Pocket 2012

The web moves fast, we know that. Good things sprout up one day and the next day they're forgotten, buried beneath the next day's link-soup, not because they're better but because they're new. People of the web have a fascination for new things. New ideas, new people, new rants, new GIFs. Often times we don't have time to reflect on the old. For us, "old" is yesterday. That article we read once, loved, and tweeted about is sent to the archive where we probably won't come back to it.

This book is my attempt to preserve all of that. This is, as Frank Chimero would probably put it, my 2012 anthology.

I use Pocket as my "read later" tool. Anytime I come across an article on the web that seems interesting, I send it to Pocket. Later when I'm traveling on the subway or sitting at home with my iPad, I'll open Pocket and start reading the articles that I saved a few days ago. Any article that I find to be great, I'll "favorite" it, tweet it out and archive it. That's what this book is built from — all of my Pocket favorites from 2012. I have created none of these writings. I didn't ask for permission from the authors to bundle their writings like this. I suspect that most will be fine with it and for those who aren't, I'm not a difficult person to find and I'll be glad to remove your writing. I'm creating this collection in the form of an ebook because it's my way of creating an artifact that I can come back to and reflect on. It's nice to put 2012 on my digital bookshelf and browse my highlights and add my own notes. Speaking of which, I'm a heavy user of Readmill, where you can share highlights and notes from the books you're reading. I'm sure they're working on a way to share highlights from web articles, but right now the only way to share highlights on their site is if it's from an ePUB, and there are highlights from these articles that need to be lifted from their pages and shared with the masses. I hope you join me and share your highlights from these writings.

What follows are some of my favorite articles, interviews and short stories from 2012. I'd love to hear which ones were your favorites. I'm @sawyerh on Twitter.

If you'd like to view this ePUB as a Readlist, go here: http://readlists.com/9fe66e0c

— Sawyer Hollenshead

The Slow Web

— Jack Cheng, June 2012

One of the better spots to enjoy a bowl of ramen noodles here in New York is Minca, in the East Village. Minca is the kind of place just out of the way enough that as you’re about to get there, you start wondering if you’ve already passed it. A bowl of noodles at Minca isn’t quite as neatly put together as those of other ramen establishments in the city, but it is without a doubt among the tastiest. There’s a home-cooked quality to a bowl of noodles at Minca. And there’s a homey vibe to the restaurant. Minca is a good place to meet a friend and sit and talk and eat and drink, and eat and talk and sit and drink some more.

The last time I was at Minca, I had an especially enjoyable conversation with Walter Chen. Walter is the CEO of a company called iDoneThis, a quiet little service that helps you catalog the things you’ve accomplished each day. iDoneThis sends you a daily email at your specified time, and you simply reply with a list of things you did that day. It’s useful for teams who want to keep track of what everyone is working on, and for individuals who just want to keep track.

I first reached out to Walter because I was mesmerized by this koan at the bottom of the daily emails:

iDoneThis is a part of the slow web movement. After you email us, your calendar is not updated instantaneously. But rest up, and you’ll find an updated calendar when you wake.

iDoneThis is a part of the slow web movement. The Slow Web Movement. I’d never heard that phrase before. I immediately started digging around—and by that I mean I googled “Slow Web Movement”—and the lone relevant search result was a blog post from two years ago. If you run the search again today, you’ll find Walter’s writeup on his company blog, which reflects a lot of what he told me over dinner.

As we talked further, I said to Walter that as soon as I saw “the slow web movement,” I assigned my own meaning to it. Because it’s a great name, and great names are like knots—they’re woven from the same stringy material as other words, but in their particular arrangement, they catch, become junctions to which new threads arrive, from which other threads depart. For me, “The Slow Web” neatly tied together a slew of dangling thoughts.

Slow Web and Slow Food

The Slow Web Movement is a lot like the Slow Food Movement, in that they’re both blanket terms that mean a lot of different things. Slow Food began in part as a reaction to the opening of a McDonald’s in Piazza di Spagna in Rome, so from its very origin, it was defined by what it’s not. It’s not Fast Food, and we all know what Fast Food is… right?

Yet, if you ask a bunch of people to describe to you the qualities of Fast Food, you’re likely to get a bunch of different answers: it’s made from low-grade ingredients, it’s high in sugar, salt and fat, it’s sold by multinational corporations, it’s devoured quickly and in overlarge portions, it’s McDonaldsTacoBellSubway, even though Subway’s spent a lot of money marketing fresh bread and ingredients but it’s still Fast Food albeit “healthy” Fast Food.

Fast Food has an “I’ll know it when I see it” quality, and it has this quality because it’s describing something greater than all of its individual traits. Fast Food, and consequently, Slow Food, describe a feeling that we get from food.

Slow Web works the same way. Slow Web describes a feeling we get when we consume certain web-enabled things, be it products or content. It is the sum of its parts, but let’s start by describing what it’s not: the Fast Web.

The Fast Web

What is the Fast Web? It’s the out of control web. The oh my god there’s so much stuff and I can’t possibly keep up web. It’s the spend two dozen times a day checking web. The in one end out the other web. The web designed to appeal to the basest of our intellectual palettes, the salt, sugar and fat of online content web. It’s the scale hard and fast web. The create a destination for billions of people web. The you have two hundred twenty six new updates web. Keep up or be lost. Click me. Like me. Tweet me. Share me. The Fast Web demands that you do things and do them now. The Fast Web is a cruel wonderland of shiny shiny things.

Timely vs. Real-time

One of the centerpieces of the Fast Web is this notion of real-time. Your friend listens to a song, and you find out about it. The smaller the gap between these two, the closer it is to real-time.

Real-time interactions happen as they happen. Timely ones, on the other hand, happen as you need them to happen. Some real-time interactions, like breaking news about an earthquake, can be timely. But not all timely interactions are real-time. I’d argue that most are not. And where the Fast Web is built around real-timedness, the Slow Web is built around timeliness.

A great example of a Slow Web product is Instapaper. Instapaper takes the process of discovering a long article and reading it on the spot (real-time) and breaks it apart, deferring the act of reading until later, when we have an extended moment to read (timely). I may be stretching my analogy a bit here, but it’s kind of like boxing up a meal and putting it away in the fridge for when you’re hungry, except in this case, it doesn’t lose as much of its taste.

Likewise, iDoneThis takes a pretty standard interaction of creating an item in a database and then reading it back—one that might normally take less than few seconds to execute—and blows it apart.

A typical app might work like this: there’s a text field for you to type in what you did. You type it in and hit submit. The database gets updated and almost instantly you see the submitted text displayed back to you. iDoneThis takes those last two steps—the update and the review—and stretches them out from a few milliseconds to half a day. The database gets updated sometime overnight and the display-back happens the next morning in your inbox.

Another name for this is turn-based, as in turn-based gaming. A traditional game of Scrabble or Pictionary is relatively demanding in real-time: it requires two or more people in the same place with both desire and freedom to play these games. Deconstructing the real-time experience gives you the Words With Friends and Draw Somethings of the world. An activity that would otherwise be impractical can now carry on in a manner more timely for each participant. Instapaper is turn-based reading. iDoneThis is turn-based data tracking.

But timeliness alone doesn’t make something Slow Web. Email, after all, is turn-based communication, and our email inboxes are probably one of the biggest sources of Fast Web distress. Those turn-based games can also quickly get overwhelming if we have too many of them going at once. What’s missing in these cases is an inherent sense of rhythm.

Rhythm vs. Random

Let’s say I told you there was a new HBO drama that aired for one hour from 9-10pm every Wednesday night. Once you decide it’s a show you’re interested in and can make room for, the act of watching takes over. It becomes about the show. Now let’s say I told you there’s a new HBO drama that’s sometimes times an hour, sometimes half an hour, sometimes two hours, that may or may not air every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night, between 6 and 11pm. Suddenly it’s no longer just about the show. It’s about whether or not the show will be on. What next? becomes When next?

In the Fast Web, we’re faced with this proposition numerous times a day. The randomness and frequency of the updates in our inboxes and on our dashboards stimulate the reward mechanisms in our brain. While this can give us a boost when we come across something unexpectedly great, dependency leads to withdrawal, resulting in a roller coaster of positive and negative emotions. The danger of unreliable rhythms is too much reward juice.

Reliable rhythms lead to predictable outcomes, and rhythm is an expression of moderation. Apps like iDoneThis have this moderation: you receive your email prompt at the same time each day, and each interaction is similarly demanding. Unlike your inbox as an aggregate, where there can be a large range of demandingness: there are newsletters you can scan and trash, personal emails that require lengthy responses, and everything in between. The lack of moderation means sometimes you spend a few minutes going through your inbox, and other times you spend a few hours.

That’s why most email productivity systems are concerned with a form of moderation: standardization. They encourage you to standardize the size and demandingness of the interaction (archive or delete messages and move on, transfer email requiring lengthy follow-ups to a to-do list, limit responses to three sentences) and standardizing the frequency (limit checking email to x times a day, at specified times).

A great example of rhythm and moderation in practice is the rollout of Wander. For the weeks leading up to their beta launch, Keenan and crew took what could have been a first-run experience on another site and stretched it out over the course of four weeks into something akin to an advent calendar. Every week there is a similarly demanding interaction: give a place, pick a photo, type a reason.

Another service that does this well is Budge from Buster and the team at Habit Labs. Budge is built around notifications reminding you to do the daily things that improve your life in small but beneficial ways, like flossing, meditating, or tracking your weight. Once you’ve signed up, you can interact with Budge solely through their notifications. In the past I’ve gone for weeks without visiting their site or app while still happily using the service just by replying to the timed texts I get on my phone.

This is a tremendously important distinction between Slow Web and Fast Web. Fast Web is destination-based. Slow Web is interaction-based. Fast Web is built around homepages, inboxes, and dashboards. Slow Web is built around timely notifications. Fast Web companies often try to rack up pageviews, since pageviews mean ad impressions. Slow Web companies tend to put effectiveness first. Here’s the crazy thing about Budge: the better it works, the less I use it. Once I get in the habit of flossing, my brain takes over, and I no longer need the notifications. Walter describes this credo well in the aforementioned blog post:

Behavior change, not growth. Behavior change is about improving the lives of others, scale is about ego. Getting scale after nailing behavior change is easier than nailing behavior change (and thus having a shot at durability) after hitting scale.

It doesn’t mean Slow Web companies can’t grow. It simply means that they put effectiveness before growth. And effectiveness leads to a sense of gratitude—I may be done flossing with Budge, but there are other things I could improve, and having been through it once, I trust the company even more.

Knowledge vs. Information

Timeliness. Rhythm. Moderation. These things dovetail into what I consider the biggest difference between Slow Web and Fast Web. Fast Web is about information. Slow Web is about knowledge. Information passes through you; knowledge dissolves into you. And timeliness, rhythm, and moderation are all essential for memory and learning.

Again, iDoneThis serves as a fitting example. After you use it for a few days, you start seeing at the bottom of your daily emails the things you’ve done in the past, a day or a week before. It’s kind of a contained version of Timehop, Benny and Jon’s product that, once you’ve connected it to your various social accounts, sends you a daily—get ready for this word—digest with everything you did a year ago on that day.

Timehop and iDoneThis both help us remember and reflect, and this gives us perspective. It grounds us in the flow of time, or perhaps lifts us up above the treetops. iDoneThis is the only task management tool I’ve come across with the potential to help you realize you’re working on the wrong thing. Fast Web derives value from the just happened or the soon to happen. Slow Web unlocks value from deeper in the past.

The Slow Web

Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease with the web-enabled products and services in our lives.

Like Slow Food, Slow Web is concerned as much with production as it is with consumption. We as individuals can always set our own guidelines and curb the effect of the Fast Web, but as I hope I’ve illustrated, there are a number of considerations the creators of web-connected products can make to help us along. And maybe the Slow Web isn’t quite a movement yet. Maybe it’s still simmering. But I do think there is something distinctly different about the feeling that some of these products impart on their users, and that feeling manifests from the intent of their makers.

Fast Web companies want to be our lovers, they want to be by our sides at all times, want us to spend every moment of our waking lives with them, when sometimes that’s not what we really need. Sometimes what we really need are friends we can meet once every few months for a bowl of ramen noodles at a restaurant in the East Village. Friends with whom we can sit and talk and eat and drink and maybe learn a little about ourselves in the process. And at the end of the night get up and go our separate ways, until next time. Until next time.

Subcompact Publishing

Simple tools and systems for digital publishing

— Craig Mod, November 2012

“I see god in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.” — Buckminster Fuller

… Zip drives ate floppies.

CDs ate Zips.

DVDs ate CDs.

SD cards ate film.

LCDs ate CRTs.

Telephony ate telegraphy.

Text messaging ate talking.

Tablets are eating our paper …

Imagine a table:

Hundreds of meters long and wooden.

Worn and oiled.

Old and knotted.

Wide enough for a person.

Now — open the sky and dump down upon that table all the digital publishing tools we have. Let rain down the infrastructure and typography, the platforms and devices. Separate them into their smallest components. Spread them out evenly.

Grab a ladder.

Place it next to the table.

Climb it and look down upon it all.

What do you see? What can you build?

A magazine

When I first saw The Magazine I smiled.

I smiled because it was so sensible, so rational, and so immediately obvious.

It felt like a platonic mobile-publishing container. No cruft, all substance. A shadow on the wall. The kind of app that's doing nothing fancy but everything right. The kind of app deemed anathema by Future Publishing Authorities because, quite frankly, it’s boring.

We feel like we've seen this before, but — have we?

In a conversation with renowned Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen about the newspaper industry, Joshua Benton remarked, “The perception of the incoming disruptors is that they are low quality, and therefore not really worth paying attention to.”[1]

Let’s pay attention.

Cars & publishing

In 1967 Honda unveiled the N360.

The N360 was a kei, or light style car; a subcompact.

Honda N350 — a sexy little beast — via kemeko1971

I like to imagine the engineers at Honda huddled together, dumping the sum total of all car design and production technology on our worn, wooden table. Around they gathered and togeher they asked, “What's the simplest thing we can build with this?”

With that question in mind, Honda — who had only been making motorcycles since 1949, and cars since 1963 — took one of their motorcycle engines and placed it in a Mini Cooper inspired body. It had 31 horse power. It was reliable. It was affordable. It got 39.4 miles to the gallon.[2]

The N360 was something an American car company would never dream of producing. You can’t blame them though: they had no incentive by which to dream such dreams. Unlike the American automotive industry, the Japanese automotive industry wasn't beholden to industry momentum or legacy. And when you’re not beholden to legacy, you can be excessively brazen.

In the software industry we talk about MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products. The N360 was a Minimum Viable Car.

The N360 didn’t make it to the States, but the followup — and near equally cute — N600 did. Next came the Honda Civic, then soon after, the oil crisis. We all know how the story goes from there.

“They started with cheap subcompacts that were widely considered a joke. Now they make Lexuses that challenge the best of what Europe can offer.”[3]— Christensen, Skok, Allworth

Honda was a nobody in the car industry. But they gained foothold and marketshare by building a car that was more appropriate for many consumers. They had built a subcompact.

So I ask: where are our digital publishing subcompacts?

Current offerings

There is an intuitive usability implicit to the physicality of our printed books and magazines. A reader is given two possible directions — which one depends on language and culture. And from there, a mostly linear, usually obvious interface.[4]

Tablet and smartphone books and magazines are not so obvious. They’re so not obvious that we often need tutorials explaining just how to use them.

How to read

Why did we jump to such complex interfaces?

Homer

Perhaps we Homer’d.

When Homer Simpson was asked to design his ideal car, he made The Homer. Given free reign, Homer’s process was additive. He added three horns and a special sound-proof bubble for the children. He layered more atop everything cars had been. More horns, more cup holders.

The Homer

In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It’s the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.

Our now

Publishing incumbents have been faced with disruption for years. But a curious, natural thing is happening: another, increasingly difficult to dismiss publishing ecosystem — disconnected from and unbeholden to legacy — is emerging. Bubbling up.[5]

A few years back, ‘publishing’ startups[6] were usually launched by one of two types of individuals:

1. Technologists disconnected from traditional content ecosystems

2. Incumbents of traditional content ecosystems disconnected from technologists

What publishing startups really needed during that narrow window of time was both: Technologists who got infrastructure and product, coupled with the stewards of the content of the incumbents. What they needed — and often lacked — was a mutual empathy.

Now, it’s not so clear. The content of the incumbents becomes less important as new content creators emerge. And emerging they are. [7]

With history as our guide, it shouldn’t be a surprise when new entrants like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which began life as news aggregators, begin their march up the value network. They may have started by collecting cute pictures of cats but they are now expanding into politics, transforming from aggregators into generators of original content, and even, in the case of The Huffington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting. — Christensen, Skok & Allworth

We can look to even more recent examples to see an evolution of this trend.

Matter

Launched on November 14, 2012, Bobbie Johnson and Jim Giles’ new publication MATTER may be indicative of the quality of publishers to arrive in this emergent space. In March, 2012, they raised $140,000 from 2,500 supporters on Kickstarter — the equivalent of an angel round of investing for a technology startup.[8]

With those funds they built their website, commissioned writers and photographers, and have set out to explore the somewhat uncharted intersection of paid content and high-quality journalism.

In their words:

MATTER isn’t quite a website, it’s not really a magazine and it’s not exactly a book publisher either. Instead, MATTER is something else — a new model for high-quality journalism, an area that’s been hit hard by the transition from print to digital media. We think that our focus on selling individual long-form stories for consumption on any device, whether it’s your computer, phone, e-reader or tablet, could be a sustainable way of paying for the hard work required to produce the best reporting.

What a great invocation: not quite website, not quite magazine, not quite book. It sums up well the liminal space in which we play as digital publishers.

The first article they published was 7,826 words. You can read a preview or buy it for $0.99. Buying the article gets you:

- Distraction free web edition

- eBook for Kindle, iPad or other readers

- Invite to a Q&A with the author

They also sell memberships — which includes a seat on their editorial board.

MATTER is building their most valuable asset: community. They're hungry and talented. And they're the tip of an iceberg.

Not quite website, not quite magazine, not quite book. Whatever they may be, we’re poised to see more like them — soon.

Skeuomorphic business models

Skeuomorphism is traditionally attached to design decisions. We bring the mechanical camera shutter sound to digital cameras because it feels good. We render paper page flips in our digital reading applications because it’s familiar.

But skeuomorphism also cuts into business models.

A publisher like MATTER brings the best of the old — an understanding of editorial ethics, storytelling, craft — and changes the shape of the content and distribution models of the content to match digital. This isn’t always the case.

Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium — no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry. The simplest example is with magazines.

Just look at the covers in Newsstand:

Digital Magazine ‘Covers’

Not a single cover is readable. This may seem like design skeuomorphism, but it’s not. No designer looked at those covers in Newsstand and said: "Perfect! Ship it!" It’s driven by business decisions and legacy-facing infrastructure.[9]

The father out we zoom, the clearer this becomes. A generalized print magazine may be composed of the following qualities:

- Each issue contains a dozen or more articles.

- Issues operate on a monthly cycle.

- All articles are bundled and shipped at the same time.

Almost all of these qualities are the result of responses to distribution and production constraints. Printing and binding takes a certain amount of time. Shipping the issues takes another chunk of time. In order to find a balance between timeliness of content and shelf-life, a month makes a pretty sensible — if brisk — publishing schedule.

Old into new

So why do so many of our digital magazines publish on the same schedule, with the same number of articles as their print counterparts? Using the same covers? Of course, they do because it’s easier to maintain identical schedules across mediums. To not design twice. To not test twice (or, at all).

Unfortunately — from a medium-specific user experience point of view — it’s almost impossible to produce a digitally indigenous magazine beholden to those legacy constraints. Why? Not least because we use tablets and smartphones very differently than we use printed publications.

One of the great benefits of being part of the emergent publishing world is that you don’t have multiple mediums to publish across.[10] You can and probably should focus squarely on digital. Perhaps later — contingent on market demand and content quality — you can consider publishing a print anthology to give your publication a stronger literal edge.[11]

So what are these so called ‘indigenous’ qualities of digital?

A Subcompact Manifesto

Subcompact Publishing tools are first and foremost straightforward.

They require few to no instructions.

They are easily understood on first blush.

