Why paying attention is anything but elementary

It’s surprising how much of the world we see and yet do not take in. Who better to teach us why we miss so much and what to do about it than Sherlock Holmes?

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What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

The digital pioneer and visionary behind virtual reality has turned against the very culture he helped create

• By Ron Rosenbaum
• Smithsonian magazine, January 2013,

I couldn’t help thinking of John Le Carré’s spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan. Le Carré’s espionage tales, such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, are haunted by the spectre of the mole, the defector, the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to.

Jaron Lanier (Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.” Jaron Lanier is the spy who came in from the cold 2.0.

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Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

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Kurzweil vs. Dertouzos

Two of technology’s deepest thinkers in a dialogue on the future of humanity.

By Ray Kurzweil and Michael Dertouzos on January 1, 2001

In our September issue, Michael Dertouzos wrote a column, “Not by Reason Alone,” that took Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems to task for a piece Joy had written in Wired. In his Wired article, Joy argued that humanity should renounce certain lines of research, including nanotechnology, because of the dangers they pose. Dertouzos argued that Joy’s view was flawed because his predictions were based on reason which, taken alone, is an inadequate guide to the future. Dertouzos’ column drew an impassioned response from Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines. We print Kurzweil’s letter and Dertouzos’ rejoinder.

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Kurzweil’s Rules of Invention

Kurzweil’s Rules of Invention One prolific inventor offers tips on how to ensure that your inventions have their day in the sun.

By Ray Kurzweil on May 1, 2004

I am often asked my advice on how to succeed as an inventor. More than 30 years of experience have given me a few insights. To wit: invention is a lot like surfing; you have to catch the wave at the right time. This is why I have become an ardent student of technology trends. I now have a research staff that gathers data on a broad variety of technologies, and I develop mathematical models of how technology in different areas evolves. These models show that the pace of innovation itself is doubling every decade.

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How We Will Read: Kevin Kelly

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This is the fifth post of “How We Will Read,” a Findings interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. See our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here.

Kevin Kelly is a scholar of the future. There seems to be no better way to encapsulate his myriad intellectual endeavors, which have sought to explain the new economy, technology as an extension of the self, and the mechanisms of complex organization. Even the creators of The Matrix recognized his brilliance — they made his book Out of Control required reading on set. It’s impossible to speak to him without it realizing that you are talking to someone who has a wide and incredible knowledge of the world. A humble and extraordinary man, Kevin has so many ideas for the future, he doesn’t quite know where to put them all.

Currently, Kevin maintains an active presence on his website, KK.org, where he blogs on several different personal projects he is pursuing, including the sequencing of his own genome and incisive analysis of gadgetry. A founding editor at WIRED and prolific writer of nonfiction books, Kevin’s explorations have never been far from text. So that is precisely what we wanted to ask him about. And who better to ask about the future of books than a scholar of the future?

You’re posting your book New Rules, New Economy in blog posts over the course of a couple of years. I noticed that the posts are formatted in a way that makes them seem annotated. Can you tell me about that?

I long ago got in the habit of marking up books as I went along — talking to it, marginalia, dog-earing, all that kind of stuff. I’m an active reader, and I mostly read to write.

This project is a recycling of that book. When the book was out of print, I decided to re-issue it as blog posts page-by-page. I had some heuristics, and my assistant Camille went through the book. It’s her work. There was some emphasis elements that we decided on, and on her own judgment, she followed through emphasizing in more than one manner.

I have had an idea of actually republishing the book in paper in the kind of annotated way. That was inspired by Tom Peters, the business guru, who does these books where he has a kind of kinetic typography. I always liked that, so I thought I’d try to imitate it here.

Why post your book as blog posts at all?

I’m so far onto the left of the copyright issue. I believe that the natural home of all creation is in the public domain. I believe that is naturally where it wants to reside. I think that works enjoy a temporary moment where they are monopolized and you can charge for them, but they’ll revert back to the free. So putting it out free was basically my habit. I believe — I’m not sure — but I believe I was the first person ever to put an in-copyright, in-print book on the web for free. I happened to have owned the digital rights. Because when it was contracted in 1989 or 1990, nobody knew anything about digital rights.

I don’t think my publishers even know. I just decided to do this. I have no idea whether I own the digital rights or not. I’m no longer even concerned about how many books I sell. I’m really concerned about how many books people read. I’m almost willing, right now, to pay people to read my books.

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Social Power And The Coming Corporate Revolution

Civilizations have clashed in an unexpected way this year, as ordinary people using Facebook and Twitter knocked down dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya—and are threatening absolute rule in Syria. A so-called Arab spring brought waves of liberation to a long-oppressed region. Something similar is happening in more democratic countries. In Spain throngs of young people, known as “the indignant ones,” occupied public plazas nationwide, protesting unemployment and exclusionary politics. In Israel ordinary citizens from both right and left united in massive demonstrations against high housing prices. And in India one man’s campaign against corruption went viral, bringing thousands to the streets in support.

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Primal Urges

By CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA

THE EVOLUTION OF BRUNO LITTLEMORE

By Benjamin Hale

By 578 pp. Twelve. $25.99.

Vladimir Nabokov claimed that the “initial shiver of inspiration” for “Lolita” came from a newspaper account of an ape in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris that produced the first drawing ever made by an animal. “This sketch,” he reported, “showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.” The story neatly encapsulates the tragedy and comedy of Humbert Humbert: for all his preternatural brilliance — no one of his kind has ever set such things down on a page — he knows less than nothing because he doesn’t know that a world exists outside himself. The narrator of Benjamin Hale’s first novel, “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore,” has some of Humbert’s erudition and much of his arrogance. Like Humbert, he is imprisoned for a murder he can’t bring himself to regret, and like Humbert’s, his confession is far less concerned with that act than with the scandalous love affair that precipitated it. The difference is that Bruno knows he is trapped, for he has “seen this cage from both within and without.” Also, Bruno is an actual ape.

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At What Cost

By MEGAN BUSKEY

THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING

Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do

By Eduardo Porter

296 pp. Portfolio/Penguin. $27.95.

In 1992, Lawrence Summers, then the chief economist of the World Bank, caused a minor uproar when it was reported that he had signed a memo arguing that poor countries should lease out land to house waste produced by rich countries. To many, Eduardo Porter writes in “The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do,” the memo demonstrated that the World Bank “believed poor countries were dumps.” While Summers back­pedaled, calling the argument an exercise in “sardonic counterpoint,” it nevertheless cost him a lot of political capital in ­Washington.

In this judicious book, Porter, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, says that while the Summers memo was impolitic, it wasn’t “totally insane,” as one critic termed it. “By evaluating opportunity costs, we organize our lives,” Porter writes. A poor country could have used revenue from a landfill to satisfy an important public need, like school construction, and the investment may very well have turned out to be worth the risk. The Summers kerfuffle is one example among the scores that Porter weaves together to prove his worthy point: ­“Prices — how they are set, how people react to them — can tell us who people really are.”

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