What's On Your "Required Reading" List?

These are major pieces in my "canon" - interested in what you think of these and what's in yours...

I’ve already done a version of this newsletter that focused on quotes and snippets of stuff that I have found important and meaningful to me (I recently added a bunch of stuff to that issue). As a follow-up to that, I thought I’d do a issue that focused on the longer pieces of writing that I consider to be my canon or fundamental pieces for how I see the world. You may note that I don’t really discriminate between fiction and non-fiction, I absolutely think that both forms are key for both staying curious, imaginative, and innovative.

I will say as I look at this list that it is chock full of history, anthropology, some network theory and plenty of science fiction.

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“As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, July 1945, The Atlantic: “Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” Important because > “Vannevar Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), during WW2…and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation. The memex, which he began developing in the 1930s (heavily influenced by Emanuel Goldberg's "Statistical Machine" from 1928) was a hypothetical adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of hypertext. The memex and Bush's 1945 essay "As We May Think" influenced generations of computer scientists, who drew inspiration from his vision of the future.” >Simply, this genius envisioned the internet and hyperlinks in 1945. Just an amazing piece of work.

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‘The Mother of All Demos’ by Douglass Engelbart, 1968: Not exactly reading but picture this - you’re sitting at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco and Doug Engelbart comes up and gives this demo. Now the things the that were show, for the first time in single system, included “windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.” >I mean, just the foundational elements of modern, personal computing….and all this was directly influenced by the first article up there, As We May Think.

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Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson: The simple take is that it is a story about a hacker. The larger story is that it largely created the cyberpunk genre, coined the term “cyberspace” and established a visual identity and slang vocabulary that influenced a whole generation of writers, scientists, and filmmakers. Gibson is absolutely in my pantheon of important writers. > “More than any other science fiction book that I can think of, Neuromancer conveys what the future is going to feel like,” says Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley.”(WIRED) >It also featured one of the most evocative opening lines in literature - “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

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Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson: As Neuromancer coined cyberspace, so too does Snow Crash popularize if not coin, the Metaverse. I mean the hero’s name is Hiro Protagonist and he delivers pizza for the mafia. Aside from that it introduces the idea of language as a transmission vector for viruses among humans. I mean this work touches on history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy to name a few. It also nails our human susceptibility to things like conspiracy theories “We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.” Language is code.

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The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984)by Robert Darnton: No, not fiction but finding out why the title is what it is, is one of the joys of the book. Darnton made a huge impression on me with this work and with his admonition that whenever he was looking at primary sources, and came across a joke he didn’t understand - that’s where he would turn into and start investigating. It reminded me that we need to be aware of the context that we bring with us and that we don’t always share that context with others and if we seek to understand them, understanding their jokes is a rich place to start. And “Darnton was just appointed Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982 and was president of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and president of the American Historical Association in 1999, where he founded the Gutenberg-e Program, sponsored by Mellon Foundation. Oh yeah, he was also a trustee of the Oxford University Press and from 1994 to 2007. He is a trustee of the New York Public Library, where he designed and helped launch the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Oh and then he was appointed Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library, where he co-founded the Digital Public Library of America and he designed the digital archive Colonial North America: Worlds of Change. Darnton is a pioneer in the field of the history of the book, and has written about electronic publishing.” Typical underachiever.

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Radicalized by Cory Doctorow (specifically make sure you read Unauthorized Bread): Radicalized is a collection of 4 short stories and they’re all good but Unauthorized Bread really hits - especially now when so many companies from John Deere, to BMW, to Tesla; want to make sure that you’re not really buying something but rather signing up for a lifelong subscription. The story starts with a woman wondering why her toaster won’t work “The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt. “Come on.” Brrt.” Cory, in all his works, has a focus not unlike Gibson’s current works in the near future.

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Clifford Geertz

Here I’m going to break my own formatting and use an entry not for one book or item but for an author. By way of disclaimer, I want to acknowledge that Geertz, like so many anthropologists of his time and before him, had baggage from times when anthropology studied the “savage” and the “other.” Not overlooking those issues just also looking at the influence Geertz had on my thinking about culture, how to study it and how to understand the context in which its embedded. Pieces of his work that influenced me:

Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight: I won’t recite or quote articles about this essay but here’s what struck me - sometimes it takes being an earnest participant in something that allows you to see the real meaning behind something and to be accepted. Don’t neglect these opportunities. The other is that “play” can be awfully serious and high stakes.

The book, of which that essay is a part, is The Interpretation of Cultures. It has a companion volume, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology.

I consider these two volumes to be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand, assess, or (in the corporate space) influence a culture. Business writers study business. Anthropologists study culture and how it is formed. The key theory to take away here is that of “Thick Description.” Described as “a more analytical approach…meant to pick out the critical structures and established codes. This analysis begins with distinguishing all individuals present and coming to an integrative synthesis that accounts for the actions produced. The ability of thick descriptions to showcase the totality of a situation to aid in the overall understanding of findings was called mélange of descriptors.”

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The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, 1995: is another worthy read because it nails not only what we have now but how it could be used both for good and ill. The central piece of tech here is the Primer. “The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life…and growing up to be an effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an interesting life is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop.” What’s interesting is what happens when this incredible teaching tool becomes available to someone in the lower classes. Fun fact: One character in the book who gets a Primer is named Fiona and the internal code name for the Kindle was “Fiona” and Amazon still has a building named that. Again, I’ll say the value here is in one sense thinking that if he gets so much right and there is so much more in the book, what else is left that could happen.

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A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster, 2013: This one should be required reading - I was going to say for anyone working in #learninganddevelopment but I really think it should just be required reading. Period. Raph writes and draws an engaging tale that explains how fun, games, and learning are not just related but inextricably linked. Here’s just one tidbit…when you see people continuing to play games, even simple ones like Solitaire or Tetris - what keeps them coming back isn’t graphics or anything that falls into the ‘gamified’ category - its learning. Learning and the potential to learn is addictive. Seriously, if you’re an instructional designer and reading this book doesn’t change how you think about learning, then I don’t know what to tell you. It’s all right here.

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