The editorial and design decisions around them react to digital as a distribution and consumption space.

They are the result of dumping our publishing related technology on a table and asking ourselves — what are the core tools we can build with all this stuff?

They are, as it were, little N360s.

I propose Subcompact Publishing tools and editorial ethos begin (but not end) with the following qualities:

- Small issue sizes (3-7 articles / issue)

- Small file sizes

- Digital-aware subscription prices

- Fluid publishing schedule

- Scroll (don’t paginate)

- Clear navigation

- HTML(ish) based

- Touching the open web

Many of these qualities play off one another. Let’s look at them in detail.

Small issue sizes

I’ve written quite a bit about creating a sense of ‘edge’ in digital space. One of the easiest and most intuitive ways to do so is to limit the amount of data you present to the user.[12]

It’s much more difficult for someone to intuit the breadth of a digital magazine containing twenty articles than a digital magazine containing, for example, five. By keeping article number low this also helps decrease file size and simplify navigation.

Small file size

Speed is grossly undervalued in much of today’s software — digital magazines inclusive. Speed (and with it a fluid and joyful user experience) should be the thing you absolutely optimize for once you have a minimum viable product.

One way to bake speed into a publishing product is to keep issue file sizes as small as possible. This happens naturally when you limit the number of articles per issue.

Reasonable subscription prices

Ideally, digital subscription prices should reflect the cost of doing business as a digitally indigenous product, not the cost of protecting print subscriptions. This is yet another advantage digital-first publications have — unlike print publications transitioning to digital, there is no legacy infrastructure to subsidize during this transition.

Fluid publishing schedule

With smaller issue sizes comes more fluid publishing schedules. Again, to create a strong sense of edge and understanding, the goal isn’t to publish ten articles a day, but rather to publish just a few high-quality articles with a predictable looseness. Depending on the type of content you’re publishing, days can feel too granular, and months require the payload to be too large. Weeks feel just about right in digital.

Scroll (for now)

When I originally presented these ideas at the Books in Browsers conference in 2012, the dismissal of pagination was by far the most contentious point. I don’t mean to imply all pagination is bad. Remember — we’re outlining the very core of Subcompact Publishing. Anything extraneous or overly complex should be excised.

I’ve spent the last two and half years deconstructing scrolling and pagination on tablets and smartphones. If your content is formless, then you might be able to paginate with minimal effort. Although, probably not.

Certain kinds of pagination increase the complexity of an application by orders of magnitude. The engineering efforts required to produce beautiful, simple, indigenous, consistent — and fast — pagination are simply too high to belong in the subcompact space.

Furthermore, when you remove pagination, you vastly simplify navigation and thereby simplify users’ mental models around content.

No pagination is vastly superior to pagination done poorly.

Clear navigation

Navigation should be consistent and effortless. Subcompact Publishing applications don’t require complex how-to pages or tutorials. You shouldn’t have to hire a famous actor to show readers how to use the app with his nose. Much like a printed magazine or book, the interaction should be intuitive, effortless, and grounding. The user should never feel lost.

By limiting the number of articles per issue, and by removing pagination, many of the routes leading to complex navigation are also removed.

HTML(ish) based

When I say HTML I also mean epub or mobi or any other format with an HTML pedigree. HTML has indisputably emerged as the future format for all text (and perhaps also interactive) content. By constraining Subcompact Publishing systems to HTML we bake portability and future-proofness into the platforms. We also minimize engineering efforts because most all computing devices come with high-quality HTML rendering engines built in.

Open web

Simply: whatever content is published on a tablet should have a corresponding, touchable home on the open web.

Content without a public address is non-existent in the eyes of all the inter-operable sharing mechanisms that together bind the web.

Publishing jobs to be done

Clayton Christensen — author of The Innovator’s Dilemma — likes to look at the relationship between consumers and products from the perspective of his jobs-to-be-done theory. In his words:

The basic idea is that people don’t go around looking for products to buy. Instead, they take life as it comes and when they encounter a problem, they look for a solution—and at that point, they’ll hire a product or service.

The key insight from thinking about your business this way is that it is the job, and not the customer or the product, that should be the fundamental unit of analysis.

In his recent Neiman Reports piece on disruption in the news industry, Christensen uses the contemporary example of “I’m waiting in line for coffee and have ten minutes to kill.” The person with the problem hires their smartphone to entertain or educate them for those ten minutes.

More contemporary jobs

Within the scope of contemporary digital publishing are many, many, many yet-to-be-satisfied jobs-to-be-done. One that has irked me for years is the lack of a great solution to ‘subscribe,’ for money, to a website or author or publisher. When I find a new writer with whom I’m enamored, there’s usually no effortless or indigenous way to pay for their content.

RSS may be fine for a backend protocol and packet structure, but from a ‘normal’ consumer facing point of view, RSS has never made sense. (It’s sort of like git without github.) In effect, creating a better kind of consumer facing RSS is to solve the above problem.

Connected with this generalized notion of subscription is that the output to which you’re subscribed should be quick, lightweight, predictable, reliable and cached locally. If you hire an author or publication to solve a problem, you may partially be paying for the content, but you’ll really be paying for a great reading solution with those attributes. It just happens to have their content.

Outlining a system

To begin, let’s sketch out the world’s simplest desktop editorial system.

Our simple editorial system

Our system has three columns: Issues, Articles, and Article Text. You click an issue, it shows you the articles. You click an article, you see the article text. There’s a button that says Publish. That’s it.

So where does it publish to?

The open web

For most content — in most contexts — a publisher will only benefit from giving their content a publicly referable address. So the first obvious place to publish to is the open web.

Easy. We’ve done that for nearly two decades now and have oodles of mature tools to handle open web publishing.

On the open web, optimize first for reading and second for one or two calls to action: an app download or an email subscription. But whatever you do, don’t undermine the reading experience. To undermine open web reading is to undermine open web sharing (no one wants to share something that’s hard to read) — and that’s the whole point of having our content out there.

Tablets and smartphones

Desktop — the open web — is easy. Tablets and smartphones are still hard.

Publishing to the web is easy, effortlessly publishing to tablets is unpossible

Tablets and smartphones are used differently than desktops and laptops. They’re frequently without an internet connection. Smartphone users ‘snack’ and want content quickly. The open web isn’t always the fastest way to get content: it (usually) doesn’t cache content, and it’s not accessible without an internet connection.

To simplify the tablet equation, let’s assume we’re only interested in publishing to iOS devices. If only someone had built a delivery mechanism to push content from our editorial system to readers seamlessly and in the background …

Newsstand

Ah! But someone did — Apple: Newsstand.

Apple’s Newsstand? "But isn’t that where all those horrible things live?" I hear you say. Or, "Oh? That folder I’ve never opened?"

Newsstand is perhaps the most underutilized, under-imagined distribution tool in the short history of tablet publishing. If you squint your eyes and tilt you head at just the right angle, you’ll notice something magical about Newsstand: given the proper container, it’s a background downloading, offline-friendly, cached RSS machine people can subscribe to. For money.

It handily solves our job-to-be-done.

The Magazine

Which brings us back to The Magazine.

In the words of Marco Arment, creator of the magazine:

I don’t consider The Magazine to be a member of “the magazine industry” any more than blogs are members of “the publishing industry”. Those terms evoke the old and established, while this is the new and experimental.

He goes on to say:

Many iPad magazines are carrying unnecessary and expensive baggage from their print days. Some born-digital magazines even took on print baggage simply because they thought they needed it.[13]

In one gesture Marco set loose an N360. He’s designed and programmed one of the first truely tablet-indigenous subcompact publications.

- Each issue contains only four or five articles.

- Each issue is less than a few megabytes, meaning they download in seconds, rather than minutes or hours like many other digital magazines.

- The subscription price is $2.99 a month.

- Subscribing is seamlessly baked into the platform via Newsstand.

- It’s published twice a month.

- It’s an unpaginated application.

- The navigation is consistent and completely intuitive.

- It’s HTML based.

UI and UX

There is almost nothing to the app. On the main reading screen you have three options:

The main magazine

- Swipe up or down to scroll and read the current article

- Tap the top right button to share the current article

- Tap the hamburger button(Fig. 1) to slide in the Table of Contents

That’s it. You can’t do anything else.

There’s even less UI when you dig deeper: the share button will be rarely used, and the hamburger button is superfluous; the Table of Contents can be invoked at any time by swiping from left to right across the page.

The Magazine doesn’t need a how-to, an instructions page, or a fancy video. This app mimics the intuitive usability of a printed publication as well as anything else we’ve seen.

Fig. 1: The Hamburger button

Issues

By keeping issue size small, The Magazine mitigates Table of Contents complexity. There’s no need to ‘zoom out’ or show a macro view of the length of each article. When there’s only four or five articles per issue, the user intuitively senses the edges. Navigation need not be more than a simple list.

The simple, intuitive, edgeful table of contents

Swipe to delete an issue and it collapses down to a neat row. Tap a deleted issue and it downloads again in seconds.

Links

The Magazine also smartly handles links. Tap a link and you’re shown an annotated version of that link at the bottom of the screen (or in a pop-over on the iPad). Effectively, they’re footnotes. The author summarizes the link’s content and if you then wish to visit the URL, you can, by tapping again.

Links / Footnote UI

The result is a very solid reading environment. There are no accidental buttons to press. There’s no confusion as to where you are. There’s really only two places to be in The Magazine: reading an article or scrolling through the always succinct ToC.

Newsstand

Perhaps the most magical part of the entire experience is The Magazine’s integration with Apple’s Newsstand. Newsstand provides two critical functions:

- Background downloading of content

- Paid subscription conversions

Newsstand is the only place in iOS that allows 3rd party applications to download content in the background. What this means is that new articles are available almost immediately after Marco hits publish (or whatever his button says) in The Magazine’s backend. Which means as a reader you don’t have to preemptively load content before getting on an airplane or subway. If there’s new content, it will be waiting and cached for your offline pleasure.

Newsstand also mitigates all complexity and trust issues connected with payments — you’re paying Apple, not Marco. The infrastructure allows you to give readers a free starter subscription, and then later — seamlessly — convert them into a recurring, monthly, payments.

Open web

And finally — unsurprisingly — The Magazine also nails the web.

The Magazine on the web

the-magazine.org is minimal and optimized for two actions: reading and converting to a The Magazine download.

Presently, the full text of the articles isn’t online. I would love to see an A/B test around full / truncated content conversion. My gut tells me that app downloads / subscription conversions wouldn’t change by switching to full content. But sharing would increase dramatically.

Users are much more likely to share a link to the full-text of an article than a truncated version. Increased sharing means more eyeballs, and more eyeballs — if conversion rates remain static — means more downloads and subscriptions.

Keep in mind Christensen’s jobs-to-be-done — users are probably more excited about paying for the cached, simple, svelte, eminently hirable reading experience The Magazine provides, than simply getting to the full version of any single article.

The Magazine: a subcompact publication in seven screen shots

In just a handful of screens, The Magazine cleanly answers the question posed above in our subcompact editorial system: where does your content go when you hit Publish?

Clarity

The clarity of The Magazine is exciting. It’s doubly exciting because it’s precisely the sort of app at which incumbent publishers balk. This is expected. Again, from Christensen:

Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.

We are the new customers: The new readers, the new writers, the new publishers. The Magazine is indeed cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient than most other publishing apps.

It doesn’t take much imagination to connect a minimal container like The Magazine with the deeper investigative editorial ethos of MATTER and get even more excited.

So why doesn’t a publication like MATTER just publish to Newsstand? Because the tallest hurdle before Newsstand is that you have to program an iOS application to use it. A cost prohibitively expensive endeavor for many publishers. And, complicating matters, publishers usually aren’t good at producing software.

The fact that Marco — a programmer — launched one of the most ‘digitally indigenous’ contemporary tablet publications is indicative of two things:

1. Programmers are today’s magicians. In many industries this is obvious, but it’s now becoming more obvious in publishing. Marco was able to make The Magazine happen quickly because he saw that Newsstand was underutilized and understood its capabilities. He knew this because he’s a programmer. Newsstand wasn’t announced at a publishing conference. It was announced at the WWDC.

2. The publishing ecosystem is now primed for complete disruption.

In Paul Graham’s essay Startup Ideas[14] he talks about the kind of programmer Marco is: the self-motivated producer.

Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you’ll be able to implement them. That’s not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn’t) but it’s an advantage. It’s a big advantage, when you're considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if instead of merely thinking “That's an interesting idea,” you can think instead “That’s an interesting idea. I’ll try building an initial version tonight.” It’s even better when you’re both a programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.

Marco is not just a publishing-interested engineer, he’s a subcompact publishing magnate. He lives happily outside of anything resembling the incumbent big-P infrastructure. And from this removed stance he produces podcasts, a magazine, a reading application, and curated reading lists … all using simple tools wrapped in minimal containers.

You need technological awareness to be a future publishing disruptor; even if you don’t see yourself as such.

Distruptationalisticly

We’re on the precipice of a wave of tools and systems that have nothing to do with incumbents and everything to do with the bubbling new wave.

To quote again from Paul Graham’s essay:

When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore. It’s particularly good if there’s an admixture of disdain in the big players’ attitude, because that often misleads them.

The winter of 2012 will be the first holiday season where a broad swath of consumers will have both an awareness of tablets, and several good enough options to choose from (occupying multiple price points). If 2013 doesn’t prove to be an inflection year for digital publishing — and particularly for the non-incumbents — then I don’t know what market circumstances would be necessary to make it so.

Our current tools are a bit kludgey, a bit clunky, a bit too tied to the past. The Magazine is a great first example of a subcompact publication, utilizing Newsstand — an existing under-leveraged tool — to indigenously and ingenuously deliver content.

I’d be shocked if there weren’t a dozen other publishers prepping to launch similar magazines. Or, even better: someone building a system by which anyone could launch a Newsstand app like The Magazine — for minimal cost with minimal complexity.

It’s easy to dismiss.

There’s lots of disdain.

Why not be part of the group that shakes it up?

Take all of our digital publishing nuts and springs, bits and bolts and spread them out on the old table. Climb our ladder and look down and ask yourself:

“What can I build for subcompact publishing?”

Followup reading, inspiration and thanks

This essay — the entire concept of Subcompact Publishing — was obviously hugely inspired by:

- Clayton Christensen, David Skok, and James Allworth’s Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism in the Fall 2012 issue of Neiman Reports. If any of the above interests you, I can’t recommend more highly going and reading that report.

- Marco’s The Magazine — an app that helped crystalize a lot of my thinking around these topics.

Christensen did a supplementary interview to the Report piece which is also worth your time. Somewhat related, but also unrelated, he has a wonderful TEDx talk on measuring your life. If, like me, you’re not particularly religious, just replace the word "god" with "Google" in your head, and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. ("Google will judge you when you’re gone." — oh, yes, yes Google will!)

There’s a bunch of links in the Noted section below on the N360 which really is a neat little car. I’ve become more than slightly obsessed with finding one to take for a drive.

Thank you to all these people (known and unknown — I’m looking at you, unsung post-war Honda engineers) for making these wonderful things.

Noted:

About the Author

Craig Mod is an independent writer, publisher and designer based in the California Bay Area (and often in Tokyo (and sometimes NYC). He is a MacDowell Colony writing fellow, a TechFellow, and was a product designer at Flipboard in 2010/2011. His writing has appeared in/on New Scientist, The New York Times, CNN.com, The Morning News, Codex: Journal of Typography and elsewhere.

Thank you

Peter, Erin, Ashley and Max for lending your eyes and delicious brains.

Copyright

All images (where applicable, of course) and text © Craig Mod, 2012++.

This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. If you wish to use reproduce any of this context in a commercial context, explicit permission is required. Please contact me directly.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Where this was written (because it's good to remember)

In surprisingly few places.

Mainly California. Well — entirely California, now that I think about it. It started after a lunch with Josh Quittner and then was rocket boosted by Marco's The Magazine. Then forcibly formalized by a presentation at Books in Browsers as The Internet Archive celebrated their tenth petabyte of stored data. And then worked over atop alternating tatami mats in Palo Alto and San Francisco. It was edited while violently shaking on the CalTrain as the CalTrain does. It was fueled mainly by Ethiopian coffee from a farm called Wata that makes just the most delightful beans — you can buy them at Four Barrel. Otherwise, by coffee from Cento in SoMa. Sometimes at Red Rock, sometimes at Coupa, sometimes at the new La Boulangerie on University. Thanks for reading.

10 Timeframes

Paul Ford's closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival

— Paul Ford, May 2012

I recently gave the closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, a full-day event held on Saturday, May 12, 2012, to celebrate the work of the 2012 graduating class of the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I teach a course in Content Strategy there, and working with the immensely talented students has forced me, as a content-oriented individual, to think hard about a specific task that interaction designers frequently take on—namely that they themselves must make things that allow other people to make things. They define the experiences that permit other people to do their work, or play, or tweet, or post things. They make the forms that the rest of us fill out. And so I walked around New York City and thought: What could I ask of these students, how could I advocate on behalf of the creators who are their users? This is, I hope, a partial answer to that question.

1.

There are 200 of you in this auditorium. So every minute I don’t talk saves about three-and-a-third hours of human time. That’s a pretty serious ratio. Every one of my minutes is collectively 200 of yours.

Of course in actual time a minute is just a minute—but is this true? A minute when you’re asleep is nothing. A minute on Twitter is as many as half a million tweets. If it was your job to read them that’s a month or two of full-time work. A minute in the early days of the universe, a few million years after the big bang, is pretty much like any other minute.

I’ve been talking for around a minute now. If this speech was a century long we’d be ending the first decade. If it were the 20th century we’d be thinking about getting a telephone installed and wondering if we should trade in our horse for a car. Depending on where we lived, of course.

2.

You know that decades are a recent invention? Decades are hardly a century old. Not the concept of having ten years of course, but the concept of the decade as a sort of major cultural unit, like when I say “the 90s” and you think of flannel shirts and grunge music and great R&B music, or when I say “the 80s” and you think of people with big hair using floppy disks. You need a lot of change for a decade to be a meaningful demarcation. Back in the 1600s they didn’t really talk about centuries as much either. It was all about the life of the king, the reign (of King James and so forth), or the era.

And then they invent clocks and clocks get cheaper and cheaper. Clocks are an amazing experience, right? Two hands, and a bell. This sense of relentless forward motion and they go in only one direction. Imagine doing user testing on clocks.

You say, “You’re a farmer—tell me about a normal day.”

And the farmer says, “Normally I wake up then depending on the month I might plant or reap the harvest.”

And you say, “How do you know what to plant?”

And the farmer says, “I’ve got this poem that we’ve been using for generations, so like, in June I mow my corn, in August I harvest my wheat with a sickle, stuff like that.”

And you’re trying to build understanding, you say, “That poem sounds really useful. But I’d like to talk about a new approach to time. What if I could divide every single day into 24 big parts called hours, and each of those into 60 little parts called minutes? So now instead of having just a whole day, you have 1,440 little pieces of time and you can arrange them and do whatever you want. What is your reaction to that?”

And I think the farmer would probably be polite but I’m guessing he’d be thinking, “Clock? That’s the single stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

3.

There’s a great book called The Soul of a New Machine, about what it takes to build a computer. It came out in 1981. And one of the engineers was talking about nanoseconds. That’s one billionth of a second. So instead of 1,440 minutes in a day you have 86 trillion, 400 billion nanoseconds in a day. Here’s one of the engineers talking:

I feel very comfortable talking in nanoseconds. I sit at one of these analyzers and nanoseconds are wide. I mean, you can see them go by. “Jesus,” I say, “that signal takes twelve nanoseconds to get from there to there.” Those are real big things to me when I’m building a computer. Yet when I think about it, how much longer it takes to snap your fingers, I’ve lost track of what a nanosecond really means.” He paused. “Time in a computer is an interesting concept.”

So it’s only a few hundred years ago that people started to care about centuries, and then more recently, decades. And of course hours and minutes. And in the last 40 years we’ve got 86 trillion nanoseconds a day, and a whole industry trying to make every one of them count.

If this speech was 20 years long then, right now, AltaVista would be the dominant search engine, and AOL and Yahoo! would be the most important sites on the web.

4.

