 base version of, 220–224 production of, 182–192 Model S, 15, 74–75, 81–84, 90, 99, 135–137. see also Whitestar Model T, 56 Model X, 101, 134–145 Model Year 2008, 69 Moggridge, Bill, 38–39 Montana Skeptic, 105–108 Morgan Stanley, 172 Morris, Charles, 43 Motley Fool, 98 Musk, Elon on belief, 21 and branding of Tesla, 16–17 as cause of media hype, 217–224 childhood and personality of, 25–26 clientele knowledge of, 60 “cluelessness” of, 33–35 and culture of Tesla, 60 and Daimler, 68 detractors of, 102–108 and electric cars, 25–28 and Elise-Roadster conversion, 38–39 on financial viability of Tesla, 72–73 and fundraising, 44, 69–71 and loans, 70, 78 on manufacturing, 180–181, 190 on Model 3, 8–9 on Model S, 74 on Model X, 144–145 on obstacles faced by Tesla, 46 offers of, to sell Tesla, 120–121 on price increases, 71 and production process, 142, 165 as public figure, 15 on Series D, 47 and JB Straubel, 26 and stress, 64–67, 77–78 and Superchargers, 109–119 and Tesla cofounders, 29–32, 45, 47–48 on Tesla’s master plan, 21–22, 30–31, 58, 163 at town hall meeting, 70–71 and Whitestar, 51 Musk, Errol, 25 Musk, Justine, 25–26 Musk, Kimball, 65 N National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 66 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 127, 131–132, 149–162 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 132, 167 NDAs. see non-disclosure agreements Neil, Dan, 59 Neuralink, 16, 217 New Mexico, 48, 67 New United Motor Manufacturing, 53 New York Times, 2, 30, 66 NHTSA. see National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Nissan Leaf, 198 Nissan-Renault Alliance, 197–200, 207 Noble M12, 27 nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), 5, 149–151, 152, 155–156 Norway, 12 NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), 132, 167 NUMMI plant, 76, 81 Nürburgring, 203 NuvoMedia, 23 O Occupy Wall Street, 80–81 Ohno, Taiichi, 57 OnStar, 194 Opel, 36 Opel Speedster, 36 OpenAI, 217 operating profits and losses, 89 P Packet Design, 23 Page, Larry, 44 Paine, Chris, 13, 64, 71, 73–74 Panasonic, 77 Pandora, 41 PayPal, 16, 28 Peak Oil, 11 Pinnacle Research, 25 platforms, 135–136 Porsche, 24, 26, 39, 203–204 Porsche 911, 39 power electronics module (PEM), 49 Powertrain Technology, 58 Prenzler, Christian, 100 preproduction, 187–188 price increases, 71 Prius, 24 profitability, 81–82, 89 Project Better Place, 4–5, 11–12 public, going, 80–81 Q quality, 55, 59–60 Quality Control Systems, 131 R Ranger, 60 Reddit, 97, 99–100 reliability, 143 Renault Kwid, 207 Renault Zoe, 198 Reuters, 66 Revenge of the Electric Car (film), 64 Roadster as Elise conversion, 37–39 launch of, 14–15, 29, 42, 47–51, 59–61 new model of, 211–215 profitability of, 71–72, 81 securing investments for, 44, 45 and Tesla startup, 2–3 robotaxis, 166–167 Rogan, Joe, 219 Rosen, Harold, 26 Rosen Motors, 26 S Saleen, 99–100 San Carlos, California, 28 San Francisco, California, 59 San Jose, California, 75–76 Santa Monica, California, 45 Saudi Arabia, 218–219 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 45 Scion xB, 27 Seagate, 23 “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan” (blog post), 21 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 67, 160, 219–220, 224, 234 Seeking Alpha, 103, 105–107 self-driving cars, 120–133 Semi, 211–215 Senate Finance Committee, 67 Series A funding, 29 Series C funding, 40, 44–45 Series D funding, 46, 47 Series E funding, 50 S 40 model, 84 Shashua, Amnon, 167–170 Silicon Valley, 4, 14, 15, 17, 45, 53, 54, 58 Siry, Darryl, 65, 73 60 Minutes, 66 S 60 model, 84 “skateboard” chassis, 134, 202 Skype, 41 Smart (Tesla car), 68 software startups, 54–55 SolarCity, 110–111, 164 solar power, 109–114 Sorbonne University, 66 South Africa, 25 SpaceX, 15, 16, 25, 28, 39, 66, 78, 100 Spiegel, Mark, 102–103 Stanford University, 4, 26, 27, 28, 121 startups, 41–43, 59, 62, 76 “stealth recalls,” 160–161 stock price, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 StockTwits, 98 Straubel, JB, 26, 28, 48 SunCube, 146–147 Superchargers, 109–119 SYNC, 194 T TACC (Traffic Aware Cruise Control), 125 Tama, 197 Tarpenning, Marc, 21–24, 27, 31, 37, 43, 113 Tea Party movement, 80–81 “Tesla Death Watch” (blog posts), 3 Tesla Energy Group, 68 Tesla Founders Blog, 50 Tesla Motors. see also specific headings and barriers to entry, 35, 56 branding of, 16–17, 18, 59–63, 225–234 and collisions, 127–133 concept of, 34–36 continuous improvement at, 58 culture of, 51–52, 60 detractors of, 102–108 as disruptive innovator, 195–197 EBITDA of, 215 and environmental issues, 112–113, 119 “factory-less” model of, 35–36 innovation by, 201–210 internal conflict at, 29–32 legacy of, 19 Model 3 introduced by, 8–10 personal approach to public relations, xii raising capital for, 44, 69–71, 85 “shaky ground” of, 4, 5 as startup, 2–3 stock price of, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100, 102–103 strategy of, 22 and Supercharger network, 109–119 and whistleblowers, xii Tesla Motors Club (TMC), 95–97 Teslarati, 100 “Tesla stare,” 60 “Tesla Suspension Breakage: It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverup” (blog post), 151 Thailand, 48, 218 Think Global, 11, 67 Thrun, Sebastian, 121 TMC (Tesla Motors Club), 95–97 Too Big to Fail, 91 Toyoda, Akio, 76 Toyoda, Sakichi, 57 Toyota, 184, 201. see also specific models auto sales, 11 contract with, 81, 83 electric vehicles of, 159–160 and 2008 financial crisis, 76–77 pragmatism of, 209 safety scandal, 149–151 Toyota Previa, 214 Toyota Production System (TPS), 56–60, 76–77, 142, 183 Toyota Way, 58, 77 TPS. see Toyota Production System Traction Avant, 193–194 trading volume, 89 Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC), 125 The Truth About Cars (TTAC) (blog), 1–3 Tse, Bernard, 67 turnarounds, financial, 83–87 Twitter, 41, 98, 104–108, 113, 152, 156, 217–220, 224, 236 tzero, 23–24, 26, 27, 31, 37 V Valor Equity Partners, 47 Vance, Ashlee, 38, 47, 66, 73, 84, 120–121, 137, 227–228 VantagePoint Capital Partners, 66 variable costs, 54 V8 engine, 62 Volkswagen, 11, 171, 203–205 W Wall Street Journal, 2, 18, 100, 129, 132, 168, 187 Waymo, 173–174 Web 2.0, 41 Weintraub, Seth, 97–98, 101 Wharton School of Business, 25 whistleblowers, xii Whitestar, 46–48, 51, 65, 67, 68, 73 Who Killed the Electric Car?

Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Gaining confidence, he invited visitors to his workshop at Menlo Park to witness his electric light. He also spent this time acquiring legal advice and securing a group of wealthy investors, including J. P. Morgan, to finance his experiments. Edison’s early bulb was plagued with problems of practicality, namely that most lamps could only operate for a limited amount of time. Edison’s early incandescent bulb only stayed lit for one to two hours. In response to this problem Edison tried to create a high-resistance light bulb by running a low current through thin copper wires. His team at Menlo Park also realized the importance of finding a resistant and durable filament that would not burn inside the glass bulb.

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Although Edison did not invent the original light bulb, he strove to establish a system by which sustainable light could be transferred from generators to American homes and businesses. His incandescent light faced a number of obstacles, notably the existence of the powerful gas-lighting industry. With the help of his talented team of assistants, financial backing from investors, and his laboratories at Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison intended to create a viable alternative to gas lighting. Invented by William Murdoch in the early nineteenth century in Great Britain, gas lighting transformed the nature of business and access to knowledge. In the words of one gas-lighting historian, “It banished the darkness in many people’s homes—not only the darkness of the night, but the darkness of ignorance.”13 Businesses were able to increase productivity by operating longer, and people had more opportunity to read novels and newspapers and expand their intellectual horizons.

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As noted, gas lighting was entrenched within society, and Edison was forced to confront New York’s political machinery when attempting to reach his goal of illuminating the offices of Wall Street. Modeling his electric distribution system after that of the gas industry, Edison needed permits from city authorities to bury his wires underground. In hopes to sway city leadership, Edison and his lawyers hosted a gathering at Menlo Park where those who were either apathetic or skeptical could witness Edison’s seemingly threatening innovation. Neither Edison nor the New York aldermen were ecstatic about the meeting prospects. Accounts of the meeting show that the officials proposed that Edison pay a $1,000 tax per mile of wire he buried underground within the city borders.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

During the 1950s SRI pioneered the first check-processing computers. Duvall arrived to work on an SRI contract to automate an English bank’s operations, but the bank had been merged into a larger bank, and the project was put on an indefinite hold. He used the time for his first European vacation and then headed back to Menlo Park to renew his romance with computing, joining the team of artificial intelligence researchers building Shakey. Like many hackers, Duvall was something of a loner. In high school, a decade before the movie Breaking Away, he joined a local cycling club and rode his bike in the hills behind Stanford.

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In the space of less than a year he went from struggling to program the first useful robot to writing the software code for the two computers that first connected over a network to demonstrate what would evolve to become the Internet. Late in the evening on October 29, 1969, Duvall connected Engelbart’s NLS software in Menlo Park to a computer in Los Angeles controlled by another young hacker via a data line leased from the phone company. Bill Duvall would become the first to make the leap from research to replace humans with computers to using computing to augment the human intellect, and one of the first to stand on both sides of an invisible line that even today divides two rival, insular engineering communities.

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That update made it possible to simply click on any function or command to view a related online manual. Having easy access to the software documentation made it simpler for developers to program the computers and reduce the number of bugs. At the time, however, he was unfamiliar with the history of Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center in Menlo Park during the 1960s and 1970s. He had moved to California to get a master’s degree in computer science, with a plan to move back to France after graduation. It had been a fun sojourn in California, but the French computer firm would pay for his schooling only if he returned to Europe. Not long before he was scheduled to return, however, he stumbled across a small blurb advertising a job in an artificial intelligence research laboratory at SRI.

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

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

Trained at the VA in San Francisco under the auspices of the navy and then recalled during the Korean War, Hollister decided that, if the United States was going to have so many wars, he’d be better off making a career in the VA than in private practice. He became an internist at the Menlo Park VA hospital and had a breakthrough in the early 1950s using a hypertension drug to treat schizophrenia. By 1959, when he attended a CIA-funded conference on LSD, Hollister was medical director at Menlo Park and a leader in psychopharmacology. When presenters suggested that LSD ingestion mimicked the schizophrenic state, Hollister was skeptical. The CIA was happy to pay him to check it out.42 That’s how Kesey ended up trying every drug in the government’s medicine cabinet, from LSD to psilocybin to mescaline to morning glory seeds.

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The oNLine System (NLS) was a leap forward in computing technology, and if you watch a video of the charismatic Engelbart wielding it at the “Mother of All Demos,” you’ll see that it’s still a somewhat recognizable interface today.10 The mouse moved freely in two dimensions; there were windows and linked hypertext. Engelbart gave the demo on a keyboard-mouse-screen terminal in San Francisco, wirelessly connected to the computer itself at the ARC, in Menlo Park, via microwave transmission. He video-chatted live with the team at SRI, and the audience was riveted. The next step was to transform the performance into a prototype, but that wasn’t on the philosopher Engelbart’s agenda. Meanwhile, Bob Taylor left ARPA after funding cuts and a disillusioning trip to Vietnam to try to coordinate the war’s chaotic information streams.11 He went to the University of Utah in 1969, where his ARPA munificence funded one of the nation’s top computer science programs, but the next year, when corporate copy giant Xerox invited him to help build out the Computer Science Lab (CSL) at the company’s new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he headed for the coast.

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Program director Wallace Stegner thought the charismatic and rebellious Kesey a clown, but other faculty spied promise, including novelist Malcolm Cowley. When a friend told Kesey that the veterans’ hospital was paying local volunteers to take exciting new drugs, he signed up, had his mind blown, and got a job at the Menlo Park VA, where he had unfettered access to experimental narcotics. Kesey started bringing drugs home, where he gathered a scene about him.38 His 1962 debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was an instant hit, romanticizing the patients Kesey saw at work as exemplars of independent consciousness.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

While at Disneyland a few months earlier on a date with his wife, Eberhard had come up with the name Tesla Motors, both to pay homage to the inventor and electric motor pioneer Nikola Tesla and because it sounded cool. The cofounders rented an office that had three desks and two small rooms in a decrepit 1960s building located at 845 Oak Grove Avenue in Menlo Park. The third desk was occupied a few months later by Ian Wright, an engineer who grew up on a farm in New Zealand. He was a neighbor of the Tesla cofounders in Woodside, and had been working with them to hone his pitch for a networking startup. When the start-up failed to raise any money from venture capitalists, Wright joined Tesla.

…

“It was a mistake,” Eberhard said. “I wanted more investors. But, if I had to do it again, I would take his money. A bird in the hand, you know. We needed it.” Not long after this meeting took place, Musk called Straubel and urged him to meet with the Tesla team. Straubel heard that their offices in Menlo Park were about a half a mile from his house, and he was intrigued but very skeptical of their story. No one on the planet was more dialed into the electric vehicle scene than Straubel, and he found it hard to believe that a couple of guys had gotten this far along without word of their project reaching him.

…

The founders were impressed with his spirit and hired Berdichevsky after one meeting. This left Berdichevsky in the uncomfortable position of calling his Russian immigrant parents, a pair of nuclear submarine engineers, to tell them that he was giving up on Stanford to join an electric car start-up. As employee No. 7, he spent part of the workday in the Menlo Park office and the rest in Straubel’s living room designing three-dimensional models of the car’s powertrain on a computer and building battery pack prototypes in the garage. “Only now do I realize how insane it was,” Berdichevsky said. Tesla soon needed to expand to accommodate its budding engineer army and to create a workshop that would help bring the Roadster, as they were now calling the car, to life.

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

This was not entirely arbitrary; the USGS already had an astrogeology branch, headquartered in Flagstaff, Arizona, that was deeply involved in the study of the moon and was helping to train the Apollo astronauts. The USGS gave primary responsibility for its study of Mars to a team of five geologists, three from Flagstaff, two from the survey’s California center in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. The senior member of the USGS team was a man called Hal Masursky; in part because Murray was at the same time working on a mission to Venus and Mercury, Masursky became one of the television team’s two principal investigators (PI). The other PI was a young man called Brad Smith, a highly rated expert on Mars as observed through telescopes, who had yet to complete his doctorate.

…

It was the huge success of Shoemaker’s work on impacts, and in particular his demonstration, in Germany, that the presence of coesite could be used to show that much larger, more highly eroded features than Meteor Crater shared its extraterrestrial origin, that finally got NASA on board. By August 1960 Shoemaker and a handful of others made up a newly formed Astrogeology Study Group, half of them in Washington, D.C., and half in Menlo Park, California. When in 1961 President Kennedy committed America to reaching the moon within a decade, the astrogeologists were well positioned to be part of the adventure. Shoemaker did not need to wait for the first moon missions to study the processes that shaped it. Now that he understood the process of impact cratering in all its phenomenal violence, he was able to see how it accounted for much of the lunar surface.

…

In 1960, on a trip to JPL that was in part an exploration of employment opportunities, Shoemaker was astonished to see one of the earliest copies of the first moon map drawn by Pat Bridges: a map of Copernicus, one of the youngest and most striking of the moon’s craters, and one that he had been studying as he worked out his ideas about ejecta blankets and secondary craters. He got a copy and, as soon as he returned to Menlo Park, began to use it as the basis for his first lunar geological map. On Earth, geological mapping starts in the field. The geologist wanders the landscape from outcrop to outcrop, identifying the rock type in each one. He assigns the outcrops to various geological units—bodies of rock formed by a single process, or a set of related processes, in a discrete period of time.

