Highlights from all books

One of the cool things about Richard Rhodes books is how he not only explains abstractly how technological progress happens but describes the experiments, insights and innovations.

“Oliver, what do you say to people when they are dying?” “Say! Why, nothing! What can I say? But I don’t think I’ve ever seen any one die.” “Nor have I till to-day,” said the girl, and shivered a little. “The euthanasia people were soon at work.” Oliver took her hand gently. “My darling, it must have been frightful. Why, you’re trembling still.” “No; but listen.… You know, if I had had anything to say I could have said it too. They were all just in front of me: I wondered; then I knew I hadn’t. I couldn’t possibly have talked about Humanity.”

It was a weary world, he told himself, turning his eyes homewards. Everything seemed so hopeless and ineffective. He tried not to reflect on his fellow-priests, but for the fiftieth time he could not help seeing that they were not the men for the present situation. It was not that he preferred himself; he knew perfectly well that he, too, was fully as incompetent: had he not proved to be so with poor Father Francis, and scores of others who had clutched at him in their agony during the last ten years? Even the Archbishop, holy man as he was, with all his childlike faith—was that the man to lead English Catholics and confound their enemies? There seemed no giants on the earth in these days. What in the world was to be done? He buried his face in his hands.… Yes; what was wanted was a new Order in the Church; the old ones were rule-bound through no fault of their own.

FELSENBURGH had accomplished what is probably the most astonishing task known to history. It seems from his words that Mr. FELSENBURGH (whose biography, so far as it is known, we give in another column) is probably the greatest orator that the world has ever known—we use these words deliberately. All languages seem the same to him; he delivered speeches during the eight months through which the Eastern Convention lasted, in no

All that had gone before, he said, pointed to what had now actually taken place—namely, the reconciliation of the world on a basis other than that of Divine Truth.

For herself the new worship was a crowning sign of the triumph of Humanity. Her heart had yearned for some such thing as this—some public corporate profession of what all now believed. She had so resented the dulness of folk who were content with action and never considered its springs. Surely this instinct within her was a true one; she desired to stand with her fellows in some solemn place, consecrated not by priests but by the will of man; to have as her inspirers sweet singing and the peal of organs; to utter her sorrow with thousands beside her at her own feebleness of immolation before the Spirit of all; to sing aloud her praise of the glory of life, and to offer by sacrifice and incense an emblematic homage to That from which she drew her being, and to whom one day she must render it again. Ah! these Christians had understood human nature, she had told herself a hundred times: it was true that they had degraded it, darkened light, poisoned thought, misinterpreted instinct; but they had understood that man must worship—must worship or sink.

“Eminence,” he said, “the English papers are come.” Percy put out a hand, took a paper, passed on into his inner room, and sat down. There it all was—gigantic headlines, and four columns of print broken by startling title phrases in capital letters, after the fashion set by America a hundred years ago. No better way even yet had been found of misinforming the unintelligent.

Life must be accepted on those terms; we cannot be wrong if we follow nature; rather to accept them is to find peace—our great mother only reveals her secrets to those who take her as she is.”

This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life. For him there were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master. It was an immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God’s Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar. As regarded the movements of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of the waves far beneath. Of course the world was restless, he half perceived,

“And—and which would you say were the most highly evolved people—East or West?” “Oh! West undoubtedly. The East thinks a good deal, but it doesn’t act much. And that always leads to confusion—even to stagnation of thought.”

A WEEK later Mabel awoke about dawn; and for a moment or two forgot where she was. She even spoke Oliver’s name aloud, staring round the unfamiliar room, wondering what she did here. Then she remembered, and was silent.… It was the eighth day she had spent in this Home; her probation was finished: to-day she was at liberty to do that for which she had come. On the Saturday of the previous week she had gone through her private examination before the magistrate, stating under the usual conditions of secrecy her name, age and home, as well as her reasons for making the application for Euthanasia; and all had passed off well. She had selected Manchester as being sufficiently remote and sufficiently large to secure her freedom from Oliver’s molestation; and her secret had been admirably kept. There was not a hint that her husband knew anything of her intentions; for, after all, in these cases the police were bound to assist the fugitive. Individualism was at least so far recognised as to secure to those weary of life the right of relinquishing it. She scarcely knew why she had selected this method, except that any other seemed impossible. The knife required skill and resolution; firearms were unthinkable, and poison, under the new stringent regulations, was hard to obtain. Besides, she seriously wished to test her own intentions, and to be quite sure that there was no other way than this.… Well, she was as certain as ever. The thought had first come to her in the mad misery of the outbreak of violence on the last day of the old year. Then it had gone again, soothed away by the arguments that man was still liable to relapse. Then once more it had recurred, a cold and convincing phantom, in the plain daylight revealed by Felsenburgh’s Declaration. It had taken up its abode with her then, yet she controlled it, hoping against hope that the Declaration would not be carried into action, occasionally revolting against its horror. Yet it had never been far away; and finally when the policy sprouted into deliberate law, she had yielded herself resolutely to its suggestion. That was eight days ago; and she had not had one moment of faltering since that. Yet she had ceased to condemn. The logic had silenced her. All that she knew was that she could not bear it; that she had misconceived the New Faith; that for her, whatever it was for others, there was no hope.… She had not even a child of her own. Those eight days, required by law, had passed very peacefully. She had taken with her enough money to enter one of the private homes furnished with sufficient comfort to save from distractions those who had been accustomed to gentle living: the nurses had been pleasant and sympathetic; she had nothing to complain of. She had suffered, of course, to some degree from reactions. The second night after her arrival had been terrible, when as she lay in bed in the hot darkness, her whole sentient life had protested and struggled against the fate her will ordained. It had demanded the familiar things—the promise of food and breath and human intercourse; it had writhed in horror against the blind dark towards which it moved so inevitably; and, in the agony had been pacified only by the half-hinted promise of some deeper voice suggesting that death was not the end. With morning light sanity had come back; the will had reassumed the mastery, and, with it, had withdrawn explicitly the implied hope of continued existence.

