New Tech Quotes

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

...But the heart is not a computer that can be upgraded so quickly and easily with the latest version of love. Love cannot be sealed hermetically inside a tight box like any other on the store shelf; even though the word itself is in public domain, its quality is not. Love cannot promise a full customer satisfaction garanteed or a whole lifetime of dreams shared refunded, with no questions asked. Love cannot be agreed to in terms and conditions as quickly as the "Next" button being clicked. These unspoken terms and conditions grow and develop over time until it gets very messy, and no one remembers how such a mess of accusation and anger was able to overshadow their pure ecstasy of love, the spark between two people turning on a new operation system of togetherness for the first time. Love is always beta; never a golden master. If love were a computer, constant bug reports and subsequent fixes are the name of the game, and there are many unexplained breakdowns. The heart is too stubborn for explanations and too impatient for forgiveness, and there is usually no one at the tech support line. Forgive me stan, if I've crashed so often. It's just to hard to boot up to a whole new future without you. I am an empty monitor in search of a "hello.

Please?” asked the girl. “I AM BUSY. I AM TRYING TO FIX CONTINENTAL DRIFT.” “I…didn’t know it was broken.” Uriel’s face became more animated, his speech faster. “IT HAS BEEN BROKEN FOR FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS. I THINK IT BROKE WHEN I RELOADED NEW ZEALAND FROM A BACKUP COPY, BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHY. MY SYNCHRONIZATION WAS IMPECCABLE AND THE CHANGE PROPAGATED SIMULTANEOUSLY ACROSS ALL SEPHIROT. I THINK SOMEBODY BOILED A GOAT IN ITS MOTHER’S MILK. IT IS ALWAYS THAT. I KEEP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO DO IT, BUT NOBODY LISTENS.

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.

One common mistake we see new entrepreneurs especially tech entrepreneurs making is focusing too much on product

Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. Yesterday's widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.

Data is the new fuel for growth in multiple industries, from manufacturing to retail to financial services. But unlike other assets, it doesn’t necessarily fuel job growth, but rather, profit growth. And those profits tend to be diverted directly into executives’ and shareholders’ wallets.

Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design. We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.

You can predict which features in any new technology will be used and which won't. The use of a feature is inversely proportional to the amount of interaction needed to control

New technologies are important, but not as important as new thinking.

Cybersecurity is a new area where equality will exist to allow intelligence to succeed. Cybersecurity needs women to be successful and without them it will not as the best talent a must.

In fact, the general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric. They become a distribution channel, so they can get to the world. And then they put many new products through that distribution channel.

The linearist view of technology fails to appreciate the dangers a new turning can bring. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is now predicting that everyone will soon tune in to a world of unlimited options via high-tech portable devices. What he nowhere mentions is that by merely reversing a few circuits the same technology could empower a central authority to monitor what every individual is doing.

Imagine you have a hammer. That’s machine learning. It helped you climb a grueling mountain to reach the summit. That’s machine learning’s dominance of online data. On the mountaintop you find a vast pile of nails, cheaper than anything previously imaginable. That’s the new smart sensor tech. An unbroken vista of virgin board stretches before you as far as you can see. That’s the whole dumb world. Then you learn that any time you plant a nail in a board with your machine learning hammer, you can extract value from that formerly dumb plank. That’s data monetization. What do you do? You start hammering like crazy and you never stop, unless somebody makes you stop. But there is nobody up here to make us stop. This is why the “internet of everything” is inevitable.

Republicans began to issue warnings about the new practices well before November 2020. They talked about how widespread changes in the manner the country conducts elections would create uncertainty, confusion, and delays.

Shifting to an outcome mindset is harder than it looks. We spend most of our time talking about outputs. So, it’s not surprising that we tend to confuse the two. Even when teams intend to choose an outcome, they often fall into the trap of selecting an output. I see teams set their outcome as “Launch an Android app” instead of “Increase mobile engagement” or “Get to feature parity on the new tech stack” instead of “Transition customer to the new tech stack.

Apple, for example. It employs 12,000 workers in Cupertino. Through the multiplier effect, however, the company generates more than 60,000 additional service jobs in the entire metropolitan area, of which 36,000 are unskilled and 24,000 are skilled. Incredibly, this means that the main effect of Apple on the region’s employment is on jobs outside of high tech.