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

., part of a Napa Valley wine dynasty, who worked with Singer to present daughter Agustina as a phony water polo recruit Davina and Bruce Isackson, a Hillsborough, California, couple who used Singer’s illegal services for two daughters Michelle Janavs, a Newport Beach, California, mom and Hot Pockets heiress who engaged with Singer for two daughters, including to rig tests and pitch one as an athlete Elisabeth Kimmel, a San Diego media executive who hired Singer to work with her son Spencer Marjorie Klapper, a Menlo Park, California, jewelry designer who used Singer’s illicit help for her son Toby Macfarlane, a Del Mar, California, title insurance executive who used Singer to pass off two children as bogus athletic recruits Bill McGlashan, a San Francisco–area private equity investor who hired Singer for his son P. J. Sartorio, the Menlo Park, California, founder of a frozen Mexican food company who turned to Singer to rig a test for his daughter Stephen Semprevivo, a Los Angeles business executive who used Singer’s shady services to help place his son Adam at Georgetown David Sidoo, a Canadian businessman and former pro football player who paid to have Riddell take tests for two sons, Jake and Ethan Devin Sloane, a Bel Air water-sector entrepreneur who used Singer’s illicit operation for his son, Matteo, then a student at the Buckley School Morrie Tobin, a Los Angeles investor who didn’t know Singer but who bribed Yale women’s soccer coach Rudy Meredith to tag his daughter Sydney as a recruit John B.

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He’d redo a parking job if even one tire was touching a white line, pulling back out and shifting over a few inches till it was perfect. Around fifty, with two kids and a wife, he lived about as far away from the edge as one could get. A player turned coach at the University of Kansas, Center spent two years in the 1990s as a stockbroker at Paine Webber in Menlo Park, California, before coming back to the courts as head coach at Texas Christian University in 1998. He moved to Austin in 2000. Intense, competitive, and emotional, he took losses hard. He held his athletes to a high standard, but also celebrated wins and earned their respect. Center ran a consistently good, if not outstanding, team.

…

A kind female FBI agent helped her figure out whom to text—she tried her divorce lawyer—and had Buckingham’s daughter get her mom an energy bar and her shoes. Huffman and Huneeus, the San Francisco vintner, described brash armed agents tramping through their homes and ordering the kids out of bed. In Menlo Park, Marjorie Klapper wore her pajamas when cuffed, before being allowed to change. At another home, a radiation oncologist and his wife were transported in separate cars to lockups. Michael Center, the head men’s tennis coach at the University of Texas, was carted off from his Austin home around 6:00 a.m. with a burnt orange T-shirt promoting a charity run by a longtime friend and Texas Longhorns sweatpants.

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

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

Yoler was put on the board, as was a longtime friend and mentor of Eberhard’s, Bernie Tse. On the night their new chairman’s check was deposited, they all gathered, except for Musk, in a tiny Menlo Park office that Eberhard had rented. They passed around a bottle of champagne and toasted the start of their company. It was an auspicious beginning for a promising business, one that was truly their own. CHAPTER 3 PLAYING WITH FIRE Outside the three-bedroom home JB Straubel rented in Menlo Park sat a pile of used electric motors packed individually in large wooden crates—dozens of them, creating a stark contrast to the white fence and manicured lawn of the neighbor’s house across the street.

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Eberhard and Wright had already gone to the UK to finalize their agreement with Lotus, and the carmaker shipped its first Elise to San Dimas. Straubel and the team at AC Propulsion dug in. They began by ripping out the gas engine to make room for an electric motor and batteries. Straubel quickly ran into one of Tesla’s first hurdles. While the EV1 motors stacked up back at Straubel’s home in Menlo Park illustrated the precision and uniformity that came from a big carmaker, AC Propulsion’s motors were something else. Each was a jewel, he thought. Beautifully crafted—and unique. That was a problem. Eberhard’s plan called for selling hundreds of Roadsters a year. Straubel couldn’t return to his team with jewels; he needed cogs for a machine.

…

With two young children, they eventually moved back to the States, and to Palo Alto, where he founded Panasonic’s Silicon Valley R&D lab. At Tesla, Kelty, then forty-one years old, would become Straubel’s guide to a new world. On paper, they were an odd couple: the worldly family man and the sheltered bachelor, whose yard in Menlo Park was still piled with EV1 motors. But the two connected over a curiosity for the world and a common interest in energy products. Together they made an appealing sales team: With his industry connections, Kelty could land meetings. He would open them by introducing himself and Straubel in Japanese, followed by Straubel’s presentation of Tesla’s technology, Kelty translating all the while.

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

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

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN THE LAUNCH PAD Randall Stross is the author of several acclaimed books, including eBoys, Planet Google, and The Wizard of Menlo Park. He has a PhD in history from Stanford University. Visit randallstross.com THE LAUNCH PAD Inside Y Combinator RANDALL STROSS PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China penguin.com A Penguin Random House Company First published in the United States of America by Portfolio/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA), 2012 This paperback edition with a new epilogue published 2013 Copyright © Randall Stross, 2012, 2013 Penguin supports copyright.

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The street happened to be named Pioneer Way and it was located in a light industrial area, a forlorn triangle bordered on two edges by highways. It was about a twenty-minute drive from where the posh offices of venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road were concentrated, near Stanford, on the leafy west side of Menlo Park. The neighborhood of Pioneer Way belonged to a separate galaxy. YC sat among small manufacturers, and auto repair and body shops. The architecture in the neighborhood was strictly no-frills utilitarian—a good setting for lean startups. YC was there every other winter until 2009, when Graham and Livingston decided to make the Valley their permanent home and run the program there for both the winter and summer batches.4 Two years after YC’s founding, a seed fund named TechStars sprang up in Boulder, Colorado.

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Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot), 200 Lynch, Sean, 123, 187 Machinima, 144 Mackey, Kurt, 51, 168–70, 219, 223 Mah, Jessica, 52–54 Malcolm X, 197 Mamet, David, 101 Manhattan Project, 3 Mason, Andrew, 112 McCay, Jason, 29–32, 32–33, 51, 92–97, 202–3 McClure, Dave, 35, 87, 147 McKinsey & Company, 114 Menlo Park, CA, 41 Mercedes, 214 Merrill Lynch, 211 Meteor, 234 MetroLyrics, 126, 127 Miami, FL, 40, 237 MicroMint, 105 micropayments, 105, 107, 125 Microsoft, 16, 131, 238 BASIC, 11, 68 Codecademy, 216 cofounders, 161, 162 Graffiti Facebook app, 165 invisibility in early years, 159 Office, 36 original idea, 68–69 startups, threat to, 59 MileSense, 228 Millicent, 105 Milner, Yuri, 28, 47, 87, 88, 222 Minecraft, 165, 168 Mint, 10, 204 MIT, 98, 112 Collison, Patrick, 61, 64 Graham, Paul, 22, 162, 203 Morris, Robert, 27, 63 Vogt, Kyle, 142 Mixpanel, 131 MobileWorks, 89–90, 134–39, 194 Moghadam, Mahbod, 80–82, 84, 126, 196, 201 Mohamed, Shazad, 47 MongoDB, 30, 31, 92–93, 137 MongoHQ, 30–33, 51–52, 92–97, 102, 135, 136 finalist interview, 32–33 Heroku, 31, 32 Mackey, Kurt, 219 Skype, 223 venture capitalists, 202–3 MongoLab, 92 MongoMachine, 135 Moore, Demi, 206, 214 Morris, Robert academic training, 24–25 Artix, 29 father of, 253n7 interviewing finalists, 10 MIT, 27 privacy, 253n8 Prototype Day, 119 Viaweb, 24–26, 29, 42, 133 YC partner, 27, 57, 63 Morris worm, 24–25, 253n7–8 Moses, 197 Mountain View, CA, 2, 10, 17, 35, 51, 98–99 mSpot, 106–8 Musk, Elon, 66 MVP (minimum viable product), 77 MySpace, 201 MySQL, 137 Narula, Prayag, 89, 134–39 NASDAQ, 5 National Computer Security Center, 253n7 National Security Agency, 253n7 Nebraska, 39 New World Ventures, 263n14 New York City, 42, 80 GroupMe, 124 Rap Genius, 223 SeedStart, 42 startups’ interest in, 148 YC, 256–57n3 New York Times, 105, 209 New York University, 91, 112 New Zealand, 238 NFC, 66, 151–59 NFL, 167 Nike, 122 99dresses, 267–68n6 North Carolina, 209 Northeastern University, 112 Notifo, 219–20 NowSpots, 51, 168–70, 218–19, 223 Obvious Corporation, 58 oDesk, 172 O’Doherty, Patrick, 17–18 OMGPOP, 225–26 One Kings Lane, 54 Ooyala, 104 Open Systems, 46 OpenID, 156 Opez, 98–100, 218 Oracle, 60, 161, 238 Oxford University, 57, 62 Pang, Randy, 9, 68, 163–64 Panguluri, Srini, 60, 66, 151, 154, 155, 160 Paperlinks, 51, 103, 153 Paramount, 165 Parse, 122, 129, 228 capital raised, 212, 230, 233 Demo Day, 212 Rehearsal Day, 185–86 YC alumni, 160 Path, 265n1 PayPal, 58, 64, 66, 107–8, 140 Pay2See, 105 Pellow, Ben, 110–12, 134, 136, 138, 218 Persson, Markus, 168 Philippines, 238 PHP, 122 Picasa, 43 Picplum, 194, 219 Pictionary, 225 Pincus, Alison, 54 Pioneer Way, 40 Pittsburgh, PA, 41, 237 Play-Doh, 127 Polis, Jared, 41 Portland, OR, 223 Posterous, 63, 147 PostgreSQL, 137 PowerPoint, 36 Pristavec, Venetia, 104 Procter & Gamble, 208 Providence, RI, 42 Puff Daddy, 164 Python, 124 QR codes, 152–53, 156–58 QuickBooks, 53 Quicken, 53 Rackspace, 101, 131 Rails, 122 Ralston, Geoff, 151–58 Rap Genius Altman, Sam, 196–202 Demo Day, 216 expanding idea, 235–36 growth, 78–80 New York City, 223 Prototype Day, 126–27 Taggar, Harj, 80–85, 196 Ravikant, Naval, 58 Ravisankar, Vivek, 212–13 Ready-Campbell, Noah, 105–9 Red Bull, 130 Reddit, 59, 106, 166, 195 Redis, 137 Rejection Therapy, 121 Ren, JP, 43–44, 103, 130–33 Reno 911, 121 Ridejoy, 120–21, 163, 187–88, 192, 211.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

The walls are covered with huge murals of superheroes—Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman—frozen in action poses. My grandfather was the first venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. My dad moved here, joined him, and became one of the pioneers of the business. So I grew up here when El Camino was a dirt road. Downtown Menlo Park had about five stores total. I’ve watched this whole metropolis build around Silicon Valley, and tried to get to the heart of what makes this ecosystem work. I’ve been the Johnny Appleseed of venture capital—spreading the seeds of this valley everywhere I go. You need angel investors who work together to fund start-ups.

…

That’s why everyone is confounded: this isn’t happening within city jurisdictions anymore. Suddenly you realize it’s actually an indictment of municipal taxation. The whole idea of taxing a business located in your jurisdiction is to offset the impact of the workers on housing availability, transit, parks, other city services. Today, cities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park are collecting business taxes from tech companies headquartered there, but they aren’t dealing with the impacts of the workers on housing. The link is ironic: the money to offset the housing crisis just isn’t available. The old rules are meaningless against the new technology—it allows these companies to pretend they are ungovernable.

…

If you don’t want to go to school, go get a job digging a ditch—whatever you want to do. My husband never paid child support. To buy the home that I have now, I worked three jobs. There was times when I sewed my shoes up because I needed to buy things for them. Yes, darn right I was strict on them! You have to be. I’m glad my kids went to school out of the area. I sent my son to Menlo Park, there’s a religious school. It wasn’t easy with the little money I had to pay, but I sent him over there. I wanted him to meet and be around other kids. I always worried, if all you see is crime and you don’t get to see how other people live, what do you have to live for? “Just because you live here in East Palo Alto,” I used to tell him, “you don’t have to do what other people do.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Facebook had also bid for the London lab, offering each DeepMind founder twice as much money as they made from the sale to Google. PART TWO WHO OWNS INTELLIGENCE? 7 RIVALRY “HELLO, THIS IS MARK, FROM FACEBOOK.” In late November 2013, Clément Farabet was sitting on the couch in his one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, typing code into his laptop, when his iPhone rang. The screen read “Menlo Park, CA.” When he answered the call, a voice said: “Hello, this is Mark, from Facebook.” Farabet was a researcher in the deep learning lab at NYU. A few weeks earlier, he’d been contacted by another Facebook executive, out of the proverbial blue, but he still didn’t expect a call from Mark Zuckerberg.

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What he didn’t say was that even humans couldn’t agree on what was and what was not hate speech. * * * — TWO years earlier, in the summer of 2016, after AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol and before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Zuckerberg sat down at a conference table inside Building 20, the new centerpiece of the company campus in Menlo Park. Designed by Frank Gehry, it was a long, flat building on steel stilts that spanned more than four hundred thirty thousand square feet, seven times the size of a football field. The roof was its own Central Park, nine acres of grass and trees and gravel walkways where Facebookers sat or strolled whenever they liked.

…

“In many cases,” Pomerleau said, “there is no right answer.” Initially, there was a flurry of activity in response to his challenge. Nothing came of it. A day after Pomerleau issued his challenge, as Facebook continued to deny there was a problem, the company held a press roundtable at its corporate headquarters in Menlo Park. Yann LeCun was there, and a reporter asked him if AI could detect fake news and other toxic content that spread so rapidly across the social network, including violence in live video. Two months earlier, a man in Bangkok had hung himself while broadcasting a live Facebook video. LeCun responded with an ethical conundrum.

Anarchy State and Utopia by Robert Nozick

distributed generation, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Menlo Park, moral hazard, night-watchman state, Norman Mailer, Pareto efficiency, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, rent control, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Yogi Berra

See also the more extended discussion of the private protection scheme in Francis Tandy, Voluntary Socialism (Denver: F. D. Tandy, 1896), pp. 62-78. A critical discussion of the scheme is presented in John Hospers, Libertarianism (Los Angeles: Nash, 1971), chap. II. A recent proponent is Murray N. Rothbard, who in Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, Inc., 1970), pp. 1-7, 120-123, briefly describes how he believes the scheme might operate and attempts to meet some objections to it. The most detailed discussion I know is in Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (Lansing, Mich.. privately printed, 1970), especially pp. 65-115.

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In itself this would be legitimate and not punishable as a crime, since no court or agency may have the right, in a free society, to use force for defense beyond the selfsame right of each individual. However, Smith would then have to face the consequence of a possible countersuit and trial by Jones, and he himself would have to face punishment as a criminal if Jones is found to be innocent.” Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies Inc, 1970), p. 197, n. 3. 3 See also the symposium “Is Government Necessary?” The Personalist, Spring 1971. 4 Related issues that natural-rights theories must cope with are interestingly treated in Erving Goffman, Relations in Public (New York: Basic Books, 1971), chaps. 2, 4. 5 If Locke would allow special paternalistic restrictions, then perhaps a person legitimately could give another the permission and the right to do something he may not do to himself: for example, a person might permit a doctor to treat him according to the doctor’s best judgment, though lacking the right to treat himself. 6 These questions and our subsequent discussion are repeated (with stylistic improvements) from a February 1972 draft circulated under the title of Part I of this book.

…

If legitimacy were tied to desert and merit rather than to entitlement (which it isn’t), then a dominant protective agency might have it by meriting its dominant market position. 11 Statement I below expresses a’s being entitled to wield the power, whereas a’s being entitled to be the one that wields that power is expressed by statement 2 or 3.1. . a is the individual x such that x wields power P and x is entitled to wield P. and P is (almost) all the power there is. 2. a is entitled to be the individual x such that x wields power P and x is entitled to wield P, and P is (almost) all the power there is. 3. a is entitled to be the individual x such that x wields power P and x is entitled to wield P and x is entitled that P be (almost) all the power there is. 12 Rothbard imagines that somehow, in a free society, “the decision of any two courts will be considered binding, i.e., will be the point at which the court will be able to take action against the party adjudged guilty.” Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), p. 5. Who will consider it binding? Is the person against whom the judgment goes morally bound to go along with it? (Even if he knows that it is unjust, or that it rests on a factual mistake?) Why is anyone who has not in advance agreed to such a two-court principle bound by it?

