reality distortion field

66 results back to index

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

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

He meant the phrase to be a compliment as well as a caution: “It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.” At first Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating, but after two weeks of working with Jobs, he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. “The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,” he said. There was little that could shield you from the force, Hertzfeld discovered. “Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.”

…

We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.” After Jobs decreed that the sodas in the office refrigerator be replaced by Odwalla organic orange and carrot juices, someone on the team had T-shirts made. “Reality Distortion Field,” they said on the front, and on the back, “It’s in the juice!” To some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to say that Jobs tended to lie. But it was in fact a more complex form of dissembling. He would assert something—be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting—without even considering the truth.

…

“His reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future, such as telling me that I could design the Breakout game in just a few days. You realize that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true.” When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality distortion field, they were almost hypnotized. “He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi Coleman. “He laser-beamed in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank it.” But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion field was empowering: It enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of the resources of Xerox or IBM. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed.

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, General Magic , HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

“I know,” he responded in a low voice, almost a whisper. “You know? If you know the schedule is off-base, why don’t you correct it?” “Well, it’s Steve. Steve insists that we’re shipping in early 1982 and won’t accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.” “A what?” “A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. And there are a couple of other things you should know about working with Steve.” “What else?”

…

I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adapting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently. Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed.

…

“THE JOURNEY IS THE REWARD” A few hours later, after dinner, Bill told me he had arranged to meet with Steve in private early the next morning, before the day’s meetings commenced. He then surprised me by asking me to accompany him. I told him it wasn’t my business and that I felt it was inappropriate for me to attend, but Bill insisted, telling me he needed my support, if only to have someone else present to help ground Steve’s infamous reality distortion field (see “Reality Distortion Field” on page 24). Even though I knew it would be awkward, I told him I’d do it. We were both nervous as Bill knocked on the door of the small office Steve was using during the retreat. Steve opened the door, looking angry when he noticed I was present. “What is he doing here?”

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

Long before the actual derailment, you knew this was going to happen. It wasn’t working. But at the time, your reality distortion field was strong enough to keep you going on faith and fumes alone. As a result, you hit the wall at a million miles an hour, lying to yourself the whole time. We’re not arguing against the importance of the reality distortion field—but we do want to poke a few holes in it. Hopefully, as a result, you’ll see the derailment in time to avoid it. We want you to rely less on your reality distortion field, and rely more on Lean Analytics. Airbnb Photography—Growth Within Growth Airbnb is an incredible success story.

…

—Zach Nies—Chief Technologist, Rally Software “Lean Analytics is the missing piece of Lean Startup, with practical and detailed research, advice and guidance that can help you succeed faster in a startup or large organization.” —Dan Martell—CEO and Founder, Clarity “Entrepreneurs need their own reality distortion field to tilt at improbable windmills. But that delusion can be their undoing if they start lying to themselves. This book is the antidote. Alistair and Ben have written a much-needed dose of reality, and entrepreneurs who ignore this data-driven approach do so at their peril.” —Brad Feld—Managing Director, Foundry Group; Co-founder, TechStars; and Creator, the Startup Revolution series of books “Lean Analytics will take you from Minimum Viable Product to Maximally Valuable Product.

…

Lying may even be a prerequisite for succeeding as an entrepreneur—after all, you need to convince others that something is true in the absence of good, hard evidence. You need believers to take a leap of faith with you. As an entrepreneur, you need to live in a semi-delusional state just to survive the inevitable rollercoaster ride of running your startup. Small lies are essential. They create your reality distortion field. They are a necessary part of being an entrepreneur. But if you start believing your own hype, you won’t survive. You’ll go too far into the bubble you’ve created, and you won’t come out until you hit the wall—hard—and that bubble bursts. You need to lie to yourself, but not to the point where you’re jeopardizing your business.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

For employees, it might mean a willingness to work long hours or accept a below-market salary in exchange for the upside of stock options. • The Hazard: A reality distortion field can reverse itself. Rather than bending reality to their will, overconfident founders may fail to perceive signals that their vision is a pipe dream. We’ll see some examples of this in Part II, which examines failure patterns among late-stage startups—including Better Place, which lost $900 million trying to build a network of recharging stations for electric cars. An entrepreneur’s reality distortion field can have a colossal negative impact on a late-stage startup that has hundreds of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in invested capital.

…

Monomania and charisma don’t necessarily go hand in hand, but a leader with both can move mountains. The term “reality distortion field” was coined for a 1960s Star Trek episode, but later was co-opted to describe Steve Jobs’s uncanny ability to mesmerize the engineers developing the original Macintosh computer, inspiring them to work eighty-hour weeks for months on end. Jobs exhorted: “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?” Under the spell of a reality distortion field, potential employees, investors, and strategic partners perceive a reality in which their commitment to the venture can—despite enormous obstacles—help make the founder’s dream come true.

…

• The Hazards: Entrepreneurs who struggle to raise initial funding—especially first-time founders who lack a track record—may take money from investors who don’t add much value, whose preferences regarding risk/reward trade-offs are not aligned with those of the founders, and who lack the means to provide additional capital should the venture stumble. We’ll see in the next chapter that Quincy’s founders experienced all three of these problems with their lead investors. Tactic 4: Storytelling (Downplaying Risk). By propagating a “reality distortion field”—that is, mesmerizing potential employees, investors, and strategic partners so they focus on a startup’s world-changing potential rather than on its real-world risks—overconfident and charismatic founders in particular are able to persuade people to commit resources under terms favorable to their new venture.

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

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

In lieu of a traditional greeting, his first words to me were, "I think you're making a big mistake by not putting the Mac on the cover." His eyes bore down on me out of a some-what hawklike face, and I immediately became flustered. This was my first exposure to what Jobs's subordinates would call "the reality distortion field." Though I was in no danger of accepting his premise, the effect of his tirade was impressive. The people standing around us looked embarrassed. Then, just as suddenly, Jobs took off, headed to douse some unidentified conflagration. It was understood that we'd have dinner that night. Sometime after the appointed hour, we got into his car and headed for a nearby pizza house.

…

Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs. Time after time, he insisted that the Macintosh was going to shock the world, be not merely great but insanely great, and it was clear that he believed it. Sometimes the wizards of Mac would roll their eyes at his rantsremember, they referred to Steve as a walking Reality Distortion Field-but they were flattered, too, and determined to transform the hyperbole into truth. One day, for instance, they were trying to "bring up" the main logic board-soldering the chips to the custommade circuitry-and Jobs challenged them: If you finish it by midnight, we'll all go out for pineapple pizza at Frankie, Johnnie, and Luigi's!

…

He and other likeminded engineers continued the relationship with Sony even when Jobs ordered them to terminate it. The high point in this deception occurred when Jobs dropped into Bandley 3 at the same time a Sony executive had come for a meeting. The Macintosh engineers literally ushered the disoriented Japanese businessman into a closet until the Reality Distortion Field had passed. Once again, the unmasking of the plot was a welcome escape to a hole Jobs had dug for himself. The Sony drive was a substantial addition to the Macintosh mystique of leading-edge yet compassionately designed technology. Not only did it use smaller disks than the previous standard, but the fragile Mylar that held the data was protected by a rigid plastic coating.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

Jobs himself looks back to the Macintosh effort as a peak. Other people involved in the effort look back to that period with a Camelot-type nostalgia. But at the time, it was a jagged fever chart of highs and lows—and it vividly illustrated why Jobs is not your normal leader. Those were the days when his employees created the term "Reality Distortion Field," which stuck with Jobs as a description of how his own beliefs—often at odds with conventional wisdom and, at times, at odds with the facts—were irresistibly contagious to those within earshot. On one hand, the term reflected the frustration of the Mac workers; Jobs would get things into his head, and that would be it.

…

Only a repeated assault by actual reality (when things just didn't work) would change his mind. The Perfect Thing 200 But the term was not strictly pejorative. For one thing, Jobs was often right, and only his unwillingness to compromise would convince others that taking an untrodden path was correct. More to the point, people who were in range of the reality distortion field often came to believe they could actually accomplish what seemed impossible. And they wound up exceeding their own wildest expectations, simply because they knew that nothing less was expected. Even when Jobs's criticism went overboard, his tantrums would often have a beneficial effect. Think about it: How often does anyone do a job so well that it cannot be improved upon?

…

Indeed, the people who worked on Macintosh now look back and can't believe what they did. I have kept up with many who worked on the original Macintosh—some have become close friends—and to the last person, they describe that time as the most bruising period in their professional lives—and by a long shot, the most satisfying. Reality distortion field or not, they believed they were working on one of the most important products in the history of technology. This could be described as a mass delusion except Apple for the fact that the Macintosh was one of the most important projects in the history of technology. In Steve Jobs's case, the emperor had clothes.

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

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

ISBN 978-0-316-46134-4 (ebook) LCCN 2020940737 E3-20200828-DA-NF-ORI Table of Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue Chapter One: Capitalist Kibbutz Chapter Two: Green Desk Chapter Three: 154 Grand Street Chapter Four: “I Am WeWork” Chapter Five: Sex, Coworking, and Rock ’n’ Roll Chapter Six: The Physical Social Network Chapter Seven: Reality Distortion Field Chapter Eight: Greater Fools Chapter Nine: WeLive Chapter Ten: Manage the Nickel Chapter Eleven: Mr. Ten Times Chapter Twelve: Me Over We Chapter Thirteen: Blitzscaling Chapter Fourteen: The Holy Grail Chapter Fifteen: WeGrow Chapter Sixteen: Game of Thrones Chapter Seventeen: Operationalize Love Chapter Eighteen: A WeWork Wedding Chapter Nineteen: Fortitude Chapter Twenty: The I in We Chapter Twenty-One: Wingspan Chapter Twenty-Two: Always Half Full Chapter Twenty-Three: The Sun Never Sets on We Chapter Twenty-Four: Brave New World Discover More Author’s Note Acknowledgments About the Author For Mom and Dad Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

…

The engineers were working twelve-hour days, sometimes more, plus the weekend construction duty expected of every employee; one night, Joey Cables found himself installing a toilet in a new WeWork location. It wasn’t totally clear to the tech team that their work could produce what Neumann wanted. “Adam used to say, ‘We’re on a rocket ship,’” the WeWork engineer said. “The joke was, ‘A rocket ship to where?’” Chapter Seven Reality Distortion Field A FEW WEEKS into 2014, Benjamin Dyett organized a meeting of what he called the Five Families of Coworking. Dyett was the owner of Grind, an upmarket coworking space that he opened in 2011. Landlords had begun to shift their attitude toward the new operators, thanks in part to the growing attention lavished upon WeWork, but the industry remained at a precarious moment: small fish swimming alongside much bigger sharks.

