KEVIN TWOHY

When talking about Zuckerbergs most valuable personality trait, a colleague jokingly invokes the famous Stanford marshmallow tests, in which researchers found a correlation between a young childs ability to delay gratificationdevour one treat right away, or wait and be rewarded with twowith high achievement later in life. If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: Hed still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows.

The ! mark was not featured on standard manual typewriters before the 1970s. Instead, one typed a period, backspaced, and typed an apostrophe. In the 1950s, secretarial dictation and typesetting manuals referred to the mark as “bang,” most likely adapted from comic books where the ! appeared in dialogue balloons to represent a gun being fired,

It happens quietly, but the projects that could be the most disruptive to the company begin in silence. Someone, somewhere has a bright idea and a handful of talented engineers are whisked off to a different building behind a locked door. Their status is “elsewhere” and their project is “need to know.” Having never sat with one of these projects, I can only infer how they work, but when you see the results, you know for certain - these guys and gals are hacking. Their projects are the definition of ambition, you’ve never heard their names, they are small and fast-moving, and they are outsiders in their own company. Sound familiar?

The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Anything you do for any significant amount of time, no matter how dumb or trivial it seems at first, becomes a part of your history. Witness all the people now scratching their heads wondering how they create an archive of their time spent on Twitter. I am not here to fetishize artifacts and memorabilia. Sometimes it’s fine to do a thing and let it drift out out to sea; to exist only in the re-telling. History has always been lossy but the fact that we have history at all I think demonstrates they we want and value concrete representations of the passage of time. Those representations change with the technologies at hand but the motivation doesn’t.

Further complicating all of this are the feedback loops created when a group changes its behavior in response to changes in software. Because of these effects, designers of social software have more in common with economists or political scientists than they do with designers of single-user software, and operators of communal resources have more in common with politicians or landlords than with operators of ordinary web sites.

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Spread and participate in culture. Remix, reuse, use, abuse. Make sure no one controls your mind. Create new systems and technology that circumvent the corruption. Start a religion. Start your own nation, or buy one. Buy a bus. Crush it to pieces.

The recurring metaphor in The Inmates are Running the Asylum is that of the dancing bear—the circus bear that shuffles clumsily for the amusement of the audience. Such bears, says author Alan Cooper, don’t dance well, as everyone at the circus can see. What amazes the crowd is that the bear dances at all. Cooper argues that technology (videocassette recorders, car alarms, most software applications for personal computers) consists largely of dancing bears—pieces that work, but not at all well. He goes on to say that this is more often than not the fault of poorly designed user interfaces, and he makes a good argument that way too many devices (perhaps as a result of the designers’ subconscious wish to bully the people who tormented them as children) ask too much of their users. Too many systems (like the famous unprogrammable VCR) make their users feel stupid when they can’t get the job done.

Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The sec- ond is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.