National Archives of the United Kingdom, 42
Netflix, 5
net neutrality, 95
“New Kind of Science,” 34–35
Newton, Isaac
gravity and, 26, 28, 206n16
interoperability compared to Newton’s laws, 109, 112–113
prediction and rules of universe, 25–30, 32
Principia, 27–28
strategy and, 128
three-body problem and, 28
tides and, 48–49
traditional strategy and, 139
weather forecasting and laws of, 24
nonlinear systems, 12–13
the Normal, accidents and, 36–38
nuclear war strategy, 128
Nudge (Thaler & Sunstein), 174, 175
Obama presidential campaign, A/B testing and, 4–5
obscurity, strategic, 142–144
Occupy movement, 176–177
on-demand manufacturing, 14
On War (Clausewitz), 126
open APIs, 117
open platforms, 14–15, 85–93
adding value to products, 89–90
benefits of, 87–93
increasing presence via, 87–88
integrating into workflows, 90–91
moving unanticipation upstream, 91–93
part of major business shift underway from push to pull, 94–96
resilience and, 88–89
open-source content management system, 133
open standards, 15, 104, 156
Open Text search engine, 97
operationalizing of morality, 184–189
optimization, over explanation, 68–73
Order of Things, The (Foucault), 119–120
O’Reilly, Tim, 91, 93
Packard, Vance, 174
Pahlka, Jennifer, 91
Palfry, John, 103, 110
Paracelsus, 119–120
Parker, Theodore, 148
Pascal, Blaise, 30
Pearl, Judea, 104, 114, 115, 121
Pebble, 90
Perrault, Charles, 150
Peters, Tom, 82
Phillips, Alban William Housego, 50–51
Phillips, Macon, 84
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, A (Laplace), 27
Pigliucci, Massimo, 173
Plato, 31, 32, 149, 199n4, 210n11
Porter, Michael, 129
possibility, 123–144
Drupal and, 132–135, 137–138
interoperability and increasing, 138–142
invention of strategy, 125–127
narrowing, 123–125
strategic obscurity and, 142–144
strategy revealing, 127–132
Tesla and Google, 135–138
unanticipation creating, 96, 100
Power of Pull, The (Hagel, Brown & Davison), 94–95
“Predictability” (Lorenz), 12
prediction
complexity beyond, 14–15
deep learning and, 53–55, 57–58
defined, 21
forecasts vs., 197n4
Game of Life and, 33–35
Newton’s laws and first level of, 25–27
Newton’s laws and second level of, 27–30, 32
probability theory and, 30–32
between surprise and certainty, 20–25
third level of, 35–36
weather, 12–13, 19–20, 44–45
preparing for the future, anticipate-and-prepare strategy, 77–79
presentism, 178
Present Shock (Rushkoff), 178
Principia (Newton), 27–28
principle-based morality, 182, 183–184, 189
probability theory, 30–32
probablistic truth, machine learning and, 121
programming, 32–33
progress
generative, 160–163
generativity and, 154–160
invention of, 148–150
moral, 148
shape of, 147–148, 155
technological, 148, 151–154, 162
traditional, 157–159
proportion, interoperability and, 112–113
Raleigh, Walter, 149
RAND Corporation, 128, 130
Reed, David, 95
Re-engineering Humanity (Frischmann & Selinger), 69
regularity, assumption of in models, 53
Ren Zhengfei, 142
resilience, open platforms and, 88–89
Richardson, Lewis Fry, 44
Ries, Eric, 80
Robinson, Frank, 81
rules
explanations and, 64
interoperability and adjustable, 111–112
Rushkoff, Douglas, 178
Russell, Chris, 57
Saltzer, J., 95
Samsung, 8, 123
Sandberg, Sheryl, 85, 87
Sandhaus, Evan, 106
Santucci, Antonio, 47
Sarewitz, Daniel, 11–12, 158
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 190
scenario planning, 128–129, 131
Schema.org, 104–107, 117
Schoolhouse Rock!, 176
Schwartz, Peter, 128–129
search engines, 97–100, 104–107
searching, browsing vs., 97–98
Sedol, Lee, 59–60
Selinger, Evan, 69
Semantic Web, 117
SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), 107
Signal and the Noise, The (Silver), 44
signs, machine learning and, 120–121
Silent Spring (Carson), 13
Silver, Nate, 44, 45
simplification
deep learning and, 60
models and, 52, 53
Slack, 81–82, 90–91
Smiles, Samuel, 152–153
Smith, Adam, 28
Smith, Arfon, 92–93
social graph, 86, 190
