Breaking Smart: Season One: How Software is Eating the World Kindle Edition

I keep a regular eye on VGR's Twitter and his newsletters to peer around the bend and into the future. Despite having read all of these essays when they came out I found re-reading them very worthwhile. It's fascinating to read them altogether and see how the ideas inter-relate and complement each other. Some of the ideas are super practical and can be implemented in my business. Some are just plain mind-expanding and fascinating.VGR is one of the most original and consistently interesting thinkers out there. Do yourself a favor and read it.

Long-time lurker on Ribbonfarm, enjoyed reading a purposefully selected collection of essays. I like fresh/ innovative/ speculative ideas and this is chock full of them.

Puts technology in the context of progress over the last few hundred years. If the mantra “ location location location” means anything to you, then “connection connection connection” is the modern equivalent.

FavoritePutting these ideas together, we are messily slouching towards a non-pastoral utopia on an asymptotic trajectory where reality gradually blurs into magic, waste into wealth, technology into nature and work into play.

Essential wisdom for the modern human! I think Venkatesh's historical, organizational, societal and individual analysis makes for a superior compass to orient yourself in the twenty-first century.No matter who you are, you doubtless stand to benefit from the broad insight this bite-sized series contains. Succinct, brilliant and inspiring!

Not only a great ebook but concise and to the point. I had read all this already, via the email list, but getting out of my inbox meant finally understanding it. Likely the best $4 (or so) you’ll spend on books this year.

I guess a lot of the authors fans left the 5 star reviews? It started off good, by the end it seemed to be just word salad and sophomoric. Some good observations throughout, but feels unpolished.

I like the optimism, but it was just a synthesis of his reading list. More words were needed to submit.

Read this on the recommendation of Tiago Forte, who described it as a profoundly important book, and he's right. It's a revelation: incredibly incisive about the state of the modern world, giving an excellent shared language for discussing recent trends in technology, and also sharply written and witty.It's already reshaping the way I see things, and as somebody who lacked insight about the widening impact of software methodologies (I did an English degree), it was just the right level of technicality. I couldn't recommend it more.

This is a must-read book for all. I spent a week with Venkatesh going over the work in season 1 of breaking smart and it completely changed the way I understood the scope of change we are experiencing. This Kindle version is well put together and void of the tabs and distractions of reading books from a browser.