If there are clear boundaries to behavior within a given field of endeavor, then there is also great freedom to adapt and imagine within those lines. These boundaries, however, should always be tested to see if they are actually still real. It takes conscious acts by individuals to test these edges. – David Whyte

I returned to my office and sat at my desk, staring blankly at my screen. If you had told me when I was building that spreadsheet of dream jobs during college that not only would I work for several of those companies, but also directly with some of the most famous CEOs in the world, I would have been shocked. But I also would have thought that was exactly what I wanted. As I sat there, I didn’t know how to want it anymore.

The offices of the senior partners, still mostly men, were located along the building’s outside walls. Decades after the offices had been built, their positions and sizes were still clear markers of importance. My small office was a step up from the cubicles, but I was still years away from having a real office. I always appreciated the clarity of these distinctions. So many companies seem afraid to make these power dynamics visible, disguising them behind open offices and casual dress codes.

However, some fear‑related problems cannot be solved. The authors of Designing Your Life offer a helpful reframe, calling these issues “gravity problems” which are part of life “…but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.”

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

In his book, On Liberty, published in 1859, John Stuart Mill was giving similar advice, arguing that societies need people to embrace their individuality and perform “experiments in living.” He argued that such experiments are vital to the pursuit of knowledge and that cultures only learn and evolve when original approaches to living are discovered. Mill wanted people to act on their inspiration because “the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically when anyone thinks fit to try them.”91 By choosing a unique and personal fixed point, in Mill’s view, you are not only raising the odds of finding a path worth staying on, but you are also serving an important role in pushing culture forward.

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. — Amos Tversky

Many people I talk to are convinced that the formula for living on their own terms is saving up enough money. I wish they knew what I know: the longer we spend on a path that isn’t ours, the longer it takes to move towards a path that is. Money might help pay for therapy, time off, and healing retreats, but it won’t help you come to a place where you really trust and know that everything will be okay.

Yet this is the world we live in. This means embracing the pathless path requires grappling with the feeling of being a “bad egg.” This often drives people who leave the default path to eagerly embrace new identities that are still recognizable as legible to the “traditional” economy. They gravitate to titles like a startup founder, entrepreneur, freelance consultant, or even the newly emerging “creator.”

Instead of optimizing for a future “exit,” or a sale of the company, he built a company he wanted to keep working at and all his decisions continue to be based on this goal. As his platform grew, corporations started asking the company to do customized installations for them. John decided he didn’t want to deal with these high‑maintenance customers and turned them down. Despite this obvious opportunity, Ghost still does not employ a single employee that works with enterprise customers. John learned the same lesson I had in taking the client that had drained my energy. No money is worth it if it undermines your desire to stay on the journey.

On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing.

Brene Brown’s clarification of shame and guilt helped me understand what’s really going on when we struggle to pay attention to our intuitions and desires. She defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” She believes that most people give too much power to this emotion when making life choices.”

Over the last 100 years, the number of ways you can engage with life has exploded beyond imagination. Now, not only political leaders offer narratives for interacting with the world, but also employers, companies, media outlets, and other institutions. Everyone gives you roadmaps for living life and becoming free. You just have to buy their products, embrace their story, or join their company, and instead of having to develop your own agency, the respective institution will make you part of their special group.

Ultimately, figuring out what to do with freedom once we have it is one of the biggest challenges of the pathless path. Writer Simon Sarris argues that we can only do this by increasing our capacity for agency, or our ability to take deliberate action in the world. He argues, “the secret of the world is that it is a very malleable place, we must be sure that people learn this, and never forget the order: Learning is naturally the consequence of doing.”158 In other words, only by taking action do we learn and only by learning do we discover what we want. Without this, we will struggle to take advantage of the freedom that the pathless path offers.

A sailor who pickles vegetables will be able to prepare elaborate meals with complex flavors and nutrients quickly. There are many other ways to preserve vegetables, like nuka (Japanese technique) and with miso. Fermented foods are nutritious, unlike canned foods. As Alex Lewin, author of Real Food Fermentation and Kombucha, Kefir, and Beyond said: “With canning you kill all of the microbes and seal it hermetically. With fermentation you invite the microbes you want and don’t let in the ones you don’t. Fermentation is diplomacy and canning is a massacre.”

The implicit conceptual model behind any unconstrained optimistic or pessimistic view of progress is that it is deterministic and automatic. According to many variants of techno-optimism or “doomerism,” progress just happens—either the Singularity arrives or civilization collapses. 5 But progress isn’t mechanistic. It is spectacularly singular and requires an explicit and unified vision of the future.

