If you haven’t come across it yet, Jeremy Norman‘s HistoryOfInformation.com is absolutely tremendous. It contains “more than 5,000 illustrated entries covering a diverse range of… Read More »Technology (10): a historyofinformation
Writing History by Messing Around As far as we know, writing has been invented four times in human history. The big four are Sumerian cuneiform,… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (4): Innovation at Play; or, A Loaded Pun
Technology often advances at the margins, where new problems challenge people to adapt old tools or to make new ones. (See also Hybrids (2): combinations… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (3): Marginal Revolutions
Elon Musk isn’t (just) building cars at Tesla. He started by building a car, but the end was never the car: the end was a… Read More »The machine that makes the machine; or, matryoshkas of change
Writing as Infant Technology … the thing about new technologies… is that it takes several generations for us to decide what they’re good for. They’re… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked Beginnings
We often think of writing (and reading) as primarily a matter of culture and education, which obscures its position as one of humanity’s most transformative… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (1): Transforming Fire; Slow Burn
In short This book – about the origins of the internet – comes highly recommended by lots of people, and is really excellent. Longer I… Read More »Technology (9): The Dream Machine
This extract is from one of the best interviews with Kevin Kelly I’ve heard, on David Perell’s The North Star podcast. It covers a lot… Read More »Technology (8): Kevin Kelly on finding jobs for infant technologies
On the Hook Here’s the promised graph, explained below: Fishing for Complements Robert Solow (1987) pointed out that “a technological revolution, a drastic change in… Read More »Technology (7): Solow-ng (and thanks for all the fish) – Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson on intangibles and the Productivity J-Curve
You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Nobel Prize in Economics winner Robert Solow, in 1987 (quoted everywhere but it’s… Read More »Technology (6): How did we sink Solow? – true ubiquity, clotheslines and switching costs