But such people (Moderate Conservatives) aren't liberal. What they are is corporate. Their habits and opinions owe far more to the standards of courtesy and taste that prevail within the white-collar world than they do to Franklin Roosevelt and the United Mine Workers. We live in a time, after all, when hard-nosed bosses compose awestruck disquisitions on the nature of 'change,' punk rockers dispense leadership secrets, shallow profundities about authenticity sell luxury cars, tech billionaires build rock'n'roll musuems, management theorists ponder the nature of coolness, and a former lyricist fro the Grateful Dead hail the dawn of New Economy capitalism from the heights of Davos. Coversvatives may not understand why, but business culture had melded with counterculture for reasons having a great deal to do with business culture's usual priority - profit.

Had I somehow short-circuited the control panels when I stomped across them? Cool! I might die, but I had saved New York. 'Try unplugging it,' said the second tech. 'Then plug it back in.' Clearly, he was the senior trouble shooter for 1-555-ASK-EVIL.

(I) went to see the noble knights of Holy Anocracy. By the time they assembled, the inn finished assimilating the new gaming consoles. I waved my hand and three huge flat screen opened in the stone walls of the vampire quarters. Wall spat out sets of controllers. “Greetings,” I said. “House Krah, House Sabla and House Vorga, may I present Call of Duty.” The three screens ignited simultaneously, playing the opening of the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Soldiers in high tech armor shot at target, flew across the screen from bomb impacts, and walked dramatically in slow motion. Vehicles roared, Marines roared louder, and Kevin Spacey informed us that politicians didn’t know how to solve problems but he did. The vampires stared at the screens. “This is a game of cooperative action,” I said, “Where a small elite force can triumph against overwhelming odds.” At the word elite, they perked up like wild dogs who heard a rabbit cry. “The game will teach you how to play it. May the best House triumph over their opponents.

Deep work is at a severe disadvantage in a technopoly because it builds on values like quality, craftsmanship, and mastery that are decidedly old-fashioned and nontechnological. Even worse, to support deep work often requires the rejection of much of what is new and high-tech.

The drug dealer leaned forward and covered his mouth conspiratorily with the back of his hand. In a voice softer than a gust of wind, he said: ‘Got some new merch, though. High tech, top of the line. Muy experimental. Packs quite the punch they say, and hits you like a brick wall, espiritualmente,’ he pushed three fingers together and planted them a kiss. ‘Real sweet. Un dragón muy poderoso.’ ‘Any... particular side-side-side-effects?’ Mario scratched his chin, thinking back on his aggresive nosebleeds. ‘Not a dicky bird,’ affirmed the dealer. ‘This stuff’s cleaner than la cocina de tu abuela. Mind you, it does call for some weird shit, no doubt about it. And you gotta watch yourself for sharp table corners and the lot, cause you WILL be tripping.

At their worst, alpha geeks can’t let anyone else get any glory without claiming some of it for themselves. They are the origin of any good ideas but had no part in creating the bad ideas, except that he knew they would fail. The alpha geek believes that every developer should know exactly what she knows, and if you don’t know something, she will gleefully point out your ignorance. The alpha geek can be very rigid about how things should be done and closed off to new ideas that he didn’t come up with. Alpha geeks get very threatened when people complain about systems they built or criticize their past technical decisions.

So let us praise the distinctive pleasures of re-reading: that particular shiver of anticipation as you sink into a beloved, familiar text; the surprise and wonder when a book that had told one tale now turns and tells another; the thrill when a book long closed reveals a new door with which to enter. In our tech-obsessed, speed-obsessed, throw-away culture let us be truly subversive and praise instead the virtues of a long, slow relationship with a printed book unfolding over many years, a relationship that includes its weight in our hands and its dusty presence on our shelves. In an age that prizes novelty, irony, and youth, let us praise familiarity, passion, and knowledge accrued through the passage of time. As we age, as we change, as our lives change around us, we bring different versions of ourselves to each encounter with our most cherished texts. Some books grow better, others wither and fade away, but they never stay static.

Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers' struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Bad teams gather requirements from sales and customers.

Oh, to be sure, there are the get-rich dreams that float in and out of idle conversation. But there are much headier rewards closer at hand - the freedom to be your own boss and chart your own course, the chance to explore the leading edge of some new technology, the career-opening opportunity to take on far more responsibility than any established organisation would ever grant. These are what really drive early market organisations to work such long hours for such modest rewards - the dream of getting rich on equity is only an excuse, something to hold on to your family and friends as a rationale for all this otherwise crazy behavior.