One way to think about low interest rates is that from a financial perspective, they make everything happen at once. If one dollar in 10 years is worth about as much as one dollar today, the timing of profits doesn’t matter. But everything is not what needs to happen; the bubbles and megaprojects that produce transformative innovation are specific events. Initially, these developments resist categorization because they occur before there’s even a defined category, sector, or industry for them. The atomic bomb preceded the “defense space”; the “space industry” emerged decades after Apollo; “crypto” followed Bitcoin. What does accelerate progress is a concentration of effective people working on adjacent problems.

On the contrary, policies designed to preserve or optimize abstract macroeconomic aggregates, such as “wealth” or “employment,” tend to inhibit the vital process of constant industrial revolution—which, according to Schumpeter, involves the perpetual creation and destruction of concrete, machines, material infrastructures, and industries. Consequently, “creative destruction without destruction,” “capitalism without bankruptcy,” and “risk without consequences” essentially amount to Christianity without Hell. And since Hell is not an attractive political pitch, the technocratic policies of perpetual risk suppression constantly create more systemic risk the harder they attempt to annihilate it. Naturally, eternal stagnation is preferred over economic collapse, which is not a political option. Stagnation, in other words, is a choice.

A 15th-century visitor to Constantinople, the ancient capital of a dying empire, remarked that the citizens were not obsessed with the existential threats to their lives but with obscure theological debates: “If you ask a man to change money he will tell you how the Son differs from the Father. If you ask the price of a loaf he will argue that the Son is less than the Father. If you want to know if the bath is ready you are told that the Son was made out of nothing.” A visit to a modern college campus might produce a similar observation. Higher education is now the site of an irresistible drive to moralize and politicize everything, which in turn imposes self-censorship and a risk-averse culture.

Making a decision—collapsing a range of possibilities into one actualized instance—requires taking risks. In contrast, optionality—often sustained by what Debord has called the “false choices offered by spectacular abundance”—conceals a deep risk intolerance.

In April 2023, as SpaceX prepared the experimental launch of Starship, its flagship rocket, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk lamented the “soul-sucking” process of getting all of the safety reviews and requirements that the dozen or so regulatory agencies demanded. Holding his head, Musk said, “I’m trying to figure out how we get humanity to Mars with all this bullshit.” Later, he added, “This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers. That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the Moon. When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.” 131 We need to cultivate and catalyze boldness and exuberant risk-taking, stop the decline Musk deplored, and find a way to channel our thymotic energies into something radically new. To that end, we now turn to an unexpected but highly effective vehicle for enabling just such a Promethean spirit of risk-taking: speculative bubbles.

FOMO, like many aspects of human psychology, is a bug that has evolved into a feature. It’s generally not great that we as a species exhibit herdlike behavior, of which FOMO is just one example. But such behavior also functions as a coordination mechanism. Since good bubbles function by aligning people and capital to work on the right problem at the same time, FOMO helps ensure everyone gets on board at once. If a bubble only excites people who are early in their careers, it won’t be able to marshal the institutional and financial resources necessary to reach fruition. If a bubble only grabs the attention of people who are late in their careers, it will end up constrained by existing paradigms. If a bubble excites speculators but not entrepreneurs, it will bid up assets without building anything. If a bubble only convinces founders to act, it will be starved for capital. All of these people need to participate in the bubble at the same time, and FOMO can bring them together.

Financial bubbles emerge when perception and reality diverge. When this happens, one of two things eventually occurs: either perception moves closer to reality or reality bends in the direction of perception. In the former case, bubbles can result in spectacular crashes that annihilate value and wealth. In the latter, they serve as a necessary catalyst for massive technological acceleration, as some of the bubbles we document in this book demonstrate. Nevertheless, given the potential for ruin that inevitably accompanies a bubble, some readers will remain skeptical of their value. Why not merely pursue safe, incremental progress? To address this alternative, it’s worth considering a world without financial bubbles—a world where no one gets too excited about the possibilities of the future because no one is excited about the future at all.

By contrast, in a static economy, everyone’s gain comes at someone else’s expense. Corporate profits can rise, but only if they come out of labor’s share of national income or from lower taxes, which will result in higher inflation or fewer government services. In a no- or slow-growth environment, disputes involve not how to fairly divide the spoils of winning but who will lose out. Instead of looking forward to a brighter future, people are inclined to worry about how much worse their future will be than their present, and to attribute such worsening to the behavior of others. Under such circumstances, ambitious people will be attracted to jobs that involve zero-sum games: adversarial politics, irresponsible speculation, fraud, even revolutions and coups. From this perspective, bubbles can be seen as an outlet for restless energy. They offer a domain where the Stalins, the Cesare Borgias, and other ruthless types can satisfy their ambition by participating in positive-sum games. Indeed, there is a strong, empirically documented relationship between a zero-sum mindset and the economic environment: The more adverse the economic environment, the less positive-sum the thinking becomes. Scarcity thinking kicks off a self-reinforcing doom loop, which results in more scarcity.

