Steven Johnson

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“Every Now And Then An individual Or Group Makes A Leap That Seems Almost Like Time Travelling”

October 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Innovation, that word which is appropriate sparingly but ascribed constantly, is truly the proper description for the work of inventor Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, a one-woman Jobs and Woz. As Steven Johnson points out in his latest book, How We Got to Now, excerpted in a Financial Times article, new inventions usually are born to many parents working within the same base of knowledge, but the Victorian duo thought completely outside of the box, leaping a full century ahead of everyone else with their ideas about computers. From the FT:

“Most important innovations – in modern times at least – arrive in clusters of simultaneous discovery. The conceptual and technological pieces come together to make a certain idea imaginable – artificial refrigeration, say, or the lightbulb – and around the world people work on the problem, and usually approach it with the same fundamental assumptions about how it can be solved.

Thomas Edison and his peers may have disagreed about the importance of the vacuum or the carbon filament in inventing the electric lightbulb, but none of them was working on an LED. As the writer Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine, has observed, the predominance of simultaneous, multiple invention in the historical record has interesting implications for the philosophy of history and science: to what extent is the sequence of invention set in stone by the basic laws of physics or information or the biological and chemical constraints of the environment?

If simultaneous invention is the rule, what about the exceptions? What about Babbage and Lovelace, who were a century ahead of just about every other human on the planet? Most innovation happens in the present tense of possibility, working with tools and concepts that are available in that time. But every now and then an individual or group makes a leap that seems almost like time travelling. What allows them to see past the boundaries of the adjacent possible, when their contemporaries fail to do so? That may be the greatest mystery of all.”

 

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“All Of A Sudden People Across Europe Noticed For The First Time That They Were Farsighted”

September 29, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Steven Johnson, who wrote the excellent epidemiology history The Ghost Map, has a new book and TV series about innovation, both entitled How We Got to Now. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. One exchange about the unintended consequences of the printing press:

“Question:

What was the most unexpected invention/innovation you uncovered in How We Got to Now?

Steven Johnson:

One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg’s printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn’t really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways. I love that story because I thought I knew the story of Gutenberg’s influence, but it turned out to have this other strand that had never occurred to me.”•

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“Google Employees Gave More Than 97% Of Their Political Donations To Obama”

May 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve probably mentioned before that I love Steven Johnson’s book about Victorian Era epidemiology The Ghost Map. At Medium, the author pushes back against some points George Packer makes in his just-published New Yorker article (gated here) about Silicon Valley’s reach into politics. An excerpt:

“The first assumption, cited half a dozen times in the piece, is that the default political framework of the Valley is libertarian. When I was writing Future Perfect—which makes a cameo in Packer’s piece—I spent quite a few pages clarifying that while the new ‘peer progressive‘ worldview shared some superficial characteristics with Randian libertarianism, it was in actuality fundamentally different. Yes, people who work in the tech sector today (particularly around the web and social media) believe in the power of decentralized systems and less hierarchical forms of organization. But that does not mean they are greed-is-good market fundamentalists. For starters, almost all of them recognize that their industry itself arose out of government funding (see ARPANET), and some of the most celebrated achievements of the digital culture (open source software, Wikipedia) involve commons-based collaboration with no conventional definition of private property whatsoever. It’s precisely because we lack a new vocabulary to describe this worldview that we end up lumping the tech sector together in the libertarian camp.

You can see this confusion most clearly in a series of datapoints that go amazingly unmentioned in Packer’s piece: namely, the election returns from last fall’s presidential race. As Nate Silver observed in a detailed postmortem on Northern California votes, Obama won Santa Clara county by 42% — more than ten times his margin nationally, and more than twice his margin in the rest of liberal California. (While San Francisco and Oakland have long been hotbeds of progressivism, Reagan won Santa Clara by double digits in both of his successful campaigns.) You would think such a dramatic swing to the left would at least warrant a mention in Packer’s piece, but from reading it, an outsider might reasonably assume that the Valley was a Republican stronghold—a vast army of Koch brothers with hoodies.

The numbers are even more stark when you look at campaign finance. According to Silver’s analysis, Google employees gave more than 97% of their political donations to Obama, with comparable percentages at Apple and eBay as well. If libertarianism is so rampant in Silicon Valley, why are they voting for higher taxes and funding a big government liberal by such overwhelming numbers?” (Thanks Browser.)

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“For All His Obnoxiousness With His Colleagues…Jobs Had A Rich Collaborative Streak As Well”

October 30, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Walter Isaacson, a writer who can communicate complicated ideas lucidly, was the perfect biographer for Steve Jobs, a technologist who could make complex functions work simply. Steven Johnson offers up his thoughts on Isaacson’s Jobs bio immediately after reading it. An excerpt:

‘While Jobs historically had a reputation for being a nightmare to work with, in fact one of the defining patterns of his career was his capacity for deep and generative partnerships with one or two other (often very different) people. That, of course, is the story of Jobs and Woz in the early days of Apple, but it’s also the story of his collaboration with Lasseter at Pixar, and Jony Ive at Apple in the second act. (One interesting tidbit from the book is that Jobs would have lunch with Ive almost every day he was on the Apple campus.) In my experience, egomaniacal people who are nonetheless genuinely talented have a hard time establishing those kinds of collaborations, in part because it involves acknowledging that someone else has skills that you don’t possess. But for all his obnoxiousness with his colleagues (and the book has endless anecdotes documenting those traits), Jobs had a rich collaborative streak as well. He was enough of an egomaniac to think of himself as another John Lennon, but he was always looking for McCartneys to go along for the ride with him.’