Nothing is really new in this high-tech, globally wired world, except how frequently it is. When

Nothing is really new in this high-tech, globally wired world, except how frequently it is.

We suggest that if you are feeling yourself resisting this change, you might need to be the one to change lest you, or your company, be left behind.

I think of prayers like tech support. Unless I get a person live on the phone, I’m not sure it’s getting to anybody.

monopolies are often a product of network effects, meaning that the more users a platform has, the more attractive it is to new users

Some people think Elon Musk bought Twitter but what he actually bought is DATA. Whoever has the best information wins. Data is the new oil!

Moore’s law came with a social corollary: high-tech could not remain high-tech for long.

We need to reimagine business around new ideas of value, and to understand what value means when it’s about an integrated you in an integrated world.

If AI and 3-D printers indeed take over from the Bangladeshis and Bangalorians, the revenues that previously flowed to South Asia will now fill the coffers of a few tech giants in California. Instead of economic growth improving conditions all over the world, we might see immense new wealth created in high-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while many developing countries collapse.

A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy.

As Larry Ellison put it, “choose your competitors carefully, because you’ll become a lot like them.” This is a tech founder’s version of the Hegelian dialectic, where thesis and antithesis mix to form a synthesis.

In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world. Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture. Imagine all kinds of people everywhere getting committed to human excellence, getting committed to closing the gap between the human condition and the human potential... And imagine all of us hooked up with a common high tech communications system. That's a vision that brings tears to the eyes. Human excellence is an ideal that we can embed into every formal human structure on our planet. And that's really why we're going to do this. And that's also why The Meta Network is a creation we can love. Notwithstanding Colonel Burns's failure to foresee that people would use the Internet mostly to access porn and look themselves up on Google, his prescience was admirable.

As alarm bells went off in his mind, Odi wondered if the al-Qaeda sniper had some new high-tech equipment that allowed him to home in on a target using radio waves. He would report that possibility—if he ever got home.

All of these are signs “that our societal structures are failing to keep pace with the rate of change,” he said. Everything feels like it’s in constant catch-up mode. What to do? We certainly don’t want to slow down technological progress or abandon regulation. The only adequate response, said Teller, “is that we try to increase our society’s ability to adapt.” That is the only way to release us from the society-wide anxiety around tech. “We can either push back against technological advances,” argued Teller, “or we can acknowledge that humanity has a new challenge: we must rewire our societal tools and institutions so that they will enable us to keep pace.

The scant pieces of the common approach to the gods suggest an entirely different, low-tech, more transactional relationship. A similar ethos informs this book. We are not here to found a sci-fi religion or roleplaying circle. Pick an ambivalent ally and move on.

less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the U.S. receive venture funding, and total VC investment accounts for less than 0.2% of GDP. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP. Indeed, the dozen largest tech companies were all venture-backed. Together those 12 companies are worth more than $2 trillion, more than all other tech companies combined.

Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.

by focusing mainly on individuals’ identities and overlooking the norms and structures of the tech industry, many diversity initiatives offer little more than cosmetic change, demographic percentages on a company pie chart, concealing rather than undoing the racist status quo.

Alice Marwick, an anthropologist who did her fieldwork studying the tech scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, argues that new communication technologies reflect the individualist and status-conscious values of the competitive, commercial milieu in which they were developed.

But what happens next is worse: context creep. Those who’re most offended by this initial post want to share it with others, and in doing so they inject it with their own editorial bent. Something that was already taken out of its original context is now placed in an entirely new one.

Yokoi had no desire (or capability) to compete with electronics companies that were racing one another to invent some entirely new sliver of dazzling technology. Nor could Nintendo compete with Japan’s titans of traditional toys—Bandai, Epoch, and Takara—on their familiar turf. With that, and Drive Game, in mind, Yokoi embarked on an approach he called “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the reimagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses. By “withered technology,” Yokoi meant tech that was old enough to be extremely well understood and easily available, so it didn’t require a specialist’s knowledge. The heart of his philosophy was putting cheap, simple technology to use in ways no one else considered.

If all the new industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build for ourselves virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries that will provide us with all the good things in life even if the planet becomes as hot, dreary and polluted as hell.