There’s a sense in which participating in bubbles speaks to an important aspect of the human condition. People want to transcend limitations, and a world without bubbles is a world defined by preexisting limitations. In economic terms, it’s a bit like living in the ruins of a once-advanced but now departed civilization. In his book The Decline of the West, German historian Oswald Spengler contrasted an Apollonian culture, obsessed with the present, with a Faustian culture, which looks toward the infinite and the transcendent. Bubbles are deeply Faustian. When they work, they’re a way for participants to look back and look down on the more mundane parts of the world.

In sum, Apollo was a reality-distortion field that heavily skewed perception of the program’s risks and rewards. As a consequence of this bubble-like dynamic, society’s risk tolerance increased substantially, enabling unprecedented financial and technical risk-taking. The extreme willingness to take risks, constantly reinforced by unrealistic levels of optimism, may not sound rational, but it put a man on the Moon.

Of course, decentralization isn’t inherently a good thing. It only works when valuable local knowledge—tacit knowledge—can be profitably harnessed by large groups and organizations. In other words, what’s needed is a mechanism, like prices in a free-market system, that aggregates knowledge to make it globally accessible. In the case of Apollo, handwritten notes functioned as information-aggregation mechanisms. In von Braun’s system of “Monday notes,” engineers and technicians were required to identify the most salient issues and submit a single-page note. After leaving comments in the margins, von Braun would circulate the entire annotated collection of notes within the organization. Through this informal system, everyone was able to tap into the organization’s collective knowledge and contribute solutions to each other’s problems. There was one level of centralization, with von Braun serving as the hub for information, but his role was really to highlight problems in a way that facilitated decentralized solutions.

Apollo was nothing less than an instance of the technological sublime. The Apollo 11 mission, and the technological mastery a successful Moon landing represented, elicited a cross-cultural spiritual reaction. Images from the mission were “surrounded with the aura of religion,” from the silvery Saturn V rocket, which towered against the darkness of space before it lifted off and sent the first humans to another world, to the Apollo 8 crew’s reading from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968, to Armstrong’s footprints on the lunar surface. In the 20th century, the experience of the technological sublime was a recurrent phenomenon in America—think of the interstate highway system, the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan skyline, the atomic bomb, the jet airplane, or the Golden Gate Bridge. After Apollo, that experience essentially vanished.

Rapid advances in hardware and software, while ensuring the good fortune of the industry, didn’t guarantee that any single participant could passively maintain market share. Every player had to relentlessly catch each new wave of advances. A 70-year logarithmic chart makes advances in chip density look like a smooth process, but each advance was a discrete, step-function change. Companies that were even a few months early or late would miss out on sales but would still bear the fixed cost of research and development as well as their capital expenditures.

Markets—and, by extension, bubbles—“channel the competitive spirit into constructive efforts instead of exacerbating it to the point of physical violence.” Instead of achieving order through violent and ritualistic sacrifice, a more peaceful, albeit similarly ritualistic, “spontaneous order” (to use economist Friedrich Hayek’s phrase) emerges.

Markets perform a similar function to religions in another, more literal sense. The translation of future cash flows into a present asset price is just another way of reconciling the demands of the eternal future with the here and now. Therefore, markets—these sublime machines that synthesize beliefs and aggregate them into prices—instantiate a secularized version of the sacred.

Each historical phase of speculative exuberance we’ve looked at was driven not by abstract forces but by high-agency personalities. Their thymotic drive seems to represent the apex of human agency—new energies are released, humans are launched into space, novel industries emerge. Bubbles, then, fuse agency with destiny.

Bubbles are simultaneously technologically deterministic and socially constructivist in nature. They only work if the new product is physically possible, but they also rely on discrete choices by specific people.

Each bubble we’ve discussed was fundamentally driven by a definite or constrained vision of a future that was radically different from the present. Bubbles can therefore be understood as mechanisms to reorient the present toward the future; they are materializations of futuristic visions in the present.

bubbles have a skewed risk-reward structure. The upside from being right and early is multiples of the cost of being wrong. Moreover, there’s a psychic benefit to trying to build something unique alongside a team of true believers, even if it ends up failing. Investments can vaporize in an instant, but the memory of being part of a tiny band of people trying to change the world, and feeling for a time like it’s succeeding, is timeless.

Whereas superstitions are “merely false beliefs,” philosopher Nick Land explains, “hyperstitions—by their very existence as ideas—function causally to bring about their own reality.” We can therefore think of bubbles as “reality distortion fields” that warp reality to their underlying vision.

the yearning for transcendence, redemption, and salvation from the “iron cage” of soulless rationality remains an irrepressible historical constant.

Today, a lack of transcendent vision is the ultimate source of the crisis of meaning and the techno-economic and cultural stagnation that inflicts the West. But nascent bubbles in sectors like space exploration, AI, and renewable energy offer promise that this transcendent impulse has not entirely disappeared. We’re by no means suggesting that the visionary technologists who realize the breakthroughs of the future all need to be deeply committed Christian believers. 396 But we predict that they will most likely exhibit a deeply spiritual—and, in some cases, explicitly religious—impulse toward realizing and participating in something transcendent. They will be attracted to a Promethean vision that transcends the limitations of the present and rationalizes the sacrifices and risk-taking its actualization demands. What is truly scarce are not natural resources or new ideas but the human will and courage to unlock nature’s intrinsic superabundance. There are no limits to growth, only the growth of limits. Scarcity isn’t a built-in feature of our world; the universe produces more energy and offers more matter than we could ever desire to capture, convert, and consume.