Wall Street Meat by Andy Kessler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, automated trading system, banking crisis, Bob Noyce, George Gilder, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Pepto Bismol, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, undersea cable, Y2K

I suspect there was some standoffclause in their departure agreement with Morgan Stanley that said they couldn’t recruit anyone to work for them, but, as word spread, people found them and interviewed to be part of the Deutsche Morgan Grenfell Technology group. Notice that this was not the “Technology Banking group,” or “Technology Research group,” or “Technology Trading group.” Instead, the umbrella was held high over all of them. They hired more that 150 people within a week, to work in the old EF Hutton building in New York, or in Menlo Park, California, so as to be near venture capitalists who were directing the IPOs of their investments. Frankie had analysts, bankers and traders—everything that was needed to create that “boutique within a bulge bracket” firm. · · · While all this was going on in 1996, Fred Kittler, my old client from JP Morgan, and I started our very own firm, Velocity 170 Netscape IPO Capital Management.

…

If there was a deal to be done, they did it. They also had a fund on the side to invest in private deals. There was a digital camera operating system company we were looking at, and Frankie was going to throw some cash in the deal as well. He told Fred and me to come in and talk to him about it. Their offices on El Camino in Menlo Park were two minutes from my house. When you walked in, Frankie’s office was the first one by the door. He could see everyone who was coming and going. Frank’s clothing budget hadn’t kept up with his compensation. As we walked to a conference room, I noticed a big rip in the back of his pin-stripe suit pants, and his wallet falling out.

…

Not five years earlier, Morgan Stanley had four technology 187 Wall Street Meat analysts with Frank Quattrone and a small crew as technology investment bankers. Now they had over fifty analysts covering every technology industry segment, including “periph-reeals,” and over one hundred investment bankers in their Sand Hill Road office in Menlo Park, California, alone. I struggled with what made this whole system tick. I had friends who had growth funds with $10 billion, $20 billion, even $40 billion in assets. They did absolutely no fundamental research. No Hank Hermann-like Piranha tactics to figure out what analysts were saying and how the market would react to the next piece of news.

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers by John MacCormick, Chris Bishop

Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fault tolerance, information retrieval, Menlo Park, PageRank, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush

But perhaps even more remarkable than the HP and Apple success stories is the launch of a search engine called Google, which operated out of a garage in Menlo Park, California, when first incorporated as a company in September 1998. By that time, Google had in fact already been running its web search service for well over a year—initially from servers at Stanford University, where both of the cofounders were Ph.D. students. It wasn't until the bandwidth requirements of the increasingly popular service became too much for Stanford that the two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, moved the operation into the now-famous Menlo Park garage. They must have been doing something right, because only three months after its legal incorporation as a company, Google was named by PC Magazine as one of the top 100 websites for 1998.

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See compression Lovelace, Ada Love's Labour's Lost low-density parity-check code Lycos LZ77 Machine Learning (book) machine learning. See pattern recognition MacKay, David Manasse, Mark master. See replica matching mathematician Mathematician's Apology, A mathematics; ancient problems in; beauty in; certainty in; history of; pretend McCorduck, Pamela MD5 medicine megapixel memex memory: computer; flash Menlo Park metaword; in HTML metaword trick; definition of. See also indexing Metzler, Donald Meyer, Carl D. Microsoft Microsoft Excel Microsoft Office Microsoft Research Microsoft Word mind MIT Mitchell, Tom MNIST mobile phone. See phone monitor MP3 MSN multiplicative padlock trick MySpace Najork, Marc NameSize.exe NEAR keyword in search query; for ranking nearest-neighbor classifier nearest-neighbor trick Netix network: computer; equipment; neural (see neural network); protocol; social (see social network) neural network; artificial; biological; convolutional; for sunglasses problem; for umbrella problem; training neuron neuroscience New York New York University nine algorithms Nobel Prize Norberg, Arthur Ntoulas, Alexandras number-mixing trick object recognition one-way action online banking.

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

An OSS Project-by-Project Typology,” in Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories - MSR 2014, chair Premkumar Devanbu (Hyderabad, India: Association for Computing Machinery, May 2014): 344–47, https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597116. 97 Nicole Carpenter, “The Gentle Side of Twitch,” Gizmodo, April 23, 2019, https://gizmodo.com/the-gentle-side-of-twitch-1834215442. 98 Ssh-chat Code, GitHub, accessed March 31, 2020, https://github.com/shazow/ssh-chat. 99 Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 5. 100 MacCallum, The Art of Community, 66. 101 T. L. Taylor, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 92–93. 102 MacCallum, The Art of Community, 67. 103 Nadia Eghbal, “Emerging Models for Open Source Contributions” (presentation, GitHub CodeConf, Los Angeles, June 29, 2016), https://www.slideshare.net/NadiaEghbal/emerging-models-for-open-source-contributions. 104 Mikeal Rogers, “Healthy Open Source,” Node.js Collection, Medium, February 22, 2016, https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/healthy-open-source-967fa8be7951. 105 Taylor Wofford, “Fuck You and Die: An Oral History of Something Awful,” Vice, April 5, 2017, https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/nzg4yw/fuck-you-and-die-an-oral-history-of-something-awful. 106 Adam Rowe, “Why Paid Apps Could Be the Future of Online Communities,” Tech.co, November 1, 2019, https://tech.co/news/woolfer-paid-app-online-communities-2019-11. 107 Kevin Simler, “Border Stories,” Melting Asphalt, March 2, 2015, https://meltingasphalt.com/border-stories/. 03 108 Star Simpson (@starsandrobots), “Til recently you were online . . .,” Twitter, November 5, 2017, 6:54 p.m., https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/927323260244463616. 109 Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16 (November 1937): 386–405, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511817410.009. 110 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Loc 2053. 111 Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, Or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm,’” The Yale Law Journal 112, no. 3 (2002): 369–446, https://doi.org/10.2307/1562247. 112 Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin,” 381. 113 Guido van Rossum, “Foreword for ‘Programming Python’ (1st Ed.),” Python.org, May 1996, https://www.python.org/doc/essays/foreword/. 114 Linus Torvalds, “LINUX’s History,” Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, July 31, 1992, https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html. 115 Linus Torvalds, “Re: Kernel SCM Saga..,” Mailing List ARChive, April 7, 2005, https://marc.info/?

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(Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 32. 141 “Teams,” Django Software Foundation, accessed March 31, 2020, https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/teams/. 142 Caddyserver / Caddy, GitHub, accessed March 31, 2020, https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy. 143 Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 63–67. 144 MacCallum, The Art of Community, 63. 145 “Meet the Team,” Babel, accessed March 31, 2020, https://babeljs.io/team. 146 Jacob Kaplan-Moss, “Retiring as BDFLs,” Jacob Kaplan-Moss (blog), January 13, 2014, https://jacobian.org/2014/jan/13/retiring-as-bdfls/. 147 Urllib3, GitHub, accessed March 13, 2020, https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/. 148 Andrey Petrov, “How to Hand over an Open Source Project to a New Maintainer,” Medium, February 9, 2018, https://medium.com/@shazow/how-to-hand-over-an-open-source-project-to-a-new-maintainer-db433aaf57e8. 149 Klint Finley, “Giving Open-Source Projects Life after a Developer’s Death,” Wired, November 6, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/giving-open-source-projects-life-after-a-developers-death/. 150 Alanna Irving, “Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/Year,” Open Collective, October 23, 2017, https://medium.com/open-collective/funding-open-source-how-webpack-reached-400k-year-dfb6d8384e19. 151 Christopher Hiller, Nadia Eghbal, and Mikeal Rogers, “Maintaining a Popular Project and Managing Burnout with Christopher Hiller,” Request for Commits, podcast audio, November 1, 2017, https://changelog.com/rfc/15. 152 Ayrton Sparling (FallingSnow), “I Dont Know What to Say,” Event-stream Issues, GitHub, November 20, 2018, https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116. 153 Dominic Tarr (dominictarr), “Statement on Event-Stream Compromise,” Dominictarr / Readme.md Code, GitHub, November 26, 2018, https://gist.github.com/dominictarr/9fd9c1024c94592bc7268d36b8d83b3a. 154 Felix Geisendörfer, “The Pull Request Hack,” Felix Geisendörfer (blog), March 11, 2013, https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html. 155 Na Sun, Patrick Pei-Luen Rau, and Liang Ma, “Understanding Lurkers in Online Communities: A Literature Review,” Computers in Human Behavior, no. 38 (September 2014): 110–117, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214003008. 156 Kraut and Resnick, Building Successful Online Communities, 63. 157 Andrew J.

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.,” Core-js Issues comment, GitHub, June 13, 2019, https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/571#issuecomment-501889710. 199 Denis Pushkarev (zloirock), “@revelt please, don’t say me what I should do . . .,” Core-js Issues comment, GitHub, June 14, 2019, https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/571#issuecomment-502040557. 200 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), 129. 201 Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 48. 202 David Heinemeier Hansson, “Open Source beyond the Market,” Signal v. Noise, May 20, 2019, https://m.signalvnoise.com/open-source-beyond-the-market. 203 David Bollier, “The Growth of the Commons Paradigm,” in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, eds.

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

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

Its centrepiece building alone will hold 12,000 employees, with others working from satellites around it, and the campus features a 1,000-seat amphitheatre for the company’s iconic product launches. The campus is reported to have cost around $5 billion and took eight years to construct.2 In 2018, Facebook expanded its Menlo Park campus to include a new building with a 3.6-acre rooftop garden, hundreds of forty-foot-tall redwood trees, extensive pathways, a 2,000-person events space, five new restaurant options and more than a dozen new bespoke works of art.3 Google is currently building a 595,000-square-foot campus with world-renowned designer Thomas Heatherwick on the US West Coast,4 while simultaneously building a ‘landscraper’ – an office longer than the city’s tallest building – in London to serve as its UK headquarters.5 Big tech firms have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, billions in revenues, even higher valuations, and the ultra-glitzy headquarters to show for it.

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utm_term=.77032a06a277 26https://www.cnet.com/news/huawei-reportedly-sides-with-trump-on-5g-us-is-lagging-behind/ 8 THE RESISTANCE 1https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/us/letter-from-san-francisco-a-beautiful-promenade-turns-ugly-and-a-city-blushes.html 2There’s a lot to nerd out on about Apple’s campus, and if you’d like to do so, this Wired piece on it is excellent: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/ 3https://www.adweek.com/digital/facebooks-menlo-park-campus-now-has-a-new-frank-gehry-designed-building/ 4https://www.fastcompany.com/3068889/googles-newly-approved-hq-are-the-perfect-metaphor-for-silicon-valley 5https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/01/google-submits-plans-million-sq-ft-london-hq-construction-kings-cross 6https://www.eff.org/about/staff 7$11 million in 2016–17, as its audited accounts show, but that has increased, as Cohn told me, and see https://www.eff.org/document/2016-2017-audited-financial-statement 8https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/john-perry-barlow-open-internet-champion-grateful-dead-lyricist-dies-n845781 9http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do 10https://www.eff.org/about/history 11Barlow’s full declaration can be read here (love it or loathe it, it’s certainly a fascinating document and an insight into a particular time and vision): https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence 12https://www.eff.org/files/annual-report/2017/index.html#FinancialsModal 13The Knight Foundation is a major US funder of journalism, technology and freedom-of-expression projects in the common interest. 14https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?

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That digital divide will only widen. 7https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-markets Index Aadhaar, here Abramson, Jill, here Ackerman, Spencer, here Acquisti, Alessandro, here ad blockers, here, here advertising, online, here, here, here, here, here, here complexity of, here, here and consumer benefits, here CPM (cost per mille), here programmatic advertising, here, here, here see also surveillance airspace spectrum, here Al Shabab, here Alexander, General Keith, here, here, here Alibaba, here al-Qaeda, here Amazon, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and advertising, here and centralisation of power, here and regulation, here Andreessen, Marc, here, here Android, here, here angel investors, here, here, here, here, here antitrust laws, here AOL, here, here, here Apple, here, here, here, here, here, here AppNexus, here, here, here ARPANET, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here separation of military elements, here, here see also DARPA Ars Technica, here artificial intelligence (AI), here, here, here Associated Press, here AT&T, here, here, here, here Atlantic, here Baidu, here Barlow, John Perry, here, here, here batch processing, here Bell, Emily, here, here Berners-Lee, Tim, here, here, here betaworks, here, here Bezos, Jeff, here bit.ly, here Bitcoin, here, here, here blackholing, here blockchains, here Bomis, here book publishers, here Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), here Borthwick, John, here, here, here, here, here, here botnets, here Brandeis, Louis, here broadband customers, here, here BT, here, here BuzzFeed, here cable companies, here lobbying, here peering agreements, here profits, here, here reputation and trust, here tier one providers, here, here traffic blocking, here transit fees, here cable TV, here, here, here Cambridge Analytica, here Carnegie, Andrew, here celebrities, here Cerf, Vint, here, here, here, here Certbot, here Chicago School of Economics, here China, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chrome, here CIA, here Cisco, here Clinton, Hillary, here ‘cloud, the’, here CNN, here Cohn, Cindy, here, here Cold War, here, here Comcast, here, here, here, here, here CompuServe, here computers, early, here content farms, here, here cookies, here, here, here, here, here Cox, Ben, here credit cards, here Crimea, here Crocker, Steve, here, here, here, here, here, here, here cryptocurrencies, here, here, here, here Daily Caller, here, here Daly, Tom, here, here, here DARPA, here, here, here, here, here data brokers, here, here, here Defense Communications Agency, here del.icio.us, here Deliveroo, here ‘digital colonialism’, here DirecTV, here distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, here, here, here Dolby, here Domain Name System (DNS), here, here, here, here, here, here Dots and Two Dots, here DoubleClick, here duolingo, here Duvall, Bill, here Dyn attack, here eBay, here, here Eisenstein, Elizabeth, here elections, interference in, here Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), here, here Eliason, Frank, here, here, here, here, here Encarta, here encryption, here, here Engelbart, Doug, here Etsy, here European Union (EU), here, here, here, here, here, here see also General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Facebook, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here acquisition of WhatsApp, here, here, here, here and advertising, here, here, here, here, here, here and centralisation of power, here and ‘digital colonialism’, here and government entities, here influence on elections, here Menlo Park campus, here privacy scandals, here and regulation, here, here, here, here Facetime, here facial recognition, here FakeMailGenerator, com, here Fastclick, here Fastly, here FBI, here, here Federal Communications Commission (FCC), here, here, here financial crash, here, here FireEye, here First World War, here, here Five Eyes, here, here, here Flickr, here Flint, Michigan, here Foreign Policy, here, here Fotolog, here, here, here Foursquare, here Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, here Free Basics, here free speech, here, here, here, here, here Freedom of Information Act, here GCHQ, here, here, here, here, here and encryption, here General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), here, here, here George V, King, here Ghonim, Wael, here Gibson, Janine, here, here, here Gilded Age, here, here, here Gilmore, John, here Gimlet media, here Giphy, here Gizmodo blog, here Gmail, here Goodwin, Sir Fred, here Google, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and advertising, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and centralisation of power, here London headquarters, here and regulation, here, here, here Grateful Dead, here Greene, Jeff, here, here, here Greenwald, Glenn, here Grindr, here Guardian, here, here, here, here and Snowden leaks, here, here Guo Ping, here Gutenberg press, here Heatherwick, Thomas, here Herzfeld, Charles, here Hoffman, Reid, here Hong Kong, here HOSTS.TXT, here Hotmail, here HTML, here HTTP, here, here HTTPS Everywhere, here Huawei, here, here Hutchins, Marcus, here IBM, here identity, here India, here, here Industrial Revolution, here Instagram, here intellectual property, here, here internet, origins of, here, here commercialisation and globalisation, here gradual expansion, here logging and security, here the name, here origins of networking, here separation of military elements, here, here see also ARPANET Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), here, here, here, here Internet Hall of Fame, here, here Internet of Things, here internet service providers (ISPs), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and Pakistan/YouTube incident, here intranets, here IP (Internet Protocol), here IP addresses, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and blackholing attacks, here iPhones, here, here Iran, here, here, here, here Stuxnet worm attack, here, here ISIS, here Jackson, Steve, here Jarvis, Jeff, here journalism, here see also newspapers Kaspersky, here key cards, here Kickstarter, here, here, here Kidane v.