The problem is that the pressure to disprove a stereotype changes what you are about in a situation. It gives you an additional task. In addition to learning new skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking in a schooling situation, or in addition to trying to perform well in a workplace like the women in the high-tech firms, you are also trying to slay a ghost in the room, the negative stereotype and its allegation about you and your group. You are multitasking, and because the stakes involved are high--survival and success versus failure in an area that is important to you--this multitasking is stressful and distracting. ...And when you realize that this stressful experience is probably a chronic feature of the stetting for you, it can be difficult for you to stay in the setting, to sustain your motivation to succeed there. Disproving a stereotype is a Sisyphean task; something you have to do over and over again as long as your are in the domain where the stereotype applies. Jeff seemed to feel this way about Berkeley, that he couldn't find a place there where he could be seen as belonging. When men drop out of quantitative majors in college, it is usually because they have bad grades. But when women drop out of quantitative majors in college it usually has nothing to do with their grades. The culprit, in their case, is not their quantitative skills but, more likely, the prospect of living a significant portion of their lives in a domain where they may forever have to prove themselves--and with the chronic stress that goes with that. This is not an argument against trying hard, or against choosing the stressful path. There is no development without effort; and there is seldom great achievement, or boundary breaking, without stress. And to the benefit of us all, many people have stood up to these pressures...The focus here, instead, is on what has to be gotten out of he way to make these playing fields mere level. People experiencing stereotype threat are already trying hard. They're identified with their performance. They have motivation. It's the extra ghost slaying that is in their way.

Erring on the side of caution paid off. Japanese retailers liked that one high-tech company finally took responsibility for its errors and fixed them for free. (Nintendo continues to do so today, to the point of reapplying kids’ stickers onto a new console if the old one has to be replaced instead of repaired.)

In truth, however, nothing is inevitable and very little is new. And tech is no more the root of the problem than are trade or globalization. Many of our most vaunted innovations are simply methods -- electronic or otherwise -- of pulling off some age-old profit-maximizing maneuver by new and unregulated means.

This first generation of corporate barons left a lasting, if dubious, legacy: they made America more hierarchical, with new divisions between management and labor, between a professional class and everyday workers. They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism.

Growth hackers resist this temptation (or, more appropriate, this delusion). They opt, deliberately, to attract only the early adopters who make or break new tech services and seek to do it as cheaply as possible. In fact, part of the reason the scrappy start-ups, services, and apps in this book might not always be well-known or topics of daily conversation is because their founders have focused their energies on product development with an eye toward growth—they’re now millions of members strong without any superfluous “buzz.” They got to mass market by ignoring the urge to appeal to the mass market, at least to start with.

Many pieces of management advice tell new managers that part of their job, if they are effective, is to be a shield (or, less politely, a “bullshit umbrella”). They should help their team focus on what they need to get done without being distracted by the wider drama, politics, and changes happening in the company around them.

Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.

The short version is that if a tech company is about technological innovation first, and company culture second, a startup society is the reverse. It’s about community culture first, and technological innovation second. And while innovating on technology means forecasting the future, innovating on culture means probing the past.

The bottom line is that most technology businesses simply don’t require many employees (think of all the robots roaming around Amazon warehouses), and this will only become truer with time. It’s been estimated that globally, 60 percent of all occupations will, in the next few years, be substantially redefined because of new disruptive technologies. 60

What the Soviet émigrés brought with them is symptomatic of what Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit believes can be found in a number of dynamic economies. “Ask yourself, why is it happening here?” he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. “Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States? A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor,” Margalit continued, “or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth—then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here—across the entire population.

A few years later, Jobs described to Wired the process that went into getting a new washing machine: It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better—but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. They ended up getting a Miele washer and dryer, made in Germany. “I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years,” Jobs said.

… To many biologists, cloning is all sizzle and no substance, a high-tech spectacle that fails to address habitat loss, poaching, pollution, and the other human activities that put wildlife at risk in the first place… But the time for first resorts has come and gone, and safeguarding species is an all-hands-on-deck enterprise. … Cloning won’t be a cure-all, but given the state of the planet, it can’t hurt to have options.

What’s the date?” “September 8, 1998. Where you from?” “Next July.” We sit down at the table. Kimy is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. “What’s going on, next July?” “It’s been a very cool summer, your garden’s looking good. All the tech stocks are up. You should buy some Apple stock in January.” She makes a note on a piece of brown paper bag. “Okay. And you? How are you doing? How’s Clare? You guys got a baby yet?