social influencers, 177
social role of explanations, 171–172
Socrates, 126, 199n4
software development
agile, 14, 83–85, 103, 140
waterfall process of, 84–85
spontaneity, preparing for, 93–94
spreadsheets, 45–47
standards
open, 15, 104, 156
useful unpredictability of, 104–108
statistical forecasting, 44–45
statistics, 31–32
steam engine, progress and, 152–154
Stiegler, Bernard, 179
Stone, Edward, 9
Stone, Zak, 136
storytelling, 178–181
strategic communications, 142–144
strategic obscurity, 142–144
strategy
Drupal example, 132–135, 137–138
invention of, 125–127
possibility revealed by, 127–132
Tesla and Google examples, 135–137, 138
traditional business, 123–125
Strategy: A History (Freedman), 126
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 61
Sunstein, Cass, 174, 175
Swift, Jonathan, 150
systems, interoperability working across, 109–111
tactics, 126
Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 211n24
technodeterminism, 163–165, 166–167
Technohuman Condition, The (Allenby & Sarewitz), 11–12, 158
technological progress, 148, 151–154, 162
technology, effects of, 165–166
Tech Surge, 84
telephone
dialing a, 145–147, 209n2, 209n3
history of, 147
Temple, William, 150
TensorFlow, 136–137, 154
Tesla Motors, open-sourced patents at, 135–137, 138
Thaler, Richard, 174, 175
three-body problem, 28, 29–30
tick marks, traditional progress and, 147, 155, 157, 158, 159
tides, 48–50
Tides (White), 48–49
Too Big to Know (Weinberger), 17
tools
computers as, 153–154
explanations as, 172
future and new, 192–193
significance of, 151–154
thinking out in the world with, 165–167
Torralba, Antonio, 160–161
total conversions, 15
Total Quality Management (TQM), 82
trade-offs, machine learning and, 70–71
traditional progress, characteristics of, 157–159
transient advantage, 129, 131
Transkribus, 42
Trojan War strategy, 125–126
Trolley Problem, 183
truth
ground, 42
probabilistic, 121
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 151
Turkle, Sherry, 164
Twitter, 84, 106, 111–112, 113
Twitter hashtags, 113, 117–118, 177
Uber, 69–70
unanticipation, 79–93
agile development, 83–85
creating possibilities, 96, 100
internet and, 75, 95–96
minimum viable product and, 80–83
open platforms and, 85–93
universe
armillary model of, 47–48
clock metaphor for workings of, 25–27, 116
as vast computer, 34–35
unpredictability, internet and, 101
The Upshot platform, 92
Usual Suspects, The (film), 179
Utilitarianism, 182–183, 188
Value of All Chances in Games of Fortune, The (Huygens), 30–31
Van Doren, Charles, 148
video games, 15
See also individual games; Modding/mods
virtual reality systems, 162
virtue ethics, 188, 214n29
Wachter, Sandra, 57
Wack, Pierre, 128–129
war, model explaining causes of, 65–66
See also Military strategy
waterfall process of software development, 84–85
weather prediction and modeling, 12–13, 19–20, 44–45
web
interoperability and, 116
Semantic, 117
webs of meaning, 190–191
Welchman, Lisa, 134–135
Wenger 16999 Swiss Army Knife, 78, 153
White, Jonathan, 48–49
White, Lynn, Jr., 164
willow bark, discovering reasons for effectiveness of, 9–10
Winge, Sara, 93–94
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 64
Wolfram, Stephen, 34–35
workflows, open platforms and integrating into, 90–91
working models, 41–43
armillary, 47–48
machine learning and, 53–62
Mississippi River basin model, 50–53
spreadsheets, 45–47
tides, 48–50
World War II military strategy, 127–128, 130
Yahoo!, 97–98, 104
Yandex, 104
Yext, 106
Zittrain, Jonathan, 156
Zuckerberg, Mark, 86, 87
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As I have gotten older, I have become more and more grateful for the privilege—in both its senses—of living in communities where I’m surrounded by people who are simultaneously intelligent, curious, patient, and kind. The thoughts in this book have been formed by the endless tanglings of these networks.