…

Many of them looked up to Miguel, who still spent considerable time in the trenches, designing and building out new spaces. But the company was beginning to form itself in Adam’s image. For all his bluster, he could be an inspiring leader, pushing WeWork employees beyond their limits for the good of the cause and the promise of riches down the line. They compared his aura to the “reality distortion field” that an Apple employee once described as emanating from Steve Jobs, convincing anyone within its radius that the impossible was not only plausible, but exactly what they were going to do. After several workers installed a large stone table in a Manhattan WeWork, one employee noticed smears of blood left behind by one of the workers, which felt poetic.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

After all, the middle of a journey is a blurry, mundane landscape. To get through the tremendous voids of nothingness in between the milestones, provide guidance. You’re the narrator of this journey. People who worked with Apple founder Steve Jobs over the years often talked about how his “reality-distortion field” could alter his team’s perspective, assumptions, and limits to allow for new ideas. Perhaps Jobs believed in his vision so much so that the reality around him was distorted by the power of his conviction? When you’re articulating a vision and set of assumptions with such passion and confidence, reality starts to bend your way.

…

You’re not lying or manufacturing perspective—you’re merchandising your perspective. You’re not creating a story that you think others will believe—you’re retelling the same story you tell yourself. The same forces can help a team endure another form of reality: work with no end in sight. In this case, your reality-distortion field shows people hope when they can’t see it for themselves. For example, you may see these tough days you’re currently enduring as character building for your team and as a source of defensibility for your product—even though it currently feels anything but. Are you lamenting a lack of progress or celebrating your survival and newfound strength?

…

., 199–202 perseverance, persistence, 62, 79, 85 perspective, 40–42, 66, 74, 326 quitting and, 62–64 Photoshop, 10, 144, 159, 162, 185, 206–7, 238–39, 270, 347 Pine Street, 125 Pinterest, 10, 64, 86–87, 94, 112, 158–59, 165, 174, 204, 233, 248, 319 Pixar, 141 placebo, 59–61 planning, 93, 280–81 polarizing people, 114–15 PolitiFact, 303 positive feedback, and hard truths, 28–31 Post-it notes, 325 pragmatists, 295, 296 Prefer, 28, 298, 299 preparedness, 16 presenting ideas, vs. promoting, 164–65 press, 265–66, 336 Pretty Young Professionals (PYP), 72–73 Principles (Dalio), 306, 307 problem solving, 209 big vs. small problems, 180–82, 322 explicitness and, 173–74 process, 153–57 Proctor & Gamble, 143 product(s), 8, 29 brand fit and, 256, 257 complexity in, 209–10, 217 explicitness in, 174–75, 271 founder fit and, 256 life cycle of, 209–10, 217 market fit and, 256 minimum viable (MVP), 86, 186, 195, 252 paradox of success of, 216 power users of, 217 products used to create, 143–45 simplicity in, 209, 210–11, 216–18, 271 product, optimizing, 17, 209–75 anchoring to your customers, 247–75 being first, 264–66 disproportionate impact and, 267–68 empathy and humility before passion, 248–50 engaging the right customers at the right time, 251–54 and measuring each feature by its own measure, 269–70 mystery and engagement in, 271–73 narrative in, 255–57 and playing to the middle, 274–75 and role of leaders in communities, 258–61 sales and, 262–63 simplifying and iterating, 213–46 and believing in the product, 223–25 creativity and familiarity in, 226–27 and design as invisible, 230–31 doing, showing, and explaining, 238–39 “first mile” and, 232–34 identifying what you’re willing to be bad at, 214–15 inbred innovations and, 245–46 incrementalism and assumptions in, 242–44 killing your darlings, 219–22 for laziness, vanity, and selfishness, 235–37 making one subtraction for every addition, 216–18 novelty and utility in, 240–41 scrutiny and flaws in, 228–29 productivity, 179, 180–82, 187, 322, 324, 325 measures of, 78–79 performance and, 214 promoting ideas, vs. presenting, 164–65 promotions, 130 progress, 24–25, 31, 40, 47, 64, 75, 83, 85, 160, 179, 181, 349 conflict avoidance and, 185–86 process and, 154 progress bars, 181 prototypes and mock-ups, 161–63 Psychological Bulletin, 272 psychological safety, 122 Psychological Science, 272–73 psychology, 316, 317 Quartz, 37–38, 108, 301 questions, 69–71, 183–84, 321 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 220 Quinn, Megan, 303–4 quitting, perspective and, 62–64 Quora, 138, 167 Rad, Sean, 259 Radcliffe, Jack, 197 Rams, Dieter, 230 reactionary workflow, 327, 328 Ready, The, 179 reality-distortion field, 41 Reboot, 327 Reddit, 261, 300, 302 rejection, 58 relatability, 57 relationships: commitments and, 283–84 and how others perceive you, 316–17 negotiation and, 286–87 REMIX, 165 resets, 63–64, 72–75 resistance, fighting, 35–36 resourcefulness, and resources, 100–102 reward system, short-circuiting, 24–27 Rhode Island School of Design, 186, 354 rhythm of making, 16 Ries, Eric, 194 risk, 122, 316, 337 ritual, 328 rock gardens, 67–68 routines, 323 ruckus, making, 337–38 Saatchi Online, 89 Sabbath Manifesto, 327–28 safety, psychological, 122 Sakurada, Isuzu, 361–62 salaries, 141–42 sales, salespeople, 262–63 Salesforce, 159, 204 Sandberg, Sheryl, 39 Santa Fe, USS, 167 satisficers, 229, 284–85 scalability, 242 Schouwenburg, Kegan, 50–51 Schwartz, Barry, 284–85 science vs. art of business, 310–13 Seinfeld, Jerry, 250 self, optimizing, 8, 17, 277–338 crafting business instincts, 293–313 auditing measures instead of blindly optimizing, 297–99 data vs. intuition in, 300–304 mining contradictory advice and developing intuition, 294–96 naivety and openness in, 308–9 science vs. art of business, 310–13 stress-testing opinions with truthfulness, 305–7 planning and making decisions, 279–92 focus and choice, 282–85 making a plan vs. sticking to it, 280–81 negotiation in, 286–87 sunk costs and, 291–92 timing and, 288–90 sharpening your edge, 315–28 building a network and increasing signal, 320–21 commitments and, 318–19 disconnecting, 326–28 and how you appear to others, 316–17 leaving margins for the unexpected, 324–25 values and time use, 322–23 staying permeable and relatable, 329–38 attention and, 335–36 credit-seeking and, 330–32 and making a ruckus, 337–38 removing yourself to allow for others’ ideas, 333–34 self-awareness, 54–56, 305–7 selfishness, laziness, and vanity, 235–37 setbacks, 41 70/20/10 model for leadership development, 125 Shapeways, 50 Shiva, 374 shortcuts, 85 signal and noise, 320–21 Silberman, Ben, 86–87, 94, 112, 165, 319 Silicon Valley, 86 Simon, Herbert, 229, 284 SimpleGeo, 267 Sinclair, Jake, 334 skills, and choosing commitments, 283–84 Skybox, 101 sky decks, 117 Slack, 139, 210, 241 Slashdot, 295 Smarter Faster Better (Duhigg), 180 Smith, Brad, 373 Snapchat, 70, 189, 210, 227, 249 Snowden, Eric, 48, 162 Social Capital, 107 social media, 70, 139, 195, 210, 235–36, 243 solar eclipse, 300–302 SOLS, 50–51 Song Exploder, 333 Sonnad, Nikhil, 301–2 Sonos, 275 Southwest Airlines, 214–15 Soyer, Emre, 32–33 SpaceX, 168 Spark, 303 speed, 194–98 Spiegel, Evan, 249 Spot, 256, 257 Square, 303–4 Squarespace, 312 Stafford, Tom, 291 stand-ins, 297–98 start, 1, 6–8, 13, 209, 331 Statue of Liberty, 200 Stein, Dave, 280 Steinberg, Jon, 44–45, 313 Stitch Fix, 79 story, see narrative and storytelling Stratechery, 135 strategy, patience and, 80–85 strengths, 29, 54, 95, 214 stretch assignments, 130 structure, rules for, 150–52 StumbleUpon, 112, 256 Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert), 196 suffering, 35–36, 131 Summers, Larry, 108 sunk costs, 64, 71, 185, 291–92 Super Bowl, 273 superiority, sense of, 331–32 suspension of disbelief, 60–61 Suster, Mark, 204–5 Swarthmore College, 229 sweetgreen, 10, 151, 217, 221, 233, 245–46, 310 Systemized Intelligence Lab, 306 Systems Thinking, 283 Systrom, Kevin, 36 Taflinger, Richard, 38 talent, 119–25, 127, 187 Talk of the Nation, 196 TaskRabbit, 259 team, 39, 331, 332 energy and, 43–45 perspective and, 40–42 team, optimizing, 8, 17, 97–207, 211 building, hiring, and firing, 99–131 discussions and, 112–13 diversity in, 106–9 firing people to keep good people, 126–28 grafting and recruiting talent, 119–25 hiring people who have endured adversity, 110–11 immune system in, 116–18 initiative and experience in, 103–5 keeping people moving, 129–31 polarizing people and, 114–15 resourcefulness and resources in, 100–102 clearing the path to solutions, 177–207 big and small problems, 180–82 bureaucracy, 183–84 competitive energy, 187–91 conflict avoidance, 185–86 conviction vs. consensus, 203–5 creative block, 192–93 forgiveness vs. permission, 199–202 organization debt, 178–79 and resistance to change, 206–7 speed in, 194–98 culture, tools, and space, 133–48 attribution of credit, 146–48 free radicals and, 137–39 frugality and, 140–42 stories and, 134–36 tools, 143–45 structure and communication, 149–76 communication, 170–76 delegation, 166–69 merchandising, internal, 158–60 mock-ups for sharing vision, 161–63 presenting vs. promoting ideas, 164–65 process in, 153–57 rules in, 150–52 technology, 328, 371 TED, 62, 116, 305 teleportation, 70, 264 Temps, 201 10 Principles of Good Design (Rams), 230 Teran, Dan, 221 Tesla, 273 think blend, 33 Thomas, Frank, 222 Thompson, Ben, 135 Threadless, 267 time, use of, 210, 283, 299 leaving margins, 324–25 money and, 370–72 values and, 322–23 time-outs, 74 timing, 288–90, 332 decision making and, 289–90 investment and, 290 leader and, 288–89 Tinder, 259–60 Tiny, 294 Todd, Charlie, 113 Todoist, 229 tools, 143–45 Topick, 249 transparency, 259–60, 287 triggers, 55 Trump, Donald, 273, 302–3 truth(s), 71, 174, 193, 331, 338 creative block and, 192–93 hard, 28–31 stress-testing opinions with, 305–7 about time use, 323 Turn the Ship Around!