This situation is completely without precedent, and it is now evolving so quickly that we can barely keep track of where we are. And the more technology evolves, the more that new layers of hardware and software are added, the harder it is to change. This is handing tech capitalists a unique source of power. As the Silicon Valley guru Jaron Lanier puts it, they don’t have to persuade us when they can directly manipulate our experience of the world.

The races I study still employ their immune systems, and the parallels between those systems and us as a race are striking. For we have become what Earthlings would call white blood cells. We remove foreign bodies from the cosmos. And every one leaves an imprint, a bauble of tech or a new idea, all of which we neatly coil into our lives, into our molecular structure. We are an immune system, and we are immune to death. This last, alas, is our curse.

Like all supposedly classless societies, America makes up for its lack of formal caste barriers by raising class prejudice to a fine art; the cheap shots at small town America so common among the urban middle classes who dominate today’s green scene are an expression of that, and so is the peer pressure that keeps most Americans from doing the sensible thing and buying cheap and sturdy used products in place of increasingly overpriced and slipshod new ones.

Madoff was not inhumanly monstrous. He was monstrously human. He was greedy for money and praise, arrogantly sure of his own capacity to pull it off, smugly dismissive of skeptics—just like anyone who mortgaged the house to invest in tech stocks, or tapped the off-limits college fund to gamble on a new business, or put all the retirement savings into a hedge fund they didn’t understand, or cheated a little on the tax return or the expense account or the spouse.

We are relentlessly encouraged by tech companies to think of their technology as enabling human processes, making human actions more efficient. Do your bookkeeping better! Find a restaurant more easily! Talk to a loved one far away! In fact, the business models of most tech giants, and especially social media giants, most thrive when they have replaced human experience and human actions. And now they have moved on to suppressing human experience and human actions.

When texting begins to take the place of substantive in-person conversations for any of us, we are training the language and speech centers of our brain for a new, unnatural, and superficial model of connection. When that training starts early, as it does now for young texters, they get so used to it at such a young age that, unlike the newborn baby who innately knows something is missing and complains about it, our older tech-trained children don’t even know what they have lost.

Each time scientists have unraveled a new force, it has changed the course of civilization and altered the destiny of humanity. For example, Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion and gravity laid the groundwork for the machine age and the Industrial Revolution. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell’s explanation of electricity and magnetism paved the way for the illumination of our cities and gave us powerful electric motors and generators as well as instantaneous communication via TV and radio. Einstein’s E = mc2 explained the power of the stars and helped to unravel the nuclear force. When Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and others unlocked the secrets of the quantum theory, they gave us the high-tech revolution of today, with supercomputers, lasers, the internet, and all the fabulous gadgets in our living rooms. Ultimately, all the wonders of modern technology owe their origin to the scientists who gradually discovered the fundamental forces of the world.

Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56

Companies with billions of dollars employ some of the most intelligent, creative humans on the planet to mastermind new ways to lure us into spending our lives on their apps and in their platforms. Remember, stock prices rely on keeping engagement metrics high. Many tech companies’ survival is based on continuously inventing ways to capture an ever-growing share of your time and attention. If you think you’re a customer of these products and platforms, think again. Your time, attention, and data are their product.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like... [It] often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that the novelty shall not be suppressed for very long... [N]ormal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.

Back home, we can't kill them fast enough," he says. "Even Grahamites offer blue bills for their skins. Probably the only thing they've ever done that I agreed with." "Mmm, yes." Emiko's brow wrinkles thoughtfully. "They are too much improved for this world, I think. A natural bird has so little chance, now." She smiles slightly. "Just think if they had made New People first." Is it mischief in her eyes? Or melancholy? "What do you think would have happened?" Anderson asks. Emiko doesn't meet his gaze, looks out instead at the circling cats amongst the diners. "Generippers learned too much from cheshires." She doesn't say anything else, but Anderson can guess what's in her mind. If her kind had come first, before the generippers knew better, she would not have been made sterile. She would not have the signature tick-tock motions that make her so physically obvious. She might have even been designed as well as the military windups now operating in Vietnam—deadly and fearless. Without the lesson of the cheshires, Emiko might have had the opportunity to supplant the human species entirely with her own improved version. Instead, she is a genetic dead end. Doomed to a single life cycle, just like SoyPRO and TotalNutrient Wheat. Another shadow cat bolts across the street, shimmering and shading through darkness. A high-tech homage to Lewis Carroll, a few dirigible and clipper ship rides, and suddenly entire classes of animals are wiped out, unequipped to fight an invisible threat. "We would have realized our mistake," Anderson observes. "Yes. Of course. But perhaps not soon enough.