Robot Futures by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Burning Man, business logic, commoditize, computer vision, digital divide, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, phenotype, Skype, social intelligence, software as a service, stealth mode startup, strong AI, telepresence, telepresence robot, Therac-25, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Primer 3: Electronics Electronics trends in robotics have followed a circuitous path that only now has the sort of stable progress that illuminates the future. One of the first research robots was Shakey the Robot, built by the Artificial Intelligence Center of Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International) in Menlo Park, California (Wilber 1972; Nilsson 1984). By 1971, this robot was already far ahead of its time: it could navigate cubicles in a research lab, visually identify its position, and recognize obstacles. Imagine, this was visual navigation through the use of video cameras at a time when the computer interface was still a teletype machine, not a computer monitor with text!

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v=YQIMGV5vtd4 (accessed January 31, 2012). Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Walker, Matt. 2009. “Ant Mega-Colony Takes over World.” BBC Earth News. July 1. Wilber, B. M. 1972. “A Shakey Primer.” Technical Report. Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA. November. Index 3D Printing, 28, 30, 121 Abuse, 57–60, 117 Academia, 112, 113, 118, Accelerometers, xv, 36, 95, Accountability, 100–103, 107, 110, 117 Action, xvi, xviii, 60, 100, 103, 110, 111, 121 Adjustable autonomy, 45, 46, 77, 80, 102, 103, 121 Advertising, 4, 13, 14, Agency, 60, 61, 81, 121 Air quality, 74, 113–115 Analytics, 5–9, 12, 13, 121 Android, xiv, 29, 40, 55 Artificial Intelligence, xv, xxi, 79, 81, 98, 105, 118, 121 Attention dilution disorder, 65, 82 Batteries, 19, 28, 30, 33–35, 111 Big data, 6, 122 Blade Runner, 55, 56 Blue, xi, 10 Browser, 5, 7 BumBot, 24, 25, 110 Carnegie Mellon University, x, xviii, 113 Chips, 57, 58 Cognition, xvi, xvii, 11, 41, 122 Colonies, 40, 42, 97–99 Common ground, xix, 126 Community, 38–40, 43, 112–116 Computer vision, 11–14, 21, 23, 30, 39, 102, 103, 122 CREATE Lab, x, 113 Data mining, 6, 8–13, 16, 17, 81, 122 Dehumanization, 60, 63, 107 Dick, Philip K., 55 Digital walls, 14 Disempowerment, 110 Do-it-yourself (DIY), 25–27 Driverless vehicle, 49–51, 59, 60, Drone, 76, 102, 103 132 Electric motor.

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

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

In his early days, working on telegraphic innovations in Boston, he was pretty much a one-man band. But his later success depended on producing one of the world's first and most famous industrial R&D labs. When he was born in 1847 it was still normal for thinkers and innovators to work alone; by the time he died in 1931 this new form dominated invention. In his Menlo Park lab, Edison worked closely with at first around fifteen others, and eventually up to two hundred, in what he called ‘the invention business’. These engineers or ‘muckers’ worked in a single large room strewn with the detritus of technological innovation. Hours were hard and long. The atmosphere was part lab, part machine shop, part frat house.

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The muckers were instrumental: one, Charles Batchelor, was particularly important, a skilled draughtsman and mechanic whose hands-on approach complemented Edison's so much he was even awarded 50 per cent on their co-inventions. Work was divided between research for clients in fields like telegraphy, electricity or the railways, and proprietary R&D. But the lines were never clear. Edison liked to claim a freewheeling approach, but Menlo Park was meticulous and methodical. In finding the right plant material for the first carbon filaments, the team tried no fewer than 6000 types. When developing the nickel-iron battery, they performed 50,000 experiments. Between 1876 and 1881 alone, on a workbench that ran the length of the New Jersey lab, there came a series of astonishing inventions and innovations, from vacuum pumps to filaments and lightbulbs, generators, mimeographs, voltmeters, the phonograph, a whole array of improved telegraphs and telephones.

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Over time an effective institutional and cultural matrix dedicated to discovery and creation evolved. By the twentieth century it was rare indeed for big ideas to come without any organisational context – even novelists and musicians have publishers, record labels, informal networks and structures of critical appraisal. At this point we reach Edison, Menlo Park and all the rest of it: ideas generated, as a rule, in and through institutional contexts. A society's ability to generate significant ideas hence rests on its institutional base; and as ideas require more people and resources, so they rest more heavily on that base. The context of scaling up gives reasons for optimism here.

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

Author’s interview with Alan Kay; Landau and Clegg, “Reflections by Fellow Pioneers,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis; Alan Kay talk, thirtieth-anniversary panel on the Mother of All Demos, Internet archive, https://archive.org/details/XD1902_1EngelbartsUnfinishedRev30AnnSes2. See also Paul Spinrad, “The Prophet of Menlo Park,” http://coe.berkeley.edu/news-center/publications/forefront/archive/copy_of_forefront-fall-2008/features/the-prophet-of-menlo-park-douglas-engelbart-carries-on-his-vision. After reading an early draft of this section, Kay clarified some of what he had said in earlier talks and interviews, and I modified a few of his quotes based on his suggestions. 46. Cathy Lazere, “Alan C.

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“Hugh and I were both engineers and we didn’t pay attention to business issues at all,” conceded Pitts.16 Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire. Bushnell was able to produce his game, Computer Space, for only $1,000. It made its debut a few weeks after Galaxy Game at the Dutch Goose bar in Menlo Park near Palo Alto and went on to sell a respectable 1,500 units. Bushnell was the consummate entrepreneur: inventive, good at engineering, and savvy about business and consumer demand. He also was a great salesman. One reporter remembered running into him at a Chicago trade show: “Bushnell was about the most excited person I’ve ever seen over the age of six when it came to describing a new game.”17 Computer Space turned out to be less popular in beer halls than it was in student hangouts, so it was not as successful as most pinball games.

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“A union of people here tonight is more important than letting a sum of money divide us,” he declared.78 Eventually he outlasted all but twenty or so diehards, and it was decided to give the money to him until a better idea came along.79 Since he didn’t have a bank account, Moore buried the $14,905 that was left of the $20,000 in his backyard. Eventually, after much drama and unwelcome visits from supplicants, he distributed it as loans or grants to a handful of related organizations involved in providing computer access and education in the area. The recipients were part of the techno-hippie ecosystem that emerged in Palo Alto and Menlo Park around Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog crowd. This included the catalogue’s publisher, the Portola Institute, an alternative nonprofit that promoted “computer education for all grade levels.” Its loose-knit learning program was run by Bob Albrecht, an engineer who had dropped out of corporate America to teach computer programming to kids and Greek folk dancing to Doug Engelbart and other adults.

Slide:ology: the art and science of creating great presentations by Nancy Duarte

An Inconvenient Truth, fear of failure, Isaac Newton, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, telepresence, web application, work culture

Interacting with Slides 241 Case Study: John Ortberg Faith and Flip Charts After enduring hideous presentations all week at work, the last thing you want to see are bullet points at church. Reading content from bullets in business or educational settings is bad enough, but excerpting them from sacred texts? One example of brilliant use of visual aids doesn’t involve slides at all. John Ortberg, Pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, uses a flip chart. Yes, a flip chart! Even though the congregation has 4,500 members and his sermons are broadcast to two remote locations, the flip chart works! As he speaks, he’ll sketch words or images on the flip chart to create a powerful mnemonic that congregants remember throughout the week.

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When the screens are not in use, beautiful images of nature or stained glass are projected so the congregation can focus on his message. Even though Ortberg could have used slides in this sermon, he used large signs on easels. He used varying type styles to make each one look like a different type of sign. John Ortberg Pastor, Menlo Park Presbyterian Church Small Device, Big Impact Some of the best presenters in the world speak at the TED conference each year. The fascinating thing about attending the conference is that the person sitting next to you sometimes has as great of a story to share as the presenters on the stage. At one session I sat next to Scott Harrison, founder of charity:water (www.charitywater.org).

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

EXHIBIT 6.1 Edges of the Problem Continuum Discrete Continuous Static Dynamic Sequential Simultaneous Mechanical Organic Separable Interactive Universal Conditional Homogenous Heterogeneous Regular Irregular Linear Nonlinear Superficial Deep Single Multiple Stationary Nonstationary Source: Paul J. Feltovich, Rand J. Spiro, and Richard L. Coulsen, “Issues of Expert Flexibility in Contexts Characterized by Complexity and Change,” in Expertise in Context: Human and Machine, ed. Paul J. Feltovich, Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert R. Hoffman (Menlo Park, Cal.: AAAI Press and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 128-9 and author. The second idea, reductive bias, says that we tend to treat non-linear, complex systems (the right-hand side of the continuum) as if they are linear, simple systems. A common resulting error is evaluating a system based on attributes versus considering the circumstances.

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Scott Armstrong, “The Seer-Sucker Theory: The Value of Experts in Forecasting,” Technology Review 83 (June-July 1980): 16-24. 2 Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (New York: Picador, 2002), 35-37. 3 Paul J. Feltovich, Rand J. Spiro, and Richard L. Coulsen, “Issues of Expert Flexibility in Contexts Characterized by Complexity and Change,” in Expertise in Context: Human and Machine, ed. Paul J. Feltovich, Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert R. Hoffman (Menlo Park, Cal.: AAAI Press and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997): 125-146. 4 R.J. Spiro, W. Vispoel, J. Schmitz, A. Samarapungavan, and A. Boerger, “Knowledge Acquisition for Application: Cognitive Flexibility and Transfer in Complex Content Domains,” in Executive Control Processes, ed. B.C. Britton (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987), 177-99. 5 Robyn M.

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Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fehr, Ernst. “The Economics of Impatience.” Nature, January 17, 2002, 269-70. Feltovich, Paul J., Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert Hoffman, eds. Expertise in Context: Human and Machine. Menlo Park, Cal.: AAAI Press and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Fine, Charles H. Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1998. Fisher, Kenneth L., and Meir Statman. “Cognitive Biases in Market Forecasts.” Journal of Portfolio Management 27, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 72-81.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The ARPAnet allowed academics to share resources and transfer files. In its early years, the ARPAnet (later renamed DARPAnet) existed unnoticed by the outside world, with only a few hundred participating computers, or “hosts.” All addressing for this network was maintained by a single machine located at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. By 1984 the network had grown larger. Paul Mockapetris invented a new addressing scheme, this one decentralized, called the Domain Name System (DNS). The computers had changed also. By the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computers were coming to market and appearing in homes and offices.

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Prior to the introduction of DNS in 1984, a single computer, called a name server, held all the name-to-number conversions. They were contained in a single text file. There was one column for all the names and another for all the numbers—like a simple reference table. This document, called HOSTS.TXT, 23. Ted Byfield, “DNS: A Short History and a Short Future,” Nettime, October 13, 1998. Physical Media 47 lived in Menlo Park, California, at the Network Information Center of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI-NIC).24 Other computers on the Internet would consult this document periodically, downloading its information so that their local reference tables would carry the most up-to-date data. The entire system of naming referred to in this file was called the name space.

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See Layer, link Linz, Austria, 214, 227 Ljubljana, 212 Lovelace, Ada, 185, 188–189 Lovink, Geert, 17–18, 175–176 Lyon, Matthew, 122 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 21 Malraux, André, 113 Mann, Omri, 179 Manovich, Lev, 19, 40, 52n29, 73–74 Mandel, Ernst, 23–24 Marx, Karl, 4, 87–102, 110, 113, 160 and “species being,” 13 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 151, 169, 182 Masters of Deception (Slatalla and Quittner), 164 Mattelart, Armand, 241–242 Max Planck Institute, 112 McKinsey & Company, 159 McLuhan, Marshall, 10, 18, 106n84, 212 McNamara, Robert, 205n72 Media, dead, 68 Mediation, 68 Melissa (virus), 184, 187 Memex (Bush), 59 Menlo Park (California), 48 Mentor, The, 156, 213 LambdaMOO, 191 Language, 50, 75, 164, 165, 195. See also Code; Programming, language Layer, 39–41, 129–130 application, 40, 130 Internet, 41, 130 link, 41, 130 transport, 41, 130 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 61 Leopoldseder, Hannes, 88, 103 Lessig, Lawrence, 40, 120, 141 Lévy, Pierre, 60, 169 Levy, Steven, 151–153, 169–170 LeWitt, Sol, 164–165 Lialina, Olia, 219, 224–225 Licklider, J.

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

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

This is why the final, conclusive mobile phone will never be developed, nor the perfect television show whose appeal doesn’t fade, nor the perfect umbrella, bicycle or pair of shoes. And this is why generating lots of ideas has to be a goal. Thomas Edison set “idea quotas” for his employees at Menlo Park: they were challenged to come up with one small invention per week and a major breakthrough every six months. Similarly, Google has built idea-prospecting into its business model: its 70/20/10 rule mandates that 70 percent of resources go to the core business, 20 percent to emerging ideas and 10 percent to brand new moonshots.

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Rosati, Sarah R. Heilbronner, and Nelly Mühlhoff. “Waiting for Grapes: Expectancy and Delayed Gratification in Bonobos.” International Journal of Comparative Psychology 24 (2011): 99–111. Strom, Stephanie. “TV Dinners in a Netflix World.” New York Times. November 5, 2015. Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007. “Study: A Rich Club in the Human Brain.” IU News Room. October 31, 2011. Accessed April 29, 2014. <http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news-archive/20145.html> Svoboda, Elizabeth. “Innovators Under 35: Michelle Khine, 32.”