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

With that, he slid his iPhone back into the front pocket of his jeans, straightened himself in his chair, and then turned slowly to face me. His eyes met mine. Over the years, many people have commented on Steve’s special ability to tell you something, whatever it was, no matter how implausible, and make you believe it. This reality distortion field, the RDF, has become legendary. Yet, in the moment Steve fixed his eyes on me, I felt an opposite force, the RDF with the polarity reversed. Like flipping on a light switch, Steve had turned on a no-nonsense zone around himself, one that banished all flummery and neutralized all pretense.

…

See also collaboration; craft; decisiveness; diligence; empathy; inspiration; taste Fadell, Tony, 138, 162 Feynman, Richard, 187–188 Finder, 47 FIXMEs (source code annotations), 77, 80–82, 86–88, 95 form factor, 137, 160, 182 Forstall, Scott, 234–236, 249 browser development and, 54, 70, 102, 113, 114 “eff grackles” demo and, 193–196 email editing project and, 115–117, 130 iPad keyboard demo and, 16–17, 24–28, 31–36 keyboard development and, 131–136, 138–139, 171, 193–196 Kocienda’s interview with, 47–48 multitouch multitasking gestures and, 257–261 tap target game and, 226–227 text entry and, 234 Ganatra, Nitin, 180–181, 185 Gates, Bill, 48 General Public License (GPL), 40 Giggly Demo (touchscreen keyboard autocorrection), 177–180, 185–186, 189–190, 192, 214 GNOME project, 43–44, 56 GNU Project, 40–43 Google, 42, 94, 114, 117, 133–134 A/B color choice algorithm, 212–213, 218, 242 Android, 3, 42 Maps, 53n Graziano, Joseph, 105 handheld personal digital assistant, 8, 160, 189–190, 192–193, 195, 256 handwriting recognition, 8, 160, 189–190, 192–193, 256 Heisenberg, Werner, 121 heisenbugs, 121, 126, 128 Hertzfeld, Andy, 42–43 Herz, Scott, 140, 226, 236, 248–249 home screen, 225–227, 241, 258–260 SpringBoard (icon launcher program), 137, 139–141, 180, 224–225 Human Interface (HI) team, 17–18, 136, 171, 229 HyperCard, 254 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), 49, 121–131 IBM, 58 include directive, 72–73 insertion point, 118–122, 125–130, 139, 234–235, 241–242, 247 behavioral rules (simple and complicated), 119–121 movement, 118–130, 241–242, 247 inspiration Apple Way and, 251 definition of, 3, 247 demos and, 66, 157, 218, 250 essential element of success, 3, 5, 247–248, 250 Purple project (iPhone) and, 157, 228–229 Safari project and, 84–88, 112 success ratio to perspiration, 85–87, 217, 269–70n6 Internet Relay Chat (IRC), 91 intersections algorithms and heuristics, 240–247, 251 comfort levels, 224–227 Human Interface (HI) team, 17–18, 136, 171, 229 of iPhone and effort to create it, 246–247 of iPhone and skeptics, 246 of Kocienda and Jobs, 245–246 of Kocienda’s keyboard and world, 245 mental load, 232–237 of people and commitment, 249–251 Purple-era examples, 237–245 seven essential elements of success and, 247–248 smoothness, 227–230 of technology and liberal arts, 17, 221–245 iOS 4, 257 iOS 5, 258, 261 iOS 8, 235n iOS App Store, 12 iPad, 223, 248, 257–261 K48 (internal code name), 3 keyboard demo, 7–19, 25–37, 234, 257 keyboard development, 19–25 multitouch multitasking gestures, 257–258 iPhone glass display prototype, 208–209 Macworld Conference & Expo (San Francisco, 2007), 210, 221–222, 234, 245–246, 253-254 Macworld Expo (Boston, 1997), 48 Macworld Expo (San Francisco, 2003), 102–112 Patent, 239–240, 250 Purple (product code name), 9, 135 release date (June 29, 2007), 253–254 See also keyboard design and development iPod, 2–3, 47, 49, 132n, 138, 160, 162, 187 JavaScript, 49, 80 JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition (Flanagan), 48 Jobs, Steve death of, 263 decisiveness of, 5, 30–37, 248 “Design is how it works,” 187, 245 email editing project, 116–117 Gates and, 48 interview with Brian Williams, 131 Kocienda’s iPad keyboard demo to, 7–19, 25–37, 234, 257 Macworld Conference & Expo (San Francisco, 2007), 210, 221–222, 234, 245–246, 253–254 Macworld Expo (Boston, 1997), 48 Macworld Expo (San Francisco, 2003), 102–112 management style, 217 on products and users, 226 Purple project (iPhone), 137–139, 149, 199, 207, 216, 222–223 Safari project and, 48–49, 53, 91–93, 100, 218 Johnson, Steven, 84 judgment, 4, 183–184, 214, 233, 242, 244, 248 Kant, Immanuel, 182–183 KDE (programming community), 56–57, 60, 67–70, 76 keyboard design and development bigger keys layout (iPad), 21–30, 32, 36, 234 Blob keyboard prototype, 145–146 can’t miss feature, 239 derby demo winner, 149–157, 171–172 empathy and, 182–183, 185, 188–189 iPad keyboard demo, 7–19, 25–37, 234, 257 iPad keyboard development, 19–25 letter pop-ups, 175, 201 likability, 160, 185–186, 189 keyboard design and development (continued) more-keys layout (iPad), 21–30, 36, 235 patents, 239–240 pattern skew algorithm, 203–206, 234, 243–244 product-killing potential and, 160 QuickType, 235n QWERTY, 146–148, 172–189, 196–197, 199–200, 248–249 as “science project,” 8–9 single-letter QWERTY keyboard, 172–176 taste and, 182–187 thumb-typing, 8, 139–141, 144, 151, 178, 185, 189, 235 touchscreen text entry, 159–190 Keynote (app), 26, 119, 160 KHTML, 69, 71 Kidder, Tracy, 117 KJS, 69, 78–79 Knuth, Donald, 97, 100, 184 Kocienda, Ken departure from Apple, 263–264 DRI for web page editing project, 113–117 interview with Apple, 47–49 iPad keyboard demo to Jobs, 7–19, 25–37, 234, 257 promotion to Principal Engineer, iPhone Software, 19, 257 Konqueror (open source browser), 53–79, 82, 103, 248, 250 Williamson’s “crystal ball” demo of, 53–66 Lamiraux, Henri, 258, 261–262 iPad keyboard demo and, 12–13, 14–15, 24–25, 30, 32–34, 36 Purple project (iPhone) and, 132–142, 150, 152, 157, 160, 180, 192–193, 208, 211 Lesser General Public License (LGPL), 75 licenses, 43, 50–51, 74–77, 88 likability, 160, 185–186, 189 Lingo (programming language), 20 Linux (open-source operating system), 42–43, 56–58, 68, 76 X Windows (graphical system), 57 living on dogfood, 170 Lombardi, Vince, 108–112, 126, 218, 271n5, 271n8, 272n9 Mac OS X, 14, 47–48, 51–52, 57–58, 68, 75 Macintosh (original 1984 model), 42–43, 223, 228, 254, 256 MacPaint, 254 Macworld Conference & Expo (San Francisco, 2007), 210, 221–222, 234, 245–246, 253–254 Macworld Expo (Boston, 1997), 48 Macworld Expo (San Francisco, 2003), 102–112 Madden, John, 110 Mail (app), 12, 36, 47, 118, 121, 139, 141, 180, 224 Matteson, Trey, 125–130, 247 Melton, Don, 44–49 Safari project, 50–61, 67–70, 74–75, 79, 82, 85–88, 93–97, 100, 102, 211–212, 214, 250 web page editing project, 112–114, 129 mental load, 232–236 Messages (app), 12 metadata, 124, 194 Microsoft, 39–40, 246 Internet Explorer, 48–50, 91–92, 107 PowerPoint, 26, 119 Windows, 2–3, 42–43, 45, 56–57, 104 Word, 119, 121 Mozilla, 45, 51–54, 59–60, 67, 69 multitouch-aware user interface system, 138–139 multitouch technology, 136–140, 150, 228–229, 230n, 239 multitouch multitasking gestures, 257–261 Nautilus, 43–44, 46, 218 Netscape, 39, 44–46, 50, 52, 58, 75, 211–212, 267n3 Newton (handheld personal digital assistant), 8, 160, 189–190, 192–193, 195, 256 Newton, James, 269n6 NeXT, 16, 53–54, 116, 126 AppKit, 126, 138 nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), 135, 199 Notes, 28, 36, 139, 141, 206, 209, 224 Objective-C (programming language), 137 On the Origin of the Species (Darwin), 215 open source movement, 45–46, 50–51, 54, 67, 75 Konqueror, 56–61, 64–79, 82, 102, 248, 250 Mozilla, 45, 51–54, 59–60, 67, 69 optimization, software, 95–102, 184, 243, 247, 251, 270n2 Ording, Bas iPad keyboard demo, 27–36, 257 iPad keyboard development, 18–26 “more keys” layout of, 21–25, 248 Purple project (iPhone), 137, 139, 175n, 249 OS/360 mainframe operating system project (IBM), 58 Page Load Test (PLT), 93–97, 100–102, 112, 240, 247 Pages (app), 119 pattern skew algorithm, 203–206, 234, 243–244 pinch to zoom, 257 Platform Experience, 47 pop-ups, 175, 175n, 201 QWERTY keyboard, 146–148, 172–189, 196–197, 199–200, 248–249 Radar (bug tracking program), 210–211, 253 reality distortion field (RDF), 27 release dates, 211–212 Macworld Conference & Expo (San Francisco, 2007), 210, 221–222, 234, 245–246, 253–254 Macworld Expo (Boston, 1997), 48 Macworld Expo (San Francisco, 2003), 102–112 Retina display, 10 Safari project beta release, 113 Black Slab Encounter (first web page loaded), 81–82, 85–89, 93, 102, 157, 163, 180, 248 compilation, 70–74, 77–78, 88 crystal ball demo (Konqueror web), 53–66 FIXMEs (source code annotations), 77, 80–82, 86–88, 95 football analogy to technology work on, 108–112 Konqueror and, 53–79, 82, 103, 248, 250 licensing, 43, 50–51, 74–77, 88 Macworld Expo (San Francisco, 2003) announcement, 102–112 Mozilla and, 45, 51–54, 59–60, 67, 69 naming of Safari, 102–103 Netscape and, 39, 44–46, 50, 52, 58, 75, 211–212, 267n3 open source movement and, 45–46, 50–60, 64–79 optimization, 95–102 Page Load Test (PLT), 93–97, 100–101, 112, 240, 247 porting strategy, 74–79, 87–88, 103, 156 source code, 40–42, 45–46, 50–52, 54, 65–88, 94–95, 100–101 speed and, 91–102, 107–112 Williamson’s “crystal ball” Konqueror demo, 39, 53–66 Schiller, Phil, 104, 161–163, 174, 182 Seagull Manager, 217 Serlet, Bertrand, 54, 70 shim (software translation layer), 57–60 Shneiderman, Ben, 228 “signing up” for work, 117, 135, 153, 258 Singin’ in the Rain (film), 62–65 Soul of a New Machine (Kidder), 117 source code, 40–42, 45–46, 50, 72–80, 94, 100–101, 264 FIXMEs (annotations), 77, 80–82, 86–88, 95 Konqueror, 65, 67–80 Mozilla, 50–52, 54 space bar, 20, 156, 176–178, 195 SpringBoard (home screen icon launcher program), 137, 139–141, 180, 224–225 Stallman, Richard, 40–43, 45, 74–75, 79–80, 82, 85–89, 103 Star Wars (film), 223 Starr, Bart, 108–109 Story of Great Inventions, The (Burns), 83–84 super-secret project, 132–135 Swan, Joseph, 84 Switcher marketing campaign, 104 Sync Services, 132–133 synchronization, data, 132–136 System 7, 125–126 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 82 taste Apple Way and, 251 balance, 185–187 beauty, 187–188 definition of, 4, 248 taste (continued) essential element of success, 4, 248 judgment, 4, 183–184, 214, 233, 242, 244, 248 pleasing and integrated whole, 186–189 Purple project (iPhone) and, 157, 159, 182–189, 213–214, 242, 249–250 Tevanian, Avie, 70 text entry technology, 8, 157, 159–160, 185, 192, 197, 199, 234.