Unlike the laws of physics, society is not time invariant. As even the world’s leading anti-tech blog once admitted: Virtual reality was an abject failure right up to the moment it wasn’t. In this way, it has followed the course charted by a few other breakout technologies. They don’t evolve in an iterative way, gradually gaining usefulness. Instead, they seem hardly to advance at all, moving forward in fits and starts, through shame spirals and bankruptcies and hype and defensive crouches — until one day, in a sudden about-face, they utterly, totally win.

Yet, ironically, the most tech-cautious parents are the people who invented our iCulture. People are shocked to find out that tech god Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent; in 2010, when a reporter suggested that his children must love the just-released iPad, he replied: “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” In a September, 10, 2014, New York Times article, his biographer Walter Isaacson revealed: “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer.” Years earlier, in an interview for Wired magazine, Jobs expressed a very clear anti-tech-in-the-classroom opinion as well—after having once believed that technology was the educational panacea: “I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody on the planet. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.”34 Education

the tech revolution means more comforts for everyone. It means easier communication, education, transportation, and work. Technology equalizes opportunity in important ways. Much of this is good. But it also fuels a cult of efficiency, a fetish for tools, and a lopsided focus on the future. It fosters boredom with the past. It feeds self-interest. It transfers huge wealth to a new, highly secular leadership class. It punishes many workers in traditional industries. It renders, or seems to render, the “supernatural” obsolete. And with its power to manipulate and propagandize, it reshapes our political life.

New high-tech tools allow for more precise measuring and tracking, better sharing of information, and increased visibility of targeted populations. In a system dedicated to supporting poor and working-class people's self-determination, such diligence would guarantee that they attain all the benefits they are entitled to by law. In that context, integrated data and modernized administration would not necessarily result in bad outcomes for poor communities. But automated decision-making in our current welfare system acts a lot like older, atavistic forms of punishment and containment. It filters and diverts. It is a gatekeeper, not a facilitator.

Ultimately the danger of the New Jim Code positioning is that existing social biases are reinforced – yes. But new methods of social control are produced as well. Does this mean that every form of technological prediction or personalization has racist effects? Not necessarily. It means that, whenever we hear the promises of tech being extolled, our antennae should pop up to question what all that hype of “better, faster, fairer” might be hiding and making us ignore. And, when bias and inequity come to light, “lack of intention” to harm is not a viable alibi. One cannot reap the reward when things go right but downplay responsibility when they go wrong.

I told him it would be a week, seven to ten days to get a new line. He said through his teeth he needed an exact day. I gave him my supervisor's number. This whole time, his wife was in the kitchen wiping a clean counter. I was filling out the work orders and emailing my supervisor to give him a heads-up on a possible call from a member of every cable tech's favorite rage cult when his wife knocked on my van window. She stepped back and called me "ma'am." Which was nice. Her husband with the tucked-in polo shirt had asked my name and I told him Lauren. He heard Lawrence because it fit what he saw and asked if he could call me Larry. Guys like that use your name as a weapon. "Larry, explain to me why I had to sit around here from one to three waiting on you and you show up at 3:17. Does that seem like good customer service to you, Larry? And now you're telling me seven to ten days? Larry, I'm getting really tired of hearing this shit." Guys like that, it was safer to just let them think I was a man. She said she was sorry about him. I said, "It's fine." I said there really wasn't anything I could do. She blinked back the flood of tears she'd been holding since god knows when. She said, "It's just, when he has Fox, he has Obama to hate. If he doesn't have that . . . " She kept looking over her shoulder. She was terrified of him. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just need him to have Fox." I got out of my van.

Soli looked up to the sky. Same blue as the Mexican sky. She looked through the truck's slats. This was California. The United States of America. She had arrived. And here's what she discovered. This place, this America? This new place, this streets-of-gold place? Looked a hell of lot like the old place. America streaked by her, stripped and tender with heat. She watched it all rush past through the slats of the old truck: the tin roofs, seas of broken glass, glinting and breathless like a fever dream. America was the dust in her hair, the wind in her throat, the sun that shouted against her eyelids. Between the slates of this truck, America was nothing but a high-tech, high-speed dream of trees and houses and fences, a sliver of interrupted light.