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Wheeler Elementary School (Burlington) ref1 Hobbes, Thomas ref1 Hockney, David ref1 Hokusai, Katsushika ref1 Holoroom ref1 Holz, Karl ref1 Honda ref1 honeybees ref1, ref2, ref3 Honeywell ref1 horses ref1 Hot Bertaa tea kettle ref1 How Buildings Learn (Brand) ref1 Hughes, Robert ref1 human form bending ref1, ref2, ref3 blending ref1, ref2 mythical creatures ref1 human genome project ref1 humor ref1 Iberian sculpture ref1 IBM ref1, ref2, ref3 Icebag (Oldenburg) ref1 idea flings ref1 idea quotas ref1 IDEO ref1, ref2 Idriss, Ali Mohamed Younes ref1 Ihering, Hermann von ref1 image recognition ref1 image-labeling ref1 imagination ref1, ref2, ref3 “Imagine Mars” project ref1 Indian dance ref1 indigenous art ref1 Industrial Revolution ref1, ref2, ref3 information economy ref1 instant replay ref1 insulin ref1 intravenous (iv) drips ref1 inventions see design iPad ref1 iPhone ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 iPod ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Isaiah (Michelangelo) ref1 iTunes ref1 Ive, Jonathan ref1, ref2, ref3 IXI music player ref1 Japanese Imperial court ref1 Japanese Noh drama ref1 The Japanese Footbridge (Monet) ref1 Jay Z. ref1 Jesus phone (iPhone) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 “Jewish science” ref1 jigsaw method ref1 Jobs, Steve ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Johns, Jasper ref1, ref2, ref3 Johnson, Ben ref1 Johnson, Lonni Sue ref1, ref2 Johnson, Steve ref1 JR (artist) ref1 The Judgment of Paris (Raimondi) ref1 K-12 campuses ref1 Kahlo, Frida ref1, ref2 Kandinsky, Wassily ref1, ref2 Kettering, Charles ref1, ref2 Keystone Cops ref1 Khine, Michelle ref1 Killian, Michael ref1 kin selection ref1 King Jr, Martin Luther ref1 King Lear (Shakespeare) ref1 King Tee ref1 kingfisher ref1 Kitty Hawk (airplane) ref1 knives ref1 Koestler, Arthur ref1 Kramer, Hilton ref1 Kramer, Kane ref1, ref2 Kranz, Gene ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Krzywy Domek (“Warped Building”) ref1 Ku Klux Klan ref1 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge) ref1 Kulich, Max ref1 Laarman, Joris ref1 The “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius ref1 Land, Edwin ref1, ref2 landscaping ref1 office ref1 Zen Gardens ref1 language bending ref1 blending ref1 cinema ref1 coding ref1 cultural conditioning ref1 Google Translate ref1 universal ref1, ref2 Large Hadron Collider ref1 Las Meninas (Velázquez) ref1 Picasso variations ref1 lasers ref1, ref2, ref3 The Last Judgment (Michelangelo) ref1 Lauter Piano Company ref1 LCD televisions ref1 Le Bordel d’Avignon (Picasso) ref1 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Manet) ref1, ref2, ref3 Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Picasso) ref1 The LEGO Movie (2014) ref1 Leguia, Luis ref1 Leigh, Simone ref1 Lenard, Philipp ref1 Lennon, John ref1 Lenormand, Louis-Sébastien ref1 Les Demoiselles d’Alabama (Colescott) ref1 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 “Let Me Ride” (song) ref1 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (King) ref1 Levi ref1 Lewis, Randy ref1 Lichtenstein, Roy ref1, ref2 “Life is Art” festival ref1 Ligeti, Györgi ref1 light bulbs ref1 Light Warlpiri ref1 Lightning Sonata (Cicoria) ref1 lions ref1 lipids ref1 liquid crystal displays ref1 literature bending ref1, ref2 breaking ref1, ref2 education ref1, ref2 mining history ref1 proliferating options ref1 see also drama Loewy, Raymond ref1 Longitude prize ref1 Longwell, Charles ref1 Lost in Space (tv) ref1 Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health (Gehry building) ref1 Louis C.K. ref1 Louvre ref1 Lovelace, Ada ref1 Lowes, John Livingston ref1 Lowe’s (US retailer) ref1 McCarthy, John ref1 McCartney, Paul ref1 MacWorld ref1 Maeda, John ref1 Malevich, Kazimir ref1 mami wata (mermaid) ref1 The Man in the High Castle (Dick) ref1 Manet, Edouard ref1, ref2, ref3 Manley, Tim ref1 manufacturing economy ref1 Marclay, Christian ref1 Marlborough Gallery ref1 The Marriage of Figaro (Beaumarchais) ref1 Martin, George ref1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology ref1 Maternity (Brandt) ref1 mathematical techniques ref1 Maugham, W. Somerset ref1 Mead, Margaret ref1 meatpacking industry ref1 mediated behavior ref1 memory ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Menlo Park ref1 Mercedes-Benz ref1 metaphors ref1 Michelangelo ref1, ref2 micro-encapsulation ref1 microfluidics ref1 Microsoft ref1, ref2 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) ref1 Middleton, Kate ref1 Miluni, Vlado ref1 Minotaur ref1 Mission Control ref1, ref2 MIT ref1 Media Lab ref1 mobile phones ref1, ref2, ref3 systems, breaking ref1 mobility vehicles ref1 Model T ref1 Mojave Aerospace ref1 Monet, Claude ref1, ref2 Moniz, Ernest ref1 Mont Sainte-Victoire (Cézanne) ref1 Montaigne, Michel de ref1 Moore, Marianne ref1 motivation ref1 Motor Coach Number 2 ref1 Motorola ref1 Mount Fuji ref1 moving successfully further away from a source, principle of ref1 Mozart, Nannerl ref1 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 MP3 ref1, ref2 Müller–Lyer illusion ref1 Muniz, Vik ref1, ref2 Murphy, Robin ref1 Murray, Bill ref1 Museum of Modern Art (New York) ref1 music ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 breaking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 cognition ref1 education ref1, ref2 mining history ref1, ref2 public reception ref1, ref2 scouting, distances ref1 “My dreams, my works must wait till after hell” (Ganesh/Leigh) (video) ref1 mythical creatures ref1 The Myth of the Isolated Artist (Oates) ref1 Nachmanovitch, Stephen ref1 Nakatsu, Eiji ref1 Naples conservatories ref1 Napoleon Bonaparte ref1 Napoleon III, Emperor ref1 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 National Endowment for the Arts (US) ref1 Nave Nave Fenua (Gauguin) ref1 Neanderthals ref1 Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art ref1 NeoSensory Vest ref1 Nestlé ref1 Netflix ref1 Neutral Moresnet ref1 New York Times (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 New York World’s Fair (1964) ref1, ref2 New Yorker (magazine) ref1, ref2, ref3 Newman, Barnett ref1 Newton, Isaac ref1 Newton-John, Olivia ref1 Nicholas, Adrian ref1 Nintendo ref1 Nobel Prize ref1, ref2 Nokia ref1 Norwood, Kenneth ref1 Not a Box (Portis) ref1 0 Through 9 (Johns) ref1 novelty ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 cultivating creativity ref1, ref2 with parameters ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Novich, Scott ref1 NPR (National Public Radio) ref1 Nubrella ref1 Oates, Joyce Carol ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Odyssey of the Mind ref1 Oh Sheet!

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

Even Thomas Edison, the most famous lone inventor, owed his success to his being a great collaborator, a skill he picked up as an itinerant telegraph operator, rarely staying in one place, constantly mixing and mingling with different people. Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, which opened in 1876 to be a ‘factory for invention’, produced the phonograph and the light bulb. The mythology surrounding the Menlo Park lab enshrined the idea that innovation came from specially talented people working in special conditions, cut off from the rest of the world. Yet Edison acknowledged that without his team of unsung engineers – Charles Batchelor, James Adam, John Kuresi, Charles Wurth – he would never have come up with many of the inventions that made him famous.