In a 2018 talk, Peter Thiel asked, “What aspects of technology are actually charismatic? Where there is a good story—[a] story about technology making the world a better place. It needs to be real, needs to be a viable business, but at least [it needs to be] something that inspires people, motivates people in the company, and has a transcendent mission.” Another name for what Thiel here refers to as “charismatic technologies” is the sublime.

Tolstoy stood at the opposite pole to all this. He believed that only by patient empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained; that this knowledge is always inadequate, that simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and nature is less clouded by empty theories, and not because they are inspired vehicles of the divine afflatus.

Consequently the fuller our knowledge of facts and of their connections the more difficult to conceive alternatives; the clearer and more exact the terms – or categories – in which we conceive and describe the world, the more fixed our world structure, the less ‘free’ acts seem. To know these limits, both of imagination and, ultimately, of thought itself, is to come face to face with the ‘inexorable’ unifying pattern of the world; to realise our identity with it, to submit to it, is to find truth and peace. This is not mere oriental fatalism, nor the mechanistic determinism of the celebrated German materialists of the day, Büchner and Vogt, or Moleschott, admired so deeply by the revolutionary ‘nihilists’ of Tolstoy’s generation in Russia; nor is it a yearning for mystical illumination or integration. It is scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a monistic vision of life on the part of a fox bitterly intent upon seeing in the manner of a hedgehog.

Opposed as Tolstoy and Maistre were – one the apostle of the gospel that all men are brothers, the other the cold defender of the claims of violence, blind sacrifice, and eternal suffering – they were united by inability to escape from the same tragic paradox: they were both by nature sharp-eyed foxes, inescapably aware of sheer, de facto differences which divide and forces which disrupt the human world, observers utterly incapable of being deceived by the many subtle devices, the unifying systems and faiths and sciences, by which the superficial or the desperate sought to conceal the chaos from themselves and from one another. Both looked for a harmonious universe, but everywhere found war and disorder, which no attempt to cheat, however heavily disguised, could even begin to hide; and so, in a condition of final despair, offered to throw away the terrible weapons of criticism with which both, but particularly Tolstoy, were over-generously endowed, in favour of the single great vision, something too indivisibly simple and remote from normal intellectual processes to be assailable by the instruments of reason, and therefore, perhaps, offering a path to peace and salvation.

I think that you truly believe that I prefer foxes to hedgehogs, but this is not so. No greater poet than Dante, no greater philosopher than Plato, no profounder novelist than Dostoevsky exists; yet, of course, they seem to me to have been hedgehogs, and although I do think that they were fanatical unitarians – and that this can lead to disastrous consequences in social, personal and political life – this is the price that may be paid for forms of genius which may well be profounder than any other. I may have more personal sympathy with foxes; I may think that they are politically more enlightened, tolerant and humane; but this does not imply they are otherwise more valuable – if such comparisons of incommensurables make sense at all.

It was popular to interpret the decline of GCA as an allegory about Japan’s rise and America’s fall. Some analysts saw evidence of a broader manufacturing decay that started in steel, then afflicted cars, and was now spreading to high-tech industries. In 1987, Nobel Prize−winning MIT economist Robert Solow, who pioneered the study of productivity and economic growth, argued that the chip industry suffered from an “unstable structure,” with employees job hopping between firms and companies declining to invest in their workers. Prominent economist Robert Reich lamented the “paper entrepreneurialism” in Silicon Valley, which he thought focused too much on the search for prestige and affluence rather than technical advances.

The USSR’s “copy it” strategy had actually benefitted the United States, guaranteeing the Soviets faced a continued technological lag. In 1985, the CIA conducted a study of Soviet microprocessors and found that the USSR produced replicas of Intel and Motorola chips like clockwork. They were always half a decade behind.

The Persian Gulf War was the first major test of Perry’s

As Bill Perry watched the Persian Gulf War unfold, he knew laser-guided bombs were just one of dozens of military systems that had been revolutionized by integrated circuits, enabling better surveillance, communication, and computing power. The Persian Gulf War was the first major test of Perry’s “offset strategy,” which had been devised after the Vietnam War but never deployed in a sizeable battle. In the years after Vietnam, the U.S. military had talked about its new capabilities, but many people didn’t take them seriously. Military leaders like General William Westmoreland, who commanded American forces in Vietnam, promised that future battlefields would be automated. But the Vietnam War had gone disastrously despite America’s wide technological advantage over the North Vietnamese.

To many people in Silicon Valley, Sanders’s romantic attachment to fabs seemed as out of touch as his macho swagger. The new class of CEOs who took over America’s semiconductor firms in the 2000s and 2010s tended to speak the language of MBAs as well as PhDs, chatting casually about capex and margins with Wall Street analysts on quarterly earnings calls. By most measures this new generation of executive talent was far more professional than the chemists and physicists who’d built Silicon Valley. But they often seemed stale in comparison to the giants who preceded them. An era of wild wagers on impossible technologies was being superseded by something more organized, professionalized, and rationalized. Bet-the-house gambles were replaced by calculated risk management. It was hard to escape the sense that something was lost in the process.