This is also from The Soul of a New Machine: One of the engineers in the book burned out and quit and he left a note that read: “I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

And the thing that strikes me there is that he wasn’t just going to Vermont. He was going somewhere where time was different. He was going to get away from minutes, hours, days. He was back to seasons. Which is actually where the farmer, the medieval farmer, spent most of his time, thinking about what to plant when. Figuring out the seasons was basically what made the agricultural revolution possible.

I’ve been thinking a lot about trending topics on Twitter. And it seems like trending topics serve the same function as decades, except they last a couple of hours or a day at most. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the Fitbit and the quantified self movement, where people track every step and count up the things they eat. And it seems like the quantified self movement is about our relationship with time, about the fact that we don’t know how much we exercised or what we ate, we can’t really perceive ourselves mechanically and in a world where there are so many units of time all at once, where there are so many timeframes. It’s really easy to lose track of when you are. Many of our interfaces are really just ways to try to repackage time so that it’s meaningful, so that we can do stuff with it. It’s not that there isn’t enough time but rather that there’s too much of it.

If this speech were a century long we’d be getting out of World War II right now.

5.

The other day I had just left home and I was walking down the street and there was a breeze through the trees, this note of cold, and I realized that I couldn’t tell whether we were headed into fall or into summer. I had lost track. And it was a great moment. I was incredibly happy to not know. I held on to it. And I noticed that I didn’t think of the question in terms of the calendar. I thought of it like this: What direction are we going? Are we going winterwards or springwards? And then finally my brain caught up and said, we’re headed towards summer. And you really need to go buy some new shirts.

If this speech were a decade long we’d be just swearing in George W. Bush for his second term.

The things we’ve been doing with all those nanoseconds have been frankly weird. There are so many of them—it’s like some sort of hyperinflation, but with time. So how do you spend nanoseconds? If you have trillions of them to spend you use them for all sorts of stuff. You add shadows under windows to give the illusion of depth. You make it possible for someone to watch a streaming movie in one window while they write a computer program in another. You let people do a lot of stuff at once, and you make the machine do a lot of stuff at once in the background. You keep things moving.

If this speech were only a minute long it would have been over five minutes ago at least.

6.

That’s why we’re here, in this auditorium, right? All this capacity in the world and we’re trying to figure out how to use it. It feels like it should be easy, given how powerful technology is, given the resources available to us. It feels like interaction design should be a solved problem by now. After all we have these amazing tools. Except of course it’s nowhere near done.

I bet—I’m talking here to the graduate students who just received their MFAs—I bet most of you at some point during your thesis thought, Oh God, I might die before this is over. What if I don’t make it? Who will finish my project? But let me make this very clear to you: You didn’t die. Your project did not kill you, and now it’s done.

I can never remember if we are supposed to live each day as it were our last, or if it’s the first day of the rest of our lives. It’s hard to tell sometimes. We make movies about it over and over again. The Bucket List and Terms of Endearment and so on. Or even zombie movies. And the core assumption of those movies is usually that your life is kind of inconsequential up until that moment, that now you’re going to learn what really matters. Of course these movies are made by people who are totally dedicated to making films. They give up their lives and neglect their children to make movies about the value of family.

If this speech was as long as the universe is old the earth would just be forming right now.

7.

My wife’s cousin is sick. She’s in her 50s, and she’s doing okay now but she knows with a pretty good degree of certainty that she won’t live more than a few years. She sends out emails to keep us all informed. And what she’s doing with her time is learning math. She has a tutor and she’s starting with algebra. Because she always wanted to be good at algebra, and she sucks at it. And she’s really enjoying that.

And that makes sense to me. Of course, you’d want to learn math. If you told me that I was going to die in a couple of years, I would pretty much do what I’m doing. I’ve got this one interaction that I keep prototyping in my head, about organizing objects on a timeline, and so I’d probably hire someone to help me turn it into a product and make sure it was released, at least open-source it. I’d try to learn grammar, I’d spend time with my family, and I’d prototype my interactions. And I’d do some user testing. Because even if you are dying you should still do user testing.

If this speech was a century long, disco would be huge right now.

8.

The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. Even if the world were totally silent, even in a dark room covered in five layers of foam, you’d be able to count your own heartbeats.

When you get on a plane and travel you go 15 heartbeats per mile. That is, in the time it takes to travel a mile in flight your heart beats 15 times. On a train your heart might beat 250 times per mile.

And we count this up and we make sense of it. We’re constantly switching accelerations; we’re jumping between time frames. That’s what we’re asking people to do every time we make something new, some new tool or product. We’re asking them to reset their understanding of time. To accept that the sequence we’re asking them to follow is the right way to do a thing. It’s like the farmer with the clock.

If this speech was a millennium long then right now the first smallpox vaccinations would be going on in England, and a society to oppose vaccination was being established in Boston. That was in the late 1700s, although smallpox wouldn’t be officially eradicated until 1979.

9.

The sensible thing for a keynote speech like this is for me to get up and talk about your time, about how to value it. And you might think that’s what I’ve been doing. But it’s not. I don’t worry much about your personal particular time. You’re free; go forth and do what you want. You’re getting these graduate degrees, you are people of skill and privilege, you are people with gifts. There is a poem by Raymond Carver called “Late Fragment.” It goes like this:

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

And listen, trust me, even if you do not feel that way at the end of these years, even if you are feeling burned out and done with the vagaries of social user design interaction universal community-driven agile information experience, even if you are ready to close your laptop screen forever, you are beloved on the earth. You are skilled and talented and young and bright and accredited. The world wishes it were you.

When I look out at this room I see a comparatively small number of faces but I also see a trillion heartbeats. Not your own heartbeats, but those of your users. The things that you build in the next decade are going to cost people, likely millions of people, maybe a billion people depending on the networks where you hitch your respective wagons, they are going to cost a lot of people a lot of time. Trillions of heartbeats spent in interaction.

If this speech were a century long Clinton would have just been elected president.

10.

And that’s my point, and it’s a simple point. The time you spend is not your own. You are, as a class of human beings, responsible for more pure raw time, broken into more units, than almost anyone else. You spent two years learning, focusing, exploring, but that was your time; now you are about to spend whole decades, whole centuries, of cumulative moments, of other people’s time. People using your systems, playing with your toys, fiddling with your abstractions. And I want you to ask yourself when you make things, when you prototype interactions, am I thinking about my own clock, or the user’s? Am I going to help someone make order in his or her life, or am I going to send that person to a commune in Vermont?

There is an immense opportunity—maybe it’s even a business opportunity—to look at our temporal world and think about calendars and clocks and human behavior, to think about each interaction as a specific unit, to take careful note of how we parcel out moments. Whether a mouse moving across a screen or the progress of a Facebook post through a thousand different servers, the way we value time seems to have altered, as if the earth tilted on its axis, as if the seasons are different and new.

So that is my question for all of you: What is the new calendar? What are the new seasons? The new weeks and months and decades? As a class of individuals, we make the schedule. What can we do to help others understand it?

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats—if we are going to ask them to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

If this speech was as long as this speech it would be over.

Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21

— George Plimpton

HEMINGWAY

You go to the races?

INTERVIEWER

Yes, occasionally.

HEMINGWAY

Then you read the Racing Form . . . . There you have the true art of fiction.

—Conversation in a Madrid café, May 1954

Ernest Hemingway writes in the bedroom of his house in the Havana suburb of San Francisco de Paula. He has a special workroom prepared for him in a square tower at the southwest corner of the house, but prefers to work in his bedroom, climbing to the tower room only when “characters” drive him up there.

The bedroom is on the ground floor and connects with the main room of the house. The door between the two is kept ajar by a heavy volume listing and describing The World’s Aircraft Engines. The bedroom is large, sunny, the windows facing east and south letting in the day’s light on white walls and a yellow-tinged tile floor.

The room is divided into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high bookcases that stand out into the room at right angles from opposite walls. A large and low double bed dominates one section, oversized slippers and loafers neatly arranged at the foot, the two bedside tables at the head piled seven-high with books. In the other alcove stands a massive flat-top desk with a chair at either side, its surface an ordered clutter of papers and mementos. Beyond it, at the far end of the room, is an armoire with a leopard skin draped across the top. The other walls are lined with white-painted bookcases from which books overflow to the floor, and are piled on top among old newspapers, bullfight journals, and stacks of letters bound together by rubber bands.

It is on the top of one of these cluttered bookcases—the one against the wall by the east window and three feet or so from his bed—that Hemingway has his “work desk”—a square foot of cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the other by a newspaper-covered heap of papers, manuscripts, and pamphlets. There is just enough space left on top of the bookcase for a typewriter, surmounted by a wooden reading board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east window.

A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.

When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of the typewriter.

Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.

He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

A man of habit, Hemingway does not use the perfectly suitable desk in the other alcove. Though it allows more space for writing, it too has its miscellany: stacks of letters; a stuffed toy lion of the type sold in Broadway nighteries; a small burlap bag full of carnivore teeth; shotgun shells; a shoehorn; wood carvings of lion, rhino, two zebras, and a wart-hog—these last set in a neat row across the surface of the desk—and, of course, books: piled on the desk, beside tables, jamming the shelves in indiscriminate order—novels, histories, collections of poetry, drama, essays. A look at their titles shows their variety. On the shelf opposite Hemingway’s knee as he stands up to his “work desk” are Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, Ben Ames Williams’s House Divided, The Partisan Reader, Charles A. Beard’s The Republic, Tarle’s Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, How Young You Look by Peggy Wood, Alden Brooks’s Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand, Baldwin’s African Hunting, T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, and two books on General Custer’s fall at the battle of the Little Big Horn.

The room, however, for all the disorder sensed at first sight, indicates on inspection an owner who is basically neat but cannot bear to throw anything away—especially if sentimental value is attached. One bookcase top has an odd assortment of mementos: a giraffe made of wood beads; a little cast-iron turtle; tiny models of a locomotive; two jeeps and a Venetian gondola; a toy bear with a key in its back; a monkey carrying a pair of cymbals; a miniature guitar; and a little tin model of a U.S. Navy biplane (one wheel missing) resting awry on a circular straw place mat—the quality of the collection that of the odds-and-ends which turn up in a shoebox at the back of a small boy’s closet. It is evident, though, that these tokens have their value, just as three buffalo horns Hemingway keeps in his bedroom have a value dependent not on size but because during the acquiring of them things went badly in the bush, yet ultimately turned out well. “It cheers me up to look at them,” he says.

Hemingway may admit superstitions of this sort, but he prefers not to talk about them, feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away. He has much the same attitude about writing. Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny—“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

As a result, though a wonderful raconteur, a man of rich humor, and possessed of an amazing fund of knowledge on subjects which interest him, Hemingway finds it difficult to talk about writing—not because he has few ideas on the subject, but rather because he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed, that to be asked questions on them “spooks” him (to use one of his favorite expressions) to the point where he is almost inarticulate. Many of the replies in this interview he preferred to work out on his reading board. The occasional waspish tone of the answers is also part of this strong feeling that writing is a private, lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work is done.

This dedication to his art may suggest a personality at odds with the rambunctious, carefree, world-wheeling Hemingway-at-play of popular conception. The fact is that Hemingway, while obviously enjoying life, brings an equivalent dedication to everything he does—an outlook that is essentially serious, with a horror of the inaccurate, the fraudulent, the deceptive, the half-baked.

Nowhere is the dedication he gives his art more evident than in the yellow-tiled bedroom—where early in the morning Hemingway gets up to stand in absolute concentration in front of his reading board, moving only to shift weight from one foot to another, perspiring heavily when the work is going well, excited as a boy, fretful, miserable when the artistic touch momentarily vanishes—slave of a self-imposed discipline which lasts until about noon when he takes a knotted walking stick and leaves the house for the swimming pool where he takes his daily half-mile swim.

INTERVIEWER

Are these hours during the actual process of writing pleasurable?

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Very.

INTERVIEWER

Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?

HEMINGWAY

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

INTERVIEWER

Can you dismiss from your mind whatever project you’re on when you’re away from the typewriter?

HEMINGWAY

Of course. But it takes discipline to do it and this discipline is acquired. It has to be.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do any rewriting as you read up to the place you left off the day before? Or does that come later, when the whole is finished?

HEMINGWAY

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.

INTERVIEWER

How much rewriting do you do?

HEMINGWAY

It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

INTERVIEWER

Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

HEMINGWAY

Getting the words right.

INTERVIEWER

Is it the rereading that gets the “juice” up?

HEMINGWAY

Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

INTERVIEWER

But are there times when the inspiration isn’t there at all?

HEMINGWAY

Naturally. But if you stopped when you knew what would happen next, you can go on. As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.

INTERVIEWER

Thornton Wilder speaks of mnemonic devices that get the writer going on his day’s work. He says you once told him you sharpened twenty pencils.

HEMINGWAY

I don’t think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.

INTERVIEWER

Where are some of the places you have found most advantageous to work? The Ambos Mundos hotel must have been one, judging from the number of books you did there. Or do surroundings have little effect on the work?

HEMINGWAY

The Ambos Mundos in Havana was a very good place to work in. This Finca is a splendid place, or was. But I have worked well everywhere. I mean I have been able to work as well as I can under varied circumstances. The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.

INTERVIEWER

Is emotional stability necessary to write well? You told me once that you could only write well when you were in love. Could you expound on that a bit more?

HEMINGWAY

What a question. But full marks for trying. You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.

INTERVIEWER

How about financial security? Can that be a detriment to good writing?

HEMINGWAY

If it came early enough and you loved life as much as you loved your work it would take much character to resist the temptations. Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying. Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.

INTERVIEWER

Can you recall an exact moment when you decided to become a writer?

HEMINGWAY

No, I always wanted to be a writer.

INTERVIEWER

Philip Young in his book on you suggests that the traumatic shock of your severe 1918 mortar wound had a great influence on you as a writer. I remember in Madrid you talked briefly about his thesis, finding little in it, and going on to say that you thought the artist’s equipment was not an acquired characteristic, but inherited, in the Mendelian sense.

HEMINGWAY

Evidently in Madrid that year my mind could not be called very sound. The only thing to recommend it would be that I spoke only briefly about Mr. Young’s book and his trauma theory of literature. Perhaps the two concussions and a skull fracture of that year had made me irresponsible in my statements. I do remember telling you that I believed imagination could be the result of inherited racial experience. It sounds all right in good jolly post-concussion talk, but I think that is more or less where it belongs. So until the next liberation trauma, let’s leave it there. Do you agree? But thanks for leaving out the names of any relatives I might have implicated. The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not. On the question you raised, the effects of wounds vary greatly. Simple wounds which do not break bone are of little account. They sometimes give confidence. Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else.

INTERVIEWER

What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?

HEMINGWAY

Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

INTERVIEWER

How about people who’ve gone into the academic career? Do you think the large numbers of writers who hold teaching positions have compromised their literary careers?

HEMINGWAY

It depends on what you call compromise. Is the usage that of a woman who has been compromised? Or is it the compromise of the statesman? Or the compromise made with your grocer or your tailor that you will pay a little more but will pay it later? A writer who can both write and teach should be able to do both. Many competent writers have proved it could be done. I could not do it, I know, and I admire those who have been able to. I would think though that the academic life could put a period to outside experience which might possibly limit growth of knowledge of the world. Knowledge, however, demands more responsibility of a writer and makes writing more difficult. Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill. I see I am getting away from the question, but the question was not very interesting.

INTERVIEWER

Would you suggest newspaper work for the young writer? How helpful was the training you had with the Kansas City Star?

HEMINGWAY

On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time. This is one of the dustiest clichés there is and I apologize for it. But when you ask someone old, tired questions you are apt to receive old, tired answers.

INTERVIEWER

You once wrote in the Transatlantic Review that the only reason for writing journalism was to be well paid. You said: “And when you destroy the valuable things you have by writing about them, you want to get big money for it.” Do you think of writing as a type of self-destruction?

HEMINGWAY

I do not remember ever writing that. But it sounds silly and violent enough for me to have said it to avoid having to bite on the nail and make a sensible statement. I certainly do not think of writing as a type of self-destruction, though journalism, after a point has been reached, can be a daily self-destruction for a serious creative writer.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the intellectual stimulus of the company of other writers is of any value to an author?

HEMINGWAY

Certainly.

INTERVIEWER

In the Paris of the twenties did you have any sense of “group feeling” with other writers and artists?

HEMINGWAY

No. There was no group feeling. We had respect for each other. I respected a lot of painters, some of my own age, others older—Gris, Picasso, Braque, Monet (who was still alive then)—and a few writers: Joyce, Ezra, the good of Stein . . . .

INTERVIEWER

When you are writing, do you ever find yourself influenced by what you’re reading at the time?

HEMINGWAY

Not since Joyce was writing Ulysses. His was not a direct influence. But in those days when words we knew were barred to us, and we had to fight for a single word, the influence of his work was what changed everything, and made it possible for us to break away from the restrictions.

INTERVIEWER

Could you learn anything about writing from the writers? You were telling me yesterday that Joyce, for example, couldn’t bear to talk about writing.

HEMINGWAY

In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers’ books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.

INTERVIEWER

You seem to have avoided the company of writers in late years. Why?

HEMINGWAY

That is more complicated. The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

INTERVIEWER

What about the influence of some of these people—your contemporaries—on your work? What was Gertrude Stein’s contribution, if any? Or Ezra Pound’s? Or Max Perkins’s?

HEMINGWAY

I’m sorry but I am no good at these postmortems. There are coroners literary and non-literary provided to deal with such matters. Miss Stein wrote at some length and with considerable inaccuracy about her influence on my work. It was necessary for her to do this after she had learned to write dialogue from a book called The Sun Also Rises. I was very fond of her and thought it was splendid she had learned to write conversation. It was no new thing to me to learn from everyone I could, living or dead, and I had no idea it would affect Gertrude so violently. She already wrote very well in other ways. Ezra was extremely intelligent on the subjects he really knew. Doesn’t this sort of talk bore you? This backyard literary gossip while washing out the dirty clothes of thirty-five years ago is disgusting to me. It would be different if one had tried to tell the whole truth. That would have some value. Here it is simpler and better to thank Gertrude for everything I learned from her about the abstract relationship of words, say how fond I was of her, reaffirm my loyalty to Ezra as a great poet and a loyal friend, and say that I cared so much for Max Perkins that I have never been able to accept that he is dead. He never asked me to change anything I wrote except to remove certain words which were not then publishable. Blanks were left, and anyone who knew the words would know what they were. For me he was not an editor. He was a wise friend and a wonderful companion. I liked the way he wore his hat and the strange way his lips moved.

INTERVIEWER

Who would you say are your literary forebears—those you have learned the most from?

HEMINGWAY

Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinir, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Góngora—it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.

INTERVIEWER

Did you even play a musical instrument?

HEMINGWAY

I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent. We played chamber music—someone came in to play the violin; my sister played the viola, and mother the piano. That cello—I played it worse than anyone on earth. Of course, that year I was out doing other things too.

INTERVIEWER

Do you reread the authors of your list? Twain, for instance?

HEMINGWAY

You have to wait two or three years with Twain. You remember too well. I read some Shakespeare every year, Lear always. Cheers you up if you read that.

INTERVIEWER

Reading, then, is a constant occupation and pleasure.

HEMINGWAY

I’m always reading books—as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever read manuscripts?

HEMINGWAY

You can get into trouble doing that unless you know the author personally. Some years ago I was sued for plagiarism by a man who claimed that I’d lifted For Whom the Bell Tolls from an unpublished screen scenario he’d written. He’d read this scenario at some Hollywood party. I was there, he said, at least there was a fellow called “Ernie” there listening to the reading, and that was enough for him to sue for a million dollars. At the same time he sued the producers of the motion pictures Northwest Mounted Police and the Cisco Kid, claiming that these, as well, had been stolen from that same unpublished scenario. We went to court and, of course, won the case. The man turned out to be insolvent.

INTERVIEWER

Well, could we go back to that list and take one of the painters—Hieronymus Bosch, for instance? The nightmare symbolic quality of his work seems so far removed from your own.

HEMINGWAY

I have the nightmares and know about the ones other people have. But you do not have to write them down. Anything you can omit that you know you still have in the writing and its quality will show. When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing.

INTERVIEWER

Does that mean that a close knowledge of the works of the people on your list helps fill the “well” you were speaking of a while back? Or were they consciously a help in developing the techniques of writing?