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

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

Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal. Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step in the innovation process. Like Steve Jobs, Haggerty was able to project a reality distortion field that he used to push people to accomplish things they thought impossible. Transistors were being sold in 1954 to the military for about $16 apiece. But in order to break into the consumer market, Haggerty insisted that his engineers find a way to make them so that they could be sold for less than $3.

…

“This was the most wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that people would use,” he recalled. As Woz stayed up all night churning out elements of the design, Jobs sat on a bench to his left wire-wrapping the chips. Woz thought the task would take weeks, but in an early example of Jobs exerting what colleagues called his reality distortion field, he was able to stare unblinkingly at Woz and convince him he could do the job in four days. Steve Jobs (1955–2011) and Steve Wozniak (1950– ) in 1976. Jobs graphic on the original Macintosh in 1984. Richard Stallman (1953– ). Linus Torvalds (1969– ). The March 1975 first gathering of the Homebrew Computer Club came just after Wozniak had finished designing Breakout.

…

So Jobs wrote into his contract with Microsoft a clause that he believed would give Apple at least a year’s head start in having a graphical user interface. It decreed that for a certain period Microsoft would not produce for any company other than Apple any software that “utilizes a mouse or tracking ball” or had a point-and-click graphical interface. But Jobs’s reality distortion field got the better of him. Because he was so intent on getting Macintosh on the market by late 1982, he became convinced that it would happen. So he agreed that the prohibition would last until the end of 1983. As it turned out, Macintosh did not ship until January 1984. In September 1981 Microsoft secretly began designing a new operating system, intended to replace DOS, based on the desktop metaphor with windows, icons, mouse, and pointer.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

Rather than lamenting them, use these advantages to experiment under the radar and then do a public marketing launch once the product has proved itself with real customers.11 Finally, it helps to prepare for the fact that MVPs often result in bad news. Unlike traditional concept tests or prototypes, they are designed to speak to the full range of business questions, not just design or technical ones, and they often provide a needed dose of reality. In fact, piercing the reality distortion field is quite uncomfortable. Visionaries are especially afraid of a false negative: that customers will reject a flawed MVP that is too small or too limited. It is precisely this attitude that one sees when companies launch fully formed products without prior testing. They simply couldn’t bear to test them in anything less than their full splendor.

…

Pivot or Persevere Over time, a team that is learning its way toward a sustainable business will see the numbers in its model rise from the horrible baseline established by the MVP and converge to something like the ideal one established in the business plan. A startup that fails to do so will see that ideal recede ever farther into the distance. When this is done right, even the most powerful reality distortion field won’t be able to cover up this simple fact: if we’re not moving the drivers of our business model, we’re not making progress. That becomes a sure sign that it’s time to pivot. INNOVATION ACCOUNTING AT IMVU Here’s what innovation accounting looked like for us in the early days of IMVU.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

When confronted by awkward facts that challenge our favoured view – proof that our quick fix is not working, for instance – we tend to write them off as a rogue result, or as evidence that “the exception proves the rule.” This is known as the confirmation bias. Sigmund Freud called it “denial,” and it goes hand in hand with the legacy problem and the status-quo bias. It can generate a powerful reality distortion field. When told by doctors they are going to die, many people block out the news entirely. Sometimes we cling to our beliefs even in the face of slam-dunk evidence to the contrary. Look at the cottage industry in Holocaust denial. Or how, in the late 1990s, Thabo Mbeki, then the president of South Africa, refused to accept the scientific consensus that AIDS was caused by the HIV virus, leading to the death of more than 330,000 people.

…

Though Apple relies on collaboration and teamwork to forge its game-changing gadgets, it also encourages project leaders to act as “auteurs,” who lead from the front and stamp their personality all over the final product. Jonathan Ive was so central to designing the iMac, iPod and iPad that he is sometimes credited with inventing the devices. And then there was the auteur-in-chief, Steve Jobs. Friends and foes likened his knack for winning over people to a “reality distortion field.” His keynote speeches were hailed as master-classes in the art of persuasion. By the time he died in 2011, Jobs had achieved the kind of rock star status seldom granted to CEOs, with fans leaving flowers, messages and even apples with a bite taken out of them at Apple stores around the world.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

They thus present the Internet as a magically virtuous circle, an infinitely positive loop, an economic and cultural win-win for its billions of users. But today, as the Internet expands to connect almost everyone and everything on the planet, it’s becoming self-evident that this is a false promise. The evangelists are presenting us with what in Silicon Valley is called a “reality distortion field”—a vision that is anything but truthful. Instead of a win-win, the Internet is, in fact, more akin to a negative feedback loop in which we network users are its victims rather than beneficiaries. Rather than the answer, the Internet is actually the central question about our connected twenty-first-century world.

…

Unorthodoxy is the new orthodoxy in a world where the supposedly most different kind of thinkers—those who have escaped their traditional silo—are branded as the new rock stars. The only convention is to be unconventional and work for uncompanies, join unclubs, or attend unconferences. But today’s technology hipsters aren’t quite as cool as they imagine. Steve Jobs, the founding father of Silicon Valley’s “reality distortion field” and the original tech hipster, who idolized Bob Dylan and spent a summer in an ashram, also outsourced the manufacturing of Apple products in Foxconn’s notorious 430,000-person Shenzhen factory.5 And Jobs ran an astonishingly profitable company that, according to the US senator Carl Levin, has been cleverly avoiding paying the American government a million dollars of tax revenue per hour.6 Rather than “Think Different,” “Think Irresponsibly” might have been the mantra of the Apple accountants who organized this unethical and possibly even illegal scheme to avoid paying American tax.

To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy

Apollo 13, computerized trading, index card, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, spice trade, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

I thought it would be fascinating to at least see what Pixar was all about. By the time I was halfway home, though, my mind was back on the business issues; he should have mentioned them, and I should have pushed to hear about them. We had made a personal connection—better than I could have imagined—but how did I know Steve wasn’t putting up another “reality distortion field” for which he was notorious? That phrase had long been associated with Steve’s ability to make others believe almost anything, regardless of the business or market realities. Maybe he was weaving another fantasy, this time about Pixar. If I took this job and Pixar flamed out, as everyone I had spoken to seemed to think it would, the career I had so carefully built, along with my reputation, would take a huge blow.