First among these is, of course, my family, newly sweet with grandchildren, but not untouched by sorrow. Our children have sharp eyes for where the rails lead and when I would happily veer off of them. I owe an endless thanks to my wife, Ann Geller, who has seen me through the many years it has taken to write this book, always bringing her clear and sympathetic mind to my prose, and joy to my life. Everyone who knows us agrees that I am the luckiest person in the world.
I have benefited incalculably from being allowed to be part of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society for the past fifteen years. It is a model of a community of scholars and researchers who care passionately about their work, the world, and one another—remarkable not only in its level of scholarship but also in its compassion.
Within that community, the members of the “Book Club”—people working on books—have been especially supportive.
Because I’m an old-school internet user, I also rely on mailing lists, some of which go back decades. Since they’re private lists—there’s that privilege again!—I’ll designate them in ways their members will recognize: Thank you, IRR, BH, and Gordon!
In the final couple of months of this project, when I was cleaning up drafts and the like, I began a six-month tenure as a part-time writer-in-residence—an outsider embedded on the inside—at Google PAIR (People + AI Research). While the book was fully drafted at that point, working literally next to machine learning developers and having the opportunity to pester them with endless and endlessly foolish questions has helped deepen my understanding and appreciation of the world we’ve entered.
Thanks to the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, from which I learned so much about the delicate and intricate connections among computer representations of ideas. Also thanks to the Lab for developing—under Jonathan Zittrain’s direction—the Perma.cc service this book uses to provide stable referents for web links.
David Miller and Lisa Adams have been my literary agents and dear friends for almost twenty years. With extraordinary patience and clearheadedness, they helped me locate ideas worth talking about and shape them into the form of a book.
Then I had the incredible good fortune to work with Ania Wieckowski, an executive editor at Harvard Business Review Press. Ania worked through my drafts with an unparalleled commitment to challenging and clarifying the ideas and my expression of them. Her fierce patience, perfect pitch, and intellect were crucial, as were her enthusiasm and kindness. I could not have dreamed of a better editor.
Many other people and many conversations helped me, not least those who let me interview them for the book. Of course, I cannot capture all the other conversations that provided insights, steered me away from errors, and opened up entirely new lines of thought. So here are just a few of the people to whom I owe warm thanks—although more than a few of them will disagree with the broad themes or details of this book: Hal Abelson, Yannick Assogba, Dan Brickley, Greg Cavanagh, Judith Donath, Finale Doshi-Velez, Elena Esposito, John Frank, Brett Frischmann, Urs Gasser, Elyse Graham, Mary L. Gray, Jenn Halen, Timo Hannay, Eszter Hargittai, Tim Hwang, David Isenberg, Joi Ito, Reena Jana, Ansgar Koene, Jeannie Logozzo, Hilary Mason, Elliot Noss, Angelica Quicksey, Emily Reif, Angela Ridgely, Daniel Russell, Bruce Schneier, Evan Selinger, Zak Stone, Tim Sullivan, John Sundman, Peter Sweeney, Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, Joel Weinberger, James Wexler, and Ethan Zuckerman.
I miss both of my wife’s parents who passed away during the course of writing this book. Virginia and Marvin Geller were constant sources of support for me as an individual but more importantly as a member of a large, lively, and loving family.
I also miss my teacher Professor Joseph P. Fell who opened worlds when he taught, and was a model of scholarship, thoughtfulness, teaching, decency, and friendship.
This book’s errors, mistakes, omissions, redundancies, misunderstandings, exaggerations, misrepresentations, inaccuracies, mispellings, biases, lacunae, typos, blind spots, missteps, lapses, redundancies, fallacies, misjudgments, flaws, slights, and redundancies are all that I can claim as fully mine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
From the earliest days of the web, DAVID WEINBERGER has been a pioneering thought leader about the internet’s effect on our lives, on our businesses, and most of all, on our ideas. He has contributed in a range of fields, from marketing to libraries to politics to journalism and more. And he has contributed in a remarkably wide range of ways: as the author of books tha
t explore the meaning of our new technology; a writer for publications from Wired and Scientific American to Harvard Business Review and even TV Guide; an acclaimed keynote speaker around the world; a strategic marketing vice president and consultant; a teacher; an internet adviser to presidential campaigns; an early social-networking entrepreneur; the codirector of Harvard’s groundbreaking Library Innovation Lab; a writer-in-residence at Google; a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy; a Franklin Fellow at the US State Department; and always a passionate advocate for an open internet. Dr. Weinberger received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Toronto.