HEMINGWAY

They were a part of learning to see, to hear, to think, to feel and not feel, and to write. The well is where your “juice” is. Nobody knows what it is made of, least of all yourself. What you know is if you have it, or you have to wait for it to come back.

INTERVIEWER

Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels?

HEMINGWAY

I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them. If you do not mind I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work. If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

INTERVIEWER

Continuing with just one question on this line: One of the advisory staff editors wonders about a parallel he feels he’s found in The Sun Also Rises between the dramatis personae of the bull ring and the characters of the novel itself. He points out that the first sentence of the book tells us Robert Cohn is a boxer; later, during the desencajonada, the bull is described as using his horns like a boxer, hooking and jabbing. And just as the bull is attracted and pacified by the presence of a steer, Robert Cohn defers to Jake who is emasculated precisely as is a steer. He sees Mike as the picador, baiting Cohn repeatedly. The editor’s thesis goes on, but he wondered if it was your conscious intention to inform the novel with the tragic structure of the bullfight ritual.

HEMINGWAY

It sounds as though the advisory staff editor was a little bit screwy. Who ever said Jake was “emasculated precisely as is a steer”? Actually he had been wounded in quite a different way and his testicles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them. The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not psychological and that he was not emasculated.

INTERVIEWER

These questions which inquire into craftsmanship really are an annoyance.

HEMINGWAY

A sensible question is neither a delight nor an annoyance. I still believe, though, that it is very bad for a writer to talk about how he writes. He writes to be read by the eye and no explanations or dissertations should be necessary. You can be sure that there is much more there than will be read at any first reading and having made this it is not the writer’s province to explain it or to run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work.

INTERVIEWER

In connection with this, I remember you have also warned that it is dangerous for a writer to talk about a work-in-progress, that he can “talk it out” so to speak. Why should this be so? I only ask because there are so many writers—Twain, Wilde, Thurber, Steffens come to mind—who would seem to have polished their material by testing it on listeners.

HEMINGWAY

I cannot believe Twain ever “tested out” Huckleberry Finn on listeners. If he did they probably had him cut out good things and put in the bad parts. Wilde was said by people who knew him to have been a better talker than a writer. Steffens talked better than he wrote. Both his writing and his talking were sometimes hard to believe, and I heard many stories change as he grew older. If Thurber can talk as well as he writes he must be one of the greatest and least boring talkers. The man I know who talks best about his own trade and has the pleasantest and most wicked tongue is Juan Belmonte, the matador.

INTERVIEWER

Could you say how much thought-out effort went into the evolvement of your distinctive style?

HEMINGWAY

That is a long-term tiring question and if you spent a couple of days answering it you would be so self-conscious that you could not write. I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people can see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.

INTERVIEWER

You once wrote me that the simple circumstances under which various pieces of fiction were written could be instructive. Could you apply this to “The Killers”—you said that you had written it, “Ten Indians,” and “Today Is Friday” in one day—and perhaps to your first novel The Sun Also Rises?

HEMINGWAY

Let’s see. The Sun Also Rises I started in Valencia on my birthday, July 21. Hadley, my wife, and I had gone to Valencia early to get good tickets for the feria there which started the twenty-fourth of July. Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph. So I started the book on my birthday, wrote all through the feria, in bed in the morning, went on to Madrid and wrote there. There was no feria there, so we had a room with a table and I wrote in great luxury on the table and around the corner from the hotel in a beer place in the Pasaje Alvarez where it was cool. It finally got too hot to write and we went to Hendaye. There was a small cheap hotel there on the big long lovely beach and I worked very well there and then went up to Paris and finished the first draft in the apartment over the sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs six weeks from the day I started it. I showed the first draft to Nathan Asch, the novelist, who then had quite a strong accent, and he said, “Hem, vaht do you mean saying you wrote a novel? A novel huh. Hem you are riding a travhel büch.” I was not too discouraged by Nathan and rewrote the book, keeping in the travel (that was the part about the fishing trip and Pamplona) at Schruns in the Vorarlberg at the Hotel Taube.

The stories you mention I wrote in one day in Madrid on May 16 when it snowed out the San Isidro bullfights. First I wrote “The Killers,” which I’d tried to write before and failed. Then after lunch I got in bed to keep warm and wrote “Today Is Friday.” I had so much juice I thought maybe I was going crazy and I had about six other stories to write. So I got dressed and walked to Fornos, the old bullfighters’ café, and drank coffee and then came back and wrote “Ten Indians.” This made me very sad and I drank some brandy and went to sleep. I’d forgotten to eat and one of the waiters brought me up some bacalao and a small steak and fried potatoes and a bottle of Valdepeñas.

The woman who ran the pension was always worried that I did not eat enough and she had sent the waiter. I remember sitting up in bed and eating, and drinking the Valdepeñas. The waiter said he would bring up another bottle. He said the Señora wanted to know if I was going to write all night. I said no, I thought I would lay off for a while. Why don’t you try to write just one more, the waiter asked. I’m only supposed to write one, I said. Nonsense, he said. You could write six. I’ll try tomorrow, I said. Try it tonight, he said. What do you think the old woman sent the food up for?

I’m tired, I told him. Nonsense, he said (the word was not nonsense). You tired after three miserable little stories. Translate me one.

Leave me alone, I said. How am I going to write it if you don’t leave me alone? So I sat up in bed and drank the Valdepeñas and thought what a hell of a writer I was if the first story was as good as I’d hoped.

INTERVIEWER

How complete in your own mind is the conception of a short story? Does the theme, or the plot, or a character change as you go along?

HEMINGWAY

Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out. Everything changes as it moves. That is what makes the movement which makes the story. Sometimes the movement is so slow it does not seem to be moving. But there is always change and always movement.

INTERVIEWER

Is it the same with the novel, or do you work out the whole plan before you start and adhere to it rigorously?

HEMINGWAY

For Whom the Bell Tolls was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

INTERVIEWER

Were The Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, and Across the River and Into the Trees all started as short stories and developed into novels? If so, are the two forms so similar that the writer can pass from one to the other without completely revamping his approach?

HEMINGWAY

No, that is not true. The Green Hills of Africa is not a novel but was written in an attempt to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action could, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination. After I had written it I wrote two short stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” These were stories which I invented from the knowledge and experience acquired on the same long hunting trip one month of which I had tried to write a truthful account of in The Green Hills. To Have and Have Not and Across the River and Into the Trees were both started as short stories.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find it easy to shift from one literary project to another or do you continue through to finish what you start?

HEMINGWAY

The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don’t worry.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of yourself in competition with other writers?

HEMINGWAY

Never. I used to try to write better than certain dead writers of whose value I was certain. For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think a writer’s power diminishes as he grows older? In The Green Hills of Africa you mention that American writers at a certain age change into Old Mother Hubbards.

HEMINGWAY

I don’t know about that. People who know what they are doing should last as long as their heads last. In that book you mention, if you look it up, you’ll see I was sounding off about American literature with a humorless Austrian character who was forcing me to talk when I wanted to do something else. I wrote an accurate account of the conversation. Not to make deathless pronouncements. A fair percent of the pronouncements are good enough.

INTERVIEWER

We’ve not discussed character. Are the characters of your work taken without exception from real life?

HEMINGWAY

Of course they are not. Some come from real life. Mostly you invent people from a knowledge and understanding and experience of people.

INTERVIEWER

Could you say something about the process of turning a real-life character into a fictional one?

HEMINGWAY

If I explained how that is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers.

INTERVIEWER

Do you make a distinction—as E. M. Forster does—between “flat” and “round” characters?

HEMINGWAY

If you describe someone, it is flat, as a photograph is, and from my standpoint a failure. If you make him up from what you know, there should be all the dimensions.

INTERVIEWER

Which of your characters do you look back on with particular affection?

HEMINGWAY

That would make too long a list.

INTERVIEWER

Then you enjoy reading over your own books—without feeling there are changes you would like to make?

HEMINGWAY

I read them sometimes to cheer me up when it is hard to write and then I remember that it was always difficult and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

INTERVIEWER

How do you name your characters?

HEMINGWAY

The best I can.

INTERVIEWER

Do the titles come to you while you’re in the process of doing the story?

HEMINGWAY

No. I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book—sometimes as many as a hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.

INTERVIEWER

And you do this even with a story whose title is supplied from the text—“Hills Like White Elephants,” for example?

HEMINGWAY

Yes. The title comes afterwards. I met a girl in Prunier where I’d gone to eat oysters before lunch. I knew she’d had an abortion. I went over and we talked, not about that, but on the way home I thought of the story, skipped lunch, and spent that afternoon writing it.

INTERVIEWER

So when you’re not writing, you remain constantly the observer, looking for something which can be of use.

HEMINGWAY

Surely. If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen. If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, et cetera. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.

Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this time and could convey the experience completely and have it be one that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that I had a good man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still are such things. Then the ocean is worth writing about just as man is. So I was lucky there. I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.

INTERVIEWER

Archibald MacLeish has spoken of a method of conveying experience to a reader which he said you developed while covering baseball games back in those Kansas City Star days. It was simply that experience is communicated by small details, intimately preserved, which have the effect of indicating the whole by making the reader conscious of what he had been aware of only subconsciously . . . .

HEMINGWAY

The anecdote is apocryphal. I never wrote baseball for the Star. What Archie was trying to remember was how I was trying to learn in Chicago in around 1920 and was searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions, such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter’s flat-soled gym shoes, the gray color of Jack Blackburn’s skin when he had just come out of stir, and other things I noted as a painter sketches. You saw Blackburn’s strange color and the old razor cuts and the way he spun a man before you knew his history. These were the things which moved you before you knew the story.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever described any type of situation of which you had no personal knowledge?

HEMINGWAY

That is a strange question. By personal knowledge do you mean carnal knowledge? In that case the answer is positive. A writer, if he is any good, does not describe. He invents or makes out of knowledge personal and impersonal and sometimes he seems to have unexplained knowledge which could come from forgotten racial or family experience. Who teaches the homing pigeon to fly as he does; where does a fighting bull get his bravery, or a hunting dog his nose? This is an elaboration or a condensation on that stuff we were talking about in Madrid that time when my head was not to be trusted.

INTERVIEWER

How detached must you be from an experience before you can write about it in fictional terms? The African air crashes you were involved in, for instance?

HEMINGWAY

It depends on the experience. One part of you sees it with complete detachment from the start. Another part is very involved. I think there is no rule about how soon one should write about it. It would depend on how well adjusted the individual was and on his or her recuperative powers. Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.

INTERVIEWER

Could I ask you to what extent you think the writer should concern himself with the sociopolitical problems of his times?

HEMINGWAY

Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function. All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently. This is very exciting to them and to their political-literary reviews. Sometimes they even have to rewrite their viewpoints . . . and in a hurry. Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.

INTERVIEWER

Has the political influence of Ezra Pound on the segregationist Kasper had any effect on your belief that the poet ought to be released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital?

HEMINGWAY

No. None at all. I believe Ezra should be released and allowed to write poetry in Italy on an undertaking by him to abstain from any politics.* I would be happy to see Kasper jailed as soon as possible. Great poets are not necessarily girl guides nor scoutmasters nor splendid influences on youth. To name a few: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Shelley, Byron, Baudelaire, Proust, Gide should not have been confined to prevent them from being aped in their thinking, their manners or their morals, by local Kaspers. I am sure that it will take a footnote to this paragraph in ten years to explain who Kasper was.

INTERVIEWER

Would you say, ever, that there is any didactic intention in your work?

HEMINGWAY

Didactic is a word that has been misused and has spoiled. Death in the Afternoon is an instructive book.

INTERVIEWER

It has been said that a writer only deals with one or two ideas throughout his work. Would you say your work reflects one or two ideas?

HEMINGWAY

Who said that? It sounds much too simple. The man who said it possibly had only one or two ideas.

INTERVIEWER

Well, perhaps it would be better put this way: Graham Greene said that a ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system. You yourself have said, I believe, that great writing comes out of a sense of injustice. Do you consider it important that a novelist be dominated in this way—by some such compelling sense?

HEMINGWAY

Mr. Greene has a facility for making statements that I do not possess. It would be impossible for me to make generalizations about a shelf of novels or a wisp of snipe or a gaggle of geese. I’ll try a generalization though. A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels. Another generalization. You see; they are not so difficult when they are sufficiently obvious. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.

INTERVIEWER

Finally, a fundamental question: as a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

HEMINGWAY

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

* In 1958 a Federal court in Washington, D.C., dismissed all charges against Pound, clearing the way for his release from St. Elizabeth’s.

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

— David E Sanger, June 2012

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack.

Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.

“We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

A Bush Initiative

The impetus for Olympic Games dates from 2006, when President George W. Bush saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At the time, America’s European allies were divided about the cost that imposing sanctions on Iran would have on their own economies. Having falsely accused Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in Iraq, Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing another nation’s nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his vulnerability, and, frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching uranium at an underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been exposed just three years before.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials. They feared that the fuel could be used in another way besides providing power: to create a stockpile that could later be enriched to bomb-grade material if the Iranians made a political decision to do so.

Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results.

For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Iran’s systems — even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would blow up — but the sabotage had had relatively little effect. General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyberoperation inside the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of America’s nuclear forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyberweapon than the United States had designed before.

The goal was to gain access to the Natanz plant’s industrial computer controls. That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz plant off from the Internet — called the air gap, because it physically separates the facility from the outside world. The computer code would invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges.

The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail.

Eventually the beacon would have to “phone home” — literally send a message back to the headquarters of the National Security Agency that would describe the structure and daily rhythms of the enrichment plant. Expectations for the plan were low; one participant said the goal was simply to “throw a little sand in the gears” and buy some time. Mr. Bush was skeptical, but lacking other options, he authorized the effort.

Breakthrough, Aided by Israel

It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground.

Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within.

The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success. But American officials had another interest, to dissuade the Israelis from carrying out their own pre-emptive strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities. To do that, the Israelis would have to be convinced that the new line of attack was working. The only way to convince them, several officials said in interviews, was to have them deeply involved in every aspect of the program.

Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market. Fortunately for the United States, it already owned some P-1s, thanks to the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

When Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he turned over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear ring, and they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in Tennessee. The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic Games borrowed some for what they termed “destructive testing,” essentially building a virtual replica of Natanz, but spreading the test over several of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to keep even the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot.

Those first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug invaded the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending instructions to speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that their delicate parts, spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed. After several false starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr. Bush’s term, the rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference table in the Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a cyberweapon. The worm was declared ready to test against the real target: Iran’s underground enrichment plant.

“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data.

“Somebody crossed the Rubicon,” he said.

Getting the worm into Natanz, however, was no easy trick. The United States and Israel would have to rely on engineers, maintenance workers and others — both spies and unwitting accomplices — with physical access to the plant. “That was our holy grail,” one of the architects of the plan said. “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand.”

In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were developed to deliver the malicious code.

The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early attack said.

The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said.

Later, word circulated through the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, that the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.

“The intent was that the failures should make them feel they were stupid, which is what happened,” the participant in the attacks said. When a few centrifuges failed, the Iranians would close down whole “stands” that linked 164 machines, looking for signs of sabotage in all of them. “They overreacted,” one official said. “We soon discovered they fired people.”

Imagery recovered by nuclear inspectors from cameras at Natanz — which the nuclear agency uses to keep track of what happens between visits — showed the results. There was some evidence of wreckage, but it was clear that the Iranians had also carted away centrifuges that had previously appeared to be working well.

But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.

The Stuxnet Surprise

Mr. Obama came to office with an interest in cyberissues, but he had discussed them during the campaign mostly in terms of threats to personal privacy and the risks to infrastructure like the electrical grid and the air traffic control system. He commissioned a major study on how to improve America’s defenses and announced it with great fanfare in the East Room.

What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of cyberwar. The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the Situation Room, often with what they called the “horse blanket,” a giant foldout schematic diagram of Iran’s nuclear production facilities. Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously.

“From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,” a senior administration official said. “And it’s safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule.”

But the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell to Mr. Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden.

An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”

Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss, they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is unclear who introduced the programming error.

The question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games was in jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself “in the wild,” where computer security experts can dissect it and figure out its purpose.

“I don’t think we have enough information,” Mr. Obama told the group that day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered that the cyberattacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite harder and reduced Iran’s oil revenues.

Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges. Olympic Games was still on.

A Weapon’s Uncertain Future

American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead with,” one former intelligence official said.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using — and particularly to overusing — the weapon. In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

— Paul Graham, March 2012

One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them.

Don't worry, it's not a sign of weakness. Arguably it's a sign of sanity. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they'd be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry them through.

There's a scene in Being John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman. She says to him:

Here's the thing: If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.

That's what these ideas say to us.

This phenomenon is one of the most important things you can understand about startups. [1] You'd expect big startup ideas to be attractive, but actually they tend to repel you. And that has a bunch of consequences. It means these ideas are invisible to most people who try to think of startup ideas, because their subconscious filters them out. Even the most ambitious people are probably best off approaching them obliquely.

1. A New Search Engine

The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible. I don't know if this one is possible, but there are signs it might be. Making a new search engine means competing with Google, and recently I've noticed some cracks in their fortress.

The point when it became clear to me that Microsoft had lost their way was when they decided to get into the search business. That was not a natural move for Microsoft. They did it because they were afraid of Google, and Google was in the search business. But this meant (a) Google was now setting Microsoft's agenda, and (b) Microsoft's agenda consisted of stuff they weren't good at.

Microsoft : Google :: Google : Facebook.

That does not by itself mean there's room for a new search engine, but lately when using Google search I've found myself nostalgic for the old days, when Google was true to its own slightly aspy self. Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Google search results used to look like the output of a Unix utility. Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen.

The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade the idea of switching seems thinkable to me.

Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers, the route is at least straightforward: make the search engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Make it really good for code search, for example. Would you like search queries to be Turing complete? Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good.

Don't worry if something you want to do will constrain you in the long term, because if you don't get that initial core of users, there won't be a long term. If you can just build something that you and your friends genuinely prefer to Google, you're already about 10% of the way to an IPO, just as Facebook was (though they probably didn't realize it) when they got all the Harvard undergrads.

2. Replace Email

Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list.

I'm open to different types of solutions to this problem, but I suspect that tweaking the inbox is not enough, and that email has to be replaced with a new protocol. This new protocol should be a todo list protocol, not a messaging protocol, although there is a degenerate case where what someone wants you to do is: read the following text.

As a todo list protocol, the new protocol should give more power to the recipient than email does. I want there to be more restrictions on what someone can put on my todo list. And when someone can put something on my todo list, I want them to tell me more about what they want from me. Do they want me to do something beyond just reading some text? How important is it? (There obviously has to be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is important.) When does it have to be done?

This is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible to replace. On the other, it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now?

If you do it right, you may be able to avoid the usual chicken and egg problem new protocols face, because some of the most powerful people in the world will be among the first to switch to it. They're all at the mercy of email too.

Whatever you build, make it fast. GMail has become painfully slow. [2] If you made something no better than GMail, but fast, that alone would let you start to pull users away from GMail.

GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month. Considering how much time I spend in email, it's kind of scary to think how much I'd be justified in paying. At least $1000 a month. If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would be a cheap way to make my life better.

3. Replace Universities

People are all over this idea lately, and I think they're onto something. I'm reluctant to suggest that an institution that's been around for a millennium is finished just because of some mistakes they made in the last few decades, but certainly in the last few decades US universities seem to have been headed down the wrong path. One could do a lot better for a lot less money.

I don't think universities will disappear. They won't be replaced wholesale. They'll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types of learning that they once had. There will be many different ways to learn different things, and some may look quite different from universities. Y Combinator itself is arguably one of them.

Learning is such a big problem that changing the way people do it will have a wave of secondary effects. For example, the name of the university one went to is treated by a lot of people (correctly or not) as a credential in its own right. If learning breaks up into many little pieces, credentialling may separate from it. There may even need to be replacements for campus social life (and oddly enough, YC even has aspects of that).

You could replace high schools too, but there you face bureaucratic obstacles that would slow down a startup. Universities seem the place to start.

4. Internet Drama

Hollywood has been slow to embrace the Internet. That was a mistake, because I think we can now call a winner in the race between delivery mechanisms, and it is the Internet, not cable.

A lot of the reason is the horribleness of cable clients, also known as TVs. Our family didn't wait for Apple TV. We hated our last TV so much that a few months ago we replaced it with an iMac bolted to the wall. It's a little inconvenient to control it with a wireless mouse, but the overall experience is much better than the nightmare UI we had to deal with before.

Some of the attention people currently devote to watching movies and TV can be stolen by things that seem completely unrelated, like social networking apps. More can be stolen by things that are a little more closely related, like games. But there will probably always remain some residual demand for conventional drama, where you sit passively and watch as a plot happens. So how do you deliver drama via the Internet? Whatever you make will have to be on a larger scale than Youtube clips. When people sit down to watch a show, they want to know what they're going to get: either part of a series with familiar characters, or a single longer "movie" whose basic premise they know in advance.

There are two ways delivery and payment could play out. Either some company like Netflix or Apple will be the app store for entertainment, and you'll reach audiences through them. Or the would-be app stores will be too overreaching, or too technically inflexible, and companies will arise to supply payment and streaming a la carte to the producers of drama. If that's the way things play out, there will also be a need for such infrastructure companies.

5. The Next Steve Jobs

I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well, and I asked him if the people now running the company would be able to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs. His answer was simply "no." I already feared that would be the answer. I asked more to see how he'd qualify it. But he didn't qualify it at all. No, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline. Apple's revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.

So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup.

I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it. Plus a startup taking on this problem now has an advantage the original Apple didn't: the example of Apple. Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users' minds that a single person could unroll the future for them. [3]

Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. If a new company led boldly into the future of hardware, users would follow. The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable.

6. Bring Back Moore's Law

The last 10 years have reminded us what Moore's Law actually says. Till about 2002 you could safely misinterpret it as promising that clock speeds would double every 18 months. Actually what it says is that circuit densities will double every 18 months. It used to seem pedantic to point that out. Not any more. Intel can no longer give us faster CPUs, just more of them.

This Moore's Law is not as good as the old one. Moore's Law used to mean that if your software was slow, all you had to do was wait, and the inexorable progress of hardware would solve your problems. Now if your software is slow you have to rewrite it to do more things in parallel, which is a lot more work than waiting.

It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old Moore's Law back, by writing software that could make a large number of CPUs look to the developer like one very fast CPU. There are several ways to approach this problem. The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that will parallelize our code for us. There's a name for this compiler, the sufficiently smart compiler, and it is a byword for impossibility. But is it really impossible? Is there no configuration of the bits in memory of a present day computer that is this compiler? If you really think so, you should try to prove it, because that would be an interesting result. And if it's not impossible but simply very hard, it might be worth trying to write it. The expected value would be high even if the chance of succeeding was low.

The reason the expected value is so high is web services. If you could write software that gave programmers the convenience of the way things were in the old days, you could offer it to them as a web service. And that would in turn mean that you got practically all the users.

Imagine there was another processor manufacturer that could still translate increased circuit densities into increased clock speeds. They'd take most of Intel's business. And since web services mean that no one sees their processors anymore, by writing the sufficiently smart compiler you could create a situation indistinguishable from you being that manufacturer, at least for the server market.

The least ambitious way of approaching the problem is to start from the other end, and offer programmers more parallelizable Lego blocks to build programs out of, like Hadoop and MapReduce. Then the programmer still does much of the work of optimization.

There's an intriguing middle ground where you build a semi-automatic weapon—where there's a human in the loop. You make something that looks to the user like the sufficiently smart compiler, but inside has people, using highly developed optimization tools to find and eliminate bottlenecks in users' programs. These people might be your employees, or you might create a marketplace for optimization.

An optimization marketplace would be a way to generate the sufficiently smart compiler piecemeal, because participants would immediately start writing bots. It would be a curious state of affairs if you could get to the point where everything could be done by bots, because then you'd have made the sufficiently smart compiler, but no one person would have a complete copy of it.

I realize how crazy all this sounds. In fact, what I like about this idea is all the different ways in which it's wrong. The whole idea of focusing on optimization is counter to the general trend in software development for the last several decades. Trying to write the sufficiently smart compiler is by definition a mistake. And even if it weren't, compilers are the sort of software that's supposed to be created by open source projects, not companies. Plus if this works it will deprive all the programmers who take pleasure in making multithreaded apps of so much amusing complexity. The forum troll I have by now internalized doesn't even know where to begin in raising objections to this project. Now that's what I call a startup idea.

7. Ongoing Diagnosis

But wait, here's another that could face even greater resistance: ongoing, automatic medical diagnosis.

One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we'll seem backward to future generations. And I'm pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer.

For example, in 2004 Bill Clinton found he was feeling short of breath. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass. It seems reasonable to assume Bill Clinton has the best medical care available. And yet even he had to wait till his arteries were over 90% blocked to learn that the number was over 90%. Surely at some point in the future we'll know these numbers the way we now know something like our weight. Ditto for cancer. It will seem preposterous to future generations that we wait till patients have physical symptoms to be diagnosed with cancer. Cancer will show up on some sort of radar screen immediately.

(Of course, what shows up on the radar screen may be different from what we think of now as cancer. I wouldn't be surprised if at any given time we have ten or even hundreds of microcancers going at once, none of which normally amount to anything.)

A lot of the obstacles to ongoing diagnosis will come from the fact that it's going against the grain of the medical profession. The way medicine has always worked is that patients come to doctors with problems, and the doctors figure out what's wrong. A lot of doctors don't like the idea of going on the medical equivalent of what lawyers call a "fishing expedition," where you go looking for problems without knowing what you're looking for. They call the things that get discovered this way "incidentalomas," and they are something of a nuisance.

For example, a friend of mine once had her brain scanned as part of a study. She was horrified when the doctors running the study discovered what appeared to be a large tumor. After further testing, it turned out to be a harmless cyst. But it cost her a few days of terror. A lot of doctors worry that if you start scanning people with no symptoms, you'll get this on a giant scale: a huge number of false alarms that make patients panic and require expensive and perhaps even dangerous tests to resolve. But I think that's just an artifact of current limitations. If people were scanned all the time and we got better at deciding what was a real problem, my friend would have known about this cyst her whole life and known it was harmless, just as we do a birthmark.

There is room for a lot of startups here. In addition to the technical obstacles all startups face, and the bureaucratic obstacles all medical startups face, they'll be going against thousands of years of medical tradition. But it will happen, and it will be a great thing—so great that people in the future will feel as sorry for us as we do for the generations that lived before anaesthesia and antibiotics.

Tactics

Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. People can notice you've replaced email when it's a fait accompli. [4]

Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another.

Empirically, it's not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you'll get it wrong.

I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.

The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.

Notes

[] It's also one of the most important things VCs fail to understand about startups. Most expect founders to walk in with a clear plan for the future, and judge them based on that. Few consciously realize that in the biggest successes there is the least correlation between the initial plan and what the startup eventually becomes.

[] This sentence originally read "GMail is painfully slow." Thanks to Paul Buchheit for the correction.

[] Roger Bannister is famous as the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes. But his world record only lasted 46 days. Once he showed it could be done, lots of others followed. Ten years later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a high school junior.

[] If you want to be the next Apple, maybe you don't even want to start with consumer electronics. Maybe at first you make something hackers use. Or you make something popular but apparently unimportant, like a headset or router. All you need is a bridgehead.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future

After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups.

— Alexis Madrigal, April 2012

Finnish teenagers performing digital ennui in 1996 2006. Reuters.

We're there. The future that visionaries imagined in the late 1990s of phones in our pockets and high-speed Internet in the air: Well, we're living in it.

"The third generation of data and voice communications -- the convergence of mobile phones and the Internet, high-speed wireless data access, intelligent networks, and pervasive computing -- will shape how we work, shop, pay bills, flirt, keep appointments, conduct wars, keep up with our children, and write poetry in the next century."

That's Steve Silberman reporting for Wired in 1999, which was 13 years ago, if you're keeping count. He was right, and his prediction proved correct before this century even reached its teens. Indeed, half of tech media is devoted to precisely how these devices and their always-on connectivity let us do new things, help us forget old things, and otherwise provide humans with as much change as we can handle.

I can take a photo of a check and deposit it in my bank account, then turn around and find a new book through a Twitter link and buy it, all while being surveilled by a drone in Afghanistan and keeping track of how many steps I've walked.

The question is, as it has always been: now what?

Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet." Fifteen years ago, it was, "Build the Web." Five years ago, the answers were probably, "Build the social network" or "Build the mobile web." And it was in around that time in 2007 that Facebook emerged as the social networking leader, Twitter got known at SXSW, and we saw the release of the first Kindle and the first iPhone. There are a lot of new phones that look like the iPhone, plenty of e-readers that look like the Kindle, and countless social networks that look like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, we can cross that task off the list. It happened.

What we've seen since have been evolutionary improvements on the patterns established five years ago. The platforms that have seemed hot in the last couple of years -- Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest -- add a bit of design or mobile intelligence to the established ways of thinking. The most exciting thing to come along in the consumer space between then and now is the iPad. But despite its glorious screen and extended battery life, it really is a scaled up iPhone that offers developers more space and speed to do roughly the same things they were doing before. The top apps for the iPad look startlingly similar the top apps for the iPhone: casual games, social networking, light productivity software.

For at least five years, we've been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like:

There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers.

That paradigm has run its course. It's not quite over yet, but I think we're into the mobile social fin de siècle.

PARADIGM LOST

It slipped into parody late last year with the hypothetical app, Jotly, which allowed you to "rate everything" from the ice cubes in your drink to the fire hydrant you saw on the street. The fake promo video perfectly nailed everything about the herd mentality among startups. Its creator told me to watch for "the color blue, rounded corners, SoLoMo [SocialLocalMobile], ratings, points, free iPads, ridiculous name (complete with random adverbing via 'ly'), overpromising, private beta, giant buttons, 'friction-less' sign up, no clear purpose, and of course a promo video."

And then, the hilarious parody ate itself and my tears of laughter turned to sadness when the people behind the joke actually released Jotly as a real, live app.

That's the microversion of the state of affairs. Here's the macro version. Thousands of startups are doing almost exactly the same thing, minor variations on a theme. Tech journalists report endlessly on the same handful of well-established companies. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft's dominate pieces of the web, and they don't appear to be in shaky positions. Good, long-time tech journalists like Om Malik are exhausted. He recently posted this to his blog after much ink was spilled over who Twitter hired as a public relations person:

Sure, these are some great people and everyone including me is happy for their new gigs and future success. But when I read these posts [I] often wonder to myself, have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

There have been three big innovation narratives in the last few years that complicate, but don't invalidate, my thesis. The first -- The Rise of the Cloud -- was essentially a rebranding of having data on the Internet, which is, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.

I also want to note that there are plenty of ambitious startups in energy, healthcare, and education, areas that sorely need innovation. But fascinating technology startups, companies who want to allow regular people to do new stuff in their daily lives? Few and far between. Take a look at Paul Graham's ideas for frighteningly ambitious startups. Now take a look at the last 30 or so startups on Techcrunch. Where are the people thinking big? What I see is people filling ever-smaller niches in this "ecosystem" or that "ecosystem."

FROM FACEBOOK TO FACEBOOK CLONES

Certainly, some of the blame for tech startup me-tooism is just the tendency of startups to cluster around ideas that seem to be working. Social networks? Here's 500! Mobile social plays? Here's another 500! Social discovery apps? Behold 1000! Perhaps that's inevitable as dumb money chases chases smart money chasing some Russian kid who just made a site on which men tended to flash their genitals at web cameras.

But I think the problems go deeper. I don't think Silicon Valley and all the other alleys and silicon places are out of ideas. But I do think that we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.

We've maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don't give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower. I remember breathlessly waiting for the next-generation processor so that my computer would be capable of a whole new galaxy of activities. Some of it, sure, is that we're dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago -- stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos -- just at higher resolutions.

On the mobile side, we're working with almost the exact same toolset that we had on the 2007 iPhone, i.e. audio inputs, audio outputs, a camera, a GPS, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and a touchscreen. That's the palette that everyone has been working with -- and I hate to say it, but we're at the end of the line. The screen's gotten better, but when's the last time you saw an iPhone app do something that made you go, "Whoa! I didn't know that was possible!?"

Meanwhile, despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most. It turns out building a superfast, ultrareliable cellular network that's as fast as a wired connection is really, really hard. It's difficult to say precisely what role this limiting factor plays, but if you start to think about what you could do if you had a 100MB/s connection everywhere you went, one's imagination starts to run wild.

LESS MONEY, MO PROBLEMS

But more than the bandwidth or the stagnant hardware, I think the blame should fall squarely on the shoulders of the business model. The dominant idea has been to gather users and get them to pour their friends, photos, writing, information, clicks, and locations into your app. Then you sell them stuff (Amazon.com, One King's Lane) or you take that data and sell it in one way or another to someone who will sell them stuff (everyone). I return to Jeff Hammerbacher's awesome line about developers these days: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

Worse yet, all this stuff is dependent on machine learning algorithms that are crude and incredibly difficult to improve. You pour more vast amounts of data in to eke out a bit more efficiency. That's great and all, but let's not look at that kind of behavior and call it "disruptive." That is the opposite of disruptive.

The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean. Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you'd get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavor: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.

Now, there are obviously exceptions to what I'm laying out. What I'm talking about here is the startup culture that I've seen in literally dozens of cities. This culture has a certain logic. There are organizing principles for what is considered a "good" idea. These ideas are supposed to be the right size and shape. There is a default spreadsheet that we expect ideas to fit onto.

But maybe it's time that changed.

So what's the future hold then? I have a couple of ideas, even if I'm not sure they're the right ones. One basic premise I have is this: More money has got to change hands. Free is great. Free is awesome. Halloween, for example, is my favorite holiday. I love free stuff. But note this chart from the Pinboard blog, comparing what happens to free sites and paid-for sites/services when they experience growth.

Free

Paid

Stagnant

losing money

making money

Growing

losing more money

making more money

Exploding

losing lots of money

making lots of money

The point is that every user of a free service costs the service money. Whereas every user for a paid-for service generates money. What that means is that a growing free site is an acquisition waiting to happen because its developers are burning through ever more cash.

Free applications and services get driven to do other things, too. They must grow quickly and they must collect vast amounts of data and they must acquire your social graph somehow. Even if those things were all good, they would still reduce the variety of startups that seem possible. The only metric that seems to matter with startups is the number of users it has been able to skim from the masses. (Partially because so many can't get anyone to visit them and partially because so few of them make money.)

It's not that I think paid software and services will be necessarily be better, but I think they'll be different.

Speaking of hardware, I think we all better hope that the iPhone 5 has some crazy surprises in store for us later this year. Maybe it's a user interface thing. Maybe it's a whole line of hardware extensions that allow for new kinds of inputs and outputs. I'm not sure what it is, but a decently radical shift in hardware capabilities on par with phone-->smartphone or smartphone-->iPhone would be enough, I think, to provide a springboard for some new ideas.

I have some of my own, too. The cost of a lumen of light is dropping precipitously; there must be more things than lightbulbs that can benefit from that. There's vast amounts of databases, real-world data, and video that remains unindexed. Who knows what a billion Chinese Internet users will come up with? The quantified self is just getting going on its path to the programmable self. And no one has figured out how to do augmented reality in an elegant way.

The truth is, though, I'm a journalist, not an entrepreneur. I know that my contribution is more likely to be distilling a feeling that is already broadly felt rather than inventing the future. Still, I want us to get back to those exciting days where people were making predictions about the affordances of the future that seemed wonderful and impossible. No doubt the future remains unevenly distributed but now, when you get your bit, it seems as likely to include worse cell reception as it does seemingly magical superpowers.

This isn't about startup incubators or policy positions. It's not about "innovation in America" or which tech blog loves startups the most. This is about how Internet technology used to feel like it was really going to change so many things about our lives. Now it has and we're all too stunned to figure out what's next. So we watch Lana Del Ray turn circles in a thousand animated gifs.

The Man Who Sold the World

Through the super-styled pages of Wallpaper* and Monocle, Tyler Brûlé has turned his own life into a successful business. Ruaridh Nicoll meets the punctilious tastemaker

— Ruaridh Nicoll, March 2012

Tyler Brûlé in his Marylebone office: 'He’s not scared of war, and he knows a good pair of trousers.' Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

"So what's the secret?" I ask Tyler Brûlé, the exquisitely groomed editor of Monocle. As the sun glances through the windows of his Marylebone office, the man who has made a success of a magazine, of a printed product at a time of media crisis, begins to talk. He starts to ramble, so I interrupt, saying that I'm disappointed, that I was expecting something pithy.

Brûlé, who at 43 has real physical presence, a gift from his American-football-playing father, looks aghast and for a moment his raw competitiveness shows. He struggles for the right line: "People need to attend to details," he says at last. "I believe in a tidy ship. No jackets on the backs of chairs."

I like Brûlé. You'd have to be po-faced (or, the sceptics say, know him well) not to. He's an original. Nearly 20 years ago, an editor I know told me that in him she'd found her perfect glossy-magazine foreign correspondent: "He's not scared of war, and he knows a good pair of trousers." The Brûlé myth began shortly afterwards when he was twice shot while in Afghanistan. He had a conversion on a hospital bed, less Damascene and more Mayfairean. He thought about what really mattered to him – and it was friends, a nice house and travelling. Since then he has turned this vision – himself – into two successful businesses. He went on to found Wallpaper* and, subsequently, Monocle.

His assistant walks in and asks whether I would like "some baumkuchen from Germany?" Brûlé breaks in: "Actually it's from Japan. It's one of those things that you'd now be hard pressed to find in Germany, but the Japanese have gone nuts for it." Of course, Brûlé knows I will write about this. Self-awareness is what he does. Art directing his life, his style is his business model. The baumkuchen is delicious, like an aspirational Swiss roll.

Wallpaper*, with its tagline "The stuff that surrounds you", was the epitome of urban dreaming. The magazine baumkuchened up the idea of Homes & Gardens, and in 1997, a year after he founded it, Time Inc bought it for a reported $1.63m. For several years, Brûlé lived the corporate life, but it didn't suit him and he says now: "We've seen the creep of the consultant on to the editorial floor – and that brought on a certain crisis of confidence."

When, inevitably, he fell out with the Americans, a noncompete clause saw him branch out into consultancy with Winkreative, where he has brought his taste to bear on everything from Swissair to the country of Taiwan. But as soon as the legal restrictions fell away, Brûlé went back into magazines, founding Monocle. A compendium of global, newsy nuggets with a furious aversion to celebrity, it wanders from Saudi arms deals to fashion shoots in Tokyo barber shops, all leavened with an obsessive fascination with aviation. It is about the infrastructure of living internationally. It earnestly, if wittily, wants us to enjoy our planes, our hotels, our metro transportation systems. But it's never going to advise you to kick off all your clothes and jump into the nearest stream.

Brûlé says he's selling more than 70,000 copies of Monocle at £6 each. According to ABC, who audit these things, 11,000 sell at newsstands and 2,000 by subscription in the UK, while the rest go abroad.

Last year he founded a 24-hour digital radio station which seems to want to be a baumkuchened-up Radio 4 and although it has not yet achieved anything like the depth, you can hear the aspiration. Add a biannual newspaper and a global chain of shops selling the accessories for a Monocle-based life, and you get a picture of the Brûlé empire.

It's all based on a philosophy that runs counter to prevailing thought in the media. "It didn't make sense to us to give away our journalism for free. But we did have to think: 'How do we add value online?' We started with video then it became radio, but it couldn't replicate what we were doing in print."

Brûlé leads me down to the morning conference. Everyone has just returned from a fifth birthday party in Budapest (they have also celebrated with their subscribers in Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin and are on their way to New York). In the meeting, they spend much of their time discussing the various airlines they've used. There is an echo of a male fascination with giving directions – Monocle meetings seem to play on this geeky joy.

Back in his office, I ask Brûlé who would be his perfect reader. He pulls out his mobile. "This email just came in. 'I am a 21-year-old studying economics and government in Australia. I have not achieved the means to live by the majority of the magazine's ideas, I'm simply writing to thank you for the wealth of, for lack of a better word, awesomeness of the magazine.' Now would I go to an advertising meeting and talk about that being the core reader, maybe not, but then I would as well because here is someone who is going to be with us for a long time, who is part of a different media generation."

