5. Gianpaolo Callioni, Xavier de Montgros, Regine Slagmulder, Luk N. Van Wassenhover, and Linda Wright, “Inventory-Driven Costs,” Harvard Business Review, Mar. 2005.
6. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (New York: Crown Business, 2011), 3–4.
7. Ibid., 107.
8. Ibid., 108–109.
9. Confirmed via email from Frank Robinson, Aug. 15, 2014.
10. Ries, Lean Startup, 97–99.
11. “From 0 to $1B—Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy,” First Round Review, accessed Aug. 21, 2018, https://perma.cc/73XZ-C3B7.
12. There are different formulations of this motto. This one is from Khurram Hashmi, “Introduction and Implementation of Total Quality Management (TQM),” iSixSigma.com, accessed Aug. 21, 2018, https://perma.cc/W2HT-8CWX. Another is “Do the right thing the first and every time,” as in Hesbon Ondiek Yala, Harry Ododa, and Chelang’a James, “The Impact of Total Quality Management (TQM) Policy on Customer Satisfaction at Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya (2010–2012),” International Journal of Academic Research and Development 3, no. 2 (Mar. 2018): 187–193, 187, https://perma.cc/ZC5L-BG5L.
13. Tom Peters, “Leadership for the ‘I-Cubed Economy,’ ” Tom Peters’s Blog, Oct. 11, 2006, https://perma.cc/M3UQ-8EKD.
14. Aneesh Chopra, interview by the author, March 9, 2014.
15. Adrianne Jeffries, “Why Obama’s Healthcare.gov Launch Was Doomed to Fail,” The Verge, Oct. 8, 2013, https://perma.cc/LJ7Z-Z9BN. CGI, the main contractor charged with creating the site, claimed to have used agile techniques, but it’s widely disputed that what CGI thought was agile met any reasonable definition of it.
16. Frank Thorp, “Only 6 Able to Sign Up on Healthcare.gov’s First Day, Documents Show,” NBC News, Oct. 31, 2013, https://perma.cc/574A-VLNV.
17. Evelyn Rusli, “Behind Healthcare.gov: How Washington Is Drawing Inspiration from Silicon Valley, Twitter,” TechCrunch, Aug. 6, 2010, https://perma.cc/L6QY-3RL9.
18. Robinson Meyer, “The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America,” Atlantic, July 9, 2015, https://perma.cc/3X7S-5A8Q.
19. Rusty Foster, “Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls: A More Agile Healthcare.gov,” New Yorker, Oct. 28, 2013, https://perma.cc/M4SG-JS7S.
20. Peter Varhol, “To Agility and Beyond: The History—and Legacy—of Agile Development,” TechBeacon, accessed Aug. 21, 2018, https://perma.cc/3U6A-2J2D.
21. VerionOne, 10th Annual State of Agile Report (VersionOne, 2016), https://perma.cc/BP34-54YK; Kerby Ferris, “Duck Typing the Gender Gap,” Media Temple, Feb. 17, 2016, https://perma.cc/394U-XVQY.
22. Aneesh Chopra, “From Silicon Valley to Main Street Virginia,” White House Blog, Aug. 11, 2011, https://perma.cc/EE6Q-W94G. The number of employees Chopra cites seems high. David Kirkpatrick in The Facebook Effect (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010) says that in 2010 Facebook only employed 1,400 people.
23. Kirkpatrick, Facebook Effect, 19.
24. Ibid., 23.
25. Information in this and the next two paragraphs about the success of Facebook’s open platform comes from ibid., 226–232.
26. Ibid., 11.
27. The information in this and the next section comes from a paper I wrote as a fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy: “The Rise, Fall, and Possible Rise of Open News Platforms,” Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, July 10, 2015, https://perma.cc/34CU-F7KD.
28. “The First ‘Official’ Castle Smurfenstein Home Page,” accessed Aug. 21, 2018, https://perma.cc/9AL3-T7S4. There’s uncertainty about whether the first of the Smurfing mods was Wolfenstein or Dragon Egg. I contacted David H. Schroeder, the creator of Dino Eggs, a similar hack of Dragon Egg, but he wasn’t sure which came first. He did say, however, “My estimate is that—of folks who played games on Apple II’s—perhaps 25% of them played Dino Eggs” (personal email, Dec. 26, 2013). See also Wagner James Au, “The Triumph of the Mod,” Salon, Apr. 16, 2002; and “History of Modding,” From Pacman to Pool (blog), accessed Oct. 7, 2018, https://perma.cc/R94H-FEMS. For more on id Software’s support of mods, see David Kushner, Masters of Doom (New York: Penguin, 2003).