Since his earliest days at Apple, Steve Jobs had thought deeply about the relationship between software and hardware. In 1980, when his hair nearly reached his shoulders and his mustache covered his upper lip, Jobs gave a lecture that asked, “What is software?” “The only thing I can think of,” he answered, “is software is something that is changing too rapidly, or you don’t exactly know what you want yet, or you didn’t have time to get it into hardware.”

Historically, as we shall see, innovations have tended to come from networks more than from hierarchies. The problem is that networks are not easily directed ‘towards a common objective … that requires concentration of resources in space and time within large organizations, like armies, bureaucracies, large factories, vertically organized corporations’.6 Networks may be spontaneously creative but they are not strategic.

In Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach are hunting for stolen Confederate gold. The treasure, they discover, is buried under a headstone in a huge Civil War cemetery. Unfortunately, they have no idea which headstone. Having earlier taken the precaution of emptying Wallach’s revolver, Eastwood turns to him and utters the immortal lines: ‘You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns. And those who dig. You dig.’ This is a modern example of an ancient truth. For most of history, life has been hierarchical. A few have enjoyed the privileges that come from monopolizing violence. Everyone else has dug.

Besides the permanent associations which are established by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals. The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it … In the United States associations are established to promote the public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion. There is no end which the human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society.

The problem was that, no matter how much he wrapped himself in the trappings of legitimate rule, appropriating Egyptian, Roman and Habsburg regalia and iconography, Napoleon could never achieve the one thing upon which hierarchical systems of rule ultimately depend (and insist upon): legitimacy.

A key reason for the British Empire’s scale and durability, then, was the relatively light touch of the central authority. Though its theory was hierarchical – indeed, like John Buchan, Victorian racial theorists ranked mankind according to inherited levels of intelligence – its practice was to delegate considerable power to local rulers and private networks. Unlike Napoleon’s short-lived European empire, the British Empire was not run by a micro-managing genius, but by a club of gentlemanly amateurs, whose seemingly effortless superiority depended on the unsung strivings of local agents and native collaborators.

In most history, success is over-represented, for the victors out-write the losers. In the history of networks, the opposite often applies. Successful networks evade public attention; unsuccessful ones attract it, and it is their notoriety, rather than their achievement, that leads to their over-representation.

nothing except infectious political and physical diseases. What they possess today, they have by a very large extent gained at the cost of the less astute German nation by the most reprehensible manipulations. Today we are merely paying this people what it deserves … [T]he German nation was, thanks to the inflation instigated and carried through by Jews, deprived of the entire savings which it had accumulated in years of honest work … We are resolved to prevent the settlement in our country

Not until the 1970s did it begin to become apparent that, in peacetime, even the best-laid plans were liable to descend into a quagmire of stagflation and corruption. High-modernist planning wreaked all kinds of havoc in its heyday, from the collectivization of Soviet agriculture to the building of Brasilia and the compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania. Yet it could always survive such catastrophes, if only because their effect was to kill off any kind of opposition. It was in its decrepitude that the planned system could be challenged.

The problem for the planners was that a hierarchical system that had been well-suited to the activity of total war – an activity characterized by monopsony, as the state is the sole buyer, and standardization, as destruction is much simpler than production – was wholly unsuited to a consumer society. Those who had fought in the world wars had been promised prosperity as well as victory. In practice, that could be achieved only if millions of households were freed to make billions of choices, to which hundreds of thousands of firms could respond.

As Hayek observed, ‘To maintain that we must deliberately plan modern society because it has become so complex is therefore paradoxical, and the result of a complete misunderstanding … The fact is, rather, that we can preserve an order of such complexity … only indirectly by enforcing and improving the rules conductive to the formation of a spontaneous order.’

As Walter Powell pointed out in an illuminating 1990 article, the growth of business networks at both the national and international level represented something more than simply the triumph of markets over the hierarchical corporation. ‘In markets,’ he argued, ‘the standard strategy is to drive the hardest possible bargain on the immediate exchange. In networks, the preferred option is often creating indebtedness and reliance over the long haul’:

Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996 – its first attempt to regulate Internet communications by imposing fines for the publication online of obscene language – it was appropriate that the Valley’s response was written (as an email) by the former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.13 His ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ was addressed to the ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel’: I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear … Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions … Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications … We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us … [Your] increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers.

In the words of David D. Clark, the Internet’s chief protocol architect: ‘We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.’

a breakdown of relations between Russia and the West, based on mutual incomprehension and made possible by: a collapse of European hard power, due to the inability of modern European leaders to accept that diplomacy without the credible threat of force is just hot air;

When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. In this way, the willingness of the engineering and scientific communities to come to the aid of the nation has been vital not only to the legitimacy of the private sector but to the durability of political institutions across the West.

A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer. A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.

Our entire defense establishment and military procurement complex were built to supply soldiers for a type of war—on grand battlefields and with clashes of masses of humans—that may never again be fought. This next era of conflict will be won or lost with software. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin. The risk, however, is that we think we have already won.

The ability to develop the tools required to deploy force against an opponent, combined with a credible threat to use such force, is often the foundation of any effective negotiation with an adversary. The underlying cause of our cultural hesitation to openly pursue technical superiority may be our collective sense that we have already won. But the certainty with which many believed that history had come to an end, and that Western liberal democracy had emerged in permanent victory after the struggles of the twentieth century, is as dangerous as it is pervasive.