…

See also Cowen and Company; Hambrecht and Quist; Robertson Stephens, investment bank company value, assessment of, 114–15, 118, 138 definition, 114 role in IPO, 114 trading price decision, 144–46 J Jennings, DJ, 203 Jobs, Steve, 3, 49, 137 Apple, relationship with, 3–4, 88, 108, 208–11 CEO, Pixar, 24, 210–11 commercial failures, 4, 11, 210 contact with, phone and face to face, 31–32, 50 Disney renegotiation and, 186 Disney’s largest stockholder, 221 Fortune story of Pixar, 200–202 interview and plan for Pixar, 5–6 office at Pixar, 57–58, 62 personal checks for Pixar shortfall, 10–11, 36 Pixar, retention of controlling stock, 88 Pixar IPO and, 5, 79, 100–101, 104, 127, 137 Pixar road show and, 147 “reality distortion field,” 6 relationship with Pixar, 27, 57–58, 210 Toy Story opening box excitement, 155 Jobs’s vision for Pixar aspirations for Pixar, 5, 31, 47, 65–66 difficulty in succeeding, 74 hurdles for Pixar to succeed, 79 process of, 66 return to Apple and, 209 risk and raising capital for filmmaking, 77 “John Lasseter School of Animation Direction,” 165 Juskiewicz, Christina, 239 K Kabloona (Poncins), 235 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 49, 167, 168, 179 Kerwin, Pam, 19, 26–27, 62–63 RenderMan manager, 30–31 video games, possibility of revenue from, 79 Knick Knack, 38 Krantz, Matt, 214 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 235 L LA Times, 157 box office numbers, 158 Lasseter, John, 13, 17–18, 94, 164, 168–72 chief creative officer, 221 film credit question, 205 Hollywood opening, 150 Pixar’s brain trust, 164–65 leverage and negotiation, definitions of, 175 Levy, Hillary, 20, 39, 47, 50, 58, 59, 60, 63, 89, 105, 138, 151, 154, 208, 230, 237, 238, 240, 243, 247 education and career, 7 faith in Steve Jobs, 25 family ties and, 7 Juniper founding, 239–40 Levy, Jason, 7, 55, 59, 64, 149–52, 247 Levy, Jenna, 63, 151, 247 Levy, Lawrence accident (automobile) and insight on Pixar, 242–43 accident (rollerblading) and change in attitude, 58–62 background, 5, 7 CFO of Pixar, 159 comparison to Marlin in Nemo, 223–24 at Electronics for Imaging, 22–23 executive vice president and CFO, Pixar, 24 family history, 228–29 interviews with Jobs and Pixar, 5, 20 joining Pixar’s board of directors, 232 Juniper founding, 239–40 personal relationship with Jobs, 63, 208, 211–13, 247–48 religion and philosophy, 229 sabbatical to study Eastern ideas, 231–32 Levy, Sarah, 7, 56, 64, 148, 149–52, 247 live-action film business, 68–70 Pixar, consideration of, 71–72 Lucas, George, 4, 9, 93 Lucasfilm history of, 9 imaging computer, 4 Pixar, computer graphics division, 140 Luxo Jr., 13, 37–38 Best Animated Short Film nomination, 38 M Magic Mountain, The (Mann), 229 Martin, Eff, 117, 118, 122 McArthur, Sarah, 166 McCaffrey, Mike, 131–32, 148, 156 Mickey Mouse, 67 Microsoft, 34–36 Middle Way, 235–36, 245 relationship to Pixar, 243–44, 246 Monsters, Inc., awards, 214–15 Moore, Gary, 184 Moore, Rob, 187–88, 191, 195, 197, 198 Morgan Stanley, 115–17 Moriarty, Pam, 239 Morrissette, Adele, 135–36 Murti, T.R.V., 235 N Nagarjuna, 229 Nelson, Randy, 166 Netscape IPO, 104 Morgan Stanley and, 115, 117 trading price, 143–45 New York Times, 198–99, 217–18, 221 Newman, Randy, 18–19 NeXT Computer, 3–4 Apple purchase, 207 commercial failure, 11, 210 O Ohlone Tribe, 82, 244 On Death and Dying (Kübler-Ross), 235 P Parikh, Milan, 203 Perennial Philosophy, The (Huxley), 235 Phillips, Diane, 203 photoscience, computer images to film, 54–55 Pixar company culture, 27–28, 83, 85 e-mail to the company, 232–33 employee feelings toward Jobs, 28, 202 location and physical facility, 6, 9, 246–47 “Production Babies,” 63, 151 story team, 164–65 Pixar, business plan brand recognition, 98, 174 expansion and talent recruitment, 165–66 film release schedule, 97–98, 164, 165 increased share of profits, 96, 174 production costs to be paid by Pixar, 96–97 Pixar, business side, 19–20.

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

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

See Streeter, “That Deep Romantic Chasm.” 5. Gitlin, Sixties, 307. 6. Lehr and Rossetto, “New Right Credo,” 24; Rossetto, interview, January 24, 2005. 7. Wolff, Burn Rate, 33 –34. 8. “They were some of many people zooming by [and] not particularly memorable,” Kelly recalled during an interview, July 27, 2001. 9. Keegan, “Reality Distortion Field.” 10. Kelly, interview, July 27, 2001. 11. Gordon, “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up?” 50. For more on developments in personal computing technology in this period, see Ceruzzi, History of Modern Computing (2003), 309 –12. [ 286 ] N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 1 3 _ 2 2 2 12. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 181, 196 –99.

…

Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 20 –21, quoted in Thrift, “Romance Not the Finance Makes Business Worth Pursuing,” 426; Alan Greenspan, “The American Economy in a World Context,” at the 35th Annual Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, May 6, 1999, available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/ board-docs/speeches/1999/19990506.htm, quoted in Gordon, “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up?” 49. 17. Frank, One Market Under God, xiv, 356. 18. Rossetto quoted in Keegan, “Reality Distortion Field”; Battelle quoted in Smith, “WiReD.” 19. Kelly, interview, July 27, 2001. 20. Smith, “WiReD.” 21. Rossetto, interview, January 24, 2005; Rossetto, Metcalfe, et al., Wired business plan. 22. “Reader Report,” internal document, Wired, January 1996, no pagination (in Louis Rossetto’s personal collection). 23.

…

Kyoto Prize Commemorative Lecture, Inamori Foundation, Kyoto, Japan. Delivered November 11, 2004. Kay, Lily E. “How a Genetic Code Became an Information System.” In Systems, Experts, and Computers, edited by Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes, 463 –92. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Keegan, Paul. “Reality Distortion Field.” UpsideToday, January 31, 1997. Kelly, Kevin. “The Birth of a Network Nation.” New Age Journal, October 1984. ———. “The Computational Metaphor.” Whole Earth 95 (Winter 1998): 5. ———. “George Gilder: When Bandwidth Is Free.” Wired, September–October 1993. ———. “Nerd Theology.” Technology in Society 21 (1999): 387–92. ———.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

He told Forbes magazine: “If there were moments I was stubborn in my life it was because I was really… REALLY believing in something that I wanted to see become a reality and every now and then people around me didn’t totally get it.” Selling and persuasion. That’s what it takes to put your vision into someone else’s head. At Apple they had a name for it. The Reality Distortion Field was the label they gave Steve Jobs’ pressure-selling charisma and its effect on those around him. You’ll have noticed something else about the list of successes a few paragraphs earlier. It’s how often they failed. And that’s the corollary of trying to innovate (or deviate) from the norm.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace

Albert Einstein, business climate, buy low sell high, complexity theory, fail fast, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Menlo Park, reality distortion field, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Wall-E

Steve’s transformation was an active one. He continued to engage; he just changed the way he went about it. There is a phrase that many have used to describe Steve’s knack for accomplishing the impossible. Steve, they say, employed a “reality distortion field.” In his biography of Steve, Walter Isaacson devoted an entire chapter to it, quoting Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Mac team at Apple, saying, “The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.” I heard the phrase used fairly often around Pixar, too. Some people, after listening to Steve, would feel that they had reached a new level of insight, only to find afterward that they could not reconstruct the steps in his reasoning; then the insight would evaporate, leaving them scratching their heads, feeling they had been led down the garden path.

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

But this is about my life, and the truth is that I had moments later in the 1980s when I got pretty full of myself. I was asking for it. The feeling of combining romance with self-importance is so powerful that it realigns reality, even in the perception of people around you. Like Steve Jobs’s famous “reality distortion field.” This wasn’t lust, exactly, but something more powerful; a deep human business, ancient, like discovering a hidden sexual organ that communicates with the great men of history and brings you into their immortal communion. Inner demons of vanity congeal into a seductive monster that envelops you and intones, “The great scientists and conquerors, the ones we remember, you will join their ranks.”

…

See also specific languages projected augmented reality proprioception protocols Prozac psychedelic drugs psychedelic magazines PTSD Punch and Judy avatars punch cards Pynchon, Thomas quantum computing quantum cryptography quantum field theory racism radio Radio Shack radio waves Ramachandran, V. S. Rand, Ayn Rathinavel, Kishore Rational thought RB2 (Reality Built for Two) Reagan, Ronald Réalité virtuelle reality. See physical reality reality distortion field Reality Engines Reality Masher Reality on Wheels real time 3-D computers real-time shadows Reddit redundancy refraction reincarnation religious tolerance REM sleep Rent-a-Mom Republican Party retina retinal displays Rheingold, Howard Rhemann, Christoph Rhythm Gimbal rights, abstract vs. economic Robinette, Warren robotic arm robotic broomstick robotic hand robotic Loch Ness-type creature robotic mimic of mimic octopus robots robust system rock climbing Rockwell, Norman Rocky’s Boots Roddenberry, Gene Roko’s Basilisk Rosedale, Philip Rosen, Joe Rosenberg, Scott Rosenthal, Sally Roswell, New Mexico rounds, startups and Royal portable typewriter Rumi Russian intelligence sales tax Salisbury, Ken Sandin, Dan San Francisco San Francisco Bay Bridge Santa Cruz Sante, Luc Satava, Rick Sault Ste.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

Fitness apps, charity Web sites, and products that claim to suddenly turn hard work into fun often fall into this quadrant. Possibly the most common example of peddlers, though, is in advertising. Countless companies convince themselves they’re making ad campaigns users will love. They expect their videos to go viral and their branded apps to be used daily. Their so-called reality distortion fields keep them from asking the critical question, “Would I actually find this useful?”10 The answer to this uncomfortable question is nearly always no, so they twist their thinking until they can imagine a user they believe might find the ad valuable. Materially improving users’ lives is a tall order, and attempting to create a persuasive technology that you do not use yourself is incredibly difficult.

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph by Ryan Holiday

British Empire, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, fear of failure, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, reality distortion field, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs

Ignore what it “represents” or it “means” or “why it happened to you.” There is plenty else going on right here to care about any of that. THINK DIFFERENTLY Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.” Part motivational tactic, part sheer drive and ambition, this field made him notoriously dismissive of phrases such as “It can’t be done” or “We need more time.” Having learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children, Jobs had a much more aggressive idea of what was or wasn’t possible.

