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Summary
Summary
This "brilliant and provocative" (Walter Isaacson) guide shares nine principles to adapt and survive the technological changes shaping our future from the director of the MIT Media Lab and a veteran Wired journalist.
The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments. The people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently.
In Whiplash , Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill that logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period:
Emergence over Authority Pull over Push Compasses over Maps Risk over Safety Disobedience over Compliance Practice over Theory Diversity over Ability Resilience over Strength Systems over Objects
Filled with incredible case studies and cutting-edge research and philosophies from the MIT Media Lab and beyond, Whiplash will help you adapt and succeed in this unpredictable world.
Author Notes
Joichi "Joi" Ito has been recognized for his work as an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom. As director of the MIT Media Lab, he is currently exploring how radical new approaches to science and technology can transform society in substantial and positive ways. Ito has served as both board chair and CEO of Creative Commons, and sits on the boards of Sony Corporation, Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The New York Times Company, and The Mozilla Foundation. Ito's honors include Time magazine's "Cyber-Elite" listing in 1997 (at age 31) and selection as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum (2001). In 2008, BusinessWeek named him one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2013, he received an honorary D.Litt from The New School in New York City, and in 2015 an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Tufts University. In 2014, he was inducted into the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame; also in 2014, he was one of the recipients of the Golden Plate award from the Academy of Achievement.
Jeff Howe is the program coordinator for Media Innovation at Northeastern, and an assistant professor at Northeastern University. A longtime contributing editor at Wired magazine, he coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 article for that magazine. In 2008 he published a book with Random House that looked more deeply at the phenomenon of massive online collaboration. Called Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business , it has been translated into ten languages. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the 2009-2010 academic year, and is currently a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab. He has written for the Washington Post , the New Yorker , the New York Times , Time , Newsweek , and many other publications. He currently lives in Cambridge with his wife and two children.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Innovation and technology guru Howe (Crowdsourcing) teams up with his colleague Ito, an Internet privacy activist and the director of MIT's Media Lab, for a highly entertaining and thought-provoking look at the ongoing shifts in technology and communication affecting the business sector. The authors have come up with organizing principles to help the reader navigate a chaotic landscape, focusing particularly on embracing innovation and disruption as vehicles for success. They bring abstract principles such as "Emergence over Authority" or "Systems over Objects" to life by narrating historical turning points, such as the Lumière brothers' 1895 screening of the first motion picture; recent failures, such as Japan's 2011 nuclear disaster; and recent innovations in technology, such as the development of bitcoin. The writing style avoids the trap of being overly conceptual and is instead snappy and accessible, sprinkled with ideas such as how to form a new "cognitive toolset" geared to ongoing advances. This provocative gem is a must-read for anyone interested in the cutting-edge research and exploration happening at MIT's Media Lab, innovation at countless universities and companies worldwide, or futuristic thinking in general. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Two cybergurus offer a users manual to the twenty-first century.Our technologies have outpaced our ability, as a society, to understand them, write MIT Media Lab director Ito and veteran Wired writer Howe (Media Innovation/Northeastern Univ.; Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, 2008). We need to catch up. In this heady, immensely rewarding book, they expand on the nine principles animating the celebrated MIT Lab to craft a blueprint for success in a world undergoing revolutions in technology and communications. As a result of Moores laweverything digital gets faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rateand the rise of the internet, the very nature of innovation has changed, relocating it from the center (governments and big companies) to the edges (a twenty-three-year-old punk rock musician and circuit-board geek living in Osaka, Japan). New products are produced at great scale and little cost in a matter of weeks, if not days. The authors devote a chapter to each of their tools for using the worlds new operating system. For example, they encourage crowdfunding and using resources as needed rather than stockpiling them to exploit the reduced cost of innovation. They discuss the value of undirected discovery, the need to accept risk and experimentation (and a willingness to fail and start again from scratch), and the importance of maintaining a culture of creative disobedience. They emphasize that planning is costlier than improvisation, that diverse aptitudes trump expertise, and that human systems are most resilient at their most diverse. They also argue that responsible innovation must focus on the overall impact of new technologies. They describe how leading MIT researchers work at the lab, which Ito, an entrepreneur and college dropout, joined in 2011. This exhilarating and authoritative book actually makes sense of our incredibly fast-paced, high-tech society. A standout among titles on technology and innovation, it will repay readingand rereadingby leaders in all fields. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ito and Howe, affiliates of the MIT Media Lab, an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describe nine core principles that are rapidly disrupting, shifting, and opening the world in a new direction of innovation. The principles, such as risks, diversity, and systems, derive from the collision of two important revolutions: communications and technology. Fittingly, each chapter moves quickly and offers compelling examples of how these trends challenge conventional approaches to facilitating and incubating creativity and productivity. From Bitcoin to Kickstarter, the book is filled with a variety of case studies, personal narratives, philosophical commentaries, and histories which make up Ito and Howe's core themes. With them, the authors explore where society is heading and how to make sense of these swift technological developments. Also cited are experiments and creative reflections from the MIT Media Lab which position how these principles can be applied in society. Readers interested in technology, science history, futurism, innovation, and entrepreneurship will find this book to be very fascinating, thought provoking, and focused.--Pun, Raymond Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
what do we do about the futurists? For the last few years, the professional conference circuit has been overrun by keynote speakers from San Francisco, bearing job titles like chief optimist and commanding five-figure fees to tell us how lucky we are to be living in a glorious new technological era. From coast to coast, every insurance-sales and dental hygienist convention now features one of these puffy paeans to technology. Robots! Augmented reality! The Internet of Things! All of these innovations will leave us richer, happier and more productive, the futurists tell us, and why not believe them? But futurism in the time of Donald Trump feels fraught. After all, the techno-optimists completely missed the signs of an impending revolution in their backyards: the spread of fake news enabled by social networks; the megaphonic power of Trump's Twitter feed; the rise of the so-called alt-right, a racist, neo-fascist clique that festered on 4chan and Reddit before emerging as a viable political movement. As a result, we fawned over self-driving cars and next-generation artificial intelligence while questions about the politics of all this new technology - the emotional backlash from manufacturing workers losing their jobs to automation, the interference of foreign hackers in American elections, the ability of partisan opportunists to flood Facebook with propaganda - went mostly unanswered. In her book "The Signals Are Talking," Amy Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute, gives us a sophisticated but fairly narrow view of the future. She limits her forecasts to trends in technology, since, as she writes, "technology is the unilateral source of nearly all of the significant things that have changed the world in the past 500 years." (There were a few wars in there, too, but let's concede the premise.) To predict trends, Webb writes, you begin by looking to the fringe, identifying the misfits and early adopters doing bizarre experiments and tinkering with emerging technologies. You look for hidden patterns in the use of these technologies and apply a six-step rubric Webb calls Cipher (contradictions, inflections, practices, hacks, extremes, rarities) to analyze which ones are likely to catch on and reach the mainstream. Then, when you have a trend firmly in hand, you create a strategy to capitalize on the trend, and "pressure-test" that strategy before taking action. Like most modern futurism, Webb's advice is directed primarily at an audience of entrepreneurs and executives trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the competition. But there is more to the future than making money, and "How will this trend affect my bottom line?" is, truthfully, one of the easier questions a futurist can answer. It doesn't take an oracle to predict that automation will displace factory workers, that Crispr gene-editing techniques will lead to a boom in pharmaceutical research or that drones will influence the shipping industry. Much harder is anticipating the downstream effects of these changes on a broader group of people, and it's here that Webb and her futurist peers often resort to hand-waving and generalities. Webb cites Uber as an example of a transformational technology. The ubiquitous ride-hailing app succeeds, she writes, because it "leverages our basic human needs and desires in a meaningful way and aligns human nature with