“To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated,” he wrote in the 1960s as the United States grappled with its military escalation in Vietnam. “The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” The virtue of Schelling’s version of realism was its unsentimental disentanglement of the moral from the strategic. As he made clear, “War is always a bargaining process.” Before one engages with the justice or injustice of a policy, it is necessary to understand one’s leverage or lack thereof in a negotiation, armed or otherwise. The contemporary approach to international affairs too often assumes, either explicitly or implicitly, that the correctness of one’s views from a moral or ethical perspective precludes the need to engage with the more distasteful and fundamental question of relative power with respect to a geopolitical opponent, and specifically which party has a superior ability to inflict harm on the other.

For many, the security that we enjoy is a background fact or feature of existence so foundational that it merits no explanation. These engineers inhabit a world without trade-offs, ideological or economic.

The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war.

And for nations that hold themselves to a far higher moral standard than their adversaries when it comes to the use of force, even technical parity with an enemy is insufficient. A weapons system in the hands of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will act as an effective deterrent only if it is far more powerful than the capability of an adversary who would not hesitate to kill the innocent.

“there are no rules without someone to enforce them.”

The appeal of pacifism is that it satisfies our instinctive empathy for the powerless.

The allure of pacifism, and a potential retreat from deterrence, is that it relieves us of the need to navigate among the difficult and imperfect trade-offs that the world presents.

“To defend myself, I must restrain power with freedom, even if the temporary beneficiaries are the enemies of freedom,”

His wife reportedly asked Nixon, affecting a certain naïveté, faux or otherwise, “Why do you have to tell people how little we have and how much we owe?” Her husband replied that politicians were destined to “live in a goldfish bowl.” But the systematic elimination of private spaces, even for our public figures, has consequences, and ultimately further incentivizes only those given to theatrics, and who crave a stage, to run for office.

The systematic expression and investigation of one’s own beliefs—the essential purpose of genuine education—remain our best defense against the mind becoming a product or vehicle for the ambitions of another.

The broader risk for any country is that elite power structures harden and calcify.

In Baltzell’s view, an aristocracy driven by talent is an essential feature of any republic. The challenge is ensuring that such aristocracies remain open to new members and do not descend into mere caste structures, which close their ranks along racial or religious lines.

The antiseptic nature of modern discourse, dominated by an unwavering commitment to justice but deeply wary when it comes to substantive positions on the good life, is a product of our own reluctance, and indeed fear, to offend, to alienate, and to risk the disapproval of the crowd. Yet there is too much that lies “beyond justice,” in the words of Ágnes Heller, the Hungarian philosopher born in Budapest in 1929. As Heller writes, “Justice is the skeleton: the good life is the flesh and blood.”

The substantive triumph of Orientalism was its exposing to a broad audience the extent to which the telling of history, the act of summation and synthesis into narrative from disparate strands of detail and fact, was not itself a neutral, disinterested act, but rather an exercise of power in the world

Hawke’s character, Jesse, offers the familiar challenge to the traps of consumption and to materialist desire. “I just feel like I’m designed to be slightly dissatisfied with everything,” he says, wistfully. “I satisfy one desire, and it just agitates another.” Celine, played by Delpy, responds, winning the exchange: “But I feel really alive when I want something…. Wanting, whether it’s intimacy with another person or a new pair of shoes, is kind of beautiful. I like that we have those ever-renewing desires.”

The bees that Lindauer and others since have studied do not incorporate caste-based social hierarchies in order to address the enormous collective action challenges that they face, but rather distribute autonomy to as great a degree as possible to the fringes—the scouts—of their organization. The individuals at the periphery of a group, who often have the latest and most valuable information regarding the suitability of potential nesting sites, and can take into account shifting conditions, are the ones who cast their ballots by dancing for the group. The swarm organizes itself around the problem at hand.

The modern enterprise is often too quick to avoid such friction. We have today privileged a kind of ease in corporate life, a culture of agreeableness that can move institutions away, not toward, creative output. The impulse—indeed rush—to smooth over any hint of conflict within businesses and government agencies is misguided, leaving many with the misimpression that a life of ease awaits and rewarding those whose principal desire is the approval of others. As the comedian John Mulaney has said, “Likability is a jail.”

that is the seed of an engineering culture. It is essential that the engineer—whether of the mechanical world, the digital, or even perhaps the written—descend from his or her tower of theory into the morass of actual details as they exist, not as they have been theorized to be.

It is essential that the engineer—whether of the mechanical world, the digital, or even perhaps the written—descend from his or her tower of theory into the morass of actual details as they exist, not as they have been theorized to be. One must, as the American philosopher John Dewey wrote in his essay “Pragmatic America” in 1922, “get down from noble aloofness into the muddy stream of concrete things.”

As Lucian Freud, the German-born figurative painter, perhaps the most enduring of the twentieth century, put it, “I try to paint what is actually there.” The act of observation, of looking closely while suspending judgment—taking the facts in and resisting the urge to impose one’s view on them—sits at the heart of any engineering culture, including ours.

And the reconstruction of a technological republic will, among other things, require the rebuilding of an ownership society, a founder culture that came from tech but has the potential to reshape government, where nobody is entrusted with leadership who does not have a stake in their own success.