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

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

We must defer to the immemorial laws of money, recognizing again the flaws of monetarism—what money is and what it is not. Based on time, real money is scarce, valuable, irreversible, and governed by entropy. It can be used to prioritize all the trade-offs and accounts of entrepreneurial life. Without time constraints, anything seems possible, particularly in the reality-distortion fields of government power. Money imposes time limits on enterprise and restrictions on government power. Real money brings reality to economic life. By mutilating the rigorous time relations of money, politicians or central banks halt learning and shrink the time horizons of our lives. “Flash boys” trading in milliseconds do not refine the market, they merely oscillate it.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, writes of his subject’s ‘reality distortion field’. The phrase was adopted from Star Trek by one of Apple’s first software designers, who identified his CEO’s approach as ‘a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand’ – characteristics similar to those identified by Churchill’s biographers. 33 Strikingly, however, the first half of Isaacson’s book, which deals with the period prior to Jobs’s 1997 return to Apple, contains sixteen references to the ‘reality distortion field’, the remainder contains only three.

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

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

The Apple CEO was a master at instilling cognitive dissonance, persuading customers to overlook (usually fixable) defects in his products as well as the troubling working conditions of the contractors who made them. Similarly, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos gets away with jerking around just about everyone—suppliers, employees, shippers, other merchants—so long as he delivers the lowest prices to customers. So far, Kalanick has succeeded neither at creating the type of “reality-distortion field” for which Jobs was famous nor at convincing the lion’s share of Uber’s riders and drivers to overlook his callous statements and outward lack of empathy for their plight. He has been troubled enough at how he and his company are perceived to try to do something about it: devoting more resources to keeping riders happy, trying to fix a badly broken customer- and driver-support infrastructure, attempting to tone down incendiary comments on the advice of highly paid image consultants.

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

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

The next day he returned, and a chastened PARC team showed him everything. Jobs went back to Cupertino and called a board meeting, saying he had to build a new computer based on the PARC architecture and that it should not be backward-compatible with the existing Apple II. The board thought he was crazy, but Jobs applied his charisma—his “reality distortion field”—and got his way. Xerox got its Apple shares, and in December of 1980, Apple went public at $22 per share. Xerox’s holdings were instantly worth millions. The first version of a computer using the PARC architecture, the Lisa, was a commercial failure, but when Jobs introduced the Macintosh in an iconic advertisement that aired during the 1984 Super Bowl, the long-awaited vision of the future arrived.

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

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

Steve is now going to be the CEO of Pixar, et cetera, et cetera. Alvy Ray Smith: It was when I looked at the prospectus for the IPO when I first realized that Steve lies. He claimed to be the cofounder of Pixar and the CEO since its founding. In the prospectus! Cofounder and CEO forever! Bullshit. Both of those are wrong: lies. I don’t like this “reality distortion field” idea. He lies. But you know his genius was to take the company public on nothing. The movie wasn’t even a hit yet, and there was essentially no cash at all. But he saw his chance to make his $50 million back. And he did. Alan Kay: Steve just hung in there and hung in there until they got into the sweet spot where everything that they knew suddenly was applicable in a way that made commercial sense.

…

Like everybody would wear a tuxedo with sneakers, or serve Kobe beef on a cheap ol’ napkin. It was some form of apology or some sort of a desperate cry to not be just about the money. Jamis MacNiven: It was all very interesting, and we were younger then, and we thought it would go on forever. John Battelle: There was this sort of reality distortion field around the entire internet, that was like, “Everything is changing, and I want a ticket to the change. Where do I buy a ticket to the change?” And so if you wanted to buy a ticket to the change in, say, retail, you would buy a share of Webvan. If you wanted a ticket to the change in travel, you would buy a ticket to Expedia or Priceline.

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

Utterly lacking in humility, they announce again and again that they are the smartest, most insightful, most creative person in the room. And sometimes they actually are. THINK DIFFERENT People who worked closely with Steve Jobs had a special name for his uncanny ability to impose his vision upon others. With reference to an early Star Trek episode, his colleagues at Apple called it the reality distortion field. Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the Macintosh team, describes it as “a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”6 According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs “would assert something—be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting—without even considering the truth.

The Wealth Dragon Way: The Why, the When and the How to Become Infinitely Wealthy by John Lee

8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, butterfly effect, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Donald Trump, financial independence, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, intangible asset, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Maslow's hierarchy, multilevel marketing, negative equity, passive income, payday loans, reality distortion field, self-driving car, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

If only it had let go of the nuts, it would have been able to run free. If I hadn't let go of that initial £10,000 that I paid to Ying Tan to help me get started in property investment, I wouldn't be where I am now. What's the Limit to What You Can Achieve? Steve Jobs had what his coworkers called a reality distortion field. He would ask a developer how long it would take to perfect a certain product or piece of software, and if she said 18 months he'd tell her to do it in 2. And he always got what he wanted. He knew no bounds, no limits. He used his charm and persuasion to distort the reality of the developer's mind so that she stopped looking at the reasons why it would take so long and started to believe she could do it in two months.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

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

“If you set an aggressive schedule that people think they might be able to make, they will try to put out extra effort,” he says. “But if you give them a schedule that’s physically impossible, engineers aren’t stupid. You’ve demoralized them. It’s Elon’s biggest weakness.” Steve Jobs did something similar. His colleagues called it his reality-distortion field. He set unrealistic deadlines, and when people balked, he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid, you can do it.” Although the practice demoralized people, they ended up accomplishing things that other companies couldn’t. “Even though we failed to meet most schedules or cost targets that Elon laid out, we still beat all of our peers,” Mueller admits.

…

Ellison, who had been a mentor of Steve Jobs, gave Musk a piece of advice: he should not get into a fight with Apple. It was the one company that Twitter could not afford to alienate. Apple was a major advertiser. More importantly, Twitter could not survive unless it continued to be available in the iPhone’s App Store. In some ways, Musk was like Steve Jobs, a brilliant but abrasive taskmaster with a reality-distortion field who could drive his employees crazy but also drive them to do things they thought were impossible. He could be confrontational, with both colleagues and competitors. Tim Cook, who took over Apple in 2011, was different. He was calm, coolly disciplined, and disarmingly polite. Although he could be steely when warranted, he avoided unnecessary confrontations.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane

airport security, Boeing 747, cognitive dissonance, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Hawkins, Lao Tzu, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, social intelligence, Steve Jobs

He starts revealing more about his own personal thoughts and views about how his company is doing, how he’s doing, what his hopes and dreams and fears are—even his insecurities. Your job is to listen attentively to each sentence and, using one of the techniques above, aim to break the flow when you think the potential backlash for these revelations would be too damaging. When you turn on your charisma full blast, you create a kind of reality distortion field around you. It’s a bit like hypnosis; people can go into an altered state in your presence. And just as a hypnotist must take care when leading people out of a trance, so must you. You’re putting them under the spell of your presence, so help them ease out of the altered state as well. You’re in the Spotlight and Held to Higher Standards Celebrities and CEOs have at least one thing in common: they’re always on display.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

These luddites, laggards, and late adopters refuse to engage with our change programs. Can’t they see that this change is inevitable and better for everyone? The train is leaving the station, and they better get on board. Right? Wrong. This cliché perception of resistance leads us astray. It’s a reality-distortion field that blunts our empathy and our humility. People can and do change. They just do so when it makes sense to them. People don’t resist all change; they resist incoherent change poorly managed. Perhaps we’re asking people to take risks while their incentives push them to avoid failure at all costs.

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It. by James Silver

Airbnb, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, call centre, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, DevOps, family office, flag carrier, fulfillment center, future of work, Google Hangouts, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, pattern recognition, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

‘We all go through those moments, and as a CEO your job is to be the cheerleader at those times to stop your team from looking down into that abyss and deciding to quit. That’s a really important thing, and the bigger the organisation grows, the more people you have who are likely to look at that irrationality; and [simultaneously] the more constituents you have, whether it’s shareholders or customers and so on. ‘[Your role as CEO] is to create a reality-distortion field around what you’re doing, and somehow give people the belief and hope that it’s going to work. That always exists, and you can never escape that part of the job.’ Mind the gap But then the question becomes: how much time must you devote to this, and what’s your personal threshold for the gap between the reality you know to be true and the version of it you’re projecting to your employees, customers and investors?

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

Microsoft, 23 times larger by market capitalization, hadn’t been able to do it. What chance did Apple have? Brandenburg never even met Jobs personally. He did not worship at the altar of Macintosh, and in casual conversation referred to the company’s customers as “brainwashed.” He lived outside of Apple’s reality distortion field, and later, when the company sent him a confidential proposal for a new mp3 player, he started on the back page with the technical specs. Apple wasn’t a threat to established markets, and Brandenburg was, in his own words, “not sentimental” about technology. In the summer of 2001 he traveled to Hong Kong to give another lecture.

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook by Michael Lopp

do what you love, finite state, game design, job satisfaction, John Gruber, knowledge worker, reality distortion field, remote working, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sorting algorithm, systems thinking, web application

Leaders optimize reality to their favor, and the more powerful and influential they are, the more they can define a comfortable reality for themselves and their team. The more this reality conflicts with the rest of the company, the more your team will need to adapt when the Maestro leaves the building with her personal reality distortion field, and that's where you need to pay attention. But Pay Attention: What you're going to learn in the first month after an influential leader has left the group is how much her view of the goals of your group differ from the goals set by the company. Ideally, your former leader did a fine job of translating corporate vision into regionally relevant goals.

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion by Virginia Postrel

Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Dr. Strangelove, factory automation, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, hydroponic farming, indoor plumbing, job automation, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, washing machines reduced drudgery, young professional

The reason lies in the nature of glamour. It is not a product or style but a form of communication and persuasion. It depends on maintaining exactly the right relationship between object and audience, imagination and desire. Glamour is fragile because perceptions change. Glamour creates a “reality distortion field”—Silicon Valley’s capsule description of Steve Jobs’s persuasive magic—and because of its artifice, it is always suspect. The real puzzle is not why glamour keeps disappearing but why it survives at all. Its mystery and grace violate our self-proclaimed commitment to honesty, transparency, comfort, realism, practicality, even overt sexuality.