THERE ARE EXTRAORDINARY librarians in every age. Many of today’s librarians, such as Jessamyn West, Sarah Houghton, and Melissa Techman, have already made the transition and become visionary, digital-era professionals. These librarians are the ones celebrated in Marilyn Johnson’s This Book Is Overdue! and the ones who have already created open-source communities such as Code4Lib, social reading communities such as LibraryThing and GoodReads, and clever online campaigns such as “Geek the Library.” There are examples in every big library system and in every great library and information school. These leaders are already charting the way toward a new, vibrant era for the library profession in an age of networks. They should be supported, cheered on, and promoted as they innovate. Their colleagues, too, need to join them in this transformation.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we only have this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens. An ecological meltdown will cause economic ruin, political turmoil, a fall in human standards of living, and it might threaten the very existence of human civilisation. We could lessen the danger by slowing down the pace of progress and growth. If this year investors expect to get a 6 per cent return on their portfolios, in ten years they will be satisfied with a 3 per cent return, in twenty years only 1 per cent, and in thirty years the economy will stop growing and we’ll be happy with what we’ve already got. Yet the creed of growth firmly objects to such a heretical idea. Instead, it suggests we should run even faster. If our discoveries destabilise the ecosystem and threaten humanity, then we should discover something to protect ourselves. If the ozone layer dwindles and exposes us to skin cancer, we should invent better sunscreen and better cancer treatments, thereby also promoting the growth of new sunscreen factories and cancer centres. If all the new industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build for ourselves virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries that will provide us with all the good things in life even if the planet is as hot, dreary and polluted as hell.

While poorhouses have been physically demolished, their legacy remains alive and well in the automated decision-making systems that encage and entrap today's poor. For all their high-tech polish, our modern systems of poverty management - automated decision-making, data mining, and predictive analysis - retain a remarkable kinship with the poorhouses of the past. Our new digital tools spring from punitive, moralistic views of poverty and create a system of high-tech containment and investigation. The digital poorhouse deters the poor from accessing public resources; polices their labor, spending, sexuality, and parenting; tries to predict their future behavior; and punishes and criminalizes those who do not comply with its dictates. In the process, it creates ever-finer moral distinctions between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor, categorizations that rationalize our national failure to care for one another.

In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy. COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.

History determines your hiring policy. Why are tech companies being lectured by media corporations on “diversity”? Is it because those media corporations that are 20-30 points whiter than tech companies actually deeply care about this? Or is it because after the 2009-era collapse of print media revenue, media corporations struggled for a business model, found that certain words drove traffic, and then doubled down on that - boosting their stock price and bashing their competitors in the process?12 After all, if you know a bit more history, you’ll know that the New York Times Company (which originates so many of these jeremiads) is an organization where the controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family literally profited from slavery, blocked women from being publishers, excluded gays from the newsroom for decades, ran a succession process featuring only three cis straight white male cousins, and ended up with a publisher who just happened to be the son of the previous guy.13

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

The cheerleaders of the new data regime rarely acknowledge the impacts of digital decision-making on poor and working-class people. This myopia is not shared by those lower on the economic hierarchy, who often see themselves as targets rather than beneficiaries of these systems. For example, one day in early 2000, I sat talking to a young mother on welfare about her experiences with technology. When our conversation turned to EBT cards, Dorothy Allen said, “They’re great. Except [Social Services] uses them as a tracking device.” I must have looked shocked, because she explained that her caseworker routinely looked at her purchase records. Poor women are the test subjects for surveillance technology, Dorothy told me. Then she added, “You should pay attention to what happens to us. You’re next.” Dorothy’s insight was prescient. The kind of invasive electronic scrutiny she described has become commonplace across the class spectrum today. Digital tracking and decision-making systems have become routine in policing, political forecasting, marketing, credit reporting, criminal sentencing, business management, finance, and the administration of public programs. As these systems developed in sophistication and reach, I started to hear them described as forces for control, manipulation, and punishment