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WikiHistory counter.li.org/ english.ohmynews.com/ www.fark.com www.ige.com www.plastic.com portal.eatonweb.com www.slashdot.org www.technorati.com/about www.worldofwarcraft.com INDEX 42 Entertainment 10, 11 A ABC 173 academia, academics 6, 27, 48, 59 Acquisti, Alessandro 210 Adam, James 95 adaptation 109, 110, 121 advertising 104, 105, 129, 173, 180, 219 Aegwynn US Alliance server 99 Afghanistan 237 Africa broadband connections 189 mobile phones 185, 207 science 196 use of Wikipedia 18 Aids 193, 206, 237 al-Qaeda 237 Alka-Seltzer 105 Allen, Paul 46 Altair BASIC 46 Amadeu, Sérgio 202 amateurism 105 Amazon 86 America Speaks 184 American Chemical Society 159 anarchy cultural 5 Wikipedia 16 Anderson, Chris: The Long Tail 216 Apache program 68 Apple 42, 103, 104, 135, 182 iPhone 134 iPods 46 Arendt, Hannah 174, 176 Argentina 203 Arrayo, Gloria 186 Arseblog 29, 30 Arsenal Football Club 29, 30 Arsenal.com 29 arXiv 160 Asia access to the web 5, 190 attitude to open-source 203 and democracy 189 mobile phones 166, 185 and open-source design communities 166–7 Ask a Ninja 57, 219 assembly line 93, 130 assets 224 astronomy 155, 162–3 authority 110, 115, 233 authorship and folk culture 57, 58 and mapping of the human genome 62 Azerbaijan 190 B bacteria, custom-made 164 Baker, Steve 148 Banco do Brazil 201 Bangladesh 205–6 banking 115, 205–6 Barber, Benjamin: Strong Democracy 174 Barbie, Klaus 17 Barbie dolls 17 Barefoot College 205 barefoot thinking 205–6 Barthes, Roland 45 Batchelor, Charles 95 Bath University 137 BBC 4, 17, 127, 142 news website 15 beach, public 49, 50, 51 Beach, The (think-tank) xi Bebo 34, 85, 86 Bedell, Geraldine x, xii–xiii Beekeepers 11, 15 Benkler, Yochai 174 The Wealth of Networks 194 Berger, Jorn 33 Bermuda principles 160 Billimoria, Jeroo 206 BioBrick Foundation 164 biology 163 open-source 165 synthetic 164–5 BioMedCentral 159 biotechnology 154, 163–4, 196–7, 199 black fever (visceral leishmaniasis) 200 Blackburn Rovers Football Club 29 Blades, Joan 188 Blizzard Entertainment 100 Bloc 8406 191 Blogger.com 33 blogs, blogging 1, 3, 20, 29–35, 57, 59, 74, 75, 78, 86, 115, 159, 170, 171, 176, 179, 181–2, 183, 191, 192, 214, 219, 229 BMW 140 Bohr, Neils 93 bookshops 2 Boulton, Matthew 54–5 Bowyer, Adrian 139, 140, 232 Boyd, Danah 213, 214 Bradley, Bill 180 Brand, Stewart 39–40, 43, 63 brands 104, 109 Brazil 201–2 Brenner, Sydney 62–5, 70, 77, 118, 231 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking) 163 Brindley, Lynne 141, 142, 144–5 British Library, London 141, 142, 144, 145 British Medical Journal 159 British National Party 169 Brooks, Fred 77–8 Brooks Hall, San Francisco 38 BT 112 bugs, software 70, 72, 165 bulletin boards 34, 40, 68, 77 Burma 190, 191 Bush, President George W. 18, 33–4, 180, 183 business services 130, 132, 166 C C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) 62–5 Cambia 197 Cambridge University Press 159 camcorders 11 Campbell, Anne 176 Cancer Genome Atlas 160 capital 224 capitalism 224 commune 121, 125 managerial 24 modern 91, 121 social dimension of 90 Carlson, Rob 164 Carnegie Mellon University 210 cars manufacture 135–6 sharing 153 CBS 173 Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT 139 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) 30–31, 159 Chan, Timothy 106, 107 chat rooms 165 Chavez, President Hugo 203 Cheney, Dick 180 Chevrolet 105 Chicago: Full Circle council project 184 China based on privileged access to information 236 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 hackers 234 Internet connection 190, 204 makes available genetic data 199 motor-cycle production 136–7 online games market 106 open-access scientific data 159–60 open-source designs 141 politics 171, 192 power struggle in 235 spending on R & D 96, 159 web censorship 190–91 Chinese Communist Party 171, 235 Chongquing, China 136 Cisco 190 Citibank 207 Citizendium 14 climate change 170, 239 Clinton, Bill 174, 188 Clinton, Senator Hillary 181, 182, 183 CNN 15 co-operatives 121, 122, 123, 188 co-ordination 109, 110–11 coffee houses, London 95 Coke 109–10, 239 Cold War 169, 235 Coles, Polly xiii collaboration 9, 22, 31, 32, 36, 67, 79–80, 81, 82 collaborative innovation 65, 70, 75 and commerce 227 computer game 99, 100 Cornish tin-mining 55 and healthcare 150 and the library of the future 145 new technologies for 227–8 open 126, 128 peer 239 public services 145, 146, 152, 153 scientific 154, 155–6 We-Think 21, 23, 24, 146 Collis, Charles 134 Columbia University 212 commerce 25, 38, 48, 52, 57, 98, 227 commons 49, 50, 51–3, 79, 80, 124, 191, 226 communes 39–40, 46, 90, 121, 122, 128 communication(s) 130, 168, 174, 206, 239 mobile 186 Communism, collapse of 6 communities collaborative 117 and commerce 48 and commons 52 conversational 63 Cornish tin-mining 55 creative 70, 95 diverse 79–80 egalitarian 27, 48, 59, 63, 64 hacker 232 healthcare 151, 152 independence of 23 of innovation 54 libertarian, voluntaristic 45 Linux 65, 227 and loss of market for local newspapers 3 meritocratic 63 open-source 45, 68, 75, 80, 83, 95–6, 102, 109, 110, 111 open-source design 166–7 of scientists 53, 228 self-governing 59, 79, 80, 97, 104, 232 sharing and developing ideas 25 web 21, 23 worm-genome researchers 62–5 community councils 77, 80, 82 Community Memory project 42–3 companies computer-games 128 employee-owned 121, 122 shareholder-owned 122, 123, 125 see also corporations; organisations computer games 60, 127, 218 children and 147 created by groups on the web 7, 23, 87 modularity 78 multi-player 7, 204 success of World of Warcraft 98–9 tools for creating content 74 and We-Think 23 computer-aided design 134 computers democratising how information is accessed 139 distrust of 39 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 laptop 5, 36, 82, 155 mini- 135 personal 39, 46, 203 punch-cards 38 and science 154, 155 viruses 3, 4 connect 67, 75–9 Connectiva 201 consumer spending 131 consumers 98–108 consumer innovators 101–3 consumption constraints 25–6 engaging 89 fans 103–4 freedom 218 and innovation risk 100–101 participant 98–108 urban 124 contribute 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74–5 conversation 53, 54, 63, 69, 77, 93, 95, 113, 118, 174 Copernicus, Nicolaus 162 copyright 124, 157, 196 core 66, 67, 68–9, 70 Cornell University 233 ‘Cornish’ engines 55–6, 136, 229 Cornish tin-mining industry 54–6, 63, 125, 136 corporations centralisation of power 110 closed 128 and collaborative approaches to work 109 the cost of corporate efficiency 89–90 difficulty in making money from the web 7 hierarchies 88, 110 industrial-era 88 leadership 115, 117–19 loss of stability 122 restructuring and downsizing 88–9 see also companies; organisations counter-culture (1960s) 6, 27, 39, 45, 46, 59 Counts, David 183 Craigslist 3, 40, 118, 128, 218 Creative Commons 124 creative sector 129–30 creativity 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 67, 82–3 collaborative 7, 20, 58, 86, 154 collective 39, 57–8 consumers 89 corporate 91–2 emergence of 93, 96 enabled by the web 1–2, 3, 5, 19, 26, 218–21, 222, 227 freedom to create 218–21 and interaction 119 and open innovation 93 origin of 112–13 social 5, 7, 58, 59, 82, 83, 86 tools for 218, 219 Crick, Francis 52, 62, 76 crime 153, 169, 183 criminality 1, 3 crowds 23, 61, 70, 72, 77 Crowdspirit 134 cultural élite 2 cultural sector 129–30 culture academic 38 anti-industrial 27, 28 basis of 4 collaborative 135 consumerist 172 corrosion of 4 cultural anarchy 5 folk 6, 27, 56–9, 220, 226 hippie 38 individual participation 6 political 171 popular 102 post-industrial 27, 28 pre-industrial 27, 28 We-Think 28, 59, 62, 169, 194, 230, 232–3, 238 Web 2.0 45 web-inflected 27 Western 239 wiki 14 work 114 YouTube cultural revolution 3 Cunningham, Ward 35–6 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Cyworld 34, 85, 86 D Dali, Salvador 105 Darby, Newman 102 Darpa 164 David, Paul 53 de Soto, Hernando 224–5 The Mystery of Capital 224 de Vellis, Phil 182 Dean, Howard 176–7, 178, 180, 185 Dean Corps 177 Debian 66 Debord, Guy 45, 46 decentralisation 7, 13, 39, 46, 59, 78, 226, 232 decision-making 78, 82, 84, 115, 173, 174 del.i.cious 86 democracy 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 16, 24, 170–74, 175, 176–92 basis of 174 conversational democracy at a national level 184 ‘craftsmen of democracy’ 174 Dean campaign 178 democratic advances 184 depends on public sovereignty 172 formal 195 geek 65 Homebrew 176 public debate 170, 171 and We-Think 170, 221, 239 Department for International Development (DFID) 207 Descartes, René 19–20 design 166 modular 136–7 open-source 133–5, 140, 141, 162–3, 166–7 developing world Fab Labs in 166 government attitudes to the Internet 190 impact of the web on 166 mobile phones 185–6 and open-access publishing 166 and open-source design communities 166–7 and open-source software 200–203 research and development 196 and We-Think’s style of organisation 204 diabetes 150 Digg 33 discussion forums 77 diversity 9, 23, 72, 76, 77, 79–80, 112, 121 division of labour 111 DNA description of the double helix (Watson and Crick) 52, 62, 76 DNA-sequencing 164–5 Dobson, John 102, 162–3 Doritos 105 dot.com boom 106 Dupral 68 Dyson (household-goods company) 134 Dyson, Freeman 163, 164 E E-Lagda.com 186 Eaton, Brigitte 33 Eatonweb 33 eBay 40, 44, 102, 128, 152, 165, 216–18, 221, 229, 235 Ebola virus 165 Eccles, Nigel xi economies of scale 137 economy digital 124, 131, 216 gift 91, 226 global 192 global knowledge 239 of ideas 6 individual participation 6 industrial 122 market 91, 221 a mass innovation economy 7 networked 227 of things 6 UK 129, 130 and We-Think 129 Edison, Thomas 72, 93, 95 EditMe 36 education 130, 146–50, 167, 183, 194, 239 among the poorest people in the world 2, 193 civic 174 a more convivial system 44 Edwards, John 181 efficiency 109, 110 Einstein, Albert: theory of relativity 52 elderly, care of 170 Electronic Arts 105, 106, 128, 177 Electronic Frontier Foundation 40 electronics 93, 135 Eli Lilly (drugs company) 77 Ellis, Mark: The Coffee House: a social history 95 enclosures 124 Encyclopaedia Britannica, The 15–18, 126 encyclopaedias 1, 4, 7, 12–19, 21, 23, 36, 53, 60, 61, 79, 161, 231 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) 161, 226 Endy, Drew 164, 165 energy 166, 232, 238 Engelbart, Doug 38–9, 59 engineering 133, 166 Environmental Protection Agency 152 epic poems 58, 60 equality 2, 24, 192–7, 198, 199–208 eScholarship repository, University of California 160 Estonia 184, 234 Estrada, President Joseph 186 ETA (Basque terrorist group) 187 European Union (EU) 130 Evans, Lilly x Evolt 68, 108 F Fab Labs 139, 166, 232 fabricators 139 Facebook 2, 34–5, 53, 142, 152, 191, 193, 210 factories 7, 8, 24 families, and education 147 Fanton, Jonathan 161 Fark 33 Feinstein, Diane 176 Felsenstein, Lee 42, 43, 44 fertilisers 123 Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University 161 file-sharing 51, 58, 135, 144, 233 film 2, 3, 4, 47, 86, 129, 216, 218, 220–21 film industry 56 filters, collaborative 36, 86 financial services 130, 132 Financial Times 118 First International Computer (FIC), Inc. 136, 141 flash mobbing 10, 11 Flickr 34, 85, 86, 210, 218–19 Food and Drug Administration (US) 92 Ford, Henry 24, 93, 96 Fortune 500 company list 122 Frank, Ze (Hosea Jan Frank) 57, 219 freedom 1, 2, 6, 24, 208, 209, 210–21, 226 French, Gordon 41, 42 friendly societies 188 Friends Reunited 34 friendship 5, 233 combinatorial 95 Friendster 34, 35 fundamentalists 232 G Gaia Online 35 Galileo Galilei 154 gambling 169 GarageBand software 57, 135, 148 Gates, Bill 46, 47, 51, 227 Gates Foundation 160 geeks 27, 29–36, 37, 38, 48, 59, 65, 179 gene-sequencing machines, automated 64 genetic engineering 164, 196–7, 235 Georgia: ’colour revolution’ 187 Gershenfeld, Neil 139–40, 166, 232 GetFrank 108 Ghana, Fab Lab in 139 Gil, Gilberto 202 Gjertsen, Lasse 56, 218 Gland Pharma 200 global warming 238 globalisation 202, 228, 239 Gloriad 155 GM 135 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 Goffman, Erving 103–4 Goldcorp Inc. 132–3, 153 Golden Toad 40 GoLoco scheme 153 Google x, 1, 29, 32, 33, 47, 66, 97, 104, 113–14, 128, 141, 142, 144, 212 Google Earth 161 Gore, Al 64 governments in developing countries 190 difficulty in controlling the web 7 GPS systems 11 Grameen Bank 205–6, 208 ‘grey’ sciences 163 grid computing 155 Gross, Ralph 210 group-think 23, 210–11 groups 230–31 of clever people with the same outlook and skills 72 decision-making 78 diverse 72, 80, 231 and tools 76–7 Guthrie, Woody 58 H Habermas, Jurgen 174 hackers 48, 74, 104, 140, 232, 234 Hale, Victoria 199 Halo 2 science fiction computer game 8 Hamilton, Alexander 17–18 Hampton, Keith 183–4 Hanson, Matt xi health 130, 132, 146, 150–52, 167, 183, 239 Heisenberg, Werner 93 Henry, Thierry 29 Hewlett Packard 47 hierarchies 88, 110, 115 hippies 27, 48, 59, 61 HIV 193 Homebrew Computer Club 42, 46–7, 51, 227 Homebrew Mobile Phone Club 136 Homer Iliad 58 Odyssey 58 Homer-Dixon, Thomas: The Upside of Down 238–9 Hubble, Edwin 162 Human Genome Project 62, 64, 78, 155, 160, 161, 226 human rights 206 Hurricane Katrina 184 Hyde, Lewis: The Gift 226 hypertext 35, 39 I I Love Bees game 8, 10–12, 15–16, 19, 20, 69, 231 IBM 47, 66, 97 System/360 computer 77 idea-sharing 37, 94, 237, 239 as the biggest change the web will bring about 6 with colleagues 27 and consumer innovators 103 dual character of 226 gamers 106 Laboratory of Molecular Biology 63 through websites and bulletin boards 68 tools 222 We-Think-style approach to 97 and the web’s underlying culture 7 ideas combining 77 and creative thinking 87 from creative conversations 93, 95 gifts of 226 growth of 222, 239 and the new breed of leaders 117–18 ratifying 84 separating good from bad 84, 86 testing 74 the web’s growing domination 1 identity sense of 229 thieves 213–14 Illich, Ivan 43–5, 48 Deschooling Society 43, 44, 150 Disabling Professions 43 The Limits to Medicine 43, 152 Tools for Conviviality 44 independence 9, 72, 231 India Barefoot College 205 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 Fab Lab in 139 Internet connection 190, 204 mobile phones 207 and One World Health 200 spending on R & D 96 telephone service for street children 206 individuality 210, 211, 215, 216, 233 industrialisation 48, 150, 188 information barriers falling fast 2 computers democratise how it is accessed 139 effect of We-Think 129 large quantities on the web 31–2 libraries 141, 142, 143, 145 looking for 8 privileged access to 236 sharing 94, 136 the web’s growing domination 1 Wikipedia 19 Innocentive 77 innovation 5, 6, 91–3, 94, 95–8, 109 among the poorest people in the world 2 biological 194 collaborative 65, 70, 75, 90, 119, 146, 195 collective 170, 238 and competition/co-operation mix 137 Cornish mine engines 54–6 corporate 89, 109, 110 and creative conversations 93, 95 creative interaction with customers 113 cumulative 125, 238 decentralised 78 and distributed testing 74 and diverse thinking 79 and education 147 independent but interconnected 78 and interaction 119 and Linux 66 local 139 a mass innovation economy 7 medical 194 open 93, 96–7, 125, 195 in open-source communities 95–6 and patents 124 pipeline model 92, 93, 97 R & D 92, 96 risks of 100–101 social 170, 238 successful 69 user-driven 101 and We-Think 89, 93, 95, 125, 126 the web 2, 5, 7, 225 Institute for One World Health 199–200 Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) 179 Institute of Fiscal Studies 131 institutions convivial 44 industrial-era 234 and knowledge 103 and professionals 3, 5 public 142, 145 Instructables site 134 Intel 97 intellectual property 75, 122, 124, 125, 234 law 124–5 intelligence, collective bloggers 33 getting the mix right 23 Google’s search system 32 I Love Bees and Wikipedia examples 8, 10–19 milked by Google 47 the need to collaborate 32 self-organisation of 8 and social-networking sites 35 the web’s potential 3, 5 International Polar Year (IPY) 156, 226 Internet broadband connection 178, 189, 192 combined with personal computers (mid-1990s) 39 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Dean campaign 177 in developing countries 190 draws young people into politics 179, 180 an early demonstration (1968) 38 and Linux 66 news source 178–9 open-source software 68 openness 233 and political funding 180 pro-am astronomers 163 used by groups with a grievance 168 in Vietnam 189–90, 191 investment 119, 121, 133, 135 Iran 190, 191 Iraq war 18, 134, 191 Israel 18 Ito, Joi 99 J Japan politics 171 technology 171 JBoss 68 Jefferson, Richard 197, 199 Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield, Cheshire 162 JotSpot 36 journalism 3, 74, 115, 170–71 Junker, Margrethe 206 K Kampala, Uganda 206 Kazaa music file-sharing system 144 Keen, Andrew 208 The Cult of the Amateur 208 Kelly, Kevin 211 Kennedy, John F. 176 Kenya 207 Kepler, Johannes 162 Kerry, John 180 Khun, Thomas 69 knowledge access to 194, 196 agricultural 194 barriers falling fast 2 collaborative approach to 14, 69 encyclopaedia 79 expanding 94 gifts of 226 individual donation of 25 and institutions 103 and networking 193 and pro-ams 103 professional, authoritative sources of 222 sharing 27, 44, 63, 70, 199 spread by the web 2, 3 Wikipedia 16, 18, 19, 195 Korean War 203 Kotecki, James (’EmergencyCheese’) 182 Kraus, Joe 36 Kravitz, Ben 13 Kuresi, John 95 Kyrgyzstan: ’colour revolution’ 187 L Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge 62–3, 77 labour movement 188 language 52–3 Lanier, Jaron 16, 210–11, 213 laptop computers 5, 36, 82, 155 lateral thinking 113 leadership 89, 115, 116, 117–19 Lean, Joel 55 Lean’s Engine Reporter 55, 63, 77 Lee, Tim Berners 30–31 Lego: Mindstorms products 97, 104, 140 Lewandowska, Marysia 220, 221 libraries 2, 141–2, 143, 144–5, 227 life-insurance industry (US) 123 limited liability 121 Linked.In 35 Linux 65–6, 68, 70, 74, 80, 85, 86, 97, 98, 126, 127, 128, 136, 201, 203, 227 Lipson Community College, Plymouth 148 literacy 194 media 236 Lloyd, Edward 95 SMS messaging (texting)"/>London coffee houses 95 terrorist bombings (July 2005) 17 Lott, Trent 181–2 Lula da Silva, President Luiz Inacio 201 M M-PESA 207, 208 MacArthur Foundation 161 McCain, John 180 MacDonald’s 239 McGonigal, Jane 11, 69 McHenry, Robert 17 McKewan, Rob 132–3, 153 McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding the Media 45 Madrid bombings (March 2004) 186–7 Make magazine 165 management authoritative style of 117 and creative conversation 118 hierarchies 110 manufacturing 130, 132, 133–7, 138, 139–41, 166, 232 niche 139 Marcuse, Herbert 43 Marin 101 Mark, Paul xi market research 101 market(s) 77, 90, 93, 102, 123, 216, 226–7 Marsburg virus 165 Marx, Karl 224 mass production 7, 8, 24, 56, 96, 227, 232, 238 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 139, 164, 233 Matsushita 135 media 129, 130, 156, 172, 173, 182, 211 literacy 236 Meetup 179, 185 Menlo Park laboratory, New Jersey 95 Merholz, Peter 33 meritocracy 16, 63 Microsoft 46, 47, 51, 56, 75, 109–10, 126, 127, 144, 202, 203, 204, 239 Office 201 Windows 200 Windows XP 66 Middle East 170, 189, 190, 192 Milovich, Dimitry 102 ‘minihompy’ (mini homepage) 204 Minnesota Mining and Materials 121 mobile phones 5 in Africa 185, 207 in Asia 166, 185 camera phones 74, 115, 210 children and 147 in developing-world markets 207–8 with digital cameras 36 flash mobs 10 I Love Bees 11 in India 207 open-source 136, 203 politics 185–9 SMS messaging (texting) 101–2, 185, 187, 214, 215 mobs 23, 61 flash 10, 11 modularity 77, 84 Moore, Fred 41–2, 43, 46, 47, 59, 227 More, Thomas: Utopia 208 Morris, Dick 174 Morris, Robert Tappan 233 Mosaic 33 motivation 109–12, 148 Mount Wilson Observatory, California 162 mountain bikes 101 MoveOn 188–9 Mowbray, Miranda xi music 1, 3, 4, 47, 51, 52, 57, 102, 135, 144, 218, 219, 221 publishing 130 social networking test 212–13 mutual societies 90, 121 MySpace 34, 44, 57, 85, 86, 152, 187, 193, 214, 219 MySQL 68 N National Football League (US) 105 National Health Service (NHS) 150, 151 National Public Radio (NPR) 188 Natural History Museum, London 161 Nature magazine 17 NBC 173 neo-Nazis 168 Netflix 216, 218 Netherlands 238 networking by geeks 27 post-industrial networks 27 social 2–7, 20, 23, 34–5, 36, 53, 57, 86, 95, 147, 149, 153, 159, 171, 183–4, 187, 193, 208, 210, 212, 213–15, 230, 233 New Economy 40 New Orleans 184 New York Magazine 214 New York Review of Books 164 New York Stock Exchange 95 New York Times 15, 182, 191 New Yorker magazine 149 Newmark, Craig 118 news services 60, 61, 171, 173, 178–9 newspapers 2, 3, 30, 32, 34, 171, 172, 173 Newton, Sir Isaac 25, 154 niche markets 216 Nixon, Richard 176 NLS (Online System) 39 Nokia 97, 104, 119, 140 non-profits 123 Nooteboom, Bart 74 Noronha, Alwyn 200–201 Norris, Pippa 189 North Africa, and democracy 189 Nosamo 35, 186 Noyes, Dorothy 58 Nupedia 13, 14 Nussbaum, Emily 214–15 O Obama, Barack 181, 191 Ofcom (Office of Communications) 31 OhmyNews 34, 87, 204, 231 oil companies 115 Oldenburg, Henry 25, 53–4, 156 Ollila, Jorma 119 Online System (NLS) 39 Open Architecture Network (OAN) 133–4 Open Net Initiative 190 Open Office programme 201 Open Prosthetics 134 Open Source Foundation 97 OpenMoko project 136 OpenWiki 36 O’Reilly, Tim 31 organisation commons as a system of organisation 51 pre-industrial ideas of 27, 48 social 20, 64, 165 We-Think’s organisational recipe 21 collaboration 21, 23 participation 21, 23 recognition 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 196 organisations civic 189 open/collaborative vs. closed/hierarchical models 89, 126, 127, 128 public 152 successful 228 see also companies; corporations Orwell, George: 1984 182 Ostrom, Elinor 51–2, 80 ownership 6, 119, 120, 121–6, 127, 128, 225 Oxford University 234 P paedophiles 3, 168, 213–14 Page, Scott xi, 72 Pakistan 237 Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco 40 parallel universes 7 participation 23, 216, 223, 230, 232 consumers 98, 100 public services 145, 146, 150, 152, 153 a We-Think ingredient 21, 24 Partido Populaire (PP) (Spain) 187 patents 55, 56, 92, 97, 102, 124, 154, 196, 197, 199 Paul, Ron 185 Pawson, Dave x–xi Pax, Salam 57 peasants 27, 48, 59 peer recognition 54, 106, 111, 156, 228–9 peer review 53, 54, 156, 165, 236 peer-to-peer activity 53–4, 135, 148, 151 People’s Computer Company 41 People’s Democratic Party (Vietnam) 191 performance art/artists 2, 10 performance management 110 Perl 68 Peruvian Congress 202 Pew Internet & American Life 31, 179 pharmaceutical industry 92–3, 195–6, 197, 199, 200 Phelps, Edmund 114–15, 220 Philippines: mobile phones 185–6 Philips, Weston 105 photographs, sharing of 34, 75, 86, 218–19 Pitas.com 33 Plastic 33 Playahead 35 podcasts 142 Poland 220–21 polar research 156 politics bloggers able to act as public watchdog 181–2, 183 decline in political engagement 171–2 democratic 173 donations 179 funding 180–81 and journalism 170–71 and mobile phones 185–9 online 183 the online political class 179 and online social networks 35, 86 political advocates of the web 173–4 racist groups on the web 169 and television 173, 183 ultra-local 183, 184 US presidential elections 173, 179 videos 182 the web enters mainstream politics 176 young people drawn into politics by the Internet 179 Popper, Karl 155 Popular Science magazine 102 pornography 169, 214 Post-it notes 121 Potter, Seb 108–9 Powell, Debbie ix power and networking 193 technological 236 of the We-Think culture 230 of the web 24–5, 185, 233 PowerPoint presentations 140, 142, 219 privacy 210, 211 private property 224, 225 Procter and Gamble (P & G) 96–7, 98 productivity 112, 119, 121, 151, 227, 232 agricultural 124 professionals, and institutions 3, 5 property rights 224 public administration 130 Public Broadcasting Service 188 Public Intellectual Property Research for Agriculture initiative 199 Public Library of Science 159 public services 132, 141–2, 143, 144–53, 183 public spending 146 publishing 130, 166 science 156–7, 159–60 Putnam, Robert 173, 184 Python 68 Q quantum mechanics 93 ‘quick-web’ 35 R racism 169, 181–2 radio 173, 176 RapRep (Rapid Replicator) machines 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 232 Rawls, John: A Theory of Justice 194 Raymond, Eric 64 recognition 21, 223 peer 54, 106, 111, 156 record industry 56, 102 recycling 111 Red Hat 66, 227 Red Lake, Ontario 132, 133 research 166 market 101 pharmaceutical 195–6 research and development (R & D) 92, 96, 119, 196 scientific 154–7, 159–65 retailing 130, 132 Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 201 Roh Moo-hyun, President of South Korea 35, 186 Roosevelt, Franklin 176 Roy, Bunker 205 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey 161 Royal Society 54 Philosophical Transactions 25, 156 Ryze.com 34 S Sacca, Chris 113, 114 Safaricom 207 St Louis world fair (1904) 75–6 Samsung xi, 203 Sanger, Larry 13, 14, 16 Sanger Centre, Cambridge 155 Sao Paolo, Brazil 201 SARS virus 165 Sass, Larry 139 satellite phones 11 Saudi Arabia 190 scanners 11 Schumacher, E.