Brûlé is half Estonian, but was raised in Canada. "I grew up in a variety of cities from Ottawa to Montreal to Toronto, in an era before the invasion of US channels across the border. From an early age I was dazzled by the big nightly newscasts and I always wanted to stay up late and see these men and women broadcast from around the world. In parallel, I grew up in a magazine household, whether it was Forbes or my mother's decorating magazines. And when I visited my Estonian relatives – people who had fled Germany – there were always copies of Stern and Spiegel. Also there was a certain gruesomeness in the German reportage. It was all incredibly exciting to me."

Into this is incorporated the painfully modern aesthetic that infuriates so many. Those programmes on his radio station and the section titles in his magazine reflect the man. He is an urbanist, he is absolutely a globalist, and he likes to speak from the perspective of seat 1A of the intercontinental jetliner. From there Brûlé finds himself first despairing of innovation in his adopted country. "There is so much international talent in London – architects, graphic design – but it's all despite itself, not because the government and private sector get together to celebrate it. It happens because of the natural forces, that we're English language, that we're in the EU. You can't just rock up in New York as an Austrian and get a job in graphic design, but you can here."

So would he move the his business out? "We've had this discussion. The question is where. That's the curse of it all. The government thinking: 'Where would these media companies go?' I mean, we're not going to go to France."

What about Scandinavia? After all, Monocle is forever claiming Copenhagen or Helsinki is the best place in the world to live. Brûlé looks aghast, revealing the conflict between aesthete and businessman. "The Scandis are a bit too socialist." He swings his hand around the office. "Everything in this room is from Scandinavia, but the maternity leave would kill us." So Copenhagen may be the best place to live in Brûlé's world, but it is no place to run a business.

We're winding down. Don't you get bored of flying, I ask. "I'm moving to grand tours rather than there and backs."

Your partner must hate it. "He travels with me a lot."

Any plans for children? A strangled laugh. "Not yet." (Pity, his rigorous aesthetic would be a hoot on Mumsnet.)

Brûlé gives me a tour of the studios, separate floors dedicated to magazine, radio and consultancy. It is like a cool architectural practice run by a cult. He has told me: "Everyone needs to be on the same page – I'm not a huge fan of creative conflict." It's supposed to be cuddly, but comes across as slightly scary. Nonetheless, it makes sense because a good answer to my original question is that a publication's success usually rests on readers buying into a singular vision. That's certainly true in Brûlé's case, and the view is absolutely from behind those thick-framed glasses.

As he walks me into the crisp sunshine, I can't stop myself messing with the show he's put on. "Tyler, there was someone in there with their jacket on the back of their seat." He looks momentarily crestfallen and mutters something about people on work experience. The next day I tell this story to one of his staff. "Oh that's why that guy was fired," he jokes.

At least I hope he was joking.

The Cocktail Creationist

The man behind Grey Goose vodka understood that Americans want to pay more—You just have to give them a good story. Now he has a new tale to tell. It’s about a tequila called Corazón.

— Seth Stevenson, May 2012

Sidney Frank at his winter home in California. (Photo: Robyn Twomey)

At 5:20 on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1996, Sidney Frank—liquor baron extraordinaire, dapper elderly gent, CEO of the Sidney Frank Importing Co.—picked up his phone in a fit of inspiration. He dialed up his No. 2 executive, who listened in a groggy daze as Frank proclaimed, “I figured out the name! It’s Grey Goose!”

And so was born one of the most astonishing brands in the history of distilled spirits. Grey Goose vodka, invented from thin air that summer morning, had as yet no distillery, no bottle, and—perhaps the most pressing order of business—no vodka. Yet this past June, almost exactly eight years after Sidney Frank gave name to this nonexistent liquor, Grey Goose was sold to Bacardi for more than $2 billion. Cash. (To understand how much that is, consider that IBM’s personal-computer business, nurtured, honed, and advertised since 1981, recently sold for $1.75 billion.)

After the Grey Goose sale, everyone at Sidney Frank Importing Co. got a hefty bonus. Longtime SFIC secretaries were handed checks for more than $100,000 apiece. Grey Goose was a spectacular success. And now the ride was over. The only question left: What’s next?

Cut to a shiver-cold night in downtown Manhattan, not long after the sale. A team of SFIC employees are out pushing Sidney Frank’s new brand of the moment: Corazón tequila. They chat up pub and restaurant owners. They teach bartenders how to mix new Corazón cocktails. And then, in a small club in the meatpacking district, they run smack into the competition: Bacardi salesguys, making their own nightly rounds.

SFIC publicist to Bacardi salesguy: “What are you drinking tonight?”

Bacardi salesguy, swirling ice in highball glass: “Goose Orange, baby!”

Suddenly, the SFIC folks look a bit downcast. Consider their fate: Just a few months back, their job had been to drink (and promote) Grey Goose, which made them the most popular people wherever they went. A Grey Goose Cosmo here, a Grey Goose–and–tonic there. Then their beloved Goose got sold to these mass-market hacks from Bacardi (who’d tried, without much success, to launch their own superpremium vodka—an Estonian concoction called Türi—before they bought Goose). Now the SFIC team is compelled to push this unknown brand of tequila, all night, every night, on crowds that don’t know what it is and don’t particularly care to find out.

When I suggest to an SFIC vice-president that vodka is by definition odorless and tasteless, his face goes tight. “That is a dinosaur statement,” he says.

Sidney Frank doesn’t necessarily want to be in the tequila business either. Agave plants are notoriously fragile crops, and the fancier tequilas must be aged for a year or two, while vodka comes out of the still and is good to go. And in the distilled-spirits game, tequila plays in the second division, accounting for just 5.1 percent of the market. Vodka dominates with 26.5 percent, while rum has 13 and gin 7.

Making matters worse, there’s already a strong brand entrenched in the superpremium tequila category, Patrón.

But when Goose got sold to Bacardi, SFIC signed a stringent noncompete clause: It can’t launch a new brand of vodka or gin for the next four years. So tequila it is. SFIC will spend at least $3 million on Corazón marketing in 2005 and make it available to all sorts of influential crowds—at a VIP tailgate party at the Super Bowl, at the victory dinner for the Indy 500, and at the Junior League’s Winter Ball in New York. As the product becomes known, says Frank, “some idea will come to me that will push it forward.”

The odds against any new spirits brand are long. Some say the Grey Goose explosion was a fluke, a miraculous confluence of timing and trends. And whatever marketing tricks SFIC had up its sleeve last time—all the guerrilla promotions that Sidney Frank is famous for—everyone else is onto them by now. Given the fierce competition, can Sidney Frank, now 85, do it again? Of course he can. He’s done it not once but twice before.

Born in 1919, Sidney Frank grew up poor in rural Connecticut, a farm boy who harbored a Gatsby-esque drive for social transformation. He wiggled his way into Brown University, where, for the first time, he slept on real bedsheets (not sewn- together flour sacks), and found himself surrounded by the children of the rich and powerful. Frank had to drop out of Brown after one year because he couldn’t afford tuition. (When Grey Goose was sold, he gave $100 million to Brown to provide financial aid for poor students.) But Frank made the most of his brush with privilege. Old snapshots show a handsome, broad-shouldered fellow, always in a coat and bow tie, hair slicked back in an impeccable part. Sidney Frank was a charmer, and he knew which people to charm.

In an interview with the Brown Alumni Magazine, on the heels of his massive donation, Frank was asked if he had any advice for the young Brown student. “If you meet any important people,” he said, “keep in touch with them . . . And marry a rich girl. It’s easier to marry a million than to make a million.” Through Brown friends, Sidney Frank met, and, in 1945, married, Louise “Skippy” Rosenstiel, whose father was chief of Schenley Distilleries (at the time a spirits-industry powerhouse). Frank went to work for the company, made his way up the corporate ladder, and then (after a family falling-out, and Louise’s death) branched out to start his own liquor business in 1972.

SFIC was no overnight success. Frank was forced to sell off personal assets (fine art, property in Antigua) to keep the company running. Early on, during the tough times, he would stroll around New York neighborhoods to see who was drinking what in the bars. Once, during a jaunt through Yorkville, he saw German immigrants downing something called Jagermeister, a 70-proof, odd-tasting liqueur from the Fatherland. It was no big seller, but the drink seemed to have a steady fan base, so Frank took a chance and secured the U.S. importing rights. Nothing much happened for the next decade.

Then, in 1985, for no clear reason at all, college kids in Baton Rouge and New Orleans decided Jager was cool. Just one of those things that happen sometimes. Kids being funny. It’s likely they chose Jager precisely because its taste was so horrific. The whole thing might have easily been forgotten by the next semester. But that’s not what happened.

Bill Goldring is chairman of Magnolia Marketing Co., which was SFIC’s distributor in Louisiana when Jager first hit. “Brands are a funny thing,” he says. “Corona beer started at the University of Texas, where kids were putting a lime in it. Then Jimmy Buffett was drinking it. Then it was the hottest beer in America. With Jager, we saw we were getting large orders because the LSU kids were drinking it. Then there was the newspaper story in the Baton Rouge Advocate.”

The story, at the height of LSU’s Jager boomlet, quotes kids calling the herb- infused drink “liquid Valium,” and theorizing that Jager was an aphrodisiac. When Sidney Frank saw this, he flew into action, assembling a team of hot chicks, dubbed Jagerettes, and dispatching them to New Orleans bars to hand out photocopies of the story. Frank also slapped up eight new Jagermeister billboards in the area. They displayed a wincing man and the words SO SMOOTH, playing on Jager’s ironic appeal. (I remember, back in high school, a friend’s college-age big brother had a T-shirt with the SO SMOOTH guy on it. We thought this was the pinnacle of cool.)

All over the country, Jager shots became a revered symbol of buck-wild partying, and the brand remains one of the hottest in the industry, growing at 40 percent a year. Yet not a single spirits expert I spoke with could explain the Jager phenomenon, beyond shrugging and calling Sidney Frank a “promotional genius.”

“It’s a liqueur with an unpronounceable name,” says Ted Wright of Liquid Intelligence, a beverage-marketing firm. “It’s drunk by older, blue-collar Germans as an after-dinner digestive aid. It’s a drink that on a good day is an acquired taste. If Sidney Frank can make that drink synonymous with ‘party’—which he has—he can pretty much do anything.”

Pretend for a moment you’re the man himself—Sidney Frank, liquor legend. First, you should be aware: You transact much of your business from bed, wearing pajamas and smoking a cigar (it is written into the prenup with your second wife that you are permitted to smoke cigars in bed). When not in bed, you wear a bow tie at all times. Also, you maintain a phalanx of full-time golf pros, at a cost of perhaps half a million dollars a year, simply so you can watch them play the game. You can’t swing a club yourself anymore—too old—so you golf vicariously, directing your pros shot-by-shot down the course. “Hey kid, hit a three-wood to the right of that water hazard,” etc.

To the business at hand. The year is now 1996, and, flush with Jager’s success, you’re ready to invent a new vodka from scratch. Why? Because the microbrewed-beer craze is giving way to a new age of sophisticated cocktails. Dot-com dollars are begging to be spent ostentatiously, at expensive nightclubs. Herein lies opportunity.

We’re out flogging Corazón at a club on the Bowery. The scene is clearly rife with Influencers. On my way in, I brush past Ethan Hawke.

As you lean back in your golf cart, watching another perfect chip shot bounce up onto the green, you ponder the fact that the premium vodka right now (in 1996) is a brand called Absolut. When it was first introduced, Absolut’s high price was considered outrageous. But it’s had great success (with its iconic, artsy ad campaign), and it now sells for the steep, steep price of about $17 a bottle.

So, to steal away Absolut’s market share, your unborn new vodka should undercut this price, correct? No, you think, chomping your cigar as you watch a 30-foot putt roll straight into the cup. Why don’t I price my vodka extravagantly higher than Absolut, at wildly more profitable margins . . . and steal Absolut’s market share that way? This was the great insight of Sidney Frank (and not only him: The makers of Ketel One vodka had the same basic idea). Frank could see that there was a product missing from the shelves. Here were all these vodkas, in the $15-to-$17 range, vying to be the premium brand (with Absolut mostly winning). Frank just sidestepped the fray altogether and charged an unheard-of $30 a bottle. The markup amount was pure profit. “He was the first person to see,” says an executive at rival Bacardi, “that there was a superpremium category above Absolut, if you had a good product story.”

In this story, the name came first—as it so often does when image is the paramount concern. Frank recalled he’d once sold a Liebfraumilch named Grey Goose back in the seventies. These were German white wines that were briefly hip but faded into oblivion. “I remember there was always something in the name that had magic with the consumer,” says Frank. (It may also be that Frank liked the name because he already owned the worldwide rights to it.) Frank gathered his lieutenants at the company’s New Rochelle headquarters. “Go to France and come back with a vodka,” he said. So they met with cognac distillers, whose business had slowed. The stills were switched to vodka, and at last there was an actual product.

But why France? Doesn’t vodka come from Russia, or perhaps, in a pinch, Scandinavia? “People are always looking for something new,” says Frank. It’s all about brand differentiation. If you’re going to charge twice as much for a vodka, you need to give people a reason.

“Nietzsche explains that human beings are looking for the ‘why’ in their lives,” says Wright. “Here at Liquid Intelligence, we refer to this ‘why’ as ‘the Great Story.’ The Great Story must be enticing, memorable, easily repeatable, and about what you want your brand to be about.”

For Grey Goose, the brand was about unrivaled quality. Grey Goose’s Great Story hinged on the following key points: It comes from France, where all the best luxury products come from. It’s not another rough-hewn Russian vodka—it’s a masterpiece crafted by French vodka artisans.

It uses water from pristine French springs, filtered through Champagne limestone.

It’s got a distinctive, carefully designed bottle, with smoked glass and a silhouette of flying geese. It looks fantastic up behind the bar, the way it catches the light (and Frank made sure to give the bars big, 1.75-liter bottles, to grab attention). It sure looks expensive.

It was shipped in wood crates, like a fine wine, not in cardboard boxes like Joe Schmo’s vodka. This catches the bartender’s eye and reinforces the aura of quality. Never forget the influence of the bartender.

It was named the best-tasting vodka in the world by the Beverage Testing Institute in 1998. (Granted, this pronouncement can and will be doubted. But it was nonetheless touted relentlessly in a series of Wall Street Journal ads.)

And now the most important piece of the story—the twist that brings it all together: Grey Goose costs way more than other vodkas. Waaaaaaay more. So it must be the best.

Pause for a reality assessment: Certainly, Grey Goose is a very good vodka. But is it really “the best”? Pace the Beverage Testing Institute, I’d venture that the answer is, ehhhhh, maybe. Of course, when I suggest to an SFIC vice-president that vodka is by definition odorless and tasteless, and thus one vodka couldn’t be much better than the next, his face goes tight. “That is a dinosaur statement,” he says, speaking slowly, then lectures me on water- filtration processes and Champagne limestone and special grains and such.

“Yes, some people may taste a difference,” says Wright of Liquid Intelligence. “But you’re talking about a grain-neutral spirit. The FDA definition is pretty narrow. At an elemental level, there is no difference. And anyway, you can’t possibly taste it when it’s in a Cosmopolitan. Grey Goose is about quality because Sidney Frank said it was about quality.”

And said it to the right people. Those ads were placed in the Wall Street Journal, not Newsday. Even more important to the campaign was event marketing—getting Grey Goose into the hottest clubs on the hottest nights, in the hands of the hottest people. “You need to influence the influencers,” says Wright. These are the obsessive arbiters of taste who like to tell their friends what to buy. When they have a Great Story to tell, they’ll tell it convincingly and often. In the classic flowchart, Influencers talk to Early Adopters (“Want to be cool but don’t have the time,” as Wright describes them), who talk to the Early Majority (“Suburbs”), who talk to the Late Majority (“Middle America”), who talk to the Laggards (“Just now buying a CD player”).

As the Influencers peddled the Grey Goose tale far and wide and people began to call for it in bars, a great thing happened—the characters on Sex and the City pointedly called for Grey Goose Cosmos. In the battle for vodka supremacy, this was the atom bomb. The war was over. Grey Goose had won.

Though Grey Goose is a product of Sidney Frank, spirits savant, it’s also a product of its age. We live in an era of luxury. The word luxury—in this context—refers not to our standard of living but rather to a highly successful sales concept.

Luxury, in a consumer sense, means spending much more than you have to. Your reason for doing this could be that you demand the absolute highest quality, because you can genuinely tell the difference. As Cornell economics professor Robert H. Frank (no relation to Sidney) points out, “You can buy a car that does zero to 60 in 3.9 seconds. Or you can spend $445,000 to buy a Porsche that does zero to 60 in 3.7 seconds. It’s a real difference, and some people will pay for it.”

But small quality differences like this are not why most people buy a luxury product. Frank, author of the book Luxury Fever, observes that the thirst for luxury trickles down to those who can’t really afford it. Frank calls this the “expenditure cascade.” We all spend more in an effort to keep up with the guy who’s one rung above us. This means we buy bigger houses to keep up with the neighbor’s mansion. It also means we buy superpremium vodkas, to keep up with the guy who’s next to us at the bar.

This is what SFIC is banking on. The company’s decided its interests lie solely in the superpremium categories—where margins are higher and volumes lower. (Even Jagermeister is technically superpremium, despite its blue-collar image. It’s priced above its competitors in the liqueurs category, such as Bailey’s and Kahlua.)

But SFIC will never again have the niche to itself. These days, every spirits marketer is diving headfirst into superpremiums. Absolut just launched Level, a new superpremium vodka, only to see the simultaneous launch of Stolichnaya Elit (which will sell for a dizzying $60 a bottle). You might wonder where the price escalation will stop or if it will stop at all. People don’t seem to blink at paying high prices for a cocktail in a bar (as opposed to in the liquor store, where they tend to be more price-conscious). As long as your high-end brand has a credible story behind it, you can keep hiking its margins, and consumers will follow. The trend is known in the industry as “trading up.”

“Consumers are drinking less, but drinking better,” says Michael J. Branca, a beverage-industry analyst at Lehman Brothers. The evidence is that volume sales of spirits have been flat, while dollar revenues have soared. According to Branca, this stems from a worldwide trend toward health and wellness, as well as a growing consumer demand for “everyday luxuries,” which includes things like Starbucks Frappuccinos.

The best thing about the everyday luxury business is that an awful lot of Americans can afford a $15 cocktail, whereas real luxuries, like a $3,500 Rolex, have a much smaller market. And the margins for superpremium spirits are fantastic. Remember, these high-status luxury products are more than half water.

It’s possible the trading-up trend could reverse, and we’ll all drink Joe Schmo’s vodka as some sort of trucker-hat statement. But liquor experts think the superpremium category is pretty safe. The reason is that Grey Goose and its ilk do not rely on mere “coolness,” which is fleeting and hard to pin down. They’re chasing after “bestness”—a consistent target even if it’s hard to hit. There will always be a large subset of drinkers who want to be drinking “the best,” because bars and nightclubs are places to be seen. Places to prove you’re a player. “Spirits is an image-driven category,” says Branca. “We’re acutely aware of what we’re drinking in the presence of others. That’s why it’s so important to have strong on-premise promotions with influential consumers.”

Thus we’re out on this freezing winter night, hawking Corazón at a club on the Bowery. The scene is clearly rife with Influencers. On my way in, I brush past Ethan Hawke.

Over in a corner, the SFIC team has set up a bar serving free Corazón tequila. There’s a Corazón ice sculpture and several babe-alicious Corazón girls flitting about with margaritas. The whole thing’s a $2,000 outlay from the marketing budget.

Though tequila has a strong frat-boy affiliation, as a salt/lime/bodyshot-off-drunken-coed’s-clavicle kind of item, it too has been caught in the trading-up trend. Sales have nearly doubled in volume since 1990, and the margarita is frequently identified by bar and restaurant owners as the most popular cocktail in America.

Corazón began outside the Sidney Frank empire, in the mind of one Frank Arcella, sole proprietor of Arcella Premium Brands. Arcella knew his one-man outfit couldn’t compete in the high-stakes vodka category. But in superpremium tequila, he had a fighting chance.

Arcella toured tequila plants in Mexico and settled on one in the highlands of Jalisco. It owned its own agave fields (a major consideration, as agave supply can fluctuate wildly) and aged its tequila in dedicated, tequila-only barrels—not reused sherry and bourbon barrels, as is often done. The product was good, and the management was reliable. So Arcella struck a deal.

He then brainstormed names and decided on Corazón de Agave (Heart of Agave) because it suggested high-quality ingredients, and because the word heart might offer good marketing angles. At the plant, Arcella was shown hundreds of existing bottle prototypes and chose one with a distinctive skinny neck. “You save half a million dollars you would have given to a bottle designer,” he says.

It’s the sort of gut decision Sidney Frank made his fortune with. To me, it’s astonishingly cavalier. (I’ve seen Coca-Cola execs give PowerPoint presentations about how they hire naming agencies and focus-group every single design decision.) But Arcella is no fool or hayseed. He spent 29 years at Seagram’s, reaching executive vice-president. He says brand creation is simple: product, package, name, marketing plan. “This is not rocket science,” he claims. Perhaps in the fickle world of luxury liquor, it’s better that one man make all the decisions. It results in a more distinctive, memorable product—one that feels less like a product for the masses.

Arcella actually went to Frank early on in the Corazón time line, to see if Frank had any interest. But it wasn’t until a few years later, in 2002, that Frank decided to buy Corazón. It’s not hard to see why. The Corazón brand blueprint looks exactly like the one for Grey Goose. Corazón can claim, with a modicum of credibility, that it’s the best product out there (it also got superlative marks from the Beverage Testing Institute, which will soon be touted in an ad campaign). It’s got distinctive packaging. It’s priced above most competitors.

And so here we are tonight, out on the town, influencing the Influencers. At one bar, we get “bottle service,” buying an entire bottle of Corazón for a mere $310—plus mixers for free!—and displaying it prominently on our table.

Even with all this, it’s hard to foresee the sequence of events that might turn Corazón into a real competitor to Patrón. But the industry knows better than to bet against Sidney Frank. “Patrón has good imagery, it’s a strong brand, and it’s set up nicely,” says Michel Roux, the liquor exec who crafted Absolut’s long reign. “Of course, you could have said the same thing about Ketel One, back before Grey Goose took off.”

If Corazón fails to overtake Patrón, Frank has fallbacks, like a new line of cognacs, which will come in flavors like pear and apple, aimed at what analysts term the “urban” or “hip-hop” market. Frank has some experience with this market—he backs a side project with rapper Lil’ John, marketing an energy drink called “Crunk!!!” It’s also a market where conspicuous luxury consumption is on the rise, and the prices are high. The best cognacs are often three to six times more expensive than anything else behind the bar.

A new line of rums is also in the offing. Rums are widely believed to be the next vodka, as they’re also adept at soaking up flavors and acting as the base for a wide range of cocktails. SFIC plans to import its rums from Australia, to break from the herd of Caribbean rums. Tentative name for the line of rums: White Pelican. “It’s an endangered species,” says Frank, “and my wife likes the sound of it.”

When I asked a Bacardi executive, he said that rum doesn’t really have a superpremium category. That’s probably what Absolut would have said about superpremium vodka back in 1996.

A Grey Goose ad from 1999.

These Days: Sample Pages

An unedited sample from Jack Cheng's upcoming novel, These Days.

— Jack Cheng

April 4

NEW LOWER PRICE set in bold Verdana type on a dangling red placard greeted Connor Vast as he stepped onto the showroom floor. A black nylon camera bag hung from his shoulder, rocked back and forth as he cut across the serpentine paths and pushed through the secret doorways.

The new Statics had just landed and it was the design department's task to get photos of them in situ. It wasn't a huge priority—just something that needed to be done every once in a while—and coming off a grueling pitch, Connor didn't mind the break from the office. Besides, there was always something cathartic about roaming the strategically-lit ghost town known as IKEA on a weekday.

Arriving at Workspaces, Connor pulled the camera out of the black nylon bag and aimed it at a room built around a desk IKEA had revamped for spring, on which sat a prop display his company had manufactured, featuring a screen he designed. Of the photos, a batch would be chosen for the company’s website and used in the capabilities deck they showed prospective clients. A smaller selection would be framed and hung in the office lobby as examples of their latest work. He pressed the glossy black shutter button and the pinhole speaker on the side of the camera let out a tinny click.

He snapped a few more pictures and reviewed them on the swiveling, back-facing LCD, then moved on to another arrangement. This one depicted a casual use notebook set on a fold-down table along the wall in a family room. "Everything this room for $1165," said a sign hanging from the ceiling.

When Connor had all the shots he needed, he returned the camera to its bag and pulled out his phone. It used to be that Facebook, Twitter, and all those other services were their own walled gardens—you had one group of friends here and another group there. But now it didn't matter which you were on anymore. When you updated one, it updated all of them. They turned out to be less like gardens and more like bodies of water, teeming, unpredictable, spilling into each other by the magnetism of an unseen moon. At some point, everyone stopped distinguishing between them, started calling it the Stream. And today, the Stream was overflowing with star-worthy jokes and bookmark-worthy links.

A flash of red in Connor's periphery caught his attention. He looked up from his phone and saw the red of a pair of leggings extending from a gray skirt that billowed ever so slightly as the supple frame carrying it glided across the aisle. She headed his way, but their eyes didn’t meet. She went about her business as if he weren’t there at all, as if nobody was watching her run her fingers along the edge of a lampshade or a seventy-nine cent vase. Still, she drew closer, and Connor pocketed his phone and turned toward a nearby bookcase as he tried to think of something to say.

“Whoever lives here must really like Barbara Kingsolver,” he projected. “They’ve got like, twenty copies of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.”

She pivoted toward him and gave him a curious look, then walked up to the shelf, sending in his direction invisible eddies of her scent: fresh jasmine, burnt coffee, a trace of shampoo. When she reached for a book, he saw a series of thin black rings tattooed at varying distances along her arm, disappearing up the sleeve of her white chiffon blouse.

“It’s all in Swedish too,” she said, flipping through the pages.

“I heard in Sweden you’re required by law to fill your shelves with familiar English books,” he said. “Cause you never know when a group of price-conscious Americans are gonna barge into your living room asking to see the BERGSBO.”

She laughed. It was a remarkable laugh—coated in honey, starting from the gut and transforming into a shorter, higher pitched jingle.

“Those tattoos on your arm, is there a story behind them?”

“They’re like tree rings,” she said as her eyes came up to meet his. “They mark significant memories in my life. It’s my own personal dendrochronology.”

She enunciated the last word with a particular delight. Den-dro-cro-no-lo-gee.

“Pick one,” she said.

“How about this one?” Connor asked, pointing to a ring on her forearm.

“That one’s private,” she said. “Pick another one.”

“This one,” he pointed at the next ring down.

“That’s for when my parents split up. I was fourteen and we were living in L.A. at the time. My dad moved back to Pennsylvania and I stayed with Mom on the west coast.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. They’re both a ton happier now.”

“What about this one?” he pointed to a ring on her bicep.

“We’ve only just met,” she said with a glint in her eye. “I’m not about to tell a stranger my entire life story.”

There was a time when Connor would’ve been at a loss for words at a moment like this, when he would’ve retreated to some nervous gesture or apologetic remark, but he’d come to understand how the whole thing worked. She had set him up and he was to follow through. The words came perfectly naturally and without thinking, as if he were merely the conduit for things that were meant to be heard.

“In that case, we should get acquainted over lunch,” he said. “I happen to know of this great little Swedish place around the corner. Their meatballs are phenomenal.”

“That would be lovely,” she smiled in approval, as if he had passed some kind of test. “I’m starving.”

“And I’m Connor.”

She tucked the Kingsolver under her arm and reached out with the other.

“K,” she said.

“Kay, like the letter spelled out?”

“Just the letter.”

“What’s that short for?”

“Not short for anything,” she said. “Just the letter. One letter. K.”

The VICE Guide to Adulthood

— VICE Staff, August 2012

We are so sick of you full-grown babies running around aimlessly—with your shoes untied and overdraft-fee receipts falling out of your pockets and grease stains on your cut-offs and employment-repellant skillsets and inability to party and go to work the next morning—that we’ve gone ahead and figured it all out for you.

In the early 2000s, 20- and even 30-somethings could eek out a passable existence as abhorrent, unabashedly selfish, microwave-dependent, and wholly unproductive members of society. Today, somewhat due to the grievous irresponsibility’s of our baby boomer parents, we know that such behavior can only heap insurmountable debt being foisted upon future generations, and, if you really give it your all, the slaughter of millions of innocent civilians worldwide and other atrocities.

Chances are your parents were selfish and didn’t raise you correctly. Like, at least one-third of the people reading this have no idea how to fold a T-shirt. What the fuck is wrong with you? Did you just not show up to that day of life? But it’s OK. We will show you the way.

HYGIENE

It is quite possible that your parents didn’t teach you certain things about hygiene while you were growing up. It’s quite possible that you didn’t even have parents, and were perhaps born from a turd similar to the ones you continuously leave in the bowl without flushing after visiting a public restroom, like a DNA stink-abortion for the next person to discover. Hate to break the news to you, pal, but if you haven’t managed to tackle how to properly deal with your fecal waste, everything else in life is going to seem like an insurmountable challenge.

PAY YOUR DEBTS

Hardly anyone has a credit card in Germany because the word for “credit card” there literally means “debt.” The Germans, culturally, do not live beyond their means, mostly because they tried that once and a lot of bad things happened. That’s sort of like America and Europe now, don’t you think? The only difference is that instead of Hitler we get a bunch of religious extremists who bunker down in the worst places in the world and figure out how they’re going to kill us over here. Bad things are happening, for sure, and a lot of it is fueled and funded by people (the West) living well beyond their means. Start by doing simple stuff like, you know, paying $100 a month above the interest owed on your credit card instead of buying drugs twice in one week.

DRUGS

This probably doesn't apply to the pot you smoke and mushrooms and other psychedelics you ingest, but the reason you’re able to buy coke and heroin and most of the other shit (especially in the States) is because a lot of people are dying in Mexico because of it. And not just drug lords—entire families of innocent people who happened to live in the wrong town, and increasingly lots of children. There’s nothing you can do to stop it, but if you feel like you might have a bad drug problem coming on, subscribe to a few Mexican newspapers so you can look at crime scene photos of piles of body parts and headless corpses the next time you feel like taking a bump or plunging a needle in your arm. In other words, moderation is key.

DON’T LIE

Want to know why so many of your parents are divorced and/or bankrupt? It’s probably because a) They got married way too early; b) Had kids way too early; c) Had an affair because at least one of the spouses never got to fuck a bunch of people; and d) Worked a job that they hated for way too long. Avoid all of these traps and you will have a much better chance of avoiding mid-life crises. Be honest with yourself, and with others because it simply is more efficient. Want to cheat on your girlfriend? Why don’t you just dump her instead and fuck whoever you want? Is it because you’re a giant sniveling pussy who is afraid to be alone and actually face the consequences of your decisions like a real human being? Probably, and we hope you get dick cancer as a result (not because we’re moral crusaders, just because we think it’s funny when people get what they deserve). You know what you want; and if you don't, just keep trying things to till you figure it out but try to not be an uptight self-serving asshole along the way and everyone will be happier in the long run.

After you’ve gone ahead and landed a real job that pays you in actual money instead of Chili’s gift certificates and sample-size bottles of shampoo, maybe you should think about using your vacation time for something other than sitting on your couch and bar-hopping around your shitty town (or on a friends couch in a similar city). Instead, how about your dumbass actually forces yourself to stop looking at your phone for five minutes and plunge headfirst into this lonely world to gain some perspective. Go somewhere dirty, dangerous, and cheap, and go by yourself, or with someone you love or are guaranteed to have a good time with. As an added bonus, if you’ve ever questioned whether or not you’re stupid or boring, this is a great way to find out. And if you are, there’s a chance you can even remedy it.

EMOTIONS

If you’re the kind of person who goes out with friends and ruins everybody’s good time because you can’t stop bitching about things and getting upset about everything and everyone you see, then I hate to break it to you, but your emotions stopped developing at the age of fetus. If your best friend in the whole world, who you’ve know since grade school can’t tell you that you have a booger in your nose without you getting uptight and misty eyed, then you need to work on your emotional health a little bit. Nobody wants to work with, fuck, or go to the movies with a walking exposed nerve. Save emotions for when they count: sexy times, animal videos, and Christmas.

LOVE VS. FUCKING

They say that a life worth living is a life worth sharing. They also say that if you’re an asshole all the time, you’re going to slip on a wad of hair in the shower, hit your head, suffer a contusion, and die. No one will find your corpse until it begins emitting a stench so powerful that it cuts through all the curry and jerk chicken your neighbors are making in your shitty apartment building. In your teens and 20s it’s OK to be annoyingly picky and indecisive (within reason) about finding the “right one” and eliminating people from your uppity little dating pool because they don’t like your favorite brand of deodorant, or because they are Nazis about recycling.  Eventually, if you’re lucky, it will dawn on you: “OHHHHHH! I’m the asshole here! Not that girl who I dumped because she’s allergic to paper!” If someone is nice to you, and your privates find them attractive, love them for as long as you can and as well as you can, and then keep trying for even longer than that because you probably don’t deserve a second chance. Fucking, however, is a completely different thing. Grunting like an animal and ramming your parts into another person’s feel-good cavity/getting rammed in yours is purely recreational, and let's face it, those hot sluts at the bar aren’t going to be the ones you want to see walk into your room with a stack of DVDS and a Coke Slurpie when you’re home in bed with a fever.

GOING OUT

The pressure to go out and do things, all the time, in public, and document those things on 14 different social-networking sites is overwhelming, especially in your 20s. But cherish those times, sparky. By 30, when you’ve fucked way too many people you shouldn’t have and start wearing a general disdain for humanity on your face, your decision to go out or stay in revolves around the following criteria: 1) I hope there’s no one there that I have to talk to; 2) I hope there’s somewhere to sit down; 3) If someone doesn’t try to have sex with me within 20 minutes, I’m going home to put on sweatpants and watch Louie. One of the best perks of adulthood is that your apartment/house is probably pretty decent, with plenty of chairs, AC/heat, and a variety of beverages to offer and enjoy. Being an adult basically means being able to say, “Why don’t we just stay in and make dinner and maybe even save some money?” and not (always) look at your place as a set for fingerbanging.

FRIENDS

They say that the older you get, the harder it is to make friends. Most people have all the “BFFs” that they’re gonna have by the time they’re in their late 20s, because these BFFs are people we met and bonded with while growing up. If you are 30-plus and have more than two friends who you’ve known for more than 15 years, then you’re doing pretty fucking good. Don’t blow it with those gems, and don’t worry about making any more close friends because between work, trying to have sex sometimes, and squeezing out time to read books and catch up on Youtube clips, who has the goddamn time? Plus—and this cannot be overemphasized—the older you get, the more you realize how many people deserve to be disappeared and possibly vaporized.

ENTERTAINMENT

If you consider yourself a “full-grown adult” and have not read (like, completed, cover to cover) a book of any sort in the past three months, you are probably someone we never want to be friends with. TV and movies are great and all, and it’s good to keep up with carefully curated show selections, but if you look forward to making it home in time to catch The Big Bang Theory or whatever slop is on when you get home, you’re probably hopeless and should be sure to only befriend similarly boring people so you don’t turd up conversations. Non-fiction, medical journals, fiction, whatever, just read a fucking book already. Also, listen to whatever music you want to because there are no rules anymore, but be warned: Talking like a rapper if you aren’t one and “acting tough” is so transparent and lame that we are considering forming a hit squad to systematically cleanse this segment of humanity. Not joking.

THE INTERNET

Hey, you know what makes adults so special? They only give a shit about a handful of people. This is because they spend the majority of time being productive members of society, not pretending they are a celebrity and talking about how the vegetarian egg salad wrap they ate earlier “tasted a little funky” on Facebook. You want to know why when you look at photos of people from the 60s and 70s they look so much cooler than you? It’s because they are. They didn’t have personal ego-satellites to mind-rape the country with their inane proclivities and terrible ideas; they actually had to talk to people, like face-to-face, or on the telephone when an in-person conversation wasn’t an option. Speaking of which, how come no one talks on the phone anymore? How about we start doing that again instead of leaving impersonal comments on the profiles of people we secretly hate. It’ll save us all some time. If you must, Twitter and Instagram are far superior because their formats don’t allow for the same level of bloated self-indulgence as a MINI-WEBSITE ABOUT YOURSELF. Trust us, you’re not that interesting.

Good design is invisible: an interview with iA's Oliver Reichenstein

— Sam Byford, July 2012

Oliver Reichenstein is the founder and director of Information Architects, the Tokyo, Zurich, and Berlin-based design agency. iA's usual trade is website design and consultancy along with the odd concept like the Twitter strikethrough, but the company has also found recent success in iOS and Mac app development. Writer for iPad is a pioneering minimalist text editor, and its focus-enhancing combination of sparse visuals and refined typography has since made the leap to OS X and the iPhone.

Reichenstein recently took the time to answer some of my questions on design and development. Since iA's work is informed by its presence in Europe and Asia, I wanted to know his thoughts on the differences between the two, and in particular where he sees the state of Japanese design right now. After all, for anyone who's visited a cluttered Japanese website recently, the tasteful and restrained work put out by iA would seem to be entirely out of step with the agency's Tokyo base. Read on for Reichenstein's thoughts on why this is, as well as typography, user interface design, influences, and more — he has a lot to say.

Sam Byford: Where are you right now, and what are you doing?

Oliver Reichenstein: I’m in Switzerland. My wife and I decided to move from Japan after the earthquake, because we deemed a triple meltdown two car hours away from Tokyo too insecure for our 3 year old boy. It’s too early to tell whether we were right or wrong, but I think it was the right decision, if only for peace of mind. Since we have offices in Zurich and Berlin, and most of our clients are European, it was not a big business risk. Actually, this has been our best year so far, and it has helped me being closer to our main clients.

SB: What originally brought you to Japan, and what kept you here?

OR: I went there on vacation. It felt like a trip to another planet, so I decided to stay and explore life on Mars. I was at a point in my life where I had to choose between a career in a big branding agency and learning something new.

Arriving in Japan without any knowledge of the language, I lived in a world without words, where, almost like a baby, I had to learn everything from scratch. I think the experience of being illiterate and then slowly growing back into society has made me a better designer. When you can’t read or write and you need to interpret everything you encounter by deciphering visual clues, you begin to understand how things and people function behind the words. If, in plus, a lot of the standard mechanical interfaces work differently, it was a magnificent training in basic interface phenomenology.

Being literally speechless for almost three months, I also discovered the aesthetic and functional beauty of Japanese typography and, through that, of Latin typography. One of my favorite places in Tokyo is the calligraphic museum in Ueno. I went there on my first trip to Japan, and it amazed me that I was able to somewhat guess the broad meaning of some calligraphy solely by looking at the shape. When I started to learn kanji and how signs represent what they mean, I started to see that a lot of our words visually represent the things they describe. The English "dog" looks like a dog sitting, the German "Hund" (same root as "hound") looks like a dog standing. I won't get too deep into this, because it sounds kind of insane. In any case I started to see and think language and its visual representation from a completely different angle and ultimately that gave me the visual and mental freedom to build iA.

What really kept me there was my wife. I went to Japan in June. We met in December. One year later I proposed.

Apart from the magic forces of my wife, it was not so much Japan, but Tokyo that hypnotised me. I enjoyed the size of Tokyo and the freedom it gives you to be yourself. In a city with 36 million people, no one tries to force you into a certain way of living. Being a foreigner is even easier, because Japanese people mostly think we’re all crazy to begin with anyway. For the first time, I was able to say and do what I felt, and no one tried to correct me back to the “standard” way. This liberty also brings you together with people that are like-minded. I could go on forever about this… as you can clearly tell, I miss Tokyo terribly. We still have iA Tokyo in a beautiful office in Shibuya, so luckily I can still go there every few months.

SB: What print designers have most influenced your online work? Web designers?

OR: I was never satisfied with the state of the web. Websites were — and still are — always too noisy for my taste. I didn’t really understand what was missing until I discovered typography. At the time I learned an awful lot from Khoi Vinh’s blog. The main lesson was: Try to find ways to translate the treasure of typographical knowledge into this new medium.

The main old-school design influences on iA’s work come mostly from typographers. I grew up in Switzerland, so Frutiger, Ruder, Tschichold, Müller-Brockmann, and Miedinger are part of my visual DNA. I discovered them in Tokyo, like you discover grammar after you can already speak. Meeting some of my design heroes in person, like Erik Spiekermann or Roger Black, let me understand that what made their work so influential was their unfailing passion and youthful spirit.

Working in Japan, I learned to see what I disliked about our design culture — the typical Swiss coldness, the lack of emotion and loveliness, the often clumsy use of color, the loneliness — from a slightly different angle. I learned to see its weaknesses and strengths, and tried to find ways to evolve it.

I think iA would not have been able to break out of this Swiss style, had I not worked with Japanese designers. I am deeply thankful for the beautiful work Mr. Tanaka, our lead designer in Tokyo, has done. I learn more from observing and discussing with him than from any book I have read in the last couple of years.

Japanese designers grow up drawing Kanji, which lets them develop a much more delicate eye in dealing with white space, gray value, and contrast. Japanese have slightly different color vocabulary and that means: a slightly different sense of color.

Japanese and Swiss design are actually a good combination. There are many similarities between Swiss culture and Japanese culture in general, including design.

SB: In our increasingly digital world, how do you see the disciplines of graphic design and product / industrial design merging?

OR: The principles of good design have not changed. Dieter Rams said: “Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.” This applies to all disciplines of design, including web design. Web design looks like graphic design because it appears visually flat, but it is actually closer to electro-mechanical engineering than any form of drawing. As a web designer you need to consider what people do with their hands and heads. You need to design your products in a way that requires minimal input, and delivers maximal output.

My skills improved a lot when I started designing fonts. I realized that microtypography is the atomic unit of our work. The more I learn about typography the better I understand what I do. Typography is not about making or choosing a nice font. Whether you design or set type, what you do is designing text for optimal performance. Both type designers and type setters need an understanding of macro and microtypography. It's obvious in the case of type designers. Of course there is no readability without legibility. But few type setters understand that if they have no clue about microtypography (legibility), they cannot excell in macrotypography (readability).

Without the collaboration and communication with Bold Monday (the type foundry that made and optimized Nitti Light, the typeface for iA Writer), iA Writer would not be what it is. A lot of what makes the product work so well, and the reasons why so many people feel so good using it, is hidden to the non-typographic eye.

To give you an idea, with the new Retina displays we had to optimize the typeface so it looks like it used to look on the iPad 2. To do this we had to grade the typeface, producing subtly different versions for each class of display so they have the same visual weight.

To the user the type looks exactly the same on the retina display as on the iPad 2. This required a lot of tweaking from our side (to find the right definition), and the deep professional knowledge of Bold Monday. Users don’t notice this, but they don’t need to. Good user interface design takes care of irritations before they appear.

Good design is invisible. Good screen design happens in the subatomic level of microtypography (the exact definition of a typeface), the invisible grid of macrotypography (how the typeface is used), and the invisible world of interaction design and information architecture. Minimum input, maximum output, with minimal conscious thought is what screen designers focus on. And just as type designers and engineers we do not try to find the perfect solution but the best compromise.

The automatic adaptation of typography to a screen is one of those compromises. We call it responsive typography. Responsive typography is not just font grading. Responsive typography is about the relationship between type size, leading, line spacing, weight and reading distance. Lately, screen resolutions have become so diverse and complicated that we felt the need to design our own typeface to discover what microtypography under what circumstances works best. It is terribly hard to explain without being able to show it on different device right in front of you, but we'll try our best to convey what we mean by responsive typography in the next couple of weeks.

One of the greatest inspirations is, as for most of us, the work of Apple. What makes us especially proud is that Apple likes us. They crowned iA Writer as one of the apps of the year and, voluntarily or accidentally, they started to use one of our lines themselves. A year ago, we described the benefit of iA Writer as: “The less thought goes into the program, the more thought you can put into your work.” Apple used a similar line half a year later to describe the new iPad. iA Writer also gets imitated a lot. I’m not always happy about that, but some imitations are indeed flattering.

SB: I'd like to hear your thoughts on the state of Japanese software and web design, as iA's work seems very out of step with a lot of it. Is there a clash of philosophy with iA's design coming out of Tokyo?

OR: Japanese web or app design is not comparable to Japanese art, graphic design or architecture. I could fill a page explaining why. It has to do with the way Japanese read, with the corporate fear of doing something different, and with the generally low level of design for the masses.

One reason why Japanese web and app design feels weak is that technology requires good active and passive knowledge of English. English is the lingua franca of contemporary web and app development, both of our tools and our discourse. Even if you master English-based Objective-C or JavaScript, if you are not able to communicate with the international community of developers and designers, you miss out on what is desirable, even what is possible. Japanese developers and designers that don’t speak English are trapped within the relatively low level of tech and design that currently reigns in the Japanese corporate world.

SB: For you, what represents the best and worst of Japanese design right now?

Muji has been doing a great job selling itself and its products as no-brand while being one of the strongest best designed commercially successful entities in contemporary Japan.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/Va3pIsBaiw0

Another impressive commercial design heavyweight is Uniqlo. I’m not a regular Uniqlo customer, but what they do impresses me from a professional perspective. I think Uniqlo does a terrific job as a big consumer brand, surprising and satisfying a huge audience with good quality at low prices. They exercise great control over their brand identity, and have been developing who they are over the last few years in an astonishing way. They surprise with beautiful ad campaigns, and they also have some of the best designed Japanese apps in the app store.

While the exterior perspective of Tokyo is generally nothing less than depressing, Japanese interior architecture is unique. Here, again, best and worst are very close. While private Japanese interiors can be shockingly dull, public interiors (stores, restaurants, hotels) can be evenly breathtaking.

Japan’s, or more precisely Tokyo’s public fashion scene is without doubt the most amazing in the world. Omotesando-dori is one 24-hour catwalk.

The worst of Japanese design is, sadly, everywhere. The average web site, app, advertisement… it’s usually really badly designed. That might be hard to believe from the outside, because only the best of the best of Japanese design reaches the rest of the world, but with the web it has become more obvious how bad basic design is in Japan. Yes, the standard for Japanese design in general is as low as for Japanese web design. Why? Nothing is more destructive to good design than group thinking and collective decision making. Why? As I said, to most people good design is invisible. Group decisions focus on the visible, bad aspects of design.

SB: What are your thoughts on operating system design in general? Individual apps often have their own interface innovations, but can you see room for improvement in the general UI paradigm of iOS, for example?

OR: iOS is the Windows XP for mobile devices. It looks a lot like Windows XP, if feels like Windows XP, and it is loved like Windows XP. It doesn’t have the same market share Windows XP had back in the day, but Windows XP was liked so much that Microsoft had a really hard time replacing it. Sooner or later Apple will have to radically evolve its UI paradigm. For example, it has to create stricter internal guidelines on the use of metaphor. That being said, UI design for operating systems is the highest form of GUI and interaction design. It is incredibly hard to create something iconic and functional on that level of the user interface.

Personally, I hope that Jonathan Ive is working on it. Some of my friends see his fingerprints in the chrome of the new mobile iPhoto and maps app, but that's probably all wishful thinking. Personally, I hope that they don't need Ive there. That he keeps on focusing on making great hardware. If iPhoto and the new maps app are test balloons for upcoming iOS chrome, I hope that they work harder on the icons and smash the tacky glass shelves. Metaphors are good if they simplify things. Metaphors that draw attention to themselves are detrimental, and double metaphors in a user interface are suicide bombs.

What I wanted to see for as long as I can remember is a perfectly white user interface. It’s incredibly hard to do with backlit devices, but it is possible. This is just a random opinion from someone that has very little experience with designing user interfaces for operating systems.

In any case, I am more excited to see the next big iteration from Apple than I am about Microsoft’s Metro. What I’ve seen so far is more graphic than interface design, it’s too Cartesian, too flat, too cold. It tries too hard to sway the hipsters who are not Microsoft's target group.

But, hey, a lot of my designer friends are troubled about how much they like Metro. I might be wrong and Microsoft might get the early adopters, and in a couple of years then the monster market share they’ve been dreaming of. But I doubt it. Metro is not design for the masses. iOS is. And by trying to do what Steve would do, they won’t beat Apple's avant garde.

The only thing that makes me think that Microsoft might have a chance on mobile devices is that they seem to invest a lot in typography, while Apple doesn’t seem to. For example, Microsoft’s latest future video uses Gotham as a system font. And while I don’t think that Gotham would be a good system font, it has the warmth and friendliness that Neue Helvetica on iOS lacks. I read that as “we care about typography”. With good typography you can score on a level that is subconscious to most users. Hardly anyone can discern good from bad typography, but everybody can feel it.

SB: You've done some design studies for clients like Facebook that never ended up getting put in place. What product, site, or service would you most like to get the chance to redesign for real?

OR: I’ve been dreaming of designing an operating system GUI since I first saw one. But there is no chance in hell that Apple lets us do that.

SB: Tell me about the inception of iA Writer. Was iOS the catalyst? Would the Mac version ever have come into being without the iPad version, and do you have any thoughts on developing for Android or other platforms in future?

OR: There were so many instances leading to it. I designed my first text editor in the early eighties. I even created a pixel font on a 5 x 5 pixel grid for the text editor. I did all that so I could see more text on the 256 x 192 resolution of my Dragon 32. Some of the ideas came from earning my philosophy student living as an informatics teacher in the nineties teaching MS Word and informatics, desperately trying to get pupils to stop fumbling and to start writing.

The biggest motivation to build iA Writer came from the mad idea to create our own hardware. A digital writing machine (the German word for typewriter). Apparently it is not that hard to produce hardware anymore if you have the right contacts in China. It is still madness for a small studio though. But months after our first sketches Apple presented the iPad, and then producing our own hardware was not necessary anymore.

The Mac version happened because the iOS version was such a big success. We tried to duplicate the same user experience in a completely different environment, which took a fair amount of time to do — and only a couple of weeks to copy.

SB: What was behind the decision to bring Writer to iPhone? How did you envisage people using the app?

OR: I wanted my documents on the go. I’m too impatient when I work on a text to wait 45 minutes on my way from home to the office. I also wanted to have a notebook for making notes that I could then transform into texts.

SB: Typography is an important part of Writer's design. What challenges were posed by the iPad's Retina display, and how did you solve them?

OR: We noticed right away that our font didn’t look right on Retina displays, and adjusted it until it looked and felt the same as on lower resolutions. However, grading alone is not enough — the iPhone, Mac and iPad have different canvas sizes and reading distances, which require a lot of alterations from spacing to line height to gutter sizes. I am currently discussing this in a series of articles I’m writing on the new challenges of typography in the age of responsive design.

SB: Is there any progress on auto-markdown for iPad? Does the new model's CPU go any further towards making it a possibility, and would you ever consider implementing a feature that didn't work on specific hardware?

OR: We have solved the performance issues that held us back, but we are also focusing on a different set of features currently, so I won’t make any promises as to when that happens. In general, I don’t have that much of a problem with different devices having different features. Writing on a touch device is a completely different story from writing with a keyboard and a point and click device.

Implementing features that don’t work on certain hardware is okay as long as it is done with the right compromise in mind. Our highest priorities are speed and simplicity.

SB: Writer has been a big success, so where does iA go from here? Are you looking to balance web design with more app development in future, or was Writer a one-off?

OR: You often hear that it’s not possible to have both clients and your own products. I think that if you are able to handle a couple of big clients, you are also able to handle a big product in the place of a big client.

We have always tried to work only with clients where we both can learn from each other. Being able to freely choose your clients without ifs or buts is the only way to do work in a meaningful relationship. Writer has made it much easier to say no.

Client work allows us to develop Writer in exactly the way we feel right, without giving into fashions and superficial features that might sell well and please the tech community, but not give much benefit to the core user.

We plan to continue both working for clients and on products, because we feel that both benefit from the experience we gain in each field. By having our own products we understand clients better, and by working for clients we understand ourselves as product makers better. Very few agencies can have the same insight we do into planning, designing and building a successful app. Lots of agencies will promise you success in the app store without having anything substantial to show. We don’t promise success, because we know first-hand what it takes and what it brings.

SB: When is the next Web Trend Map coming?

OR: We are working on it but we are not going to rush it. We have a series of beautiful concept studies, but we’re not quite there yet. The last map was swept away by the tsunami. I hope that we can publish the next one before the end of the year.

SB: Where do you look for inspiration, either in the real world or online?

OR: Outside the design world, in architecture, philosophy, art. But most of the time, there is no need for external inspiration. We have such a great team that we never run out of ideas. The vision for what we do has stayed the same since I founded iA back in 2005: Reduce to the essence.

Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both Sides: His keynote address at Montreal’s Just For Laughs 2012

— Sean L. McCarthy, July 2012

After stirring keynote speeches by Lewis Black and Marc Maron over the past couple of years, Patton Oswalt took to the stage adjacent to the Hyatt lounge on Thursday afternoon to deliver the third annual keynote for the Just For Laughs Comedy Conference in Montreal.

Oswalt employed self-deprecation right off the bat, joking that he was far from JFL's first choice to address the comedians, industry and fans in the audience. "Luckily for me, none of them could be bothered to wake up before 1 p.m.," he said. He also noted with sarcasm that in a year in which comedy has come under the microscope of the media and bloggers, of course, a "straight white male" should be the comedy community's representative to make sense of it all. Speaking of which, he added: "People are referring to us as the comedy communtiy -- thats how fucked up things are right now."

Instead of a straight speech, Oswalt wrote two open letters and read them aloud.

The first letter he addressed to "all of the comedians in the room"; the second, to "all of the gatekeepers" of the comedy business.

Here are those letters.

Dear comedian in 2012:

How are you? I am good. In answer to your last letter, the mozzarella sticks at the Irvine Improv do taste weird. I’m taking your advice and sticking with the nachos.

Hey, ‘know what I was thinking the other day? Everything I know about succeeding as a comedian and ultimately as an artist is worthless now, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

I started doing comedy in the summer of 1988. That was a different time, wasn’t it? Joe Piscopo was president, Mary Lou Retton won the Cold War, and Andy Kindler turned 50

If I hadn’t popped that goddamn ‘P’, the Piscopo joke would’ve annihilated.

When I say everything I know about succeeding a comedian is worthless, I know what I’m talking about because everything I know became worthless twice in my lifetime.

The first time was the evening of May 22, 1992. I’d been doing standup almost four years at that point, and that was Johnny Carson’s last ever Tonight Show.

Up until that night, the way you made it in comedy was very clear, simple, straightforward. You went on Carson, you killed, you got called over to the couch, and the next day you had your sitcom and your mansion, and you’re made. Just ask Drew Carey and Jerry Seinfeld and Ellen DeGeneres. And Bill Clinton. That’s how you did it.

But now, Johnny was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

All the comedians I remember starting out with in D.C., all the older ones, told me over and over again ‘you gotta work clean, you gotta get your five minutes, and you gotta get on Carson.’ And it all comes down to that.

And in one night, all of them were wrong. And not just wrong, they were unmoored. They were drifting. A lot of these bulletproof comics I’d opened for, whose careers seemed pre-destined, a lot of them never recovered from that night. You’ll never hear their names. They had been sharks in a man-made pond and had been drained. They decided their time had passed.

Keep that in mind for later. They had decided their time had passed.

The second time everything I knew about comedy became worthless has been petty much every day for the last three years.

I know that’s not an exact date. Some other younger, not yet famous name in this room – you are going to pinpoint that date 20 years from now. But for now, every day for about the last few years will have to suffice.

I just want to give you a brief timeline of my career up to this point, when I knew it was all changing again. Listen to my words very carefully. Two words will come up again and again and they’re going to come back later along with that phrase “they decided” and people are going to carry me around the room.

I was lucky enough to get hired onto King of Queens in 1998. I had nine years on that show. Money, great cast, even better writers, a lot of fun. I bought a house. Then I was lucky enough to get cast as a lead voice in a Pixar movie in 2007. Acclaim, money, I got to meet a lot of my heroes. Then I was lucky enough to get cast on The United States of Tara on Showtime. I got to watch Toni Collette work. I got to perform Diablo Cody’s writing. After which, I was lucky enough to get cast in Young Adult, which is where I got to make out with Charlize Theron. I will use that as an icebreaker if i ever meet Christina Ricci.

I’ve been lucky enough to be given specials on HBO, Comedy Central, and Showtime. As well as I’ve been lucky enough to release records on major labels, and I was lucky they approached me to do it. And that led to me being lucky enough to get Grammy nominations.

I know that sounds like a huge ego-stroking credit dump. But if you listened very carefully, you would have heard two words over and over again: “lucky” and “given.” Those are two very very dangerous words for a comedian. Those two words can put you to sleep, especially once you get a taste of both being “lucky” and being “given.” The days about luck and being given are about to end. They’re about to go away.

Not totally. There are always comedians who will work hard and get noticed by agents and managers and record labels. There will always be an element of that. And they deserve their success. And there’s always going to be people who benefit from that.

What I mean is: Not being lucky and not being given are no longer going to define your career as a comedian and as an artist.

Remember what I said earlier about those bulletproof headliners who focused on their 5 minutes on the Tonight Show and when it ended they decided their opportunity was gone? They decided. Nobody decided that for them. They decided.

Now, look at my career up to this point. Luck, being given. Other people deciding for me.

In the middle of the TV shows and the albums and the specials, I took a big chunk of my money and invested it in a little tour called The Comedians of Comedy. I put it together with my friends, we did small clubs, stayed in shitty hotel rooms, packed ourselves in a tiny van and drove it around the country. The tour was filmed for a very low-budget documentary that I convinced Netflix to release. That became a low-budget show on Comedy Central that we all still own a part of, me and the comedians. That led to a low budget concert film that we put on DVD.

At the end of it, I was exhausted, I was in debt, and I wound up with a wider fanbase of the kind of people I always dreamed of having as fans. And I built that from the ground up, friends and people I respected and was a fan of.

And I realize now I need to combine both of the lessons I’ve learned.

I need to decide more career stuff for myself and make it happen for myself, and I need to stop waiting to luck out and be given. I need to unlearn those muscles.

I’m seeing this notion take form in a lot of my friends. A lot of you out there. You, for instance, the person I’m writing to. Your podcast is amazing. Your videos on your YouTube channel are getting better and better every single one that you make, just like when we did open mics, better and better every week. Your Twitter feed is hilarious.

Listen, I’m doing the Laugh Trench in Milwaukee next week. Is there any chance for an RT?

Your friend,

Patton Oswalt

This is his second letter.

Dear gatekeepers in broadcast and cable executive offices, focus groups, record labels, development departments, agencies and management companies:

Shalom.

Last month I turned in a script for a pilot I co-wrote with Phil Rosenthal who has had a share of luck and success I can only dream of. Thanks for the notes you gave me on the pilot script. I’m not going to be implementing any of them.

And no, I’m not going to call you “the enemy” or “the man.” I have zero right to say that based on the breaks I’ve gotten from you over the years. If I tried to strike a Che Guevara pose, you would be correct in pointing out that the dramatic underlighting on my face was being reflected up from my swimming pool.

I am as much to blame for my uneasiness and realization of late that I’m part of the problem, that I’m half asleep and more than half complacent.

And I’m still not going to implement your notes. And I’m quoting Phil Rosenthal on this, but he said after we read your notes – and I’m quoting him verbatim – “We’re living in a post-Louie world, and these notes are from a pre-According to Jim world.”

I just read a letter to my fellow comedians telling them what I’m about to tell you, but in a different way. Here it is.

You guys need to stop thinking like gatekeepers. You need to do it for the sake of your own survival.

Because all of us comedians after watching Louis CK revolutionize sitcoms and comedy recordings and live tours. And listening to "WTF With Marc Maron" and "Comedy Bang! Bang!" and watching the growth of the UCB Theatre on two coasts and seeing careers being made on Twitter and Youtube.

Our careers don’t hinge on somebody in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. There are no gates. They’re gone. The model for success as a comedian in the '70s and '80s? That