We got it on file,” Van Dyne said. Vince could not believe what he had heard. “I thought people in your line of work didn't keep records? Safer for you and essential for your clients.” Van Dyne shrugged. “Fuck the clients. Maybe one day the feds or the locals hit us, put us out of business. Maybe I find myself needing a steady flow of cash for lawyers' fees. What better than to have a list of a couple of thousand bozos living under phony names, bozos who'd be willing to be squeezed a little rather than have to start all over again with new lives.” “Blackmail,” Vince said. “An ugly word,” Van Dyne said. “But apt, I'm afraid. Anyway, all we care about is that we are safe, that there aren't any records here to incriminate us. We don't keep the data in this dump. Soon as we provide someone with a new ID, we transmit the record of it over a safe phone line from the computer here to a computer we keep elsewhere. The way that computer is programmed, the data can't be pulled out of it from here; it's a one-way road; so if we are busted, the police hackers can't reach our records from these machines. Hell, they won't even know the records exist.” This new high-tech criminal world made Vince woozy. Even the don, a man of infinite criminal cleverness, had thought these people kept no records and had not realized how computers had made it safe to do so

Huxley and Orwell, wrote Postman, did not predict the same future. “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think,” As Postman explained: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.

The unbelievable speed of this process has been principally caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook) now have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’.2 Yet although we are being aggravated by a tech world which is running faster than our legs are able to carry us to keep up with it, these wars are not being fought aimlessly. They are consistently being fought in a particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unknowing in some people, deliberate in others – is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will. Although the foundations had been laid for several decades, it is only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia. The attractions of this new set of beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism. And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequity not just in their own lives but every inequity on earth. The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology. To

Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.

This book has pushed back against the randomness thesis, emphasizing instead the skill in venture capital. It has done so for four reasons. First, the existence of path dependency does not actually prove that skill is absent. Venture capitalists need skill to enter the game: as the authors of the NBER paper say, path dependency can only influence which among the many skilled players gets to be the winner. Nor is it clear that path dependency explains why some skilled operators beat other ones. The finding that a partnership’s future IPO rate rises by 1.6 percentage points is not particularly strong, and the history recounted in these pages shows that path dependency is frequently disrupted.[5] Despite his powerful reputation, Arthur Rock was unsuccessful after his Apple investment. Mayfield was a leading force during the 1980s; it too faded. Kleiner Perkins proves that you can dominate the Valley for a quarter of a century and then decline precipitously. Accel succeeded early, hit a rough patch, and then built itself back. In an effort to maintain its sense of paranoia and vigilance, Sequoia once produced a slide listing numerous venture partnerships that flourished and then failed. “The Departed,” it called them. The second reason to believe in skill lies in the origin story of some partnerships. Occasionally a newcomer breaks into the venture elite in such a way that skill obviously does matter. Kleiner Perkins became a leader in the business because of Tandem and Genentech. Both companies were hatched from within the KP office and actively shaped by Tom Perkins; there was nothing lucky about this. Tiger Global and Yuri Milner invented the art of late-stage venture capital. They had a genuinely novel approach to tech investing; they offered much more than the equivalent of another catchy tune competing against others. Paul Graham’s batch-processing method at Y Combinator offered an equally original approach to seed-stage investing. A clever innovation, not random fortune, explains Graham’s place in venture history.

Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, however, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was going at all. When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish. She didn’t want to help another boyfriend grow up. What Betsy didn’t know was that, ever since he’d started spending time with her, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. As a result, Cole started to think more aspirationally. He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply. As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job. This one break radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, he moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the identity capital he’d gained could speak for itself. Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites.

Cambridge or Boston. The same urban tech migration is playing out in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York City as some of the hottest tech companies in those areas establish themselves in downtown offices. For example, Twitter Inc. is headquartered in the gritty Mid-Market neighborhood in San Francisco, and the crowdfunding site Kickstarter Inc. opened its headquarters in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, N.Y. “It didn’t surprise me that young people wanted to move back to the city, because cities are fun,’’ said Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. “What really surprised me was this move among tech firms back to the cities.

Our focus, however, should not be on the differences among our sectors, but rather on supporting and promoting the entire innovation economy — from tech to bio to clean energy to health care and beyond. In fact, in its recent Impact 2020 report, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council highlighted the interrelationship of these vital sectors working together, combining cutting-edge biomedical research with new information technology tools for capturing and integrating data, conducting sophisticated analytics, and enhancing personal connectivity. Massachusetts is a national and world leader in the growing field of life science information technology.

The Disruption Machine What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. by Jill Lepore In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.

He also described how hospitals could become the new health start–up incubators. Doctors, nurses, medical specialists, and administrators will continue to push the “bring your own device” boundaries and will work with others to build mobile tech solutions that get around outdated technologies used in hospitals.