We are perhaps right to recoil at the summary abandonment of the unnamed “African mask” in favor of the white marble of the Apollo. But should we be left with no means of discerning between art that moves us forward, ideas that advance humanity’s cause, and those that do not? The risk is that our fear to pronounce, to speak, to prefer, has left us without direction and confidence when it comes to marshaling our shared resources and talents. Fear has led us to recoil and shrink our sense of the possible,

We are perhaps right to recoil at the summary abandonment of the unnamed “African mask” in favor of the white marble of the Apollo. But should we be left with no means of discerning between art that moves us forward, ideas that advance humanity’s cause, and those that do not? The risk is that our fear to pronounce, to speak, to prefer, has left us without direction and confidence when it comes to marshaling our shared resources and talents. Fear has led us to recoil and shrink our sense of the possible, and this fear has found its way into every aspect of our lives.

Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even

Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even if often highly paid cogs, in the ventures of another.

Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even if often highly paid cogs, in the ventures of another. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a talented graduate could perhaps join Goldman Sachs, which was a pioneer of partnership compensation models, or perhaps a white-shoe law firm, where attorneys shared the profits, and risk, of their work. But those experiments have essentially withered; such firms still attract talented and ambitious minds, but they are paid salaries, often high ones, but salaries nonetheless. The upside of the endeavors and creative energy of labor is captured by the capitalists.

The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley do not lack idealism; indeed, they often appear to be brimming with it. But it is thin and can wither under even the slightest scrutiny. The legions of young founders have for decades now routinely claimed that they aspire to change the world. Yet such claims have grown meaningless from overuse. This cloak of idealism was put on in order to relieve these young founders of the need to develop anything approaching a more substantial worldview. And the nation-state itself, the most effective means of collective organization in pursuit of a shared purpose that the world has ever known, was cast aside as an obstacle to progress.

For Strauss, the contemporary social scientist had rejected values in favor of a search for truth and convinced himself that such a distinction was possible. But it was this “indifference to any goal, or of aimlessness and drifting,” as Strauss put it, that is the seed of our current nihilism as a culture.

Although it is best when people have considerable knowledge and experience using a particular product—knowledge in the head— the designer can put sufficient cues into the design—knowledge in the world—that good performance results even in the absence of previous knowledge.

Knowledge how—what psychologists call procedural knowledge—is the knowledge that enables a person to be a skilled musician, to return a serve in tennis, or to move the tongue properly when saying the phrase “frightening witches.”

Knowledge of—what psychologists call declarative knowledge—includes the knowledge of facts and rules.

Experts minimize the need for conscious reasoning. Philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead stated this principle over a century ago:           It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. (Alfred North Whitehead, 1911.)

As we move away from many physical aids, such as printed books and magazines, paper notes, and calendars, much of what we use today as knowledge in the world will become invisible. Yes, it will all be available on display screens, but unless the screens always show this material, we will have added to the burden of memory in the head. We may not have to remember all the details of the information stored away for us, but we will have to remember that it is there, that it needs to be redisplayed at the appropriate time for use or for reminding.

The sociologist Erving Goffman calls the social constraints on acceptable behavior “frames,” and he shows how they govern behavior even when a person is in a novel situation or novel culture. Danger awaits those who deliberately violate the frames of a culture.

Standards simplify life for everyone. At the same time, they tend to hinder future development. And, as discussed in Chapter 6, there are often difficult political struggles in finding common agreement. Nonetheless, when all else fails, standards are the way to proceed.

Bath and kitchen faucet design ought to be simple, but can violate many design principles, including:        •  Visible affordances and signifiers        •  Discoverability        •  Immediacy of feedback Finally, many violate the principle of desperation:        •  If all else fails, standardize. Standardization is indeed the fundamental principle of desperation: when no other solution appears possible, simply design everything the same way, so people only have to learn once.

Put the knowledge required to operate the technology in the world. Don’t require that all the knowledge must be in the head. Allow for efficient operation when people have learned all the requirements, when they are experts who can perform without the knowledge in the world, but make it possible for non-experts to use the knowledge in the world. This will also help experts who need to perform a rare, infrequently performed operation or return to the technology after a prolonged absence.

Engineers and businesspeople are trained to solve problems. Designers are trained to discover the real problems. A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.

The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, deep, sustained reasoning is difficult. Unaided memory, thought, and reasoning are all limited in power. Human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities.

I dream of the power of individuals, whether alone or in small groups, to unleash their creative spirits, their imagination, and their talents to develop a wide range of innovation. New technologies promise to make this possible. Now, for the first time in history, individuals can share their ideas, their thoughts and dreams. They can produce their own products, their own services, and make these available to anyone in the world. All can be their own master, exercising whatever special talents and interests they may have. What drives this dream? The rise of small, efficient tools that empower individuals.

I dream of a renaissance of talent, where people are empowered to create, to use their skills and talents. Some may wish for the safety and security of working for organizations. Some may wish to start new enterprises. Some may do this as hobbies. Some may band together into small groups and cooperatives, the better to assemble the variety of skills required by modern technology, to help share their knowledge, to teach one another, and to assemble the critical mass that will always be needed, even for small projects. Some may hire themselves out to provide the necessary skills required of large projects, while still keeping their own freedom and authority.