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

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

“But you have to actually go down and see the Room demo they have in Irvine.” “Can they come up here and do a demo?” Zuckerberg asked. “Yeah. But it’ll be comparatively shitty. I mean, it’ll probably still blow you away, but it’s just not as good as the Room.” Zuckerberg was intrigued . . . but still not enough to rearrange his schedule. “I’M GONNA FLY UP TO MENLO PARK AND GIVE A DEMO TO MARK ZUCKERBERG,” Iribe said. “Nice!” Luckey replied. “Any particular objective in mind? Or just because, you know, it’s Mark Zuckerberg? It was mostly because it was Mark Zuckerberg, but Iribe and Malamed had also started throwing around a crazy idea: What if a company like Facebook led our Series C?

…

Zuckerberg agreed it was important that he make time to visit soon. Maybe the following week? And with tentative plans on the horizon, the Facebook guys spoke with Iribe about his vision for Oculus, the critical role that all four of them believed that virtual social spaces would play. LEAVING MENLO PARK, IRIBE FELT GREAT ABOUT HOW THINGS HAD GONE AT Facebook. He didn’t like getting ahead of himself, but there was a sense that this could be the beginning of a big, down-the-road collaboration. And that feeling grew even stronger the following day when Iribe received a promising follow-up email from Zuckerberg.

…

“Yes, it concerns me too,” Zuckerberg replied. As did the fact that he found Carmack to be “socially awkward in person” (and Kang to be “crazy”). Nevertheless, Facebook agreed to include the indemnity provision that Kang wanted for Carmack. Not only that, but—over a weekend of negotiating at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park—Iribe was also able to obtain a similar indemnity provision for himself as well. As for the additional upfront compensation, Iribe asked Luckey if he would be willing to reallocate some of his signing day money to Carmack. “Essentially,” Iribe explained, “you’d just be moving money from one bucket to another; so the money you’d get today, you’d now just get a few years later—at the end of the vesting period.”

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In The New Geography of Jobs, the economist Enrico Moretti tells an intriguing story of two places in California: Menlo Park and Visalia. The story begins in 1969, with a young engineer turning down a job offer at Hewlett-Packard in Menlo Park (in the heart of Silicon Valley) to move to the midsize town of Visalia, three hours’ drive away. At the time, many professionals were leaving cities for smaller communities, which were considered better places for family life. At the time, both places in California had prospering middle classes, similar rates of crime, and comparable quality of schools. And while incomes in Menlo Park were higher on average, America was on an equalizing path.

…

By 1927, electricity had a monopoly on illumination in New York City, and the last two gas lamplighters left their craft, ending the story of their profession and that of the Lamplighters Union.3 Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb surely made the world better and brighter. In his laboratory in Menlo Park, oil lamps and candles still polluted the air on the day of his breakthrough. As William Nordhaus, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018, has shown, the price of light fell dramatically thereafter, as electricity spread to Chicago’s Academy of Music, London’s House of Commons, Milan’s La Scala, and the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.4 For the purpose of streetlighting, even the New York lamplighters, some of whom were forced into early retirement, willingly admitted that the new system was more expeditious.

…

And while incomes in Menlo Park were higher on average, America was on an equalizing path. Yet today, Menlo Park and Visalia are in different universes. As Silicon Valley has grown to become the world’s hub for innovation, Visalia has become a backwater. It has the second lowest share of college-educated workers in America, and its crime rates are high and trending upward while its relative earnings are in decline.30 And these are not isolated examples: [They reflect] a broader national trend. America’s new economic map shows growing differences, not just between people but between communities. A handful of cities with the “right” industries and a solid base of human capital keep attracting good employers and offering high wages, while those at the other extreme, cities with the “wrong” industries and a limited human capital base, are stuck with dead-end jobs and low average wages.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Rather than fight Swan, Edison established a joint venture with him to manufacture lightbulbs in Britain. To create an entire system required considerable funding. Although not called such at the time, one of the other inventions that could be credited to Edison and his investors was venture capital. For what he developed in Menlo Park, New Jersey, was a forerunner of the venture capital industry that would grow, coincidentally, around another Menlo Park—this one in Silicon Valley in California. As an Edison biographer has observed, it was his melding of the “laboratory and business enterprise that enabled him to succeed.”6 Costs were a constant problem, and as they increased, so did the pressures.

…

When people think about power, it’s usually only when the monthly bill arrives or on those infrequent times when the lights are suddenly extinguished either by a storm or some breakdown in the delivery system. All this electrification did indeed begin with a flip of a switch. THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK On the afternoon of September 4, 1882, the polymathic inventor Thomas Edison was in the Wall Street offices of the nation’s most powerful banker, J. P. Morgan. At 3:00 p.m., Edison threw the switch. “They’re on!” a Morgan director exclaimed, as a hundred lightbulbs lit up, filling the room with their light.2 Nearby, at the same moment, 52 bulbs went on in the offices of the New York Times, which proclaimed the new electric light “soft,” and “graceful to the eye . . . without a particle of flicker to make the head ache.”

…

His partial deafness made him somewhat isolated and self-centered, but also gave him an unusual capacity for concentration and creativity. He proceeded by experiment, reasoning, and sheer determination, and, as he once said, “by methods which I could not explain.” He had set up a research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, with the ambitious aim, as he put it, of making an invention factory that would deliver “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.”4 “THE SUBDIVISION OF LIGHT” That was not so easy, as he found when he homed in on electricity. He wanted to replace the then-prevalent gas-fired lamp.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

This perspective was warmly received in Silicon Valley, which Brand thought was why the microcomputer revolution happened at that specific time and place: “The stuff came out of the Stanford area, I think, because it took a Buckminster Fuller access-to-tools angle on things.” For a community that was still defining itself, Fuller was an inexhaustible source of metaphors and images, which spread through existing networks into every corner of the culture. The Whole Earth Catalog, for example, was born at the Portola Institute, an educational nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, that eventually included a commercial arm for books on computing. At the suggestion of Marc LeBrun—a coding prodigy who would later be one of the first four members of the Apple Macintosh team—the subsidiary was called Dymax, an homage to Dymaxion, the personal brand that Fuller used for his designs.

…

Listening carefully to Brand’s description of the fair, Fuller advised him to clarify its intentions, and he expressed concerns that it would become overly political. When Brand asked if a photo of the whole earth might change the world’s perspective, Fuller said, “You’re right. I’ll take back what I said in my letter.” On January 3, 1968, Brand wrote to Fuller about research being conducted in Menlo Park by an engineer named Douglas Engelbart. “The program is operational now using constant on-line intense interaction with computer-driven cathode ray tube displays of text, graphs, and link-node arrays,” Brand explained. “A number of persons at remote consoles can work in interactive concert on a mutually generated display, with mutual access to the computer memory.”

…

He told Fuller that he hoped to sell the Dymaxion Map and plans for domes, with the ultimate goal of connecting readers “with manufacturers, suppliers, authors, inventors.” In October 1968 Brand launched the catalog as a start-up in a garage at the Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory, which was housed in the former Rancho Diablo near Menlo Park. He based its layout on Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook, and he often reviewed books without reading them—he could generally gather from the illustrations and index whether or not they were worth recommending. The first printing had an initial run of a thousand copies, and although he started with just fifty subscribers, he sold tens of thousands by the end of the following year.

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA, 1219–1226. Stock, J., and Trebbi, F. (2003). Who invented instrumental variable regression? Journal of Economic Perspectives 17: 177–194. Textor, J., Hardt, J., and Knüppel, S. (2011). DAGitty: A graphical tool for analyzing causal diagrams. Epidemiology 22: 745. Tian, J., and Pearl, J. (2002). A general identification condition for causal effects. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press/MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA, 567–573. Wermuth, N., and Cox, D. (2008). Distortion of effects caused by indirect confounding.

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In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 10 (R. L. de Mantaras and D. Poole, eds.). Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 46–54. Balke, A., and Pearl, J. (1994b). Probabilistic evaluation of counterfactual queries. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1. MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA, 230–237. Cartwright, N. (1983). How the Laws of Physics Lie. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK. Haavelmo, T. (1943). The statistical implications of a system of simultaneous equations. Econometrica 11: 1–12. Reprinted in D. F. Hendry and M. S. Morgan (Eds.), The Foundations of Econometric Analysis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 477–490, 1995.

…

In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 10 (R. L. de Mantaras and D. Poole, eds.). Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 46–54. Balke, A., and Pearl, J. (1994b). Probabilistic evaluation of counterfactual queries. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1. MIT Press, Menlo Park, CA, 230–237. Cowles, M. (2016). Statistics in Psychology: An Historical Perspective. 2nd ed. Routledge, New York, NY. Duncan, O. (1975). Introduction to Structural Equation Models. Academic Press, New York, NY. Freedman, D. (1987). As others see us: A case study in path analysis (with discussion).

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

Doug led a group of researchers at the Stanford Research Institute and had been working since 1962 on a topic they called “Augmented Human Intellect.” Doug got a slot at the AFIPS conference to present his group’s findings. Ho hum, a real snoozer, right? But his team had put together a huge surprise. They had microwave links on the roof and phone lines hooked up to connect the Convention Center to their labs in Menlo Park. What Doug showed off was a system called NLS or oN Line System. On a computer screen with both graphics and text were multiple windows, a text editor with cut and paste, and an outline processor. A wooden-looking mouse controlled an on-screen pointer as a cursor. Multiple users could connect remotely.

…

The second one was installed at the Stanford Research Institute.” “Doug Engelbart’s group?” “That’s it. Did I tell you this story already?” “Nope. Go on.” “With two, you can tango. These two machines talked via NCP, Network Control Protocol. We get AT&T to provide a 50 186 Running Money kilobit per second private line between LA and Menlo Park up north.” “Yeah.” “So we hook up the two IMPs, and ARPANET was born.” “But what was the first packet?” I asked. “Oh, yeah. I called them up on a regular phone line and said, ‘OK, we are about to send an L, let me know when you see it.’ “They told me, ‘There it is, we got an L,’ and I heard a lot of applause in the background.

…

“The tour starts at three, so we’d better figure out which door, quick,” I pleaded. Phil opened one of the doors in front of us and almost got trampled as a mass of people flowed out. We tried another door and were ushered into a lobby and told to step aside, a shift change was taking place. “You guys with the school?” some guy in a rent-a-cop uniform asked. “Yes, Menlo Park.” “OK, the tour has started, but you haven’t missed the tram. Walk this way.” I knew what was coming. I looked at Phil, who said, “If I could walk that way . . .” Nyuk-nyuk. Maybe this won’t be such a bad afternoon after all. It was the middle of the summer, and there were a few too Sweating at the NUMMI 241 many kids hanging around our house, so my wife had insisted I take our two older boys on the tour of NUMMI.

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

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

But maybe I can help you think about your journey in a new way. To better help you think about what a Startup Hero does and the impact he or she creates, whether in a success or a failure. I provide you here with a story. The Tesla Story Ian Wright came to pitch his new business, Wright Motors. We met at DFJ’s offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. He brought with him an invention that was strung together with tires, PVC pipes, some fabric, and magic Lithium Ion batteries. It was a new kind of electric car. He asked me to sit in the machine and get strapped in with a five-point harness. I asked why I needed to be strapped in since the only electric cars I had seen were golf carts and the original Chevy Volt that George Schultz drove, and none of them had much in the way of scary pickup.

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Tom initially went around recruiting venture capitalists to move into his space. At first, people balked since the buildings were out on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Most people, my father included, wanted to stay in Palo Alto, where they would have more of a “status” address. No one had heard of Menlo Park, but Palo Alto was considered one of the big cities of the peninsula. But Tom kept at it and finally recruited some top venture capitalists to come work at the Sand Hill Road location. It became known as the place for venture capitalists. The press wrote it up regularly as the venture capitalist’s equivalent of Wall Street.

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Mark 16:15 As apostles and prophets, we are concerned not only for our children and grandchildren but for yours as well - and for each of God's children. Russell M. Nelson The Draper University Story I always wanted to start a school. I had a top-flight education. The places I studied at were exceptional. Hillview Elementary School in Menlo Park, California, was one of the top public schools in the state at that time. Phillips Academy prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, continues to be the top prep school in the country. Stanford University, where I studied electrical engineering, was the top electrical engineering school, and arguably the best college in the country.

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

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

It was, as Scientific American concluded, “The Great Electric Car Quandary.” Of course, skeptics said the same thing about Thomas Edison’s electric light bulbs. Critics assumed that the market would continue to favor gas lamps, which were supported by a well-established infrastructure. Soon after Edison demonstrated his bulbs in a grand display at his Menlo Park lab in January 1880, a letter writer to The New York Times, who identified himself as F. G. Fairfield, PhD, of the New York College of Veterinary Surgeons, surmised “on practical and economical as well as on scientific and optical grounds, that the Edison system in its present state could not successfully compete with gas.”

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It had taken the company just three months to go from the first schematics to a functional car. The result was a bare-bones vehicle with no body panels, a new battery pack, and the insides of a prototypical Tesla stuck on the chassis of a Lotus Elise. Straubel tore off down the road outside Tesla’s new office in San Carlos, six miles from Menlo Park, as his coworkers stood around in awe of their creation. Drew Baglino, an early engineer at the company, also took a spin. At the 2016 shareholders’ meeting, he recalled what it was like. “It was my first four-second zero-to-sixty experience, and I had never experienced anything like that,” he said onstage after being invited up by Musk.

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The engineers didn’t realize until it was too late. Now he is pissed. Musk: “I want names named. If someone’s always on the hot seat and is always the root cause for problems, they will not be part of this organization long term.” Scene II: Not long after the meeting, Musk visits a Tesla vehicle delivery center in Menlo Park. Awaiting him is a workshop full of defective Roadsters. Musk: “Holy mackerel!” His hands go to his head. “Jesus! We have, like, an army of cars here. Like, Jeeeeesus!” Musk tells the team to overhire to fix the problem. “I’m available twenty-four/seven to help solve issues. Call me three A.M. on a Sunday morning, I don’t care.”

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

The story originates from a passage in a biography of Newton, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, written by one of his contemporaries, William Stukeley, and published more than two decades after Newton’s death. The relevant passages from the book are available online at The Royal Society, “Newton’s Apple,” http://royalsociety.org/library/moments/newton-apple/. 10. Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, “Young Edison,” http://www.menloparkmuseum.org/thomas-edison-and-menlo-park (excerpted from Westfield Architects and Preservation Consultants, Preservation Master Plan, Edison Memorial Tower, Museum, and Site (2007). 11. “Answers for Young People,” http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html; Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (HarperOne, 1999). 12.

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Fry was fascinated, but he didn’t think those applications made sense, and at that moment he couldn’t come up with any others.8 We like eureka stories. Popular lore is filled with this kind of thing. One warm evening, Isaac Newton is sitting under an apple tree in his garden when an apple falls and bonks him on the head; he instantly discovers gravity.9 Thomas Edison is staying up all night at Menlo Park, frantically experimenting, when suddenly he creates a new lightbulb that glows continuously for thirteen-and-a-half hours.10 Tim Berners-Lee is helping some scientists share data when out of the blue an idea hits him and he invents the World Wide Web.11 But these stories are rarely accurate. Newton had been working on the problem of gravity for years, and neither he nor his biographer said an apple hit him on the head.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

“free is not a business model”: “Ebay Lectures Taobao That Free Is Not a Business Model,” South China Morning Post, October 21, 2005, http://www.scmp.com/node/521384. his autobiography, Disruptor: 周鸿祎, “颠覆者” (北京: 北京联合出版公司, 2017). Sinovation event in Menlo Park: Dr. Andrew Ng, Dr. Sebastian Thrun, and Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, “The Future of AI,” moderated by John Markoff, Sinovation Ventures, Menlo Park, CA, June 10, 2017, http://us.sinovationventures.com/blog/the-future-of-ai. book The Lean Startup: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Crown Business, 2011). 3.