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“The Mac Was A Machine You Wanted To Live In”

September 15, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Steven Johnson, who wrote  The Ghost Map, a fascinating account of amateur epidemiology in Victorian England, shares his recollections of the mind-altering, game-changing effect of the Macintosh computer, in the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

“But that first Macintosh did much more than expand my data storage needs. It also fundamentally changed my relationship to technology—and in doing that, ultimately changed the course of my life.

It’s hard to remember now, but in the mid-1980s—before Wired Magazine, Pixar, dot-com start-ups, celebrity tweeting—being obsessed with your computer had almost no cultural cachet. You were just a nerd, full stop. The computers of the day had all the playfulness of a tax audit, and the creative people who used them did so begrudgingly.

But one look at the Mac and you could tell something was different. The white screen alone seemed revolutionary, after years of reading green text on a black background. And there were typefaces! I had been obsessed with typography since my grade-school years; here was a computer that treated fonts as an art, not just a clump of pixels. The then-revolutionary graphic interface made the screen feel like a space you wanted to inhabit, to make your own. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, the Mac was a machine you wanted to live in.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Steven Johnson revisits the cholera outbreak of 1854 during his TED Talk:

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Urban Studies: The Unintended Benefits Of 311

November 4, 2010 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mayor Bloomberg: I did good things and then my ego made everyone hate me. (Image by Rubenstein.)

Before Mayor Bloomberg absolutely refused to fucking leave after his second term was up and changed election laws to allow him to buy a third term, he did some popular things. The most popular may be initiating the 311 system, whereby NYC residents had to dial just three quick digits to lodge complaints and find out info about anything they wanted to know about their city. It reduced bureacracy and gave people a reliable bridge to their government.

What wasn’t fully anticipated at the time was that the information coming in with these calls might be more useful than the information going out. By tagging complaints and questions to particular areas, the city has become better equipped to solve problems, large and small. Steven Johnson has an interesting article in Wired on the topic, entitled “What A Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal Aboiut New York.” An excerpt:

“As useful as 311 is to ordinary New Yorkers, the most intriguing thing about the service is all the information it supplies back to the city. Each complaint is logged, tagged, and mapped to make it available for subsequent analysis. In some cases, 311 simply helps New York respond more intelligently to needs that were obvious to begin with. Holidays, for example, spark reliable surges in call volume, with questions about government closings and parking regulations. On snow days, call volume spikes precipitously, which 311 anticipates with recorded messages about school closings and parking rules.

Shut your piehole, Mister Softee. (Image by Rjsswf8.)

But the service also helps city leaders detect patterns that might otherwise have escaped notice. After the first survey of 311 complaints ranked excessive noise as the number one source of irritation among residents, the Bloomberg administration instituted a series of noise-abatement programs, going after the offenders whom callers complained about most often (that means you, Mister Softee). Similarly, clusters of public-drinking complaints in certain neighborhoods have led to crackdowns on illegal social clubs. Some of the discoveries have been subtle but brilliant. For example, officials now know that the first warm day of spring will bring a surge in use of the city’s chlorofluorocarbon recycling programs. The connection is logical once you think about it: The hot weather inspires people to upgrade their air conditioners, and they don’t want to just leave the old, Freon-filled units out on the street.

The 311 system has proved useful not just at detecting reliable patterns but also at providing insights when the normal patterns are disrupted. Clusters of calls about food-borne illness or sanitary problems from the same restaurant now trigger a rapid response from the city’s health department. And during emergencies, callers help provide real-time insight into what’s really happening. ‘When [New York Yankees pitcher] Cory Lidle crashed his plane into a building on the Upper East Side, we had a bulletin on all of our screens in less than an hour explaining that it was not an act of terrorism,’ [Executive Director Joseph] Morrisroe says. After US Airways flight 1549 crash-landed in the Hudson in 2009, a few callers dialed 311 asking what they should do with hand luggage they’d retrieved from the river. ‘We have lots of protocols and systems in place for emergencies like plane crashes,’ Morrisroe explains, ‘but we’d never thought about floating luggage.’ This is the beauty of 311. It thrives on the quotidian and predictable—the school-closing queries and pothole complaints—but it also plays well with black swans.”

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“The Physical Density Of The City Also Encourages Innovation”

November 1, 2010 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As Johnson's great book "The Ghost Map" points out, physcial density can also lead to the rapid spread of bad things, like cholera.

I’ve always believed that companies that need to be highly creative in order to survive should be housed in small, cramped offices in buildings with other companies that are housed in small, cramped offices. It might not always be pretty or comfy, but I think the physical closeness of people and ideas spurs innovation. The excellent writer Steven Johnson agrees with me, in an article he’s written for the Financial Times, about New York City’s current tech-company explosion. (It’s linked to the publication of his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.) Physical density, he argues, is key. An excerpt:

“The physical density of the city also encourages innovation. Many start-ups, both now and during the first, late-1990s internet boom, share offices. This creates informal networks of influence, where ideas can pass from one company to the other over casual conversation at the espresso machine or water cooler. When we started outside.in, we shared a Brooklyn office with a documentary film company for its first year of existence. Today, our much larger office in Manhattan also houses three other smaller start-ups working on unrelated projects. By crowding together, we increase the likelihood of interesting ideas or talents crossing the companies’ borders. The proximity also helps to counter the natural volatility of start-ups: in outside.in’s early days, we ‘borrowed’ a few talented employees from the documentary film company, which was temporarily downsizing. When the projects picked up again, some of those employees moved back. Others had found a new calling in the web world and stayed with us.

Economists have a telling phrase for the kind of sharing that happens in these densely populated environments: ‘information spillover.’ When you share a civic culture with millions of people, good ideas have a tendency to flow from mind to mind, even when their creators try to keep them secret.”

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