The Innovators

Why it’s on the list: Walter Isaacson’s group biography of the digital revolution — collaboration, not lone genius, as the engine of innovation.

Where I heard about it

• Spotted at Barnes & Noble at University Village, Seattle — January 2016 (Books photo album)

• Photographed in December 2016 (Books photo album)

• Spotted at West Portal Bookstore, San Francisco — March 2018 (Books photo album)

• My own reading — I’ve sampled it and highlighted as I went, but haven’t read it through.

• Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, under Value Investing, Finance, and Capitalism.

• On Patrick Collison’s Bookshelf — Patrick Collison’s catalog of the physical books he owns (unflagged). Saved in Kyle’s April 19th, 2020 Roam daily note.

Connections

• Walter Isaacson
• Leonardo Da Vinci
• The Idea Factory
• Bundling
• Unbundling

Highlights

Partial highlights captured via Readwise — Kyle sampled this book; not a full read.

• most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively.
• The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.
• For the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by government spending and managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration. Intersecting with that was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded hippies, do-it-yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers, most of whom were suspicious of centralized authority.

  Kyle: Technology has been a story of decentralized innovation and centralized power grabbing. On and off again. Bundling and unbundling.

• Thomas Carlyle declared that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” and Herbert Spencer responded with a theory that emphasized the role of societal forces.
• The Internet was originally built to facilitate collaboration. By contrast, personal computers, especially those meant to be used at home, were devised as tools for individual creativity.