29. “Sales of Grand Theft Auto Products Have Generated $2.3 Billion for Take Two since GTA5 Launch,” ZhugeEx Blog, Jan. 3, 2016, https://perma.cc/VHE9-KSX8.
30. “Showing Pebblers Love with Longer Device Support,” Fitbit Developer, Jan. 24, 2018, https://perma.cc/SLE8-NV8F.
31. “The Slack Platform Launch,” Slack Blog, Dec. 15, 2014, https://perma.cc/4AC2-W5ZT.
32. Jennifer Pahlka, interview by the author, June 29, 2014.
33. Sorrel Moseley-Williams, “Adopt a Siren, Avert Disaster,” Atlas of the Future, Oct. 10, 2015, https://perma.cc/SFZ9-JUB9.
34. Tim O’Reilly, “Gov. 2.9: It’s All about the Platform,” TechCrunch, Sept. 4, 2009, https://perma.cc/N39K-CDTQ.
35. Matt Apuzzo, “War Gear Flows to Police Departments,” New York Times, June 8, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-police-departments.html.
36. Tom Giratikanon, Erin Kissane, and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “When the News Calls for Raw Data,” Source, Aug. 21, 2014, https://perma.cc/D9MR-HJQE.
37. “About,” GitHub, accessed Sept. 30, 2018, https://perma.cc/P4MD-9DYZ.
38. Arfon Smith, interview by the author, Dec. 3, 2014.
39. Sara Winge, email to the author, Nov. 14, 2017.
40. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 34.
41. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: 12 Inevitable Forces That Will Shape Our Future (New York: Viking, 2016).
42. Jerome H. Saltzer, David Reed, and David Clark, “End-to-End Arguments in System Design,” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2, no. 4 (Nov. 1984): 277–284, https://perma.cc/77H4-WRES.
43. Personal email, Oct. 15, 2017.
44. “Searching the Web,” PC Magazine, Dec. 5, 1995, 55.
45. Ibid.
46. The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) has versions of Yahoo going back to 1996. All hail the Internet Archive! For the Yahoo! page from 1996, see https://perma.cc/G837-LJ8W.
47. The number is a little hard to figure. The library reported that in 2013, 733,890 of its 18.9 million items “circulated,” but a high percentage of these are likely to be the same work circulated more than once, given that the students in the same class generally read the same books. On the other hand, not all of its 18.9 million items are available to be checked out. “Harvard Library Annual Report FY 2013,” Harvard Library, accessed Aug. 21, 2018, https://perma.cc/JZM2-YQYZ.
48. “Harvard University Library,” Wikipedia (no source for that figure is given), https://perma.cc/7QN5-RW4U.
49. I talk about this in Everything Is Miscellaneous (New York: Times Books, 2007).
Chapter Four
1. Sean Hollister, “After Two Weeks of Anarchy, 100,000 Simultaneous ‘Pokémon’ Players May Actually Beat the Game,” The Verge, Feb. 26, 2014, https://perma.cc/6EWB-2QCG; Akimitsu Hamamuro, “Gravity Points,” accessed Aug. 27, 2018, https://perma.cc/MFT6-8UN7.
2. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Interop (New York: Basic Books, 2012).
3. Emily Payne, “Do You Speak ‘Pilot’? The 300-Word Language That Senior Air Crew Must Speak—WHATEVER Their Nationality,” Sun, Oct. 16, 2017, https://perma.cc/X3SM-2HGW.
4. “A Brief History of Spreadsheets,” DataDeck Blog, Jan. 31, 2018, https://perma.cc/U3DQ-CU4R.
5. GlobalData Healthcare, “Six Tech Giants Sign Health Data Interoperability Pledge,” Verdict Medical Devices, Aug. 20, 2018, https://perma.cc/B5L7-QRZW.
6. Judea Pearl, The Book of Why (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 353.
7. “Organization of Schemas,” Schema.org, accessed Aug. 27, 2018, https://perma.cc/Y9RU-N8GW.
8. Evan Sandhaus, phone interview by the author, 2012.
9. Marc Ferrentino, telephone call, Nov. 28, 2018. Disclosure: I he
ard about this example from our son who works at Yext.
10. Microsoft, “Cortana and Structured Data Markup,” Cortana Dev Center, Feb. 8, 2017, https://perma.cc/Z76L-CFJ6.
11. H2O from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is an example of this. See “H2O,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, last updated June 21, 2018, https://perma.cc/FBR6-KAUM. The Open Syllabus Project at Columbia University aims at increasing the interoperability of syllabi by encouraging their open licensing and making their elements more identifiable. https://perma.cc/P6JJ-96WL.
