A wider world · Collection guide · 5 stops
Understand a changing world
This path studies technological change through forecasts, history, an internal response and a company that arrived with ambitious ideas. Read the older material as evidence of how people reasoned at the time. Comparing expectations with outcomes is more useful here than treating any one prediction as a current map of the future.
Browse this collection in reading order →Suggested routes through material saved to explore. I haven’t read or watched everything here yet. The order and prompts are editorial suggestions based on available source text, excerpts, descriptions and synopses; they are not personal ratings or claims of completed viewing.
Start with an influential thesis
Articles · Est. 8 min
Why Software Is Eating the World - Marc Andreessen →
Collected by The Unintuitive ↗
Andreessen’s software essay offers a broad claim about how industries change. Begin by extracting its mechanism: what is supposed to change, why, and under which conditions? Keep its historical setting in view.
Pause & try
Write the thesis in your own words. Name one industry where you think it fits and one where the fit is less straightforward.
Add the messiness of history
Triumph of the Nerds tells a history of the personal-computer industry. Put it beside the broad thesis to notice the companies, decisions and circumstances that a sweeping account can compress.
Pause & try
Choose one turning point in the series. Which parts depended on technology, distribution, organisational choices or timing?
Read a response from inside an organisation
Gates’s Internet Tidal Wave memo shows an established company framing a major change for itself. This moves the route from explaining an industry to deciding what people inside a company should pay attention to.
Pause & try
Write a short memo about a change relevant to your field. Separate what is observable now from what you expect might follow.
Examine a forecast about work
Humans Need Not Apply offers an older account of automation and employment. Treat it as a forecast to inspect: some claims may look different now, and changes in tasks need not imply identical changes in entire occupations.
Pause & try
Pick one task in your work. What could change technically, and what other conditions would have to change before the prediction affected the whole role?
Consider why an idea can arrive without winning
General Magic complicates a simple story of inevitable progress. Its company history invites questions about timing, execution and the distance between imagining a useful future and building a sustainable business in it.
Pause & try
What would have to be true for your expected change to happen soon? Name one plausible obstacle and an early sign that would make you revise the timeline.
After the five stops
Take it into your own life.
Keep a one-page map with the change, affected tasks, enabling conditions and uncertainties. Choose one small skill or experiment that would be useful under more than one outcome. Set a date to update the map from new evidence rather than accumulating confident forecasts.
Continue exploring
Items 1–5 are the guided route above. The remaining items are listed alphabetically below; choose what interests you next. These numbers match the collection shelf.
- A 28-year-old Steve Jobs gives a talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen → Find on the shelf: A 28-year-old Steve Jobs gives a talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen →
- Bankrupt - Pan Am → Find on the shelf: Bankrupt - Pan Am →
- Industrial Society and Its Future → Find on the shelf: Industrial Society and Its Future →
- Jobs On Flash - Steve Jobs → Find on the shelf: Jobs On Flash - Steve Jobs →
- Meta Redbook → Find on the shelf: Meta Redbook →
- Print the Legend → Find on the shelf: Print the Legend →
- Prompt Library → Find on the shelf: Prompt Library →
- Steve Jobs - The Lost Interview → Find on the shelf: Steve Jobs - The Lost Interview →
- The Education of a Libertarian - Peter Thiel → Find on the shelf: The Education of a Libertarian - Peter Thiel →
- The Internet Services Disruption - Ray Ozzie → Find on the shelf: The Internet Services Disruption - Ray Ozzie →
- The Last Question By Isaac Asimov → Find on the shelf: The Last Question By Isaac Asimov →