People change, then forget that they changed, and act as though they always behaved a certain way and could never change again. Because of this, unexpected changes in human behavior are often dismissed as regressive rather than as potentially intelligent adaptations.As this set of essays argues — many of them inspired by a series of intensive conversations Venkat and I had — there is indeed such a case, and it follows naturally from the basic premise that people can and do change. To “break smart” is to adapt intelligently to new technological possibilities.Only a handful of general-purpose technologies – electricity, steam power, precision clocks, written language, token currencies, iron metallurgy and agriculture among them – have impacted our world in the sort of deeply transformative way that deserves the description eating. And only two of these, written language and money, were soft technologies: seemingly ephemeral, but capable of being embodied in a variety of specific physical forms. Software has the same relationship to any specific sort of computing hardware as money does to coins or credit cards or writing to clay tablets and paper books.Software eating the world is a story of the seen and the unseen: small, measurable effects that seem underwhelming or even negative, and large invisible and positive effects that are easy to miss, unless you know where to look.Writing is very flexible: we can write with a finger on sand or with an electron beam on a pinhead. Money is even more flexible: anything from cigarettes in a prison to pepper and salt in the ancient world to modern fiat currencies can work. But software can increasingly go wherever writing and money can go, and beyond. Software can also eat both, and take them to places they cannot go on their own. Partly as a consequence of how rarely soft, world-eating technologies erupt into human life, we have been systematically underestimating the magnitude of the forces being unleashed by software. While it might seem like software is constantly in the news, what we have already seen is dwarfed by what still remains unseen.The fourth reason we underestimate software, however, is a unique one: it is a revolution that is being led, in large measure, by brash young kids rather than sober adults.Within the current structure of the global economy, older generations can, and do, borrow unconditionally from the future at the expense of the young and the yet-to-be-born.But unlike most periods in history, young people today do not have to either “wait their turn” or directly confront a social order that is systematically stacked against them. Operating in the margins by a hacker ethos — a problem solving sensibility based on rapid trial-and-error and creative improvisation — they are able to use software leverage and loose digital forms of organization to create new economic, social and political wealth. In the process, young people are indirectly disrupting politics and economics and creating a new parallel social order.what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.Software-driven transformations directly disrupt the middle-class life script, upon which the entire industrial social order is based. In its typical aspirational form, the traditional script is based on 12 years of regimented industrial schooling, an additional 4 years devoted to economic specialization, lifetime employment with predictable seniority-based promotions, and middle-class lifestyles. Though this script began to unravel as early as the 1970s, even for the minority (white, male, straight, abled, native-born) who actually enjoyed it, the social order of our world is still based on it. Instead of software, the traditional script runs on what we might call paperware: bureaucratic processes constructed from the older soft technologies of writing and money. Instead of the hacker ethos of flexible and creative improvisation, it is based on the credentialist ethos of degrees, certifications, licenses and regulations. Instead of being based on achieving financial autonomy early, it is based on taking on significant debt (for college and home ownership) early.It is important to note though, that this social order based on credentialism and paperware worked reasonably well for almost a century between approximately 1870 and 1970, and created a great deal of new wealth and prosperity. Despite its stifling effects on individualism, creativity and risk-taking, it offered its members a broader range of opportunities and more security than the narrow agrarian provincialism it supplanted. For all its shortcomings, lifetime employment in a large corporation like General Motors, with significantly higher standards of living, was a great improvement over pre-industrial rural life.The legend of Prometheus has been used as a metaphor for technological progress at least since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus. Technologies capable of eating the world typically have a Promethean character: they emerge within a mature social order (a metaphoric “heaven” that is the preserve of older elites), but their true potential is unleashed by an emerging one (a metaphoric “earth” comprising creative marginal cultures, in particular youth cultures), which gains relative power as a result. Software as a Promethean technology emerged in the heart of the industrial social order, at companies such as AT&T, IBM and Xerox, universities such as MIT and Stanford, and government agencies such as DARPA and CERN. But its Promethean character was unleashed, starting with the early hacker movement, on the open Internet and through Silicon-Valley style startups.Those who adopt a Promethean mindset and break smart will play an expanding role in shaping the future. Those who adopt a pastoral mindset and retreat towards tradition will play a diminishing role, in the shrinking number of economic sectors where credentialism is still the more appropriate model.Previous historical periods of mass flourishing, such as the early industrial revolution, were short-lived, and gave way, after a few decades, to societies based on a new middle class majority built around predictable patterns of work and life. This time around, the state of mass flourishing will be a sustained one: a slouching towards a consumer and producer utopia.The nature of software has come to matter far beyond software. Agile philosophies are eating all kinds of building philosophies. To understand the nature of the world today, whether or not you are a technologist, it is crucial to understand agility and its roots in the conflict between pragmatic and purist approaches to computing. The story of the browser was not exceptional. Until the early 1990s, almost all important software began life as purist architectural visions rather than pragmatic hands-on tinkering. This was because early programming with punch-card mainframes was a highly constrained process. Iterative refinement was slow and expensive. Agility was a distant dream: programmers often had to wait weeks between runs. If your program didn’t work the first time, you might not have gotten another chance. Purist architectures, worked out on paper, helped minimize risk and maximize results under these conditions.In short, purist architecture led the way and pragmatic hands-on hacking was effectively impossible. Trial-and-error was simply too risky and slow, which meant significant hands-on creativity had to be given up in favor of productivity.Since 1974, the year of peak centralization, we have been trading in a world whose functioning is driven by atoms in geography for one whose functioning is driven by bits on networks. The process has been something like vines growing all over an aging building, creeping in through the smallest cracks in the masonry to establish a new architectural logic. The difference between the two is simple: the geographic world solves problems in goal-driven ways, through literal or metaphoric zero-sum territorial conflict. The networked world solves them in serendipitous ways, through innovations that break assumptions about how resources can be used, typically making them less rivalrous and unexpectedly abundant.Choosing a problem based on “importance” means uncritically accepting pastoral problem frames and priorities. Constraining the solution with an alluring “vision” of success means limiting creative possibilities for those who come later. Innovation is severely limited: You cannot act on unexpected ideas that solve different problems with the given resources, let alone pursue the direction of maximal interestingness indefinitely. This means unseen opportunity costs can be higher than visible benefits. You also cannot easily pursue solutions that require different (and possibly much cheaper) resources than the ones you competed for: problems must be solved in pre-approved ways.This is not a process that tolerates uncertainty or ambiguity well, let alone thrive on it. Even positive uncertainty becomes a problem: an unexpected budget surplus must be hurriedly used up, often in wasteful ways, otherwise the budget might shrink next year. Unexpected new information and ideas, especially from novel perspectives — the fuel of innovation — are by definition a negative, to be dealt with like unwanted interruptions.The networked world approach is based on a very different idea. It does not begin with utopian goals or resources captured through specific promises or threats. Instead it begins with open-ended, pragmatic tinkering that thrives on the unexpected. The process is not even recognizable as a problem-solving mechanism at first glance: Immersion in relevant streams of ideas, people and free capabilities Experimentation to uncover new possibilities through trial and error Leverage to double down on whatever works unexpectedly well Where the politician’s syllogism focuses on repairing things that look broken in relation to an ideal of changeless perfection, the tinkerer’s way focuses on possibilities for deliberate changeWhat would be seemingly pointless disruption in an unchanging utopia becomes a way to stay one step ahead in a changing environment. This is the key difference between the two problem-solving processes: in goal-driven problem-solving, open-ended ideation is fundamentally viewed as a negative. In tinkering, it is a positive.A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.As Karl Marx himself realized, the end-state of industrial capitalism is in fact the condition where the means of production become increasingly available to all. Of course, it is already becoming clear that the result is neither the utopian collectivist workers’ paradise he hoped for, nor the utopian leisure society that John Maynard Keynes hoped for. Instead, it is a world where increasingly free people, working with increasingly free ideas and means of production, operate by their own priorities. Authoritarian leaders, used to relying on coercion and policed boundaries, find it increasingly hard to enforce their priorities on others in such a world.An observation due to Arthur C. Clarke offers a way to understand this second trajectory: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The networked world evolves so rapidly through innovation, it seems like a frontier of endless magic. Clarke’s observation has inspired a number of snowclones that shed further light on where we might be headed. The first, due to Bruce Sterling, is that any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from its own garbage. The second, due to futurist Karl Schroeder, is that any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature.any sufficiently advanced kind of work is indistinguishable from play.Putting these ideas together, we are messily slouching towards a non-pastoral utopia on an asymptotic trajectory where reality gradually blurs into magic, waste into wealth, technology into nature and work into play. ` This is a world that is breaking smart, with Promethean vigor, from its own past, like the precocious teenagers who are leading the charge. In broad strokes, this is what we mean by software eating the world.For Prometheans, the challenge is to explore how to navigate and live in this world. A growing non-geographic-dualist understanding of it is leading to a network culture view of the human condition. If the networked world is a planet-sized distributed computer, network culture is its operating system.

I am still reeling from the density of paradigm altering ideas. It flows like a stream and I am so happy I stumbled upon this. It’s going to be really close to me as a start-up founder.