emerging technologies and breakthrough inventions." (And here I thought it was just the cheap fares.) Webb writes that Über "might transform how we think about logistics - not just in the realm of taxis and black cars, but in how we move around people, packages, groceries, pets and just about everything else." She imagines a near future of agriculture in which self-driving Über harvesters dig up crops on farms, place them into self-driving Uber trucks and automatically deliver them to customers. In this Uber-centric future, she writes, "a significant portion of the human-powered jobs in logistics will be obviated." She then moves on, as if the massive labor shock she has just predicted will produce nothing more consequential than robot-farmed rutabagas. But wait. What happens when the 3.5 million Americans who drive trucks for a living and the three million Americans who work on farms get booted from their jobs by Uber-bots? What kind of social safety net might soften the blow of that kind of sudden mass unemployment? What kind of political movement might oppose the rise of a new, monopolistic techno-agricultural power? What are the ecological implications of putting food production in the hands of Silicon Valley tech companies? These are the biggest, most important questions, and the ones on which futurist thinking is most conspicuously absent. in "whiplash," Joi Ito and Jeff Howe apply futurist thinking to a broader set of problems. Ito, the director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, and Howe, a visiting scholar there, are more careful to avoid the kind of futurist fortunetelling that ends in discrete, falsifiable predictions. Instead, they put forth broad theories of technological change, accompanied by examples from their work at the Media Lab. The rise of decentralized crypto-currencies like Bitcoin is an example of "pull over push" ; the runaway success of Scratch, a rudimentary programming language for kids, typifies the theory of "compasses over maps." Ito and Howe - who, like Webb, wrote their book before the 2016 election and can be forgiven for their lack of clairvoyance - are generally optimistic about the future, which they believe will be governed by "emergent systems" rather than topdown rule-making. "Unlike authoritarian systems," they write, "emergent systems foster the kind of nonlinear innovation that can react quickly to the kind of rapid changes that characterize the network age." Left unmentioned is the possibility of a movement like the alt-right, which supports authoritarianism despite having highly reactive, grass-roots origins. To their credit, Ito and Howe don't gloss over the dangers of distributing power to the masses. Nor do they engage in the hackneyed fantasy that our coming techno-utopia will lift billions out of poverty, free us from the burden of work and lead us into a glorious future of leisure and abundance. Justifying the value of alarmism in times of technological upheaval, they write, "Observing institutions of immense economic and social value stumble blithely into a buzz saw struck us as less dinner party conversation and more fouralarm fire." They're right. In our uncertain times, the work of futurism is more important than ever and should be done by people with sufficient imagination about how things could go wrong. Dystopian sci-fi and TV shows like "Black Mirror" are a necessary corrective to the cheerleaders of Silicon Valley, but in the age of Trump, they're not enough. We need serious, thoughtful people to grapple with the implications of innovation and help us recognize the ways that new technology, if placed in an unstable political climate and seized upon by malevolent actors, could result in harm and hardship. The futurists can help us navigate the storms ahead, but first, they need to take off the rosecolored binoculars. ? 'How will this trend affect my bottom line?' is one of the easier questions for a futurist. KEVIN roose is the vice president of editorial at the Fusion channel, and the executive producer and a co-host of its series "Real Future."
Library Journal Review
What comes next, and are we ready for it? Two bright minds from MIT's Media Lab, Ito, its director, and Howe (Crowdsourcing), a visiting scholar, attempt to put our fast-approaching future into a framework that readers can understand. With "everything digital getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate," Ito and Howe propose nine organizing principles to help "bring our brains into the modern era." Each chapter is devoted to one principle and concludes with "The DIY": how to translate the principle into an "actionable strategy." This helps the reader apply the concept to a variety of industries and situations and encourages unconventional and interdisciplinary thinking. Throughout, the authors explore wide-ranging topics including artificial intelligence, the flu virus, and social engineering in an effort to illustrate their nine principles in practice. Stressing the importance of flexibility, diversity, risk-taking, and relationship-building, the book can be used as inspiration for both individuals and institutions to weather the changes ahead successfully. VERDICT A deeply researched think piece recommended for readers curious about the relationship between culture and technology as well as those who plan never to stop learning.-Cori Wilhelm, SUNY Canton Coll. of Tech. Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.