12. Palfrey and Gasser, Interop, 49.
13. Even standardizing what would count as the prime meridian of longitude was once controversial, with England and France fighting for the honor. See Clark Blaise, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (New York: Vintage, 2002).
14. Rebecca Kesby, “How the World’s First Webcam Made a Coffee Pot Famous,” BBC News, Nov. 22, 2012, https://perma.cc/DNF7-PTA6.
15. Doris Wolf, “Psychopharmaka, die in der Behandlung von Angst und Panikstörungen eingesetzt werden,” Angst & Panik, accessed Nov. 7, 2018, https://www.angst-panik-hilfe.de/medikamente-angstbehandlung.html.
16. There’s an interesting argument about whether Newton thought that if there were just one body in the universe, it would exert gravity, or if gravity is a relationship between two objects. See Eric Schliesser, “Without God: Gravity as a Relational Property of Matter in Newton,” PhilSci Archive, Oct. 2008, https://perma.cc/4Y2X-4E78.
17. Stephen Snobelen, who, as mentioned in chapter 1, says that Newton viewed the universe as being more like an organism than a mechanism, also notes that Newton speculated that comets were God’s way of pulling the planets back into their perfect elliptical orbits. Stephen D. Snobelen, “Cosmos and Apocalypse,” New Atlantis 44 (Winter 2015): 76–94, https://perma.cc/X3UC-CJBK.
18. W. Daniel Hillis, “2014: What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?,” The Edge, accessed Aug. 27, 2018, https://perma.cc/X9JT-SE55.
19. Pearl, Book of Why.
20. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five has a wonderful example of this, tracking a bullet backward in time from its entry into a soldier to the mining of the minerals that made it.
21. Massimo Cirasino, Thomas Lammer, and Harish Natarajan, “Solving Payments Interoperability for Universal Financial Access,” World Bank, Feb. 25, 2016, https://perma.cc/79D6-E9RQ.
22. For a particularly insightful exploration of the order of the world that divination relies on and reveals, see Elena Esposito, “A Time of Divination and a Time of Risk: Social Preconditions for Prophecy and Prediction,” Fate, no. 5 (Aug. 2011), https://perma.cc/UNH6-US2Q.
23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 29. The translator is not listed, but seems to be Alan Sheridan: see “Philosophy—Translations,” Alan Sheridan’s website, accessed Oct. 7, 2018, https://perma.cc/8ZLF-GX53.
24. Elizabeth Gibney, “The Scant Science behind Cambridge Analytica’s Controversial Marketing Techniques,” Nature, Mar. 29, 2018, https://perma.cc/8LR5-LCLG.
Chapter Five
1. Zachary M. Seward, “The Steve Jobs Email That Outlined Apple’s Strategy a Year before His Death,” Quartz, Apr. 5, 2014, https://perma.cc/A5CV-SVL5.
2. Brenton R. Schlender, “Who’s Ahead in the Computer Wars?,” Fortune, Feb. 12, 1990, https://perma.cc/J9SA-JQKH. But he probably said it earlier; see Garson O’Toole, “Phrase: More Wood behind, All the Wood behind One Arrow,” LinguistList listserv, Sept. 4, 2011, https://perma.cc/8W8H-A7PQ.
3. Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 498.
4. Ibid., 69–70.
5. Burkhard Meißner, “Strategy, Strategic Leadership and Strategic Control in Ancient Greece,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 13, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 3–27, 12–14, 13.
6. Freedman, Strategy, xii–xiii.
7. For example, in 1805 Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow explained the strategy of war the way a mathematician proves theorems in geometry, and Antoine Henri Jomini in his 1838 treatise The Art of War looked for the timeless principles of military strategy. Freedman, Strategy, 75–84.
8. Freedman, Strategy, 85–91.
9. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832, trans. J. J. Graham (London, 1874), vol. 1, bk. 4, chap. 11, https://perma.cc/3GTU-XPGY.
10. Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reeingineering the Corporation (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
11. Maurice Matloff, US Army in WW2: War Department, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), 9, http://history.army.mil/html/books/001/1-4/CMH_Pub_1-4.pdf.
12. See Alex Abella, “The Rand Corporation: The Think Tank That Controls America,” Mental Floss, June 30, 2009, https://perma.cc/B5LR-88CF.
13. “The Evolution of Scenario Planning,” Jisc, Feb. 20, 2008, https://perma.cc/KAB9-HG3S.
14. Angela Wilkinson and Roland Kupers, “Living in the Futures,” Harvard Business Review, May 2013, https://perma.cc/L96E-5M9H.
15. Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 71–72.
16. Pierre Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead,” Harvard Business Review, Sept. 1985, 80, https://perma.cc/KAB9-HG3S.
17. Ibid.
18. Tim Hindle, “Scenario Planning,” Economist, Sept. 1, 2008, https://perma.cc/TFF7-VAYT.
19. Rita Gunther McGrath, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). For an excellent interview about that book, see Theodore Kinni, “Rita Gunther McGrath on the End of Competitive Advantage,” Strategy+Business, Feb. 17, 2014, https://perma.cc/D78W-YH37.
20. This shearing of the earth of possibilities so that they become mere formal representations tracks the view of Information Theory, which was gaining currency at the time that Kahn was working.
21. Obligatory references to the 1983 movie WarGames.
22. Dries Buytaert, “Driesnote,” slide deck, DrupalCon, Vienna, Sept. 2017, https://perma.cc/6SKS-4XWS.
23. Drupal home page, accessed Sept. 21, 2017, https://perma.cc/2VJ8-8EW8.
24. Dries Buytaert, interview by the author, Acquia, Boston, July 22, 2015.
25. Lisa Welchman, “Keynote: The Paradox of Open Growth,” slide deck, DrupalCon, Prague, Sept. 25, 2013, https://perma.cc/7WNS-VAN6.
26. Elon Musk, “All Our Patent Are Belong to You,” Tesla Blog, June 12, 2014, https://perma.cc/CYS7-V5ZP.
27. For a highly critical view of the company’s battery patents, see Steve Brachmann, “Tesla Battery Patents Further Proof of Elon Musk’s Duplicitous Views on Patents,” IPWatchdog, May 11, 2017, https://perma.cc/SL2X-S6T3. Fred Lambert, “A Number of Companies Are Now Using Tesla’s Open-Source Patents and It Has Some Interesting Implications,” Electrek, Nov. 10, 2015, https://perma.cc/49GJ-SZCF.
28. See Steven Levy, “How Google Is Remaking Itself as a ‘Machine Learning First’ Company,” Backchannel, June 22, 2016, https://perma.cc/N6T7-DDT2.
29. As I completed writing this book, I began a six-month engagement as writer-in-residence at Google PAIR.
30. Conversation with Zak Stone at Google’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, office, Sept. 2017.
31. Open Source licensing is complex. For example, here’s a useful (but complicated) discussion: “Can I use open source software commercially? Will I have to face any legal consequences?,” Quora, July 6, 2013, https://perma.cc/3GDT-AHC4.
32. Email from Zak Stone, Nov. 30, 2018.
33. On Dec. 1, 2018, Stack Overflow reported 36,311 questions tagged “tensorflow” had been asked, and 17,888 had been answered. Questions tagged: https://perma.cc/NF5A-ZM5S. Questions answered: https://perma.cc/PV6K-4D4S. (Thanks to Zak Stone for these links.)
34. Zak Stone, “Celebrating Google TensorFlow’s First Year,” Google AI Blog, Nov. 9, 2016, https://perma.cc/NYU6-HDY8.
35. I wrote about “Fort Business” in Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto (Boston: Basic Books, 2000).
36. This section has been adapted from David Weinberger, “On the Merits of Obscurity,” Rhapsody, Summer 2016.
37. Information from Walter Jennings, a public relations person with Ogilvy agency, confirmed with Huawei corporate, May 2016.
Chapter Six
1. “ ‘Now You Can Dial,’ Western Electric, 1954 or 1955,” YouTube video, 9:51, posted June 9, 2011, https://perma.cc/W5TX-J23A. The film was released once dials became mandatory. An earlier set of “how to dial” films were released in the late 1920s when dials were first introduced as an option.
2. It is complicated, because everything is. First, according to Brough Turner, a provider of wireless connectivity, the analog sounds generated by touch-tone systems do have meaning once you’ve connected to an automated system that asks you to “Press 1 to talk with …,” etc. Brough Turner, email to the author, June 2018. Second, according to David Isenberg, a telecommunications expert, “Touch tones that are generated by old-style phones that only plug into the phone line and don’t have an electrical connection or a battery are sensed and decoded at their central office,” where they are converted into digital data. David Isenberg, email to the author, June 2018.
3. Because time is a flat circle, some hotels now have QR codes that lead to online videos explaining how to use the dial phone in the room. Based on a tweet, with photos, by David Schiffman (@WhySharksMatter), “Our hotel room has a rotary phone … and there’s a QR code on the wall to download a video that explains how to use it,” Twitter, May 19, 2018, http://perma.cc/W7Y2-U3TP.
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