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Silicon Valley prides itself on long work hours, an arrangement made more tolerable by free meals, on-site gyms, and beer on tap. But compared with China’s startup scene, the valley’s companies look lethargic and its engineers lazy. Andrew Ng, the deep-learning pioneer who founded the Google Brain project and led AI efforts at Baidu, compared the two environments during a Sinovation event in Menlo Park: The pace is incredible in China. While I was leading teams in China, I’d just call a meeting on a Saturday or Sunday, or whenever I felt like it, and everyone showed up and there’d be no complaining. If I sent a text message at 7:00 PM over dinner and they haven’t responded by 8:00 PM, I would wonder what’s going on.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Bezos joined Bechtolsheim, Cheriton, and Shriram as investors, making for a total of a million dollars of angel money. On September 4, 1998, Page and Brin filed for incorporation and finally moved off campus. Sergey’s girlfriend at the time was friendly with a manager at Intel named Susan Wojcicki, who had just purchased a house on Santa Margarita Street in Menlo Park with her husband for $615,000. To help meet the mortgage, the couple charged Google $1,700 a month to rent the garage and several rooms in the house. At that point they’d taken on their first employee, fellow Stanford student Craig Silverstein. He’d originally connected with them by offering to show them a way to compress all the crawled links so they could be stored in memory and run faster.

…

Hölzle, still wary, accepted the offer but kept his position at UCSB by taking a yearlong leave. He would never return. In April he arrived at Google with Yoshka, a big floppy Leonberger dog, in tow, and dived right in to help shore up Google’s overwhelmed infrastructure. (By then Google had moved from Wojcicki’s Menlo Park house to a second-floor office over a bicycle shop in downtown Palo Alto.) Though Google had a hundred computers at that point—it was buying them as quickly as it could—it could not handle the load of queries. Hundreds of thousands of queries a day were coming in. The average search at that time, Hölzle recalls, took three and a half seconds.

…

Instead, you’d have results that suggested a fine-dining experience at Windows on the World, on the 107th floor of the now-nonexistent North Tower. A half-dozen engineers moved their computers into a conference room. Thus Google created its first war room. (By then—less than a year after moving from the house in Menlo Park to the downtown Palo Alto office—Google had moved once again, to a roomier office-park facility on Bayshore Road in nearby Mountain View. Employees dubbed it the Googleplex, a pun on the mathematical term googolplex, meaning an unthinkably large number.) When people came to work, they’d go to the war room instead of the office.

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

But, at the time, Doug was a voice crying into the wilderness. Bob Taylor: Doug and I talked about doing this demo in early ’68, and I was strongly encouraging Doug to do it. He said, “It’s going to cost a fortune. We’re going to bring in this huge display, we’re going to have online support between San Francisco and Menlo Park, and it’s just going to cost a ton of money.” Alan Kay: And basically, when they approached Taylor about doing this, Taylor said, “Look, spend what you need, but don’t do it small—and be redundant enough so the thing really works.” Bob Taylor: I said, “Don’t worry about it. ARPA will pay for it.”

…

Stewart Brand: When I went into Engelbart’s lab for the first time, there was a big poster of Janis Joplin, which is kind of an indication that they were feeling like part of the counterculture. Alan Kay: In that whole area—University Avenue in Palo Alto and then El Camino going all the way into Menlo Park—the counterculture was going on. The NLS debuted at the national computer conference at Brooks Hall in San Francisco’s Civic Center in December 1968. When the lights came up, Engelbart sat onstage with a giant video screen projected behind him, and a mouse at his fingertips. Then, in what has become known as “the Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart showed off what his computer could do.

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He founded Netscape in 1994 and in just over a year the company laid the foundation for virtually every technology that defines today’s online experience. Alan Kay: A lot of people think the internet appeared in the nineties. It started in 1969. John Markoff: Today’s internet started with the ARPANET, and the ARPANET started with two nodes, and one of them was in Southern California and the other one was at Menlo Park in Doug Engelbart’s Augment project. Doug Engelbart: Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, the two guys running that office, told us all that they were going to go ahead and put together this network, and I volunteered to start a Network Information Center and that’s sort of why they put me on early. John Markoff: The NLS system was supposed to be the first killer app for ARPANET, which became the internet.

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

Mostly under 40, they want to live in nearby bustling San Francisco, since Silicon Valley can resemble The Stepford Wives. Each morning, thousands of tech workers hop on private, Wi-Fi-enabled coaches from one of the dozens of pick-up points in San Fran’s increasingly gentrified streets, and head down Highway 101 into Menlo Park (for Facebook), Sunnyvale (for Yahoo) or Mountain View (for Google). It’s impossible to ignore the buzz, the thrill, and the enterprise of the place. Alongside it, though, is another world, inhabited by the people who are left behind in the mad rush towards progress: the ignored women in tech start-ups who complain about misogyny, the Uber drivers who can only afford to live 70 miles away and have to work on zero-hour contracts, the long-time residents who are turfed out so their landlords can rent out their homes on Airbnb.

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I recently visited GCHQ as part of an outreach effort held by the intelligence agency, who are worried about losing their best computer programmers to the tech firms, who can outbid even them (imagine how much worse it must be for local councils). GCHQ has a security-cleared Costa Coffee in their building with notoriously long queues and average drinks. Facebook’s Menlo Park has excellent coffee. The biggest tech firms are motoring ahead. They spend more on research than businesses in other industries: the top companies in the US that spend the most on research and development are ‘the big five’: Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s holding company), Intel, Microsoft and Apple.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

This is our dilemma: Old, network-blinded leaders (and the young people who think like them) pull us from Washington and other capitals and traditional power centers into a world in which their ideas and policies constantly fail. We trust them less and less as a result. At the same time, a rising generation lashes us into amazing meshes. We welcome this connection. Centered in places such as Menlo Park or Seattle or Zhongguancun or Tel Aviv, these figures understand networks perfectly, but—so far—not yet much else. Old and new, each group works anyhow on our freedom. We are pulled dangerously between these forces. Problems seem to get worse. What we need to find is a way out of this trap. A fusion.

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We are children of the Enlightenment, after all, so we want to know what goes on inside the machines. We want them, at least, to be accountable to us. This tension is one reason why places such as Silicon Valley often leave a visitor with an uneasy feeling. Go drive along the anodyne strip of asphalt that runs in front of Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, home of the greatest venture capital funds of our age. Inside those offices, revolutions are dreamed up, debated, and funded. You might expect to see, as a result, something as magnificent as the Vatican for these high priests of technology. But what you pass in that two-mile strip resembles nothing so much as a row of mildly prosperous dental practices.

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Dense and self-learning fusions of mind and data such as TensorFlow and other soon-to-be-arriving AI systems are all gated universes. 5. The topological charm of these explosively growing clusters was first teased apart by the electrical engineer Bob Metcalfe in the 1970s. Metcalfe was hunting for a better way to send data—say, grocery lists to his wife—through Menlo Park, and he perfected a connection protocol called Ethernet, which soon became a standard for linking machines. What Metcalfe noticed as more and more users piled into the gateland of Stanford’s Ethernet-connected machines was that the reach of the system was growing exponentially. A system with one phone, for example, is really not very useful.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

All of this was happening at that time: Seymour Papert with his Logo programming language and Turtle graphics; Simula; and some of our own stuff as well, such as the Arpanet, the Flex Machine and its first object-oriented operating system, the idea of Dynabook, and much, much more. It was an exciting time. The Whole Earth Catalog and its folks were nearby in Menlo Park thinking big thoughts about universal access to tools. Not just physical, but especially mental. This was the first book in the PARC library, and it had a big influence on how we thought things should be. We loved the idea of lots of different tools being available with explanations and comments, and we could see that it would be just wonderful if such media could be brought to life as one found and made it.

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There are still bad websites and bad software, some of it spectacularly bad, but the example of the good ones will drive out the bad ones. 8.3 Interactivity David Albrecht of People’s Computer Company (PCC: what a radical name!) discovered and promoted Computer Lib. People’s Computer Company operated a timesharing BASIC computer lab in Menlo Park, and published a newsletter on interactive computing. The newsletter told me how to get the book. PCC also published a big book of computer games in BASIC, called What to Do After You Hit Return. One guessing game was called “Hunt the Wumpus.” It was lucky for Ted that Bob Albrecht knew about Computer Lib, because Hugo’s Book Service had few contacts among computer enthusiasts.

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

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

THE DRIVE SOUTH to Palo Alto is a trip through the history of Silicon Valley. From Route 92 in San Mateo over to Interstate 280, a “bucolic” eight-laner skirting San Andreas Lake and Crystal Springs Reservoir, which store drinking water for San Francisco piped in from the Sierras; past the blandly ostentatious venture-capitalist habitat along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park and traversing the oblique, mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator, which slashes like a hairline fracture through the landscape and beneath the freeway; past the “Stanford Dish” radio telescope, and the white-faced Herefords and ornate oak trees dotting the expansive greenbelt behind the university campus.

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He even resisted when a court-ordered paternity test established the likelihood that he was the father at 94.4 percent; it was as if the mere fact of his denial would negate the proof. When he finally starting paying child support of $385 a month, he continued to protest that he might well not be Lisa’s father. He saw her rarely, letting Chrisann raise Lisa on her own in a small house in Menlo Park. It would take years for Steve to bring Lisa into his life in any significant way, and later he would repeatedly express deep regret over his behavior. He knew he had made a terrible mistake. The event obviously crossed the line of what anyone would consider acceptable behavior. Lisa has spoken about the distance she felt from her father, and the confusion and instability she felt as a child.

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This potentially noble sentiment became a half-baked and confused endeavor, and yet another distraction. Sometimes Steve’s good intentions could lead to a deep intellectual self-deception, in which trivial issues loomed larger than life and fundamental realities were swept under the rug. He did try to be a good boss. For example, Steve hosted annual “family picnics” for his employees in Menlo Park. They were kid-oriented Saturday affairs, featuring clowns, volleyball, burgers and hot dogs, and even hokey events like sack races. At his invitation, I attended one in 1989 with my daughter, Greta, who was five years old at the time. Steve, who was barefoot, sat with me on a hay bale and chatted for an hour or so while Greta wandered off to watch the Pickle Family Circus, a Bay Area comedic troupe of acrobats and jugglers that Steve had hired.

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley

air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, The Home Computer Revolution, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Sheridan even offered to demonstrate the techniques described in the document for the FBI and AT&T if they wanted. Sheridan also told the FBI that Draper had a small assembly line going for red boxes that were to be sold in the near future. He was actively using a blue box from the house across the street from People’s Computer Company, or PCC, a small nonprofit in Menlo Park dedicated to teaching people about computers. And Draper was also red boxing from a pay phone just down the street from PCC, Sheridan reported. The AUTOVON document caused quite a stir. It described, in detail, how to use a blue box to access the military’s phone system from the civilian telephone network via a phreaking technique called guard banding.

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Despite Sheridan’s failure to hack into AUTOVON earlier in the day, Perrin had developed a certain confidence in Sheridan’s claims ever since getting the White House on the phone. “What the hell are you calling me about? I already knew that,” Perrin recalls telling them. He hung up and went back to sleep. Just two miles from Stanford University, the 1900 block of Menalto Avenue in Menlo Park was a collection of small storefronts on a tree-lined street in a mostly residential neighborhood. You wouldn’t have thought so from a casual glance but it was a nexus of nerdly activity. A fixture on the block was the electric vehicle pioneer Roy Kaylor. Kaylor was an inveterate tinkerer, a Stanford electrical engineer, an odd blend of hippie and West Point graduate.

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The Pacific Telephone people said they would need to talk to their attorneys to figure out how they could help. For its part, the FBI started spot surveillances on Draper’s known haunts to get a handle on his activities. Agents were assigned to check two locations on a random basis. The first was Draper’s apartment in Mountain View. The second was the People’s Computer Company in Menlo Park. Draperism. That was John Draper’s term for what he viewed as the persistent bad luck that seemed to follow him around like a rain cloud. Draperism was never his fault, never the result of anything he had done. Like the weather, it was a purely external phenomenon, something that just happened.

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

The first was a raid on the only laboratory on the West Coast—possibly the country—whose work on interactive computing met his stern standards. The lab belonged to the legendary engineer Douglas C. bart, an adamantine visionary who held court out of a small think tank called SRI, or the Stanford Research Institute, a couple of miles north of Palo Alto in the community of Menlo Park. There Engelbart had established his “Augmentation Research Center.” The name derived from his conviction that the computer was not only capable of assisting the human thought process, but reinventing it on a higher plane. The “augmentation of human intellect,” as he defined it, meant that the computer’s ability to store, classify, and retrieve information would someday alter the very way people thought, wrote, and figured.

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At NASA in 1963 Taylor had saved Engelbart’s lab by scrounging enough money to overcome a budget crisis. After moving on to ARPA he turned the trickle of funding into a flood. By the end of the decade the Augmentation Research Center, fueled by ARPA’s half-million-dollar annual grant and occupying one entire wing of SRI’s Menlo Park headquarters, reigned as the think tank’s dominant research program. What it produced was nothing short of astonishing. Obsessed with developing new ways for man and computer to interact, Engelbart linked video terminals to mainframes by cable and communicated with the machines via televised images.

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The audience was riveted, as Engelbart in his subdued drone described and demonstrated a fully operational system of interactive video conferencing, multimedia displays, and split-screen technology. At one point half of a twenty-foot-tall projection screen was occupied by a live video image of Engelbart on stage, the other half by text transmitted live from Menlo Park (it was a shopping list including apples, oranges, bean soup, and French bread). Minutes later the screen carried a live video image of a hand rolling the unusual “mouse” around a desktop while a superimposed computer display showed how the cursor simultaneously and obediently followed its path.

Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec, Maria Popova

lifelogging, Menlo Park

www.giorgialupi.com STEFANIE POSAVEC is a data designer whose work focuses on non-traditional representations of data derived from language, literature or scientific topics. Often using a hand-crafted approach, her work has been exhibited at, among others, MoMA in New York, CCB in Rio de Janeiro, the Science Gallery in Dublin and the V&A in London. In 2013 she was Facebook’s first data-artist-in-residence at their Menlo Park campus. www.stefanieposavec.co.uk

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, obamacare, Parler "social media", Skype, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Though we remained in touch throughout the school year, we would each pursue other love interests, much to his dismay. By the time summer rolled around, I decided not to go home to Los Angeles. I had an apartment and freedom, so why would I? I took a temporary volunteer gig in Menlo Park as an after-school workshop instructor in the arts for kids aged twelve to seventeen. The only thing I remember about those kids was that not one of them knew who Michael Jackson was, which made me wonder what kind of sad kids Menlo Park was raising. I met Oladife at the grocery store during the summer where my best girlfriends, Megan and Akilah, and I took a vow to be open-minded to everything that came our way.

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

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

He worries about unintended consequences and loss of privacy as well as lesser matters such as the paucity of apps. Immediate Want Israel got to see Glass firsthand for the first time in May 2013. He was scheduled to spend the day with Scoble, at SRI International, the venerable and prolific independent research and development facility in Menlo Park, to interview researchers for this book. Early in the day, he tried on Scoble’s device for about 60 seconds. His concerns evaporated. He immediately wanted one. He might not vow to wear it every day, but knew he wanted one and would find many uses for it. It took only that single minute for him to understand how such a device would improve his productivity, give him access to information and enable new forms of communication.

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Later she uses the same app to summon it back. As she waits, she watches the car approach on her app. The car knows where its owner is via a location sensor in the phone. Annie Lien, is an independent automated driving consultant who was formerly program manager at Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Lab in Menlo Park, California, where she was in charge of product and marketing for conceptual cars under the Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche and Volkswagen brands. She played a key role in the development of experimental cars such as the driverless Audi in the video. Lien prefers to call them automatic or auto-piloted rather than self-driving, because “it will be a very long time before cars operate without a driver who can take over the controls, except for limited, low-speed activities such as self-parking,” she says.

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar