Neal Stephenson

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Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

“Introduction.” Copyright © 2012 by Neal Stephenson. “Arsebestos.” Copyright © 2012 by Neal Stephenson. “Slashdot Interview.” Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. “Metaphysics in the Royal Society 1715–2010.” Copyright © 2010 by Neal Stephenson. “It’s All Geek to Me.” Copyright © 2007 by Neal Stephenson. “Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out.” Copyright © 2006 by Neal Stephenson. “Gresham College Lecture, 2008.” Copyright © 2008 by Neal Stephenson “Spew.” Copyright © 1994 by Neal Stephenson. “In the Kingdom of Mao Bell (selected excerpts).” Copyright © 1994 by Neal Stephenson. “Under-Constable Proudfoot.”

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“Under-Constable Proudfoot.” Copyright © 2012 by Neal Stephenson. “Mother Earth, Mother Board.” Copyright © 1996 by Neal Stephenson “The Salon Interview.” Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. “Blind Secularism.” Copyright © 1993 by Neal Stephenson. “Time Magazine Article About Anathem.” Copyright © 2012 by Neal Stephenson. “Everything and More Foreword.” Copyright © 2003 by Neal Stephenson. “The Great Simoleon Caper.” Copyright © 1995 by Neal Stephenson. “Locked In.” Copyright © 2011 by Neal Stephenson. “Innovation Starvation.” Copyright © 2011 by Neal Stephenson. “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent.”

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I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent. About the Author Neal Stephenson is the author of the bestselling Reamde; Anathem; the three-volume historical epic The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World); Cryptonomicon; The Diamond Age; Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine’s top one hundred all-time best English-language novels; and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors. Also by Neal Stephenson Reamde Anathem The System of the World The Confusion Quicksilver Cryptonomicon The Diamond Age Snow Crash Zodiac Permissions A version of “Slashdot Interview” previously appeared on Slashdot.org.

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

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

Peirce explained early in the last century, all symbols and their objects, whether in software, language, or art, require the mediation of an interpretive mind.1 From our minds open potential metaverses, infinite dimensions of imaginative reality—counter-factuals, analogies, interpretive emotions, flights of thought and creativity. The novelist Neal Stephenson, who coined the term metaverse,2 and Jaron Lanier, who pioneered “virtual reality,” were right to explore them and value them. Without dimensions beyond the flat universe, our lives and visions wane and wither. This analogy of the “flat universe” had come to me after reading C. S. Lewis’s essay “Transposition,”3 which posed the question: If you lived in a two-dimensional landscape painting, how would you respond to someone earnestly telling you that the 2D image was just the faintest reflection of a real 3D world?

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Because Google, alone among the five, is the protagonist of a new and apparently successful “system of the world.” Represented in all the most prestigious U.S. universities and media centers, it is rapidly spreading through the world’s intelligentsia, from Mountain View to Tel Aviv to Beijing. That phrase, “system of the world,” which I borrow from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle novel about Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, denotes a set of ideas that pervade a society’s technology and institutions and inform its civilization.1 In his eighteenth-century system of the world, Newton brought together two themes. Embodied in his calculus and physics, one Newtonian revelation rendered the physical world predictable and measurable.

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So before we contemplate bitcoin and Ethereum, NEO and EOS, Blockstack and Ripple, let’s sit down and make ourselves comfortable. What would you say if I told you that all of us, right now—in the United States and around the world—have been sucked up into the phantasmagorical pages of a novel by Neal Stephenson, the shy West Coast prodigy who is the twenty-first century’s greatest writer and demiurge? You can say it is my wild opinion. You can call it metafact or mystifiction, a demented conspiracy theory, or even a massively multiplayer online game, or a virtual world. But you cannot prove that it isn’t true—that the ardent logorrheic genius cyberludic scrivener with the ponytail and the kaleidoscopic brain and fiber-optic diet has not somehow infiltrated the very operating code of the system of the world.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

Decide on Your Depth Philosophy “What I do takes long hours of studying” and “I have been a happy man”: from Donald Knuth’s Web page: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html. “Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration”: from Neal Stephenson’s old website, in a page titled “My Ongoing Battle with Continuous Partial Attention,” archived in December 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20031231203738/http://www.well.com/~neal/. “The productivity equation is a non-linear one”: from Neal Stephenson’s old website, in a page titled “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent,” archived in December 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20031207060405/http://www.well.com/~neal/badcorrespondent.html.

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“The productivity equation is a non-linear one”: from Neal Stephenson’s old website, in a page titled “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent,” archived in December 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20031207060405/http://www.well.com/~neal/badcorrespondent.html. Stephenson, Neal. Anathem. New York: William Morrow, 2008. For more on the connection between Anathem and the tension between focus and distraction, see “Interview with Neal Stephenson,” published on GoodReads.com in September 2008: http://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/14.Neal_Stephenson. “I saw my chance”: from the (Internet) famous “Don’t Break the Chain” article by Brad Isaac, writing for Lifehacker.com: http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret. “one of the best magazine journalists”: Hitchens, Christopher, “Touch of Evil.” London Review of Books, October 22, 1992. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v14/n20/christopher-hitchens/touch-of-evil.

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Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted “Think Weeks” twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts. It was during a 1995 Think Week that Gates wrote his famous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo that turned Microsoft’s attention to an upstart company called Netscape Communications. And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-mail address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here’s how he once explained the omission: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels.

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Danny Hillis, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Free Software Foundation, gentleman farmer, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion, short selling, short squeeze, Snow Crash, the scientific method, trade route, urban planning

VOLUME ONE OF THE BAROQUE CYCLE NEAL STEPHENSON To the woman upstairs Contents Quicksilver: An E-book Invocation BOOK ONE Quicksilver House of Stuart House of Orange-Nassau House of Bourbon BOOK TWO King of the Vagabonds Houses of Welf and Hohenzollern BOOK THREE Odalisque Map of Rhine Valley Dramatis Personae Acknowledgments About the Author Critical Acclaim By Neal Stephenson Credits Copyright About the Publisher Invocation State your intentions, Muse. I know you’re there. Dead bards who pined for you have said You’re bright as flame, but fickle as the air.

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Please enjoy these materials in the confines of this e-book — but, should they live on, do visit the Uniform Resource Locators we have provided and relish the many more riches that we hope are still out there. A source of particular bounty is the Quicksilver Metaweb, as introduced by Neal Stephenson nearby. Interview http://www.baroquecycle.com/interview.htm Therese Littleton interviewed the author on July 9, 2003. Interviewer: Quicksilver includes some of the most important events and people during a crucial nexus between historical eras. What compelled you to write about this particular time period? Neal Stephenson: Around the time that I was closing in on the end of Cryptonomicon [1999], I heard from a couple of different people about some interesting things having to do with Isaac Newton and with Gottfried Leibniz.

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It would be so clear and logical that you could understand what it was saying even if you weren’t fluent in that language. Interviewer: Speaking of languages, one of the toughest languages in your books is that of the people of Qwghlm, where Eliza’s from. Is Qwghlm pronounceable? Neal Stephenson: I never say it out loud. It’s like one of those languages used in southern Africa that have sounds people can’t make unless they’ve grown up in that culture. Interviewer: What’s the literary utility of using a made-up place like Qwghlm? Neal Stephenson: All I can say is that it does have utility. As soon as I came up with it, it immediately became incredibly useful. Not only in Cryptonomicon, but in the Baroque Cycle as well.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the Fusion of Virtual and Physical Worlds,” Time, April 18, 2021, accessed January 2, 2022, https://time.com/5955412/artificial-intelligence-nvidia-jensen-huang/. 7. David M. Ewalt, “Neal Stephenson Talks About Video Games, the Metaverse, and His New Book, REAMDE,” Forbes, September 19, 2011. 8. Daniel Ek, “Daniel Ek—Enabling Creators Everywhere,” Colossus, September 14, 2021, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/14058936/ek-enabling-creators-everywhere?tab=transcript. 9. David M. Ewalt, “Neal Stephenson Talks About Video Games, the Metaverse, and His New Book, REAMDE,” Forbes, September 19, 2011. Chapter 5 Networking 1. Farhad Manjoo, “I Tried Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.

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† In 2021, global GDP was estimated at roughly $90 trillion–$95 trillion by the International Monetary Fund, United Nations, and World Bank. ‡ The Security Times cited the author of this book when describing the Metaverse. Part I WHAT IS THE METAVERSE? Chapter 1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE THE TERM “METAVERSE” WAS COINED BY AUTHOR Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. For all its influence, Stephenson’s book provided no specific definition of the Metaverse, but what he described was a persistent virtual world that reached, interacted with, and affected nearly every part of human existence. It was a place for labor and leisure, for self-actualization as well as physical exhaustion, for art alongside commerce.

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Even if this data doesn’t arrive on time, the consequences are modest: some of Manhattan’s buildings will temporarily be procedurally generated, rather than resemble the real thing, with the realistic details then added when they arrive. Finally, MSFS’s virtual world has more in common with a diorama than Neal Stephenson’s bustling and unpredictable Street. Sending users this sort of data, which cannot easily be predicted and is far more voluminous than the visual detail of an office park or forest, will require significantly more than 1 GB per hour. This brings us to the next, and arguably least understood, element of internet connectivity today: latency.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

“The Hacker Tourist Travels the World to Bring Back the Epic Story of Wiring the Planet,” the cover announced, with an image of the travelogue author, superstar cyberpunk writer Neal Stephenson, legs spread and arms crossed, astride a manhole cover in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, The “Hacker Tourist” epic was the longest article Wired had published. The FLAG cable, at 28,000 kilometers, was the longest engineering project in history at the time. The cable, Stephenson predicted, would revolutionize global telecommunications and engineering. Well-known for his science fiction writing, Neal Stephenson wrote a technopredictive narrative that was accurate in all its major predictions: fiber-optic information tubes did in fact dramatically improve internet speeds.

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For nineteenth-century metaphors in modern road-building, see America’s Highways 1776–1976: A History of the Federal Aid Program, Federal Highways Administration (Washington, DC: US Government printing Office, 1977). 23. “The 20 Greatest Magazine Stories,” Outlook Magazine, November 2, 2015, https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/the-20-greatest-magazine-stories/295660. 24. Neal Stephenson, “The Epic Story of Wiring the Planet,” Wired (December 1996), 160. 25. Neal Stephenson’s reinvention of Enlightenment science and travel narratives is more extensively explored in “‘Travel as Tripping’: Technoscientific Travel with Aliens, Gorillas, and Fiber-Optics,” Kavita Philip, keynote lecture, Critical Nationalisms and Counterpublics, University of British Columbia, February 2019. 26.

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Optical fibers run along old railroad lines, new systems are designed for backward compatibility; and failing to account for these constraints may be fatal or distorting to new development processes.”26 Some critics of the “cultural turn” in technology studies, recoiling at the disturbing historical and political history that seem to be uncovered at every turn, yearned for a return to empirical, concrete studies. For a moment, the focus on materiality and nonhuman actors seemed to offer this.27 But neither Neal Stephenson’s deep dive to the Atlantic Ocean floor nor the rise of “infrastructure studies” yielded clean stories about matter untouched by politics. It seemed to be politics all the way down. Even as Stephenson waxed eloquent about the new Western infrastructure that was bringing freedom to the world, US news media outlets were filled with reports of a different wave of economic globalization.

The Big U by Neal Stephenson

anti-communist, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, invisible hand, Neal Stephenson, Ronald Reagan, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue

And the Go Big Red Fan was found unscathed, sitting miraculously upright on a crushed sofa on a pile of junk, its painted blades rotating quietly and intermittently in the fresh spring breeze. About the Author Neal Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Zodiac and Cryptonomicon. Born on Halloween 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland—home of the National Security Agency—he grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Ames, Iowa, before attending college in Boston. Since 1984 he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has made a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article. Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. Also by Neal Stephenson Cryptonomicon In the Beginning…Was the Command Line The Diamond Age Zodiac Snow Crash Copyright THE BIG U.

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The Big U Neal Stephenson to John Forssman “When I think of the men who were my teachers, I realized that most of them were slightly mad. The men who could be regarded as good teachers were exceptional. It’s tragic to think that such people have the power to bar a young man’s way.” —German political figure Adolf Hitler, 1889–1945 (from Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–44, translated by Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens) Contents Epigraph The Go Big Red Fan First Semester September On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon waited,… October At the front of the auditorium, Professor Embers spoke.

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The knee-deep glom on the… February Sarah quit the Presidency of the Student Government on the… March The social lounge of D24E had picture windows that looked… April While we sewer-slogged, E13S held a giant party in honor… May “Everyone look at Big Wheel!” she said. There was long… About the Author Other Books by Neal Stephenson Copyright About the Publisher I am indebted to the following people for the following things: My parents for providing several kinds of support. Edward Gibbon, for writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Julian Jaynes, for writing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Programming Clojure by Stuart Halloway, Aaron Bedra

continuous integration, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Gödel, Escher, Bach, higher-order functions, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, type inference, web application

Use defrecord to create a Book record: ​(defrecord Book [title author])​ ​-> user.Book​ Then, you can instantiate a record with user.Book.: ​(->Book "title" "author")​ Once you instantiate a Book, it behaves almost like any other map: ​(def b (->Book "Anathem" "Neal Stephenson"))​ ​-> #'user/b​ ​​ ​b​ ​-> #:user.Book{:title "Anathem", :author "Neal Stephenson"}​ ​​ ​(:title b)​ ​-> "Anathem"​ Records also have alternative invocations. There is the original syntax that you may have already seen: ​(Book. "Anathem" "Neal Stephenson")​ ​-> #user.Book{:title "Anathem", :author "Neal Stephenson"}​ You can also instantiate a record using the literal syntax. This is done by typing in exactly what you have seen returned to you at the REPL.

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

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

full range of anxiety disorders: Jessica Maples-Keller, “The Use of Virtual Reality Technology in the Treatment of Anxiety and Other Psychiatric Disorders,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 25, no. 3 (May-June 2017): 103–113. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421394/. School 2030 the novel The Diamond Age: Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Spectra, 1995). chief futurist at Magic Leap: Davey Alba, “Sci-Fi Author Neal Stephenson Joins Mystery Startup as ‘Chief Futurist,’ ” Wired, December 16, 2014. See: https://www.wired.com/2014/12/neal-stephenson-magic-leap/. Chapter Nine: The Future of Healthcare Martine and the Moonshots Martine Rothblatt: Martine Rothblatt, author interview, 2018. For more background on Martine, see: Neely Tucker, “Martine Rothblatt: She Founded Siriusxm, a Religion and a Biotech.

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Most crucially, when AI and VR converge with wireless 5G networks, our global education problem moves from the nearly impossible challenge of recruiting teachers and funding schools for the hundreds of millions in need, to the much more manageable puzzle of building a fantastic virtual educational system that we can give away for free to anyone with a headset. It’s quality and quantity on demand. School 2030 It’s 2030 and school is in session—only what does school 2030 actually look like? Turns out, our first glance at that future actually arrived in 1995, when science-fiction author Neal Stephenson published the novel The Diamond Age. This coming-of-age story is set in a neo-Victorian future where nanotechnology and AI are woven into the fabric of everyday life, and education is handled by the book—that is, by the Young Woman’s Illustrated Primer. The primer is an AI-driven, individually customized learning companion disguised as a book.

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Packed with sensors that monitor everything from energy levels to emotional state, the primer creates a rich learning environment aimed at producing a specific transformation. Rather than molding children to the needs of society, the primer has more humanist aims: to produce strong, independent, empathetic, and creative thinkers. As it turns out, Neal Stephenson is now the chief futurist at Magic Leap, helping use augmented reality to birth his illustrated primer, version 1.0. Magic Leap’s technology allows you to place holograms in the world around you. Concepts that are difficult to visualize via a 2D screen—such as human anatomy—come alive in this 3-D world.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

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

When systems become more and more interconnected, not only do resolution levels intersect, but domains thought to be separated are increasingly brought together. More and more we need to combine both the physics and the biological ways of thinking, looking at the order while not ignoring the rough edges. A biological mind-set partnered with a physics mind-set allows us to feel more comfortable with the kluges around us. In Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, one of the characters elaborates on the structure of the pantheon of Greek gods, making exactly this point: And yet there is something about the motley asymmetry of this pantheon that makes it more credible. Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance—you have a sun god and a moon goddess, for example, which is all clean and symmetrical, and yet over here is Hera, who has no role whatsoever except to be a literal bitch goddess, and then there is Dionysus who isn’t even fully a god—he’s half human—but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices.

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Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin looks at how to think properly—and often counterintuitively—about the complex systems that are all around us. “When Technology Ceases to Amaze” by Robert Herritt in The New Atlantis 41, Winter 2014, pages 121–31, is a great essay about technological wonder, complexity, and amazement. “In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson, an essay and also a short book, is essentially a long and winding meditation on computing. Though outdated, it contains a great deal of wisdom on connection to and detachment from technology. “I, Pencil” by Leonard E. Read is a brief essay that explores the highly interconnected socioeconomic system involved in manufacturing a pencil, the totality of which no single individual understands.

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Stewart Brand noted about legacy systems: Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 85. a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant: Peter G. Neumann, Computer-Related Risks (New York: ACM Press, 1995), 122. elaborates on the structure of the pantheon: Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon Books, 1999; repr. 2002), 802–3. Corky Ramirez: Note that in the episode “The Van Buren Boys,” someone is referred to as “Ramirez” in a bar (though I believe his name is stressed differently than Kramer’s pronunciation of Corky Ramirez). Perhaps he is visible in the room, but it is unclear.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

I read fairly widely, but particularly enjoy and give or recommend to my friends and family books written by three contemporary writers: Richard Rhodes, Neal Stephenson, and Philip Kerr. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is a masterpiece of explaining the sequence of discoveries that led to the development of the atomic bomb in an historical context. During my graduate studies at Cornell, I minored in theoretical physics and took courses from Hans Bethe and other luminaries, so I had met several of the physicists in the book. Yet I learned more physics from the book than I did in my courses. Neal Stephenson is an incredible writer who manages to create fictional characters who reveal the eccentricities and absurdities of real-life scientists and mathematicians as they go about their work of creativity.

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Build strong connections with your team and stay updated on things through them. In other words, the team members are a filter for all the invitations and distractions. Important stuff has a way of bubbling up and you won’t miss out. How to Say No Neal Stephenson TW: @nealstephenson FB: /TheNealStephenson nealstephenson.com NEAL STEPHENSON is an author known for his speculative fiction works, variously categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, maximalism, and cyberpunk. His bestsellers include, among others, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, and Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine’s “Top 100 All-Time Best English-language Novels.”

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Money Mustache David Lynch Nick Szabo Jon Call Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Feb. 3–Feb. 24, 2017) Dara Torres Dan Gable Caroline Paul Darren Aronofsky Evan Williams Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: March 10–March 24, 2017) Bram Cohen Chris Anderson Neil Gaiman Michael Gervais Temple Grandin Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: March 31–April 21, 2017) Kelly Slater Katrín Tanja Davíðsdóttir Mathew Fraser Adam Fisher Aisha Tyler Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: April 28–May 12, 2017) Laura R. Walker Terry Laughlin Marc Benioff Marie Forleo Drew Houston Scott Belsky Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: May 19–June 2, 2017) Tim McGraw Muneeb Ali How to Say No: Neal Stephenson Craig Newmark Steven Pinker Gretchen Rubin Whitney Cummings Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: June 9–June 16, 2017) Rick Rubin Ryan Shea Ben Silbermann Vlad Zamfir Zooko Wilcox Stephanie McMahon Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: June 23–July 7, 2017) Peter Attia Steve Aoki Jim Loehr Daniel Negreanu Jocko Willink Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: July 14–July 27, 2017) Robert Rodriguez Kristen Ulmer Yuval Noah Harari Some Closing Thoughts Breathe Recommended Resources The Top 25 Episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show Extended Conversations Mentor Index Question Index Subject Index Acknowledgments Sample Chapter from TOOLS OF TITANS Buy the Book About the Author Connect with HMH Footnotes Copyright © 2017 by Timothy Ferriss All rights reserved.

The Cobweb by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, computer age, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Neal Stephenson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Snow Crash, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

“I’ll take care of it,” Clyde said. “You hurry home now, okay?” “That’s the plan, Clyde,” she said. “That’s the whole idea.” about the authors Neal Stephenson is the author of THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD, THE CONFUSION, QUICKSILVER, CRYPTONOMICON, THE DIAMOND AGE, SNOW CRASH, and other books and articles. J. Frederick George is a historian and writer living in Paris. Also by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George INTERFACE Praise for Interface also by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George “A Manchurian Candidate for the computer age.” —Seattle Weekly “Qualifies as the sleeper of the year, the rare kind of science-fiction thriller that evokes genuine laughter while simultaneously keeping the level of suspense cranked to the max.”

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Contents Title Page Dedication Map Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-one Chapter Twenty-two Chapter Twenty-three Chapter Twenty-four Chapter Twenty-five Chapter Twenty-six Chapter Twenty-seven Chapter Twenty-eight Chapter Twenty-nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-one Chapter Thirty-two Chapter Thirty-three Chapter Thirty-four Chapter Thirty-five Chapter Thirty-six Chapter Thirty-seven Chapter Thirty-eight Chapter Thirty-nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-one Chapter Forty-two Chapter Forty-three Chapter Forty-four Chapter Forty-five Chapter Forty-six Chapter Forty-seven Chapter Forty-eight Chapter Forty-nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty-one Chapter Fifty-two Chapter Fifty-three Chapter Fifty-four Chapter Fifty-five Chapter Fifty-six About the Author Also by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George Praise for Interface Preview of Interface Copyright Page TO THE LACKERMANN FAMILY one MARCH 1990 CLYDE BANKS was standing in line, in the early stages of hypothermia, when he first saw his future wife, Desiree Dhont, wrestle. At the time, both of them were juniors at Wapsipinicon High School.

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—Seattle Weekly “Qualifies as the sleeper of the year, the rare kind of science-fiction thriller that evokes genuine laughter while simultaneously keeping the level of suspense cranked to the max.” —San Diego Tribune “Complex, entertaining, frequently funny.” —Publishers Weekly Now available wherever Bantam Books are sold. Read on for a preview of Interface by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George Available now from Bantam Spectra INTERFACE On sale now Springfield Central had started out as your basic Big Old Brick Hospital with a central tower flanked symmetrically by two slightly shorter wings. Half a dozen newer wings, pavilions, sky bridges, and parking ramps had been plugged into it since then, so that looking at it from the window of the chopper, Mary Catherine could see it was the kind of hospital where you spent all your time wandering around lost.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

From a 2005 study by CSD Almond et al in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Hyponatremia has emerged as an important cause of race-related death and life-threatening illness among marathon runners.”* Kelly is a legitimate fantasy and sci-fi nerd. He knows Dune by Frank Herbert and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson inside and out. For whatever reasons, many men in this book like precisely these two fiction books. Kelly has daughters and texted me about the latter book, which follows a young female protagonist: “How do you raise girls that are of the system but crush the system while rebuilding a better one?”

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Off hours, Chris is training to break a world record in unpowered gliding. Target location: Patagonia. Chris was my go-to scientist for the “Scientist” section of The 4-Hour Chef, and several of his recipes led me to a live cooking demo with Jimmy Fallon. Chris is good friends with science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who’s penned several of my all-time favorites, including Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. Many guests in this book recommend both Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (Seth Godin, page 237, and Kelly Starrett, page 122). Every year, Chris and Neal have the Annual Loudness Fest in Neal’s backyard, where they build outrageous machines and cooking contraptions: “It wasn’t a big deal that we dug a 6' x 6' x 6'-deep pit in his backyard and turned it into a Jacuzzi to sous-vide cook a 300-pound pig,” Chris says.

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Harris), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Little Drummer’s Girl; The Russia House; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré), The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande), all of Lee Child’s books Godin, Seth: Makers; Little Brother (Cory Doctorow), Understanding Comics (Scott McCloud), Snow Crash; The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson), Dune (Frank Herbert), Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) AUDIOBOOKS: The Recorded Works (Pema Chödrön), Debt (David Graeber), Just Kids (Patti Smith), The Art of Possibility (Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander), Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale (Zig Ziglar), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield) Goldberg, Evan: Love You Forever (Robert Munsch), Watchmen; V for Vendetta (Alan Moore), Preacher (Garth Ennis), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams), The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) Goodman, Marc: One Police Plaza (William Caunitz), The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom) Hamilton, Laird: The Bible, Natural Born Heroes (Christopher McDougall), Lord of the Rings (J.R.R.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

Your nerves grow new connections as you use them—the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells—your bioware self-modifies—the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you’re vulnerable—all hackers are vulnerable—to a nam-shub. We have to look out for one another.” Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, p. 126 Codes and Magic The myth is probably as old as language itself. There are spells in the world: incantations that can transform reality through the power of procedural utterances. The marriage vow, the courtroom sentence, the shaman’s curse: these words are codes that change reality.

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Understanding how we can know that requires the critical methods of the humanities. This is algorithmic reading: a way to contend with both the inherent complexity of computation and the ambiguity that ensues when that complexity intersects with human culture. Excavation In the epigraph above, the nam-shubs of Neal Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash are ancient Sumerian incantations whose magic infects the modern substrates of silicon and binary logic. A megalomaniacal billionaire begins digging up Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with actual spells that once had the power to directly program human minds.

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Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise.”35 This line of argument evolved into the theory of autopoiesis proposed by philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1970s, the second wave of cybernetics which adapted the pattern-preservation of homeostasis more fully into the context of biological systems. Describing organisms as information also suggests the opposite, that information has a will to survive, that as Stewart Brand famously put it, “information wants to be free.”36 Like Neal Stephenson’s programmable minds, like the artificial intelligence researchers who seek to model the human brain, this notion of the organism as message reframes biology (and the human) to exist at least aspirationally within the boundary of effective computability. Cybernetics and autopoiesis lead to complexity science and efforts to model these processes in simulation.

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

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

What’s more, this will happen at a time when technology is anyway tending to increase inequality in the industrial economies. So although politicians fret about the tax bill for the welfare state, it is inequality that presents the most serious challenge. This is where the dystopian visions derive their power. In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash all of Western society has been privatised. The affluent live in franchised quasi-national enclaves with their own private police forces — luckily the cops accept all major credit cards. Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong is one of the better quality franchises. Companies educate their own indentured workers and the Mafia is one of the major powers in the economy.

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But this falls into the trap of assuming there is a fixed pot of work available to be shared more or less fairly — the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy, as economists call it. It does not escape from the tyranny of thinking about people’s options in terms of jobs and not-jobs. For an alternative vision, let’s turn to science fiction. Neal Stephenson’s view about how people will make their way in the world in Snow Crash is at The Weightless World 232 least as plausible as the jobbist outlook. It starts with a very a distinctive and American view of the role of government. The Federal Government in a future USA has put all Federal buildings in Washington DC out to a tourism concession.

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Lester Salamon & Helmut Anheier (1996) The Emerging Non-profit Sector, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Juliet Schor (1992) The Overworked American, Basic Books, New York. Joseph Schumpeter (first published 1942) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Gill Seyfang and Colin Williams (February 1997) ‘LETS make money work for people rather than profits’, Kindred Spirit. Neal Stephenson (first published 1992) Snow Crash, Bantam, London. Bruce Sterling (1988) Islands in the Net, Arbor House. Susan Strange (1996) The Retreat of the State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Vito Tanzi & Ludger Schuknecht (December 1995) ‘The growth of government and reform of the state’, IMF Working Paper.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Danny Hillis, double helix, information security, interchangeable parts, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, selection bias, Snow Crash, Stewart Brand, trade route

Anathem Neal Stephenson TO MY PARENTS Contents Note to the Reader [ Part 1 ] Provener [ Part 2 ] Apert [ Part 3 ] Eliger [ Part 4 ] Anathem [ Part 5 ] Voco [ Part 6 ] Peregrin [ Part 7 ] Feral [ Part 8 ] Orithena [ Part 9 ] Inbrase [ Part 10 ] Messal [ Part 11 ] Advent [ Part 12 ] Requiem [ Part 13] Reconstitution Glossary Calca 1: Cutting the Cake Calca 2: Hemn (Configuration) Space Calca 3: Complex Versus Simple Protism Acknowledgments About the Author Other Books by Neal Stephenson Credits Copyright About the Publisher Anathem: (1) In Proto-Orth, a poetic or musical invocation of Our Mother Hylaea, which since the time of Adrakhones has been the climax of the daily liturgy (hence the Fluccish word Anthem meaning a song of great emotional resonance, esp. one that inspires listeners to sing along).

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This is unfortunate in a way, since many readers will presumably wish to know where the ideas being discussed by the characters actually originated, and how to learn more about them. Accordingly, detailed acknowledgments, complete with links to other resources, may be found at www.nealstephenson.com/anathemacknowledgments. About the Author NEAL STEPHENSON is the author of seven previous novels. He lives in Seattle, Washington. www.nealstephenson.com Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. ALSO BY NEAL STEPHENSON The System of the World The Confusion Quicksilver Cryptonomicon The Diamond Age Snow Crash Zodiac Credits Jacket design by Ervin Serrano Jacket photographs by Yolande De Korte/Dave Wall @ Arcangel Images Copyright This book is a work of fiction.

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Wick: In Complex Protism, a fully generalized Directed Acyclic Graph in which a large (possibly infinite) number of cosmi are linked by a more or less complicated web of cause-and-effect relationships. Information flows from cosmi that are more “up-Wick” to those that are more “down-Wick” but not vice versa. CALCA 1: Cutting the Cake A supplement to Anathem by Neal Stephenson “LET’S SAY THAT EACH serving will be a square, the same width as the spatula. Go ahead and cut in one corner of the pan.” Dath cut the cake thus: and then made more cuts thus, to produce the four servings I’d asked for: “I can’t believe you’re doing this!” Arsibalt muttered. “If it worked for Thelenes…” I muttered back.

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

Paul Fraser of Spectrum SF applied far more editorial muscle than I had any right to expect, in preparation for the original magazine serialization; likewise Marty Halpern of Golden Gryphon Press, who made this longer edition possible. Finally, I stand on the shoulders of giants. Three authors in particular made it possible for me to imagine this book and I salute you, H. P. Lovecraft, Neal Stephenson, and Len Deighton. Introduction CHARLIE'S DEMONS "THE ATROCITY ARCHIVE" IS A SCIENCE FICTION novel. Its form is that of a horror thriller with lots of laughs, some of them uneasy. Its basic premise is that mathematics can be magic. Its lesser premise is that if the world contains things that (as Pratchett puts it somewhere) even the dark is afraid of, then you can bet that there'll be a secret government agency covering them up for our own good.

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Ford's Web of Angels onward, we've had hackers exploiting networks to find the truth about what's really going on. Sometimes the hacker archetype overlaps with the guy-with-a-gun (as in Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction or William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic), or the gamer-with-a-virtual-gun (in film, Mamoru Oshii's Avalon), or even both (Hiro Protagonist, in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). Mao remarked, "power grows from the barrel of a gun"--both in real life and in fiction--and if guns are about power, then hacking is about secret knowledge, and knowledge is also power. In fact, when you get down to it, what the fictional hacker has come to symbolize is not that far away from the fictional spy--or the nameless narrator of one of H.

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He was right: if I'd read Declare it would have derailed me completely. And that would have been a shame, because in tone and attitude the two novels are very different. Declare is perhaps best read as an homage to John Le Carré, whereas the outlook of "The Atrocity Archive" is perhaps closer to Len Deighton, by way of Neal Stephenson. Declare is about disengagement and the abandonment of former responsibility; "The Atrocity Archive" is more interested in coming of age in a world of ghosts and shadows. Declare is about the secret services that waged The Great Game; "The Atrocity Archive" is about the agencies that fought the Wizard War.

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

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

A scan of “The Development of Abstract Art” is available at <http://www.arthistory-online.info/imagepages/ahom03w07/ahom03w07barrdiagram.htm>. A downloadable movie of a Lorenz strange attractor is available at <http://hypertextbook.com/chaos/movies/lorenz.mov>. 28 . Here I am caging the title of the third book of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Stephenson was of course caging Isaac Newton. Neal Stephenson, The System of the World (New York: William Morrow, 2004). 29 . In The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), neoliberal journalist Thomas L. Friedman looks at these same conditions and sees within them the seeds of what he calls Globalism 3.0. 30.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

It occurs to me that this is not a man who would have adjusted well to prison life. As we sit in silence punctuated by the sound of noodle slurps, I peruse his shelves. One wall is covered in awards from civic organizations and privacy groups, the other with books on nuclear history, novels by Isaac Asimov and Neal Stephenson, and below them a mass of cryptography textbooks. It’s only when I mention one in particular, titled PGP Source Code and Internals, that Zimmermann immediately sets aside his lunch and switches into war-story-telling mode. “As soon as they decided to prosecute me,” he says in a mischievous tone, “that book would have been Exhibit A in my defense.”

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They later asked John Gilmore if he would host an e-mail list on the server of his personal site, Toad.com, and he eagerly agreed. But it was Jude Milhon, Hughes’s girlfriend several decades his senior, who provided the group’s name. At the time, science fiction authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson had adopted the “cyberpunk” genre, stories of bohemian hackers fighting steely megacorporations in virtual worlds. But Milhon, a writer for the early technoculture magazine Mondo 2000, told Hughes that the group he and May were creating wasn’t composed of mere cyberpunks, but a new species of hacker: “cypherpunks.”

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They were invited to appear on the talk show of Egill Helgason to discuss their bombshell bank leak, two idealistic young men unable to suppress goofy grins on camera as they basked in some of the first mainstream attention to their work. Afterward, strangers on the street offered them hugs and bought them drinks in bars. It was on the set of Helgason’s talk show that Assange reintroduced a long-smoldering idea, a blend of his love of Neal Stephenson’s data haven novel Cryptonomicon, his recent work digging into the internals of the Cayman Islands holdings of the Swiss bank Julius Baer, and Barlow’s seed of an idea from his talk a year before. “You mentioned to me this idea that in Iceland we should become a vanguard of publishing freedom,” Helgason, a cheery round man with blond curls said to the pair of WikiLeakers in their on-camera interview.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

Endpaper Illustrations About the Author NEAL STEPHENSON is the author of Reamde, Anathem, and the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), as well as Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Also by Neal Stephenson Some Remarks Reamde Anathem The System of the World The Confusion Quicksilver Cryptonomicon The Diamond Age Snow Crash Zodiac Copyright Illustrations by Weta Workshop; copyright © by Neal Stephenson Lead Illustrator: Christian Pearce Creative Research: Ben Hawker and Paul Tobin This book is a work of fiction.

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Dedication TO JAIME, MARIA, MARCO, AND JEFF Contents Dedication Part One The Age of the One Moon The Seven Sisters Scouts Pioneers and Prospectors Consolidation Casting of Lots Cloud Ark Part Two White Sky Hard Rain Ymir Endurance Cleft Part Three The Habitat Ring circa A+5000 Five Thousand Years Later Epilogue Acknowledgments Endpaper Illustrations About the Author Also by Neal Stephenson Copyright About the Publisher Part One The Age of the One Moon THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero. An amateur astronomer in Utah was the first person on Earth to realize that something unusual was happening.

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Also by Neal Stephenson Some Remarks Reamde Anathem The System of the World The Confusion Quicksilver Cryptonomicon The Diamond Age Snow Crash Zodiac Copyright Illustrations by Weta Workshop; copyright © by Neal Stephenson Lead Illustrator: Christian Pearce Creative Research: Ben Hawker and Paul Tobin This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. SEVENEVES. Copyright © 2015 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things by Donald A. Norman

A Pattern Language, crew resource management, Dean Kamen, industrial robot, job automation, language acquisition, Neal Stephenson, Rodney Brooks, Vernor Vinge, Yogi Berra

The pantry, refrigerator, and cooking robots work smoothly to prepare the day's menu and, finally, place the completed meal onto dishes provided by the pantry robot. Some robots will take care of children by playing with them, reading to them, singing songs. Educational toys are already doing this, and the sophisticated robot could act as a powerful tutor, starting with the alphabet, reading, and arithmetic, but soon expanding to almost any topic. Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel, The Diamond Age, TLFeBOOK Six: Emotional Machines 171 does a superb job of showing how an interactive book, The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer., can take over the entire education of young girls from age four through adulthood. The illustrated primer is still some time in the future, but more limited tutors are already in existence.

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Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable law. 165 "The psychologists Robert Sekuler and Randolph Blake" (Sekuler & Blake, 1998) 166 "as happens to some emotionally impaired people" (Damasio, 1994,1999) 169 "The 1980s was the decade of the PC." Toshitada Doi, president of Sony Digital Creatures Laboratory. (Nov. 2000) 170—171 "Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel" (Stephenson, 1995) 173 "Rodney Brooks, one of the world's leading roboticists" (Brooks, 2002). The quotation is from page 125. 175 "Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist": The Buddha in the Robot (Mori, 1982). The argument that we are more bothered when the robot is too close to human appearance comes from an essay by Dave Bryant (Bryant, not dated).

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

You’re not going to make your lunch with one, or even your next pair of shoes. For that you’ll need a full-on Universal Fabricator. Just like the Star Trek Replicator, it’s a machine that can make almost anything on command. Too bad it’s still fictional. The idea has fired the imagination of science fiction writers for decades. In his novel, The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson imagines an entire society transformed by “matter compilers” that can make whatever you need, rendering scarcity obsolete. In the beginning was an empty chamber, a diamond hemisphere, glowing with dim red light. In the center of the floor slab, one could see a naked cross-section of an eight-centimeter Feed, a central vacuum pipe surrounded by a collection of smaller lines, each a bundle of microscopic conveyor belts carrying nano-mechanical building blocks—individual atoms, or scores of them linked together in handy modules.

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id=tcm:12–75973 40. ht​tp​://m​one​y.c​nn.​com​/ma​gaz​ine​s/f​ort​une​/gl​oba​l50​0/2​011​/pe​rfo​rme​rs/c​omp​anie​s/b​igg​est​/ 41. http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2011/01/11/is-the-iphone-bad-for-the-american-economy/ 42. http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/crowdfunding-exemption.html 43. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/04/05/president-obama-sign-jumpstart-our-business-startups-jobs-act 44. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/the-underground-venture-capital-economy/2010/12/20/gIQAzkRQvJ_blog.html 45. http://cultureconductor.com/author/sarahdopp/ 46. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17531736 47. http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_kickstarter/all/1 48. http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2012/notes-from-chad-funding-etsys-future/ 49. http://www.slideshare.net/stevekeifer/b2b-emarketplaces-rise-and-fall-by-steve-keifer 50. http://ftp.iftf.me/public/IFTF_open_fab_China_conversation.pdf 51. http://www.iftf.org/LightweightInnovation 52. Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1995). 53. http://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/crystal-method 54. Chris Anderson, FREE: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Hyperion, 2009). 55. Here are the main tools in my workshop: Hardware: • First-generation MakerBot Cupcake, upgraded as much as possible • MakerBot Cyclops 3-D scanner • MyDIYCNC • Hitachi desktop bandsaw • Dremel workstation/drill press • Weller WES51 soldering station • Picoscope USB oscilloscope • Saleae USB logic analyzer • Volleman Power supply/Multimeter/Soldering station Software: • Adobe Illustrator (for laser cutting drawings) • Autodesk 123D (for 3-D) • Cadsoft Eagle (for PCB design) • Arduino, Notepad++ and TortoiseSVN and TortoiseGIT for version control

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

TC39 had to decide whether to continue supporting an outdated method for the sake of not breaking old websites or to break them for the sake of evolving JavaScript, the language.190 A heated debate ensued, resulting in a titillating suggestion, made by developer Michael Ficarra, to rename “flatten” to “smoosh” (complete, of course, with an adorable bunny GIF).191 Michael Ficarra’s “smoosh” proposal. Software doesn’t die, because someone out there—someone its developers may not even be aware of—will continue to use it. The author Neal Stephenson once described Unix as “not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic . . . Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it.”192 Code is not a product to be bought and sold so much as a living form of knowledge.

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., https://opensource.guide/metrics/. 182 Eghbal, “Methodologies for Measuring Project Health.” 04 183 Kevin Kelly, “Immortal Technologies,” The Technium, February 9, 2006, https://kk.org/thetechnium/immortal-techno/. 184 Nathan Ensmenger, “When Good Software Goes Bad: The Surprising Durability of an Ephemeral Technology,” Indiana University, September 11, 2014, http://homes.sice.indiana.edu/nensmeng/files/ensmenger-mice.pdf. 185 Fergus Henderson, “Software Engineering at Google,” ArXiv, February 19, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf. 186 Alex Handy, “Ruby on Rails 3.0 Goes Modular,” SD Times, February 12, 2010, https://sdtimes.com/ruby-on-rails/ruby-on-rails-3-0-goes-modular. 187 Yehuda Katz, “Rails and Merb Merge,” Katz Got Your Tongue, December 23, 2008, https://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/. 188 Byrne Hobart, “The Case for Subsidizing, or Banning, COBOL Classes,” Medium, March 29, 2019, https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/you-cant-reduce-all-economic-decisions-to-a-series-of-financial-bets-but-it-s-a-good-way-to-d40e88e89e17. 189 Chris Zacharias, “A Conspiracy To Kill IE6,” Chris Zacharias (blog), May 1, 2019, http://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6. 190 Jacob Friedmann, “SmooshGate: The Ongoing Struggle between Progress and Stability in JavaScript,” Medium, March 10, 2018, https://medium.com/@jacobdfriedmann/smooshgate-the-ongoing-struggle-between-progress-and-stability-in-javascript-2a971c1162dd. 191 Michael Ficarra (michaelficarra), “Rename Flatten to Smoosh,” Tc39 / Proposal-flatMap Pull Requests, GitHub, March 6, 2018, https://github.com/tc39/proposal-flatMap/pull/56. 192 Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1999), 88. 193 Chrislgarry / Apollo-11, GitHub, accessed March 31, 2020, https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11. 194 Nadia Eghbal, “The Hidden Costs of Software” (lecture, the Web Conference, San Francisco, May 16, 2019). 195 Free Software Foundation, “What Is Free Software?

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

.,” Geophysical Research Letters 28 (May 15, 2001); and Clive Thompson, “The Five-Year Forecast,” New York, November 27, 2006. “AN INTELLECTUALLY VENTURESOME FELLOW NAMED NATHAN”: This section is drawn from author interviews with Nathan and his colleagues, whom the reader will meet in fuller detail in Chapter 5. Neal Stephenson—yes, the same one who writes phantasmagorical novels—was particularly helpful in walking us through some of the details and showing computer simulations. The hurricane killer described is also known as Jeffrey A. Bowers et al., “Water Alteration Structure Applications and Methods,” U.S. Patent Application 20090173366, July 9, 2009.

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INTELLECTUAL VENTURES AND GEOENGINEERING: This section is primarily drawn from a visit we made to the Intellectual Ventures lab in Bellevue, Washington, in early 2008, and from subsequent interviews and correspondence with Nathan Myhrvold, Ken Caldeira, Lowell Wood, John Latham, Bill Gates, Rod Hyde, Neal Stephenson, Pablos Holman, and others. During our visit to IV, several other people contributed to the conversation, including Shelby Barnes, Wayt Gibbs, John Gilleand, Jordin Kare, Casey Tegreene, and Chuck Witmer…. Conor and Cameron Myhrvold, Nathan’s college-age sons, also participated. They have already stepped into the invention racket themselves with a “wearable/ portable protection system for a body,” or a human air bag.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

And there have been moments of a nostalgic sublime—such as the final flight of the space shuttle Discovery, carried into history on a special Boeing 747 airliner, which had people craning their necks to watch as the retired spacecraft was ferried from Florida to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. But the hyperloop is a blueprint, Las Vegas is a simulacrum, virtual reality is not—and as the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson wrote after watching Discovery pass overhead, the nostalgic sublime of its final flight mostly accentuated the possibilities we’ve given up: “My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions.

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Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even twenty years before that seem plausibly circa 2012. … Not long ago in the newspaper, I came across an archival photograph of Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell with a dozen of their young staff at Morgans, the ur-boutique hotel, in 1985.

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

The history I offer here thus largely and willfully resists generalizations and sweeping conclusions; it highlights instead the stories of individuals, it pays heed to the difference different tools and technologies actually make, and it reveals how attitudes and assumptions can sometimes change over the span of even just a few years. It also, I would hope—constructively, even joyfully—extends our imagination of what writing is by illustrating the variety of ways in which all manifestations of that activity coexist and cohabitate with technology. Take, for example, Neal Stephenson and his epic Baroque Cycle. His colophon to the three books (just shy of 3,000 published pages of scientific and historical fiction) captures what I mean. He tells us there that the manuscript was drafted longhand, using a succession of boutique fountain pens. Stephenson then transcribed the text to his personal computer system using the venerable Emacs program and typeset it himself using TeX, the computer typesetting system to which Donald Knuth (perhaps our most famous living computer scientist) devoted nearly a decade of his career to perfecting.

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Peters, “Writing,” 4. 90. Though liberally reproduced around the Web, this text is currently unavailable from its most widely addressed location on Stephenson’s own personal website: http://www.nealstephenson.com/content/author_colophon.htm. I reference it instead from http://wiki.zibet.net/wiki.pl/Neal_Stephenson. Stephenson has also confirmed the particulars of his process in several interviews reprinted in Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing (New York: William Morrow, 2012), noting in particular that the LISP program “was nasty and tedious, but in the end reasonably satisfying” (31). In a separate interview therein he indicates that Cryptonomicon (1999) was the last book he wrote directly on the computer and that he switched over to longhand because he found it often helped him when he was blocked.

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Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1971); the definitive textual history of the poem has been reconstructed by Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting The Waste Land (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); finally, see Hannah Sullivan’s reading of the revisions, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 120–146. 95. One notable example is The Mongoliad, an ongoing historical fantasy saga cowritten by Neal Stephenson and six other authors. The group used Microsoft Word and Track Changes to share drafts and comments. See Cesar Torres, “How Swords, Track Changes, and Amazon Led to The Mongoliad: Book Two,” Ars Technica, October 14, 2012, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/10/14/how-swords-track-changes-and-amazon-led-to-the-mongoliad-book-two/. 96.

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

Finally, there have been various big-picture conversations over the years with George Dyson and Jaron Lanier that undoubtedly influenced this book. About the Author NEAL STEPHENSON is the bestselling author of the novels The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Also by Neal Stephenson The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland) Seveneves Some Remarks Reamde Anathem The System of the World The Confusion Quicksilver Cryptonomicon The Diamond Age Snow Crash Zodiac Copyright This is a work of fiction.

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Contents Cover Title Page Map Dedication Book 1 Part 1 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Part 2 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Part 3 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Part 4 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Part 5 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Part 6 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Part 7 Chapter 42 Book 2 Part 8 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Part 9 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Part 10 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Part 11 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Neal Stephenson Copyright About the Publisher Book 1 Part 1 1 Dodge became conscious. His phone was burbling on the bedside table. Without opening his eyes he found it with his hand, jerked it free of its charging cord, and drew it into bed with him. He tapped it once to invoke its snooze feature.

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Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. FALL; OR, DODGE IN HELL. Copyright © 2019 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Like SpaceX, Blue Origin will use a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) rocket that’s fully reusable. After being named valedictorian of his high school class, the eighteen-year-old Bezos said he wanted “to build space hotels, amusement parks, and colonies for two or three million people who would be in orbit.”7 Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and other science fiction novels, worked part-time for Blue Origin for several years. Meanwhile, NASA isn’t simply giving up and passing the baton. It’s like an older brother with achievements under his belt who suddenly has a set of young, talented, and rambunctious siblings.

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Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, ed. by G. Benford and J. Benford 2013. Lucky Bat Books. This book represents the proceedings of a conference by the same title in 2013, featuring scientists such as Sir Martin Rees, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Hawking, and Paul Davies, and science fiction authors such as Neal Stephenson, David Brin, and Nancy Kress. 18. Frontiers of Propulsion Science by M. Millis and E. Davis 2009. Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. 19. The 100 Year Starship (100YSS) project was started in 2012 by NASA and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

air freight, airport security, autism spectrum disorder, book value, crowdsourcing, digital map, drone strike, Google Earth, industrial robot, informal economy, Jones Act, large denomination, megacity, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, ransomware, restrictive zoning, scientific management, side project, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, South China Sea, SQL injection, the built environment, the scientific method, young professional

PRAISE “Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear, and he makes them funny, heartbreaking and thrilling.”—Time “The rarest of geniuses.”—New York Post “[The] Homer of geek mythology.”—San Diego Union-Tribune “Neal Stephenson has made a name for himself as a writer whose imagination knows no limits.”—Salon.com “The Seattle writer is hard-wired to tell stories, explore technology and riff on anything that catches his fancy.”—Oregonian “The cult legend.”—Popular Mechanics “The view from Stephenson’s world is a marvel.”—Seattle Times “For all of his achievements, Neal Stephenson’s most impressive may be his ability to attract a following equal parts hacker and literati… It’s not just that his prose is smooth and often witty or that his intelligence is wide-ranging and speculative, but that he wrestles with concepts … in ways that would shame most ‘literary’ novelists.”

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REAMDE Neal Stephenson WILLIAM MORROW An Imprint of Harper­CollinsPublishers CONTENTS Cover Title Page Part I: Nine Dragons Day 0 Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Part II: American Falls Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Day 15 Day 17 Day 18 Day 19 Day 20 Day 21 Acknowledgments About the Author Praise Other Works Credits Copyright About the Publisher PART I Nine Dragons THE FORTHRAST FARM Northwest Iowa Thanksgiving Richard kept his head down. Not all those cow pies were frozen, and the ones that were could turn an ankle.

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There is no Prohibition Crick, as far as I know. In short, none of the geographical description in Reamde can be expected to tally with the real world or its high-quality digital representations, and so readers are encouraged to enjoy it as what it is—a work of fiction—and leave it at that. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Neal Stephenson is the author of Anathem; the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World); Cryptonomicon; The Diamond Age; Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine’s top one hundred all-time best English-language novels; and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Which is a roundabout way of saying that even before the ink has dried on the manuscript page, novelists’ families—nuclear and extended—have had to put up with a lot from us. The greatest share of my gratitude, always, goes to them. Neal Stephenson May 2004 About the Author NEAL STEPHENSON is the author of the novels Quicksilver, The Confusion, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Don’t miss the next book by your favorite author. Sign up now for AuthorTracker by visiting www.AuthorTracker.com. Also by Neal Stephenson The Confusion Quicksilver Cryptonomicon The Diamond Age Snow Crash Zodiac Credits Jacket design by Richard L.

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THE System OF THE WORLD VOL. III of THE BAROQUE CYCLE Neal Stephenson To Mildred Contents The story thus far… EPIGRAPH BOOK SIX Solomon’s Gold BOOK SEVEN Currency BOOK EIGHT The System of the World EPILOGS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY NEAL STEPHENSON CREDITS COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER But first whom shall we send In search of this new world, whom shall we find Sufficient? Who shall tempt with wandring feet The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his aerie flight Upborn with indefatigable wings Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive The happy Ile… MILTON, Paradise Lost The story thus far… In Boston in October 1713, Daniel Waterhouse, sixty-seven years of age, the Founder and sole Fellow of a failing college, the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts, has received a startling visit from the Alchemist Enoch Root, who has appeared on his doorstep brandishing a summons addressed to Daniel from Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, thirty.

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Aquan Jacket illustration of world map by Frederick de Wit from De Zee Atlas Amsterdam, 1662, Birmingham Library, UK This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

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

Then seeing that your agent and theirs have already communicated, put a meeting on the calendar and your agent has already booked you a flight out Tuesday night so that you are there in plenty of time. None of the above requires full artificial intelligence. A digital personal assistant or agent avatar that could carry out all of those tasks might appear to be quite intelligent, but there is a defined set of experiences it might be able to handle, just like the librarian portrayed in Neal Stephenson’s classic novel Snow Crash (1992). At some point, the capability of these agents will become so good that it will cease being Siri-like (where we laugh at her canned responses) to something we rely upon every day and solves quite complex problems. It simply doesn’t matter that it isn’t full AI.

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Figure 7.2: Max Headroom, the first computer-generated TV host ... or so we thought (Credit: The Max Headroom Show, UK’s Channel 4) It was only a few years before Max Headroom that computer avatars made their appearance in popular literature. The word avatar is actually from Hinduism and stands for the “descent” of a deity in a terrestrial form. In Norman Spinrad’s novel Songs from the Stars (1980), the term “avatar” was used to describe a computer-generated virtual experience, but it was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that cemented the use of the term in respect to computing. In Stephenson’s novel, the main character, Hiro Protagonist, discovers a pseudo-narcotic called Snow Crash, a computer virus that infects avatars in a virtual world known as the Metaverse, but in doing so carries over its effects to the human operators who are plugged into the Metaverse through VR goggles that project images onto the users’ retinas via lasers.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, book scanning, Colossal Cave Adventure, Columbine, corporate governance, Free Software Foundation, game design, glass ceiling, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Marc Andreessen, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Neal Stephenson, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, slashdot, Snow Crash, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, X Prize

He’s excited about his new ideas on rendering holographic worlds.” It was true, Carmack was over his previous accomplishment, just as he was over his past. Right now the next obvious step was for him to further enrich his virtual worlds. The spirit was in the air. In May 1992, when Wolfenstein was released, an author named Neal Stephenson published a book called Snow Crash, which described an inhabitable cyberspace world called the Metaverse. Science fiction, however, wasn’t inspiring Carmack’s progress; it was just his science. Technology was improving. So were his skills. 97 The opportunity to experiment came during the development of Spear of Destiny, the commercial spin-off of Wolfenstein that id was now making tor FormGen.

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Marshall McLuhan wrote in the sixties that “a society without games is one sunk in the zombie trance of the automaton… Games are 143 popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or actions of any culture… The games of a people reveal a great deal about them… [They] are a sort of artificial paradise like Disneyland or some Utopian vision by which we interpret and complete the meaning of our daily lives.” By 1994 there was no more Utopian vision of a game than the Holodeck. And the dream of this virtual world simulator on Star Trek was inching from science fiction to reality. Neal Stephensons sci-fi novel Snow Crash, published in 1992, imagined the Metaverse–an alternate reality similar to the “cyberspace” envisioned in William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer. The Internet was taking off, capable of connecting humans into such a domain. Arcades buzzed with virtual reality games–unseemly machines with big, clunky headsets that, for about five dollars, immersed a player in a firstperson polygon world.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

“The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five year olds?” Bezos was five when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969. FOR A WHILE, the company’s only employee was Bezos’s friend Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author. They had met in the mid-1990s at a dinner party, where they had started talking about rockets. While the pair may have “bored everyone else at the table,” Stephenson said, they hit it off. “It was super obvious he knew a lot.” As their friendship grew, they spent time launching model rockets in Seattle’s Magnuson Park overlooking Lake Washington.

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But then one Monday: John Schwartz, “Add to Your Shopping Cart: A Trip to the Edge of Space,” New York Times, January 18, 2005. Since its founding in 2000: Brad Stone, “Bezos in Space,” Newsweek, May 5, 2003. And one industry official: “One Small Step for Space Tourism…,” Economist, December 16, 2004. Stephenson held a variety: Neal Stephenson, http://www.nealstephenson.com/blue-origin.html. “It became obvious that”: Steve Connor, “Galaxy Quest,” Independent, August 4, 2003. “Those guys wanted to sell”: Brad Stone, “Amazon Enters the Space Race,” Wired, July 2003. 2. THE GAMBLE “Doesn’t anybody play higher”: Much of the discussion about Beal’s trips to Vegas relied on Michael Craig’s The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2006).

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

A Pattern Language, Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Boeing 747, Clayton Christensen, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, correlation coefficient, David Brooks, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, end-to-end encryption, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, finite state, Free Software Foundation, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, history of Unix, Innovator's Dilemma, job automation, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, level 1 cache, machine readable, macro virus, Multics, MVC pattern, Neal Stephenson, no silver bullet, OSI model, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, premature optimization, pre–internet, publish or perish, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, transaction costs, Turing complete, Valgrind, wage slave, web application

Transparency, Modularity, Multiprogramming, Configuration, Interfaces, Documentation, and Open Source chapters released. Shipped to Mark Taub at AW. Revision 0.0 1999 esr Public HTML draft, first four chapters only. * * * Dedication To Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, because you inspired me. Preface Preface Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history. -- Neal Stephenson There is a vast difference between knowledge and expertise. Knowledge lets you deduce the right thing to do; expertise makes the right thing a reflex, hardly requiring conscious thought at all. This book has a lot of knowledge in it, but it is mainly about expertise. It is going to try to teach you the things about Unix development that Unix experts know, but aren't aware that they know.

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Gentner & Nielsen sum up the tradeoff very well in The Anti-Mac Interface [Gentner-Nielsen]: “[Visual interfaces] work well for simple actions with a small number of objects, but as the number of actions or objects increases, direct manipulation quickly becomes repetitive drudgery. The dark side of a direct manipulation interface is that you have to manipulate everything. Instead of an executive who gives high-level instructions, the user is reduced to an assembly-line worker who must carry out the same task over and over”. Noted science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson made the same point, less directly but more entertainingly, in his brilliant and discursive essay In the Beginning Was the Command Line [Stephenson]. A typical Unix old hand's take on this problem is rather less theoretical: The commercial world generally goes for the novice mode because (a) purchase decisions are often made on the basis of 30 seconds trial, and (b) it minimizes the demands on customer support to have only a dumbed-down GUI.

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ISBN 0-596-00132-0. [Spinellis] Journal of Systems and Software. Diomidis Spinellis. “Notable Design Patterns for Domain-Specific Languages”. 56. (1). February 2001. p. 91-99. Available on the Web. [Stallman] Richard M. Stallman. The GNU Manifesto. Available on the Web. [Stephenson] Neal Stephenson. In the Beginning Was the Command Line. 1999. Available on the Web, and also as a trade paperback from Avon Books. [Stevens90] W. Richard Stevens. Unix Network Programming. Prentice-Hall. 1990. ISBN 0-13-949876-1. The classic on this topic. Note: Some later editions of this book omit coverage of the Version 6 networking facilities like mx().

The confusion by Neal Stephenson

correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land bank, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, web of trust

About the Author NEAL STEPHENSON issueth from a Clan of yeomen, itinerant Parsons, ingenieurs, and Natural Philosophers that hath long dwelt in bucolick marches and rural Shires of his native Land, and trod the Corridors of her ’Varsities. At a young age, finding himself in a pretty Humour for the writing of Romances, and the discourse of Natural Philosophy and Technologick Arts, he took up the Pen, and hath not since laid it down. Credits Jacket design by Richard L. Aquan Jacket illustration: 1746 plan of Versailles/Historic Urban Plans, Inc. Also by Neal Stephenson Quicksilver Cryptonomicon The Diamond Age Snow Crash Zodiac The epigraph on page 292 is from The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, edited and translated by H.

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Vol. II of THE BAROQUE CYCLE Neal Stephenson To Maurine THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE TO BE THANKED for their help in the creation of the Baroque Cycle of which this book, The Confusion, is the second volume. Accordingly, please see the acknowledgments in Quicksilver, Volume One of the Baroque Cycle. Author’s Note THIS VOLUME CONTAINS two novels, Bonanza and Juncto, that take place concurrently during the span 1689–1702. Rather than present one, then the other (which would force the reader to jump back to 1689 in mid-volume), I have interleaved sections of one with sections of the other so that the two stories move forward in synchrony.

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Bligh’s Coffee-house, London Bonaventure Rossignol to Eliza Eliza to Rossignol Eliza to Pontchartrain Rossignol to Eliza Pretzsch, Saxony Pontchartrain to Eliza Eliza to Pontchartrain The Dower-house of Pretzsch Jean Bart to Eliza Leipzig Eliza to Jean Bart BOOK 4: BONANZA Southern Fringes of the Mogul Empire Malabar Book 5: The Juncto The Thames Dunkirk An Abandoned Church in France Winter Quarters of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards Near Namur The Track to Pretzsch A House Overlooking the Meuse Valley Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover BOOK 4: BONANZA Japan Book 5: The Juncto Berlin BOOK 4: BONANZA The Pacific Ocean Book 5: The Juncto Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin BOOK 4: BONANZA Mexico City, New Spain Mexico City Qwghlm Book 5: The Juncto Hôtel Arcachon BOOK 4: BONANZA En Route from Paris to London About the Author Also by Neal Stephenson Credits Copyright About the Publisher Book 4 Bonanza So great is the dignity and excellency of humane nature, and so active those sparks of heavenly fire it partakes of, that they ought to be look’d upon as very mean, and unworthy the name of men, who thro’ pusillanimity, by them call’d prudence, or thro’ sloth, which they stile moderation, or else through avarice, to which they give the name of frugality, at any rate withdraw themselves from performing great and noble actions.

Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

And for the few men in their lives who saw them as individuals and valued them for their personhood, they made the world a better place. The Powerpuff Girls ran for six years (1998–2004)—longer than the age of the titular characters. “UNTIL A MAN IS TWENTY-FIVE, HE STILL THINKS, EVERY SO OFTEN, THAT UNDER THE RIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES HE COULD BE THE BADDEST MOTHERF–ER IN THE WORLD.” —NEAL STEPHENSON, SNOW CRASH THE MALE GEEK has largely made it a point of pride to distance himself from the stereotypical tough guys of the world. But the male geek is deluding himself. Fact is, we’re not all that far removed from each other, geeks and jocks. Stephenson nails why: The notion that, if circumstances were right, we could be “The Man” is the impulse that fuels male fantasies, from Mickey Mantle to Batman, from Muhammad Ali to Casanova.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

We can look back fondly at the 1990s because we made it through them safely. Where did the sense of invention go—the sense of futurity—the sense that by working in tech, you were somehow building a better tomorrow, a cooler tomorrow, a smarter tomorrow, a more democratic tomorrow? The answer is: China. 13 Author Neal Stephenson wrote a wonderful article on cable-laying and its culture for Wired magazine in 1996. In it, he said, “The crews of the cable barges tend to be jacks-of-all-trades: ship’s masters who also know how to dive using various types of breathing rigs or who can slam out a report on their laptops, embed a few digital images in it, and email it to the other side of the world over a satellite phone, then pick up a welding torch and go to work on the barge.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

If we get that going (and obviously there are some people trying DigiCash, and a couple of others), the banks will become the obsolete dinosaurs they deserve to become,” Back told the Cypherpunk list soon after releasing hashcash. The Cypherpunk seekers were given a platonic ideal to shoot for when science fiction writer Neal Stephenson published his book Cryptonomicon in 1999. The novel, which became legendary in hacker circles, imagined a subterranean world that was fueled by a kind of digital gold that allowed people to keep their identities private. The novel included lengthy descriptions of the cryptography that made it all possible.

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Roger Ver was in from Tokyo and spent most of the weekend in a sweatshirt he had made with a picture of two honey badgers copulating. Roger also brought along Nic Cary, the young man he had hired to run Blockchain.info. Morehead was pushing Roger to sell part of his stake in Blockchain.info, which was coming to look increasingly valuable. Morehead had also roped in Neal Stephenson, the author of the science fiction book Cryptonomicon, which had popularized the idea of virtual currencies when it was published in 1999. Roger quickly got Stephenson set up with his first Bitcoin wallet, from Blockchain.info. Wences Casares couldn’t make the trip to Lake Tahoe—he was too busy closing the sale of Lemon—but his longtime collaborator, Micky Malka, made the journey.

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Even electronic monies, those very monies emphasized by Goux, have symbolic values projected onto them (Gilbert 2005: 378; see also Gilbert 1998). Moreover, the neat threefold distinction (between gold, paper, and digital currency) on which Goux’s argument depends is equally open to question. Digital gold currencies such as Pecunix are a case in point. Explored in Neal Stephenson’s novel, Cryptonomicon (Stephenson 1999), digital gold currency is hybrid: though it represents gold, its security is protected by code, i.e., digital cryptography. Dematerialization as Goux defines it has displaced money’s underlying roots in time and space only up to a point, never completely; indeed, it has brought new forms of symbolic meaning into money’s compass.

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Most of the utopian images of money we have seen in this chapter are concerned with money’s substantive features: the source of value it represents, its effect on social inequality and human freedom, its potential as a social technology for addressing resource depletion, and its role in forging sustainable local economies. In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson conjures up an image of future money—most would probably see it as dystopian—that is striking because it focuses not on value, but rather on process. His protagonist, Bud, secures a new line of credit from an individual calling himself the Peacock Bank. The credit is implanted in the iliac crest of Bud’s pelvis—although he could have opted for the mastoid bone in the skull, or indeed anywhere a big bone was close to the surface.

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Thus he is the managing director of a village bank, not a village money-lender; the 20% he charges for income-generating loans is called interest not usury as any rate over about 8% was called in the good old days; the loans he gives are called micro-credit rather than micro-debt; the people to whom this micro-credit is extended are called borrowers not debtors” (Gregory 2012: 385). 21 Riegel does not cite Proudhon; neither does Greco. 22 At around the same time, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon was published. Stephenson mixed the genres of historical novel (one of the book’s central characters was based on Turing, whose work in cryptography was crucial to Allied efforts during the Second World War) and science fiction thriller. One of the key story lines tells of an attempt to establish a data haven in Southeast Asia, partly funded through a digital currency using powerful encryption and backed by gold (Stephenson 1999). 23 See http://p2pfoundation.net/bitcoin. 24 See http://blockchain.info/.

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

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

If you want to learn to count in cuneiform go tohttp://it.stlawu.edu/~dmelvill/mesomath/Numbers.html. 3. Nicolas Negroponte wrote a wonderful book on this: Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995). A more recent, more technical book is Frances Cairncross’ The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997); or see Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning … Was the Command Line (New York: Avon, 1999). 4. Various organizations monitor these trends, among them Gartner and Telegeography. For a summary see Juan Enriquez, “Latin America’s Changing Media: Social, Political, and Economic Implications,” Latin American Studies Association, September 24, 1998, Chicago. 5.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

"Nanotech: The Hope and the Hype," Technology Review, Special Report, vol. 102, no. 2 (March-April 1999), 46-63. very small particles: Niall McKay, "A Big Future for Very Small Machines," Reuters (November 10,1998). our mad system: Several of these examples are from K. Eric Drexler and Chris Peterson with Gayle Pergamit, Unrounding the Future: The Nanotechnolgy Revolution—The Path to Molecular Manufacturing and How It Will Change Our World (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991). One of the best of the recent nanotechnology science fiction books is Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age (New York: Bantam Books, 1996). 205 205 208 208 ChApTER 10 213 213 214 217 218 219 220 220 John Noble Wilford, "Superclusters of Galaxies Shed New Light on Cosmic Architecture, New York Times 0anuary 26, 1999), Dl. John Noble Wilford, "New Findings Help Balance the Cosmological Books," New York Times (February 9, 1999), Dl. and more funding: Brian Sager made this argument in an interview with the three authors in the fall of 1998.

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Explores what makes a nation's industries competitive in the global marketplace, and presents Porter's findings about the importance of "clusters" in creating competitive advantage. Contact, by Carl Sagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). A science fiction book that examines what would happen if our contemporary world finally did pick up radio signals from other intelligent life in the galaxy. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson (New York: Bantam Books, 1996). A science fiction book that broke new ground by envisioning a world where 316 Selected BibiioQRAphy nanotechnology is widespread and the world is organized by cultural tribes that are defined not by geography, but by mentality, The Discoverers, a History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself, by Daniel J.

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

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

More recently the definition begins on a note of higher self-esteem: “Geek: A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.” As geek mutated its way toward respectability, it was joined by geek out. Author Neal Stephenson explained in a 2005 New York Times op-ed: “To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal—and to have a good time doing it.” True geeks have a capacity to geek out on almost anything—even kitchen cleanup. An enthusiast of productivity software named Merlin Mann, who in 2004 started a blog called 43 Folders that quickly became a cult favorite among programmers, once composed a love letter to a book he was reading called Home Comforts: “Some deranged fold of my lizard brain gets most turned on by nine detailed pages on how to wash your dishes . . . .

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“one who eats (computer) bugs”: The original definition of computer geek is from Eric Raymond, ed., The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 3rd ed. (MIT Press, 1996), p. 120. “Geek: A person who has chosen”: The current definition of geek from the online Jargon File (source of the Hacker’s Dictionary) is at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/geek.htm. “To geek out on something”: From Neal Stephenson, “Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out,” New York Times, June 17, 2005, and also at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17 stephenson.htm?ex=1276660800&en=a693ccc4ec008424&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland&emc=rss. “Some deranged fold of my lizard brain”: Merlin Mann on his 43 Folders blog, September 15, 2004, at http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/15/home-comforts-illustrated-housekeeping-pr0n/.

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

In the coastal city of Longkou, Shandong province, China (just opposite Korea), Singaporean entrepreneurs are preparing to kick off the first of these, erecting improved port facilities and a power plant, as well as hotels, residential buildings, and, yes, shopping centers. The project, to occupy 1.3 square kilometers, reminds me of “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong” in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a sovereign nation set up like so many fried-noodle franchises along the feeder routes of edge-city America. But Mr. Lee’s Greater Singapore means very serious business, and the Chinese seem uniformly keen to get a franchise in their neighborhood, and pronto. Ordinarily, confronted with a strange city, I’m inclined to look for the parts that have broken down and fallen apart, revealing the underlying social mechanisms; how the place is really wired beneath the lay of the land as presented by the Chamber of Commerce.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

“Seeky,” everything2, March 30, 2001, http://everything2.com/title/seeky. something like “seeky”: “Suppose you have a roof with a hole in it,” the novelist Neal Stephenson explains, “that means it’s a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment.” Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon Books, 1999), 373–74. jet planes simply do not: In a widely publicized competition in July 2015, Airbus spent £14 million ($22 million) just to ensure the success of a single crossing of its electric plane over the English Channel.

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

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

See Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned – and Have Still to Learn – from the Financial Crisis (Allen Lane, 2014) 11. Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (Granta, 2011) 12. The metaverse of virtual reality became thrown into the public spotlight at the end of 2021 when Facebook’s parent company name was rebranded by Mark Zuckerberg as ‘Meta’. The original phrase was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, The Snow Crash; Daniel Villareal, ‘What is “Snow Crash”? Twitter Compares Facebook’s “Metaverse” Announcement to ’90s Novel’, Newsweek, 28 October 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/what-snow-crash-twitter-compares-facebooks-metaverse-announcement-90s-dystopian-sci-fi-1643690 13. Amy Greenshields, ‘Covid-19 Forces One of the Biggest Surges in Tech Investment in History, Finds World’s Largest Tech Leadership’, KPMG, 22 September 2020, https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2020/09/covid-19-forces-one-of-the-biggest-surges-in-technology-investment-in-history-finds-worlds-largest-technology-leadership-survey.html; McKinsey, ‘Global Business-Services Sourcing Comes of Age’, 1 September 2021, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/global-business-services-sourcing-comes-of-age 14.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Vinge presented the paper at a NASA colloquium, arguing, “We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.... Developments that before were thought might only happen ‘in a million years’ (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.” His idea became incredibly influential in both science and science fiction (writers such as Neal Stephenson and William Gibson wrestled with what it would mean for humanity, and such movies as The Matrix are set in a post-Singularity future). Vinge’s concept underlies how Kurzweil and other futurists envision the coming decades. If the present trends in technology continue, then the current exponential growth is picking up such steam that we hit a paradigm shift.

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While the Experience Music Project next door has the guitars used by Bob Dylan, Bo Diddley, and Kurt Cobain, the Science Fiction Museum rocks just as hard. Displayed in the museum are such artifacts as Captain Kirk’s command chair from Star Trek, the alien queen from Aliens, Darth Vader’s helmet from The Empire Strikes Back, Neal Stephenson’s handwritten manuscript for the Baroque Cycle trilogy, and the pistol used by Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. The museum also runs a kids’ program, including a “summer camp on Mars,” as well as a happy hour for the adults, with three-dollar beers on tap. It is easy to think of the Museum and Hall of Fame as only some sort of “Pantheon of Nerds” (what my editor jokingly called it), as science fiction may well be the ultimate of geekdom.

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The first is a trend toward more women writers, in particular the pioneering work of the recently deceased Octavia Butler, one of the first African American women science fiction writers and the only science fiction author ever to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. “Women writers tend to write more about the social stuff and what happens to people.” There is also an evident trend of more focus on the impact of computers and robotics. She notes the work of writers like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling, who helped found the “cyberpunk” movement. The trend emphasizes not merely the coming technology, but what happens when it gets placed “in the hands of our depraved society.” SCIENCE FICTION AND WAR “I thought Ender’s Game might be popular when I finished writing it—high-tension story, semi-tragic outcome.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Cyberpunk science fiction of the 1980s never got much into pure bank-free cryptographic currencies; it mostly treated the idea of transmitting money digitally at all as being interesting enough for story purposes. (If William Gibson had thought of Bitcoin for his cyber-heist short “Burning Chrome,” it could have been set in the present day.) The Cypherpunks got very excited about Neal Stephenson’s 1999 novel Cryptonomicon, one plot thread of which involves a fictional sultanate promoting a cryptographic digital currency, even though the book example is issued by a government and backed by gold. An anonymous person calling himself “Satoshi Nakamoto” started working on Bitcoin in 2007,15 as a completely trustless implementation of the b-money and Bitgold proposals16 (though Nakamoto wasn’t aware of Szabo’s work until quite late in the process).17 In 2008, he emailed Adam Back with some of his ideas, and six weeks later announced the Bitcoin white paper on the Cryptography and Cryptography Policy mailing list, a successor to the Cypherpunks list.

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Likewise, there could be Accidentcoin that those involved in an accident pay to similarly compensate passing-by drivers for lost #QualityofLife; payment could be immediate, and shifted later as insurance companies assess blame. In science-fiction parlance, it could be said that franchulates as envisioned in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash are finally on the horizon.106 Franchulates are the concept of a combination of a franchise and consulate, businesses that provide fee-based quasigovernmental services consumed by individuals as any other product or service, a concept that blockchain governance could make possible.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

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

.*4 As with intercontinental airline routes, direct Internet cable connections will gradually expand between South America, Africa, and Asia, reflecting their growing ties as well. The melting of the Arctic ice sheet has even made it possible to lay a new Polarnet cable over the North Pole directly connecting London and Tokyo. As the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson has written, “The cyberspace-warping power of wires changes the geometry of the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in. The financial districts of New York, London, and Tokyo are much closer to each other than the Bronx is to Manhattan.”2 More than thirty million people are employed in the software industry, either as professional developers or in ICT operations.

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Elliott, “The Role of Finance in the Economy: Implications for Structural Reform of the Financial Sector” (Brookings Institution, July 11, 2013). CHAPTER 14: CYBER CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS 1. Julio Bezerra et al., The Mobile Revolution: How Mobile Technologies Drive a Trillion-Dollar Impact (Boston Consulting Group, Jan. 2015). 2. Neal Stephenson, “Mother Earth, Mother Board,” Wired, Apr. 2012. 3. Mark P. Mills, “The Cloud Begins with Coal: Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power” (Digital Power Group, 2013). 4. Forrest Hare, “Borders in Cyberspace: Can Sovereignty Adapt to the Challenges of Cyber-Security?” (George Mason University, 2011). 5.

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

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

Also in attendance at each CFP are certain colorful and irrepressible Net aficionados who call themselves “cypherpunks,” partly from cipher, a class of secret coding techniques, and in part as a tribute to cyberpunk authors of vivid, hard-boiled science fiction stories—William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and others —whose tales are often filled with glossy images of computerized gadgetry, set in near-future worlds more dour and forbidding than Blade Runner. Cypherpunks enthusiastically promote the notion that widespread use of encryption will help ensure freedom in the coming electronic age.

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We will see that openness, credibility, and responsibility might be enhanced as entrenched systems of hierarchical control loosen, enabling citizens increasingly to dispense with intermediaries and participate directly in the running of their civilization. In each case, it will happen by increasing the flow of information to those who can best make use of it. Take an example recently proposed by science fiction author Neal Stephenson, a hybrid between openness and privacy, wherein people around the world would band together in ad hoc teams to keep an eye on each otherʼs safety and property, allowing (or forcing) the police to draw back to a lesser role in everyoneʼs lives. Under this “global neighborhood watch,” homeowners would set up their own cameras to monitor nearby streets and surroundings, feeding those images across the Net to friends on the other side of the world.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

We make the future in the same way: we extrapolate as much as we can, and whenever we run out of imagination, we just shovel the present into the holes. That's why our pictures of the future always seem to resemble the present, only moreso. So the futurists told us about the Information Economy: they took all the "information-based" businesses (music, movies and microcode, in the neat coinage of Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash) and projected a future in which these would grow to dominate the world's economies. There was only one fly in the ointment: most of the world's economies consist of poor people who have more time than money, and if there's any lesson to learn from American college kids, it's that people with more time than money would rather copy information than pay for it.

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Extending Human + Machine Collaboration Eight New Fusion Skills for an AI Workplace Conclusion Creating Your Future in the Human + Machine Era Postscript Notes Index Acknowledgments About the Authors Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible. —Alan Turing See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places. —Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash INTRODUCTION What’s Our Role in the Age of AI? In one corner of the BMW assembly plant in Dingolfing, Germany, a worker and robot are collaborating to build a transmission. The worker prepares a gear casing, while a lightweight robot arm, sensitive to and aware of its surroundings, picks up a twelve-pound gear.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

It holds two male statues symbolising Anglo-American partnership, commissioned by its American developers. Bush House was officially opened on 4 July 1925 – to mark American Independence Day. If there is a symbolic headquarters for ‘the Anglosphere’, it is here, in Trafalgar Square and its environs. This is a term of relatively recent coinage, first used by the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age, published in 1995. But in the last two decades it has achieved much greater prominence in political discourse to denote a group of English-speaking nations that share a number of defining features: liberal market economies, the common law, parliamentary democracy, and a history of Protestantism.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

But selling non-Sears-branded appliances was more profitable to the appliances division, so they began to offer more prominent in-store placement to rivals of Kenmore products, undermining overall profitability. Its in-house tool brand, Craftsman—so ubiquitous an American trademark that it plays a pivotal role in a Neal Stephenson science fiction bestseller, Seveneves, 5,000 years in the future—refused to pay extra royalties to the in-house battery brand DieHard, so they went with an external provider, again indifferent to what this meant for the company’s bottom line as a whole. Executives would attach screen protectors to their laptops at meetings to prevent their colleagues from finding out what they were up to.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

An example that played on these ambiguities was Robert Luxembourg’s The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice (2003), which consisted of program code (crisis.php), an explanatory text file (crisis.txt), and a screenshot (crisis.png).52 If the program was run, it parsed the screenshot into the full text of the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (of 1999). The project operated as a conceptual puzzle that contained a number of interconnected parts all found in the screenshot itself. These included a still from the film The Matrix,53 and a passage from Hardt and Negri’s Empire (published in 2000) that questioned the limits of the legal apparatus that underpins contemporary power structures54 (and this passage from Hardt and Negri also supplies the phrase that Robert Luxembourg uses for his work’s title).

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

It seemed inevitable. In 1992, a film called The Lawnmower Man was released and it began to play on a seemingly endless loop on HBO and Cinemax. It had a ludicrous story line, but the movie’s depiction of virtual reality’s future potential stoked my anticipation for this evolving technology even further. So did Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which was published the same year. I was completely floored by Stephenson’s stark vision of a sprawling virtual world called the Metaverse that millions of real people around the world were able to access with a pair of VR goggles. Snow Crash built upon the concept of cyberspace that William Gibson had introduced in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer, by extrapolating VR technology even further.

…

And while there was certainly a chance that Iribe could be wrong, that underlying certitude primed Patel toward believing. That was one theory, but there also was another: Patel believed Iribe because, deep down, he so badly wanted to believe. For years, as an avid science fiction reader, Patel had fantasized about futures like those in William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. But up until about six months, all that just seemed like pure fantasy. That all changed, however, when he read Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.3 Set in the year 2044, Ready Player One depicts a world in which people jump in and out of virtual reality with the ease of using the internet.

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

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

Engelbart’s Law states that the rate of human performance is exponential; that while technology will augment our capabilities, our ability to improve upon improvements is a uniquely human endeavor. He essentially founded the field of human-computer interaction. There are many other visionaries who influenced me and the industry, but around the time I joined Microsoft in 1992, two futuristic novels were being eagerly consumed by engineers all over campus. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash popularized the term metaverse, envisioning a collective virtual and shared space. David Gelernter wrote Mirror Worlds, foreseeing software that would revolutionize computing and transform society by replacing reality with a digital imitation. These ideas are now within sight. * * * It is a magical feeling, at least for me, the first time you experience a profound new technology.

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

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

Acknowledgments Some passages in this book are adapted from “Jaron’s World,” the author’s column in Discover magazine, and others are adapted from the author’s contributions to edge.org, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Think Magazine, assorted open letters, and comments submitted to various hearings. They are used here by permission. Superspecial thanks to early readers of the manuscript: Lee Smolin, Dina Graser, Neal Stephenson, George Dyson, Roger Brent, and Yelena the Porcupine; editors: Jeff Alexander, Marty Asher, and Dan Frank; agents: John Brockman, Katinka Matson, and Max Brockman; at Discover: Corey Powell and Bob Guccione Jr.; and various people who tried to help me finish a book over the last few decades: Scott Kim, Kevin Kelly, Bob Prior, Jamie James, my students at UCSF, and untold others.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

For assistance with the history of coffee, I am grateful to Jeremy Torz of Union Coffee Roasters and Peter Hingley at the Royal Astronomical Society. Endymion Wilkinson of Harvard University provided invaluable advice on the history of tea. Other people helped by providing inspiration, acting as sounding boards, or pointing me in unexpected directions during my research, including George Dyson, Neal Stephenson, my colleagues Ann Wroe, Robert Guest, Anthony Gottlieb, and Geoffrey Carr at The Economist, Philippe Legrain, Paul Abrahams, Phil Millo, Vasa Babic, and Henry Hobhouse. Help of various kinds was also furnished by Virginia Benz and Joe Anderer, Cris-tiana Marti, Oliver Morton and Nancy Hynes, Tom Moultrie and Kathryn Stinson, Daniel Illsley and Jonathan Warren at Theatre of Wine in Greenwich, Carolyn Bosworth-Davies, Roger Highfield, Maureen Stapleton and Tim Coulter, Ward van Damme, Annika McKee, and Lee McKee.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Think of a GI, and you’re more likely to imagine a soldier on the front lines than a construction worker. But in the case of the United States, the construction worker is the better mental image. During the war, fewer than one in ten U.S. service members ever saw a shot fired in anger. For most who served, the war wasn’t about combat. It was about logistics. The novelist Neal Stephenson got it right when he described the U.S. military in World War II as “first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.” Operating this vast mechanism drew the United States abruptly into world affairs, giving it business in places it had formerly cared little about.

…

Similar stories discussed in Daniel Immerwahr, “‘American Lives’: Pearl Harbor and the United States’ Empire,” in Pearl Harbor and the Attacks of December 8, 1941: A Pacific History, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, KS, forthcoming). 13. KILROY WAS HERE fewer than one in ten: James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York, 2011), 202. “first and foremost”: Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York, 1999), 548. nearly every independent nation: Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943 (Washington, DC, 1955), 39. “disintegration of the British commonwealth”: Quoted in ibid., 48. The mechanics of aid to Britain in Egypt are described in Edward R.

Designing Search: UX Strategies for Ecommerce Success by Greg Nudelman, Pabini Gabriel-Petit

access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, call centre, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, folksonomy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, performance metric, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, search costs, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social graph, social web, speech recognition, text mining, the long tail, the map is not the territory, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The mean price for cameras on the site happened to be $100, so this price should have been a perfect starting point for exploring the site’s inventory. Instead, the nature of the search user interface caused users to manipulate the filters in a way that was detrimental to their success in finding a camera. As Neal Stephenson said in his book, In the Beginning… Was the Command Line: “Giving clear instructions, to anyone or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and depending on the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard about abstract things and consider any number of ramifications, in order to do a good job of it.

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

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

In this way, the metaverse may help to develop what sociologist Ray Oldenburg described as ‘third places’ – contexts outside of home and work – that bring people from different worlds together in a common community life.29 And, unlike the real world, space in the metaverse is infinite. Imagining life in the metaverse takes us squarely into the realm of science fiction. In fact, it is in science fiction that we first see mention of the term. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 book Snow Crash describes a dystopian world in which the free market reigns supreme in all areas of life, most of society lives in destitution, and those workers who can afford the technology escape the dreariness of their lives by disappearing into the alternative reality of the metaverse.

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson

Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, butterfly effect, carbon tax, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Emanuel Derman, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, hindcast, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, implied volatility, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kim Stanley Robinson, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, negative emissions, paperclip maximiser, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, random walk, risk tolerance, selection bias, self-driving car, social distancing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, systematic bias, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Great Resignation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trolley problem, value at risk, volatility smile, Y2K

But as the effects and impacts of climate change become more visible and more immediate, the realisation that greenhouse gas emissions have already dangerously geoengineered our planet may make the prospect of deliberate intervention more palatable. Geoengineering is increasingly featuring in near-future climate fiction by bestselling authors like Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson, and Integrated Assessment Models are essentially just a mathematical version of near-future climate fiction. If solar radiation management does become the next big thing, we will need to have thought about it carefully, ideally before the point that it becomes a pillar of international climate policy.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

Krajewski is writing here about a different context. 75. Alan Liu, “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004): 63. 76. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 33–34. 77. I’m thinking very generally here of Neal Stephenson, “In the Beginning Was the Command Line,” accessed 24 June 2013, http://www.cryptonomicon.com /beginning.html. See also David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), especially 163–77. 78. Wershler, “The Pirate as Archivist.” Wershler explains that cbz and cbr files are made by manually changing the suffixes on rar and zip archives. 79.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

It would also make it nearly impossible for legitimate governments to lawfully collect taxes from shady racketeers. Among the first big clients PayPal solicited: offshore casinos. “A great company is a conspiracy to change the world,” Thiel later wrote. His startup even charted its growth with a “World Domination Index.” The 1999 Neal Stephenson novel Cryptonomicon was, in Thiel’s words, “required reading” for employees—the plot of the nine-hundred-page novel involves the creation of a digital currency beyond governmental control. Thiel’s loathing for government spending did not apply when the government spent money on him. His next big startup, Palantir—a name borrowed from Tolkien—depended for survival upon the least transparent, least accountable, and most profligate extension of the federal government, the CIA.

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, G4S, high net worth, information asymmetry, Kim Stanley Robinson, license plate recognition, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, old-boy network, public intellectual, satellite internet, six sigma, Social Justice Warrior, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit

William Gibson Cory Doctorow has authored the Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunct faculty/Anonymous/shareware/thingiverse/cypherpunk/LGTBQIA*/squatter/upcycling culture and zipped it down into a pretty damned tight techno-thriller with a lot of sex in it.’ Neal Stephenson ‘A hard-edged, intelligent look at our immediate future and the high and low points of human nature, incisive, compelling and plausible.’ Adrian Tchaikovsky ‘Thrilling and unexpected... A truly visionary techno-thriller that not only depicts how we might live tomorrow, but asks why we don’t already.’

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

At TE Subcom, Courtney McDaniel arranged fascinating and hugely informative visits with Neal Bargano in Eatontown and Colin Young in Newington. Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (New York: Walker, 2007) and John Steele Gordon’s A Thread Across the Ocean (New York: Walker, 2002) filled in the fascinating history, while Richard Elliott at Apollo brought it up to the present. And every word written about this topic owes a debt to Neal Stephenson’s epic 1996 article for Wired, “Mother Earth Mother Board” (available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html). In their continental scale, they invoked: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 159. In 2004, Tata paid $130 million: Ken Belson, “Tyco to Sell Undersea Cable Unit to an Indian Telecom Company,” New York Times, November 2, 2004 (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/02/business/02tyco.html).

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

A Russian journalist I know told me about her friend, who invented a design for an Internet base station that could provide free wireless for an entire country. The patent was quickly purchased for several million, and suppressed by a major Internet provider. No such stories can by definition be verified, but it’s significant in itself that they exist—that they have the complete aura of believability. 109. Neal Stephenson, “Innovation Starvation,” World Policy Journal, Fall 2011, pp. 11–16. 110. It has often occurred to me that Steampunk really represents nostalgia for precisely this state of affairs. I once attended a museum panel on the topic, and it struck me as odd that all the commentators talked exclusively about the “steam” element, but none about the “punk.”

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

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

Contrary to prevalent stereotypes about online users at the time, 40 percent of its subscribers were women (granted, it was, to the dismay of Horn, very white). While conversations were broadly cultural, about all kinds of film, books, and music, community favorites tended to skew toward the cyber-introspective and science fictional, like Blade Runner and Neal Stephenson. “Everybody in the early days had at least some part geek to them,” Horn told me. * * * Echo was clever and communal in threads, where users were constantly joking, but conversations also accessed a depth of intimacy that Horn compares to “group therapy.” Someone might have created a “conference” with a subject like “Tell me about your mother,” and scores of responses would accumulate, in great detail, expressing trauma and pain; users would share their stories and sympathy throughout the week.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

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

What does the collective utopia look like that would fill the empty hearts of such diverse people as Stephen Fry, MrBeast, Elon Musk, Billie Eilish, Roger Federer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Danielle Steel, Richard Dawkins, PewDiePie, Robert Downey Jr, Nick Cave, LeBron James, Larry David, Donald Trump, Kylie Jenner, The Rock, Boris Johnson, Quentin Tarantino, Posh Spice, Robert Smith, Chris Rock, Blixa Bargeld, Neal Stephenson, Kim Kardashian, Lionel Messi, Johan Norberg and some 7.9 billion more?11 Liberalism is not based on ignoring the meaning of life but on believing that more people have a chance to find that meaning if they have the freedom to search for it. The counter-argument is that we just can’t. That there is something in the very freedom of choice that makes us too selfish, afraid of relationships and isolated, that it’s precisely this individual search for meaning in life that creates the epidemic of loneliness that is sweeping the Western world.

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do by Jeremy Bailenson

Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, computer vision, deliberate practice, experimental subject, fake news, game design, Google Glasses, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, overview effect, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telepresence, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury

Moments after logging in, I forgot about the people milling about me, sipping their cocktails in the physical room—the virtual people were the ones I was looking at, gesturing to, and listening to. The transformation was instant and thorough. As with Second Life, Rosedale’s ambition for the size of High Fidelity is almost boundless. Rosedale makes clear he wants it to be nothing less than the metaverse that has been predicted in the sci-fi novels of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. “Virtual reality is the next disruptor for society, after the smartphone and after the Internet,” Rosedale has said. “Much of our human creativity may move into these spaces. I think that it will. We will move into the metaverse for much of our work, design, education, and play in the same way we moved to the Internet.”16 He imagines a virtual world that could exceed the size of Earth.

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

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

Illustration courtesy of Jonathan Hiller What will happen in the future, when intelligent computers learn to bridge the gap between what humans need and what multi-material printers can make? The result will be next-generation design software, or what I like to call a “matter compiler.” The term matter compiler was coined by science fiction author Neal Stephenson. In his novel The Diamond Age, the book’s characters tell their matter compilers what to fabricate and in a moment or two, they’d pull a plastic mattress or food or a firearm from the machine. Stephenson’s matter compilers were not 3D printers, of course; they were “nano-assemblers” that re-arranged atoms streamed from a central “feed.”

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Moving from squares and rectangles to other “seating” arrangements makes things a bit more natural, but it doesn’t solve the loss of eye contact. This is about to change as we move participants into a 3D space. A number of companies—including Meta and Microsoft—have recently unveiled their visions for the “metaverse,” a digital world that both replicates and enhances our physical reality. (The term was coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite modern science fiction authors.) The idea is that you will use a 3D avatar—a digital representation of yourself—to meet with people in a virtual space that mimics the feeling of being together in real life. This feeling is often referred to as “presence,” and a lot of tech companies have been working on capturing it since before the pandemic started.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

“We all were working with Jeff in secret, in this ‘Friday afternoon space club,’ as we called it,” Cantrell told me. Bezos, too, looped into a crew of outside-the-box space engineers, many of whom overlapped with the crowd around Musk. Some were more outside the box than others: the science fiction author Neal Stephenson worked for Blue Origin, claiming to have been its sole employee for a time. His primary effort was thinking up ways to reach space that didn’t involve rockets. These were ideas like propelling spacecraft with ground-based lasers or using space elevators, which would link the earth to an orbiting counterweight by a cable that could then be climbed.

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

It will not be an age in which we disappear into a blacked-out virtual reality—marked by a life lived on the digital side of an Oculus Rift, say, or inside the subversive and dystopian world of novels such as Ready Player One. Rather, real and virtual worlds will combine. We will be augmented by our connections, as reality is augmented by the HoloLens or Magic Leap goggles. Think of Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece novel, for instance, in which characters move effortlessly between net and city. Or of the elegant design of the video game Ingress, which drew hundreds of thousands of us to a game board that had been laid atop the world’s cities in recent years. These cultural landmarks matter.

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

The experience in a virtual reality arcade game at an amusement park fell so far short of expectations generated by the first flush of media reports about this emerging technology that the public lost interest quickly. In addition to the practical limitations posed by the problem of presenting consumers with decent-quality immersive experiences in virtual worlds, certain psychological factors were at play, and continue to lurk in the popular consciousness. William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and the popular series of Matrix movies by the Wachowski brothers all present bleak visions of a future in which technology allows us to build virtual spaces that are indistinguishable from physical ones. In each of these cases, and in many others, we are given glimpses of dystopic worlds in which parallel virtual universes are used like weapons to produce mass delusions that crush the human spirit, or in which the virtual worlds we create become forums for the exercise of our basest impulses, untrammeled by the normal mores of social conduct and even freed from the operation of physical law.

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

They see it as offering a new, or they might say old, sort of liberty, one where they will be subject only to the say-so of the universe and their peers, of a way of living beyond “politics”—“The word . . . nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization,” as a character of Neal Stephenson’s puts it in “Seveneves” (2015), a dark novel of survival in the rubble of a demolished Moon above the inferno of a ruined Earth. Manny starts off “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” enjoying exactly this sort of frontier liberty, resolutely apolitical, reliant purely on his family, his own enterprise and the enterprise of other private individuals; it is this which libertarians like about the book.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

There are few explorations of history that surpass it in imagination and vividness, and as soon as I finished listening to the hundredth episode, I immediately began thinking of what the next hundred objects might be. More broadly, I owe a debt of gratitude to the writers who have inspired me: Vernor Vinge, Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Hyde, Ted Chiang, George Orwell, Stanislaw Lem, and many more. Without their stories and ideas, the future would be a darker place. Thanks to my editor at MIT Press, Susan Buckley, for her invaluable advice, and the editors of the first edition, Richard Dennis and Andrea Phillips.

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

Say what you will about this vision’s credibility, but in the days that followed his speech I became convinced that Peter wasn’t the only person in the office who believed it. The company’s Web site designer created a T-shirt that showed God and Adam from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling exchanging cash with a pair of Palm Pilots. Many of the engineers carried around copies of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, a novel about the offspring of World War II army coders who conspired to build an offshore haven for encryption-protected data in Asia. In between the dings of the World Domination Index emitting from their computers, employees laughed that paper money was passé and insisted on using PayPal to settle their lunch bills and office pools.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

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

Gordon HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW EDITOR Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the “innovation ain’t what it used to be” bell. “Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century,” he writes, “the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.” Fox has a lot of company. He points to science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who worries that the internet, far from spurring a great burst of industrial creativity, may have put innovation “on hold for a generation.” Fox also cites economist Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we’re living in a time of innovation stagnation. He might also have mentioned tech powerbroker Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we’ve entered a technological “desert.”

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

A few days later they opened Amazon.com and set up shop in a two-bedroom house. Two years after Amazon.com went public, the Internet company's market value was bigger than its two biggest retail book competitors combined. Bezos would use his Internet wealth to reconnect with his dreams about space. "Why did the founder of Amazon.com and a famous cyberpunk novelist [Neal Stephenson] ask for a tour of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory last February?" That was the opening line of a July 2003 Wired magazine article that tried to get to the bottom of Bezos's mystery visit. Not knowing why an Internet multibillionaire would want to visit a world-renowned robotics laboratory, JPL gave the pair a vIP welcome, in the hopes of soliciting sponsorship.

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

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

Ideologically, this was a torch carried by Wired magazine, and the ideal probably reached its zenith in John Perry Barlow’s 1996 essay, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Silly me. I should have known better. It would all be spelled out clearly in John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, Vernor Vinge’s True Names, and even less-well-read classics such as John Barnes’s The Mother of Storms. Science fiction writers were always the best social scientists, and in describing the dystopian nature of the Net they were again right on target. There would be nothing even vaguely utopian about the reality of the Internet, despite preachy “The Road Ahead” vision statements by (late to the Web) luminaries like Bill Gates.

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

But the lack of a body is also writing’s greatest disadvantage, especially when it comes to representing emotions and other mental states. In the early days of going online, it seemed like we had a very clear eventual answer to the question of virtual embodiment. In the future envisioned by Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, or the 3D virtual world Second Life, launched in 2003, it seemed like we’d all be making full-bodied avatars for ourselves, with hands and feet and hairstyles, to bodily interact with each other in virtual space. The idea was that these avatars would project in cyberspace whatever we’d do in the physical world, whether logistical or emotive: thus we’d enter rooms and shake hands and roll on the floor laughing.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

Its epic nature is an outgrowth of its morphing flavors, always under development, that nevertheless adhere to a set of well-articulated standards and protocols: flexibility, design simplicity, clean interfaces, openness, communicability, transparency, and efficiency (Gancarz 1995; Stephenson 1999). “Unix is known, loved, understood by so many hackers,” explains sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson (1999, 69), also a fan, “that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it.” Due to its many layers and evolving state, learning the full capabilities of Unix is a lifelong pursuit, and it is generally accepted that most users cannot ever learn its full capabilities. In the words of one programmer who helped me (a novice user) fix a problem on my Linux machine, “Unix is not a thing, it is an adventure.”

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

The rising price of water is already hurting poor people by increasing waterborne diseases and reducing their agricultural yields. Higher food prices would increase hunger and malnutrition. More expensive fuel would cause extra deaths of poor elderly people in winter even in the rich countries. As in the world of Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel The Diamond Age, poor people may be forced to cope with flimsy synthetic substitutes made with nano-technology, rather than real natural materials. Far more urgent, of course, is the challenge of climate change, whose consequences are already being felt and certain to become extremely serious, if not necessarily catastrophic, within the next generation or two.

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

—a shift from sarcasm to enthusiasm. On a break, Lindbeck came into the sound booth and explained that Hello Barbie required a new kind of acting. Much like how action stars envision fantasy worlds as they perform in front of green screens, Lindbeck had to imagine the responses of a girl who wasn’t there. (In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson’s prescient science-fiction classic about AI, this particular job was called “racting.”) Sunderman said that she frequently employed a catchphrase to coax Lindbeck into conveying an intimacy between doll and girl. “I’m sure you’ve heard me say this a thousand times, ‘knee to knee,’” Sunderman told Lindbeck.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

It would take me a while to figure out whether the dimness meant that I was at my mother’s condo or my father’s one-bedroom, and I’d have no recollection of having been driven between them. Every day became the same. It was a haze. I remember reading The Conscience of a Hacker (aka The Hacker’s Manifesto), Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and reams of J. R. R. Tolkien, falling asleep midchapter and getting the characters and action confused, until I was dreaming that Gollum was by my bedside and whining, “Master, Master, information wants to be free.” While I was resigned to all the fever dreams sleep brought me, the thought of having to catch up on my schoolwork was the true nightmare.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

A technology perfectly suited for long-form reading on a device (and terrible for everything else) just happened to be maturing after a decade of development. In those waning months of 2004, the early Lab126 engineers selected a code name for their new project. On his desk, Zehr had a copy of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a futuristic novel about an engineer who steals a rare interactive textbook to give to his daughter, Fiona. The early Lab126 engineers thought of the fictitious textbook in the novel as a template for what they were creating. Michael Cronan, the San Francisco–based graphic designer and marketing executive who baptized the TiVo, was later hired to officially brand the new dedicated reading device, and he came up with Kindle, which played off the notion of starting a conflagration and worked as both a noun and a verb.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

During that early time back in California, Hoffman and Thiel spent a weekend at Hoffman’s grandparents’ house in Mendocino County, talking about what they were going to do with their lives. Hoffman told Thiel, with great enthusiasm, about a science fiction novel he’d just read, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, which takes place in a twenty-first-century California where government has collapsed and people create avatars and try to find a new way to live through a technology-based virtual society called the Metaverse. This was before the term “Internet” was in general circulation, though the technology for it existed.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Verne’s other books, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Clipper of Clouds, inspired the creators of the submarine and the helicopter.48 Robert Goddard, who invented the first liquid-fueled rocket, was transfixed by H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, a novel about a Martian invasion, and decided to dedicate his life to making spaceflight possible. The science-fiction author Neal Stephenson was one of the first employees of Bezos’s Blue Origin. Stephenson was tasked with dreaming up ways of getting to space without conventional rockets (his ideas included using space elevators and lasers that could propel spacecraft).49 Science-fiction thinking isn’t reserved only for major inventions.

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

* A striking range of the world's leading economists sketch a worrying ground-state for the future of big ideas. They argue that the breakthrough problem is general, that diminishing returns are evident not just in medicine and transport but across swathes of the frontier. Whole societies appear to be running out of new ideas. When a tech titan like Peter Thiel or a science fiction writer like Neal Stephenson says they are disappointed with our achievements, it's easy to shrug: of course they'd say that! Platitudes about flying cars and settlements on the Moon are their bread and butter. But all this is more than anecdata. Research productivity isn't some distant measure; it ultimately affects every aspect of our lives, from how we communicate to what medicines are available at what price.

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

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

I started using the phrase before I knew about Artaud, but I couldn’t be happier about a connection across generations. Present-day VR-heads would be startled to read either Susanne Langer (who came up with “virtual world” in the 1950s) or Artaud. There are other disputes about the origins of VR vocabulary. I distinctly remember the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coining the term “avatar”—not as a word, obviously, since it has ancient origins in Hinduism, but as the term for your body in VR. And yet, apparently, there are competing claims. “Virtual reality” isn’t the only term for what it roughly describes, and it’s hard to believe how intensely people fought over words back in the 1980s.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, airport security, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, citizen journalism, Firefox, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, mail merge, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Bayes, web of trust, zero day

If you want to get at some real forbidden knowledge, have a skim around Cryptome (cryptome.org), the world's most amazing archive of secret, suppressed and liberated information. Cryptome's brave publishers collect material that's been pried out of the state by Freedom of Information Act requests or leaked by whistle-blowers and publishes it. The best fictional account of the history of crypto is, hands-down, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (Avon, 2002). Stephenson tells the story of Alan Turing and the Nazi Enigma Machine, turning it into a gripping war-novel that you won't be able to put down. The Pirate Party mentioned in Little Brother is real and thriving in Sweden (www.piratpartiet.se), Denmark, the USA and France at the time of this writing (July, 2006).

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Thanks to Lena and Lilibell for putting up with me as I disappear into projects like this book. Thanks to my early readers: Brian Arthur, Steven Barclay, Roger Brent, John Brockman, Eric Clemons, George Dyson, Doyne Farmer, Gary Flake, Ed Frenkel, Dina Graser, Daniel Kahneman, Lena Lanier, Dennis Overbye, David Rothenberg, Lee Smolin, Jeffrey Soros, Neal Stephenson, Eric Weinstein, and Tim Wu. Thanks to the musical instrument makers and dealers of Berkeley, Seattle, New York City, and London for providing delightful opportunities for procrastination. © JONATHAN SPRAGUE Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist and musician, best known for his work in virtual reality research.

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

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