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

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

Her slow-blinking stare, it was said, could bore holes through your eye sockets. She also took on Jobs’s less admirable traits. She ran Theranos like a police state, obsessed with preventing employees from talking about their work with each other. She became a master at employing Jobs’s “reality distortion field”—a fictional narrative about her own genius and wondrous Theranos products that were unyielding to the facts. Jobs was only twenty-one when he cofounded Apple, and twenty-five when Apple first sold its stock to the public, making Jobs a young celebrity and centi-millionaire. Holmes felt increasingly pressured in a race to glory and early wealth against her old idol.

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

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

Among other things, he felt hemmed in by competitors, by the financial markets, by regulators, by campaigners, by the media, by the interests of employees and communities, by the company’s history and earlier decisions, and—crucially—by events. His company was Monsanto, eventually sold to Bayer, with dire results for the latter. If your work takes you regularly into the world’s boardrooms and C-suites, it really is hard to miss the reality distortion fields such places generate. Black and Gray Swan risks seem remote, almost certainly covered by insurance policies or the responsibility of governments, while Green Swan opportunities are the stuff of speculation by delusional do-gooders. Such reality distortion shapes incoming information in both direct and indirect ways, creating worldviews that may differ considerably from those held by other people elsewhere in the same organization, let alone in the wider world.

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

I was visiting Dally to find out. A fifty-seven-year-old, brown-haired engineer with a black hat and backpack and hiking boots, he is dressed Silicon-Valley-mountaineer style to take me on a high-altitude adventure in microchips and software, ideas and speculations, Google maps and Elon Musk “reality distortion fields” down Route 101 at five o’clock on a late-August Friday evening. It’s not quite Doctor Brown’s Back to the Future ride in a DeLorean, but it will suffice for some modest time-travel in the history of computing. Since writing his college thesis in the late 1970s, Dally has rebelled against the serial step-by-step computing regime known as the von Neumann architecture.

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

It was at Reed that Friedland met a young Steve Jobs. The two became close friends and Friedland was ‘one of the few people in Jobs’s life who were able to mesmerize him’, his biographer wrote.8 Jobs thought of Friedland, who was four years older, as a sort of guru and adopted some of his key charismatic traits, including the famous ‘reality distortion field’ that he used to compel others to do what they thought was impossible. They were both into eastern religions and spirituality. Friedland had travelled to India in the summer of 1973 to meet a famous Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba and Jobs took the same trip a year later. Friedland was a father figure to Jobs and a seeker ‘in the tradition of Ram Dass’, the American spiritual teacher, according to Jobs’s former girlfriend Chrisann Brennan.

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

Hillis has a magnetic intellectual charisma, as you may have guessed by now. An afternoon with him resembles nothing so much as lingering in a mental theme park: roller coasters of big ideas (a ten-thousand-year clock!) mixed with smaller, sugary treats (how to design a better fence post). No wonder he fit in at Disney. Critics accused Steve Jobs of having a “reality distortion field” in which the Apple founder’s charisma bludgeoned the boundaries of the practical. Hillis, by contrast, has a sort of “reality enhancement field” in which much of the world as seen through his eyes is filled with possibility. From an early age, Hillis had been interested in the dream of a thinking robot.

Possiplex by Ted Nelson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Computer Lib, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Murray Gell-Mann, nonsequential writing, pattern recognition, post-work, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vannevar Bush, Zimmermann PGP

I do believe Steve Jobs based the entire style and persona of the Apple corporation on the attitude of my book Computer Lib—the attitude of creative defiance that I offered the reader, and that Jobs invited the Apple customers to share.* * Creative defiance has always been my attitude, and is the essence of Bohemianism.) Jobs’ “reality distortion field”— his cloud of ideas so often disdained by journalists-- has proven to be reality itself.* But the question is, where did Jobs get these ideas originally? I believe they were pretty much set forth in Computer Lib two years before the Apple I. * As of this writing, the value of Apple— its market cap— has just passed that of Microsoft.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The historian of science Mark Essig writes that ‘the question is not so much why Edison’s campaign failed as why he thought it might succeed’.59 But an understanding of cognitive errors such as the sunk cost effect, the bias blind spot and motivated reasoning helps to explain why such a brilliant mind may persuade itself to continue down such a disastrous path. The co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, was similarly a man of enormous intelligence and creativity, yet he too sometimes suffered from a dangerously skewed perception of the world. According to Walter Isaacson’s official biography, his acquaintances described a ‘reality distortion field’ – ‘a confounding mélange of charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand’, in the words of his former colleague Andy Hertzfeld. That single-minded determination helped Jobs to revolutionise technology, but it also backfired in his personal life, particularly after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

The odds that Holmes could pull off this latest Houdini act while under criminal investigation were very long, but watching her confidently walk the audience through her sleek slide show helped crystallize for me how she’d gotten this far: she was an amazing saleswoman. She never once stumbled or lost her train of thought. She wielded both engineering and laboratory lingo effortlessly and she showed seemingly heartfelt emotion when she spoke of sparing babies in the NICU from blood transfusions. Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief. The spell was broken, however, during the question-and-answer session when Stephen Master, an associate professor of pathology at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York and one of three panelists invited onstage to ask Holmes questions, pointed out that the miniLab’s capabilities fell far short of the original claims she had made.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

The chicken-and-egg problem, and variants thereof, is the most important element of strategy to understand. Well, OK, you can probably live without understanding it: Steve Jobs practically made a career out of not understanding the chicken-and-egg problem, twice. But the rest of us don't have Jobs's Personal Reality Distortion Field at our disposal, so we'll have to buckle down and study hard. The classic domain of chicken-and-egg problems is in software platforms. But here's another chicken-and-egg problem: Every month, millions of credit card companies mail out zillions of bills to consumers in the mail. People write paper checks, stuff them in trillions of envelopes, and mail them back.

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

I shudder faintly, but Mo is visibly distracted. "Hang on. They've ported OFCUT to the iPhone? What does it look like?" "I'll show you . . ." Fifteen minutes later I am on my way to the office, sans shiny. Mo is still sitting at the kitchen table with a cold mug of coffee, in thrall to the JesusPhone's reality distortion field, prodding at the jelly-bean icons with an expression of hapless fascination on her face. I've got a horrible feeling that the only way I'm going to earn forgiveness is to buy her one for her birthday. Such is life, in a geek household. ACTUALLY, I HAVE A MOTIVE FOR GOING IN TO WORK THAT I don't feel like telling Mo about.

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

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

Jobs progressively increased his level of charisma over the years, choosing a signature style of personal dress, the simple black turtleneck; learning to introduce products with Broadway-level drama, whipping off a cloth to reveal a new offering and promoting what Apple employees called his “reality distortion field,” demanding even that which appears to be impossible. I saw Mark Zuckerberg for the first time at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. He was sitting in front of several hundred people in a large conference room on a panel about the future of mobile along with Chad Hurley and a number of other high-tech luminaries.

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

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

In another era, investors would have steered clear of a college dropout making such an outrageous claim. But in the 1990s, this sort of over-the-top bravado was exactly what people expected from young tech geniuses. When Steve Jobs used his charisma to overcome or hide inconvenient facts, people called it his reality distortion field. As Liemandt demonstrated, Jobs was far from the only entrepreneur adept at distorting reality. Liemandt himself admitted to the Stanford Daily newspaper that the initial product “sucked,” but once they finally got it to work, Trilogy sold a major software deal to Hewlett-Packard. Silicon Graphics, a large technology firm that had pulled out of a deal with Trilogy, came back to the table asking to renegotiate.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Armstrong belonged to a particular category of media executive, familiar to old and new media alike, a born dealmaker who could convince anyone of anything. Like many a great salesperson, he seemed to be able to convince himself of pretty much anything as well. He was a perfect mark for Arianna, whose own reality-distortion field had created an image of The Huffington Post—a mecca for young viewers, powered by earnest concern about politics and “citizen journalists” blogging for free—that bore little resemblance to the dark arts KT, Jonah, and Breanna had mastered of gaming Google and getting middle-aged men to click on links that promised photographs of attractive young women.

With a Little Help by Cory Efram Doctorow, Jonathan Coulton, Russell Galen

autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, death of newspapers, don't be evil, game design, Google Earth, high net worth, lifelogging, lolcat, margin call, Mark Shuttleworth, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, sensible shoes, skunkworks, Skype, traffic fines, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban planning, Y2K

When he started doing it to national banks, put a run on the dollar, broke the Fed, well, that's when we all knew that he was someone who was special, someone who could create signals that went right to your hindbrain without any critical interpretation." 2261 "Scary." 2262 "Oh yes. Very. In another era they'd have burned him for a witch or made him the man who cut out your heart with the obsidian knife. But here's the thing: he could never, ever kid me. Not once." 2263 "And you're alive to tell the tale?" 2264 "Oh, he likes it. His reality distortion field, it screws with his internal landscape. Makes it hard for him to figure out what he needs, what he wants, and what will make him miserable. I'm indispensable." 2265 He had a sudden, terrible thought. He didn't say anything, but she must have seen it on his face. 2266 "What is it? Tell me." 2267 "How do I know that you're on the level about any of this?

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

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

WSJ, Sep. 16, 1985. Nauenberg, Michael. “Robert Hooke’s Seminal Contribution to Orbital Dynamics.” Phys. Persp. 7 (2005): 4. Newsweek. “Mr. Chips: Steve Jobs Puts the ‘Wow’ Back in Computers.” Oct. 24, 1988. Newton, Isaac. Letter to Edmond Halley, June 20, 1686. Pitta, Julia. “The Steven Jobs Reality Distortion Field.” Forbes, Apr. 29, 1991, 137. Pollack, Andrew. “The Return of a Computer Star.” NY Times, Oct. 13, 1988. ________. “A Co-Founder of Next Is Quitting the Company.” NY Times, May 4, 1991. Price, David A. The Pixar Touch. Knopf, 2008. Rechtshaffen, Michael. “Toy Story.” Hollywood Reporter, Nov. 20, 1995.

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

Despite his famously hearty laugh and cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, who could terrify any employee who stepped into an elevator with him. Bezos is a micromanager with a limitless spring of new ideas, and he reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards. Like Jobs, Bezos casts a reality-distortion field—an aura thick with persuasive but ultimately unsatisfying propaganda about his company. He often says that Amazon’s corporate mission “is to raise the bar across industries, and around the world, for what it means to be customer focused.”1 Bezos and his employees are indeed absorbed with catering to customers, but they can also be ruthlessly competitive with rivals and even partners.

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

In the popular children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon, the four-year-old protagonist has the power to create things just by drawing them. There’s no path to walk on, so he draws a path. There’s no moon to light his path, so he draws the moon. There are no trees to climb on, so he draws an apple tree. Throughout the story, his imagination brings things into existence.17 Thought experiments are your very own reality-distortion field, your choose-your-own-adventure game—your purple crayon. The purple crayon was Einstein’s favorite scientific tool, one that he carried with him even as an adult.18 As he wrote to a friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.”19 Centuries earlier, Isaac Newton purportedly used similar words in describing himself as “a boy playing on the seashore… whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”20 Although Einstein and Newton managed to retain their childlike curiosity, it is beaten out of most people.

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

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

Katzenberg held fast to his original theory, though, believing eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds would eagerly seek out a few moments of diversion from the bleak news of the deadly virus’s relentless spread. “Here is a moment in time when, collectively, all of us are stressed out, anxious, depressed, threatened. Life as we know it has just been turned upside down and inside out,” said Katzenberg, summoning a reality distortion field that was every bit as potent as Steve Jobs’s. “Here comes something that’s new, it’s unique, it’s different. As you know, the entire goal of our enterprise is to inform and to entertain and inspire.” Whitman had planned a $400 million “rolling thunder” marketing campaign to grab the attention of a distracted world, kicking off Quibi’s launch with a glitzy, star-studded Hollywood red-carpet event, with one hundred or so celebrities parading before the world’s entertainment press.

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

Unable to open it, the police wheeled it out as well. Singapore had decisively moved to investigate, and it seemed like they wanted to brag about it. An employee tipped us off about the raid, and Stefania Palma was surprised to get an on-the-record confirmation from the usually taciturn police department. Wirecard’s reality distortion field was in operation, meanwhile; its staff in Singapore simply had a prearranged chat with officers to help them with their inquiries, it claimed, but the share price suggested Markus Braun was no longer getting the benefit of the doubt. It had crept as high as €136 after the billionaire CEO’s reassuring chat with investors.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

They need to allow for control illusion and recognise that people chase their dreams. Probabilistic reasoning does not play a large part in our lives because the situations in which it can usefully be applied are limited. We deal with radical uncertainty through storytelling, by constructing narratives. Steve Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, wrote of his subject’s ‘reality distortion field’, and the same phrase might equally have been applied to Ford or Disney.29 This, not the Panglossian world of ‘the Greenspan doctrine’, is the world in which business is conducted and securities are traded. The reality of market behaviour, as the psychologist David Tuckett recorded in his interviews, makes little use of probabilistic thinking but relies on conviction narratives – stories that traders tell themselves, and reinforce in conversation with each other.

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

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

“It’s a funny story,” Jobs replied. He hadn’t had any idea how to find the small development team, but he had hunted around. Because every iPhone developer had to supply a phone number to the App Store, Apple’s CEO found Kittlaus’s number in his developer database. The team’s first foray into the legendary “reality distortion field”—Jobs’s personal brand of hypnotic charisma—wasn’t promising. Jobs invited the trio of Siri developers to his house in the heart of old Palo Alto. Jobs’s home was a relatively low-key 1930s Tudor-style set next to an empty lot that he had converted into a small grove of fruit trees and a garden.

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

So they rented a Ryder truck, hauled the washing machine–size monster to Boston along with its equally large storage module, got them running, and then tried to digitally penetrate them, simply to see if they could. The first night Mudge entered the L0pht, the elite group of hackers were struck by his technical genius, his heavy-metal hair, and the onstage charisma and extroversion that he’d learned as a performing musician. “He had that reality distortion field,” says Space Rogue. “He could see we needed a front man, and that’s what he became.” At the time, the L0pht had a de facto leader in Count Zero, one of the group’s two cofounders. But Count Zero was going through a messy divorce that kept him away from the L0pht for months at a time, long enough for Mudge to stake his claim.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Apple did not say why it removed the app shortly after it first appeared. It might have been Guideline 16.1, the catchall ban on “objectionable content,” or 15.3, which forbids depictions of “a real government or corporation, or any other real entity.” Or the topic might have just menaced the company’s famous “reality distortion field.”30 Political speech is especially protected under the First Amendment, but Apple isn’t bound by the Bill of Rights.31 Zittrain anticipated opportunistic behavior like this in his 2008 book The Future of the Internet— And How to Stop It. His work is a complex and nuanced call for technology companies to reflect public 64 THE BLACK BOX SOCIETY values in their decisions about what apps to make accessible.

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

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

You feel it at the civic center as tech executives walk onstage brandishing the latest world-changing gadget. And the secrecy generated beforehand, the sense that you’re being allowed a peek under the hood is—undeniably—a little bit thrilling. But as gadget-review editor Mark Spoonauer reminds me, “There are journalists who actually try to stay away from the ‘reality distortion field,’ because what you don’t want to do is get caught up in the excitement. Because you have to be objective.” It’s just really hard to do after Apple delivers you the sublime. After the presentation, which concluded with a performance by the Australian pop singer Sia, who stood motionless in a giant wig and sang her hits while a kid bounced around and did cartwheels, the press is funneled into a room, stage right, that resembles a miniature version of an Apple Store—a month into the future, when the products just announced onstage will be available.

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

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

So when he started limiting access, and cooperating with the press only when he needed to promote his products, the tales from those early days at Apple became the conventional wisdom about his personality and thinking. Perhaps that’s why the posthumous coverage reflected these stereotypes: Steve was a genius with a flair for design, a shaman whose storytelling power could generate something magical and maleficent called a “reality distortion field”; he was a pompous jerk who disregarded everyone else in his single-minded pursuit of perfection; he thought he was smarter than anyone else, never listened to advice, and was an unchanging half-genius, half-asshole from birth. None of this gibed with my experience of Steve, who always seemed more complex, more human, more sentimental, and even more intelligent than the man I read about elsewhere.

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

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

But in fact neither proposition is even remotely true. Leary played an important role in the modern history of psychedelics, but it’s not at all the pioneering role he wrote for himself. His success in shaping the popular narrative of psychedelics in the 1960s obscures as much as it reveals, creating a kind of reality distortion field that makes it difficult to see everything that came either before or after his big moment onstage. In a truer telling of the history, the Harvard Psilocybin Project would appear more like the beginning of the end of what had been a remarkably fertile and promising period of research that unfolded during the previous decade far from Cambridge, in places as far flung as Saskatchewan, Vancouver, California, and England, and, everywhere, with a lot less sound and fury or countercultural baggage.

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

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

Thwart him, and it scarcely mattered whether you were an eighth-grade dropout or a Ph.D. in electrical engineering; he would trash your arguments like they were so much chaff in the blades of a thresher. Jobs’s associates had a label for his unyielding confidence in his own vision and judgment. They called it his “reality distortion field.” He lived securely within his worldview and seemed to exist chiefly for the purpose of imposing it on others. He had a way of seeming at once intolerably brash and older than his years. Those were the qualities that enabled him to hold the experienced investors of XDCrapt by relating the story of how he had founded Apple.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

At Amway, Mary Kay, Walmart, Chick-fil-A, Apple, the Oprah Winfrey empire, Martha Stewart in her heyday, Whole Foods, and Amazon—among employees as well as customers—those businesses cultivated a cultish, evangelical vibe. And maybe most of all at Apple, one of my own brand faiths, where the acid-tripping megalomaniac Steve Jobs famously radiated a “reality distortion field” that made people believe whatever he wanted them to believe. “In his presence,” said the Apple underling who borrowed the idea and phrase from a Star Trek episode, “reality is malleable.” Another employee explained her boss to Jobs’s biographer in terms of the Bay Area religious entrepreneur Jim Jones, who became famous when Apple was also a Bay Area start-up: “It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid.

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

anti-globalists, barriers to entry, book value, Burning Man, company town, creative destruction, double helix, Internet Archive, inventory management, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, New Journalism, off-the-grid, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, printed gun, random walk, reality distortion field, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, time dilation, union organizing, wage slave, work culture

“You think that this happened overnight? You think that this problem just cropped up yesterday and I tossed in the towel?” Oh. “Oh.” “Yeah. We’ve been tanking for months. I’ve been standing on the bridge of this sinking ship with my biggest smile pasted on for two consecutive quarters now. I’ve thrown out the most impressive reality distortion field the business world has ever seen. Just because I’m giving up doesn’t mean I gave up without a fight.” Suzanne had never been good at condolences. She hated funerals. “Landon, I’m sorry. It must have been very hard—” “Yeah,” he said. “Well, sure. I wanted you to have the scoop on this, but I had to talk to the press once the story broke, you understand.”

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, Commentariolus, crowdsourcing, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, game design, iterative process, lone genius, New Journalism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, urban planning, wikimedia commons

Like the construction of his flying machines, they were too fanciful to execute. This inability to ground his fantasies in reality has generally been regarded as one of Leonardo’s major failings. Yet in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. The things he envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now exist. Suction pumps now drain swamps. Along the route of the canal that Leonardo drew there is now a major highway. Sometimes fantasies are paths to reality.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Elizabeth Holmes, the twenty-something founder of Theranos, claimed to have developed technology for conducting a wide range of medical tests from a small drop of blood extracted from the finger. Holmes modelled herself on Apple’s Steve Jobs, right down to the black turtleneck sweaters. Like her hero, she created a ‘reality distortion field’. Impossible things could be achieved if only people acted as if they were possible. Hyperbole was the order of the day. Holmes claimed her ‘mini lab’ to be the ‘most important thing humanity has ever built’. In fact, Theranos’s black-box technology didn’t function as described. Long before this was discovered, the company achieved a $9 billion valuation on Silicon Valley.

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

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

Since his death, it has become widely known that he invented elements of his biography, which the late scholar Loretta Lorance described accurately as “a public relations tool.” He had to become what others believed he was, and by the end, he was the only living source for many of the facts. Fuller’s writings and talks overflowed with misinformation and outright falsehoods, which he methodically built into the reality distortion field that allowed him to achieve so much in a single lifetime. His embellishments naturally left previous biographers in a difficult position. Alden Hatch simply took him at his word, while Fuller reportedly advised Athena Lord, the author of a book about his life for young readers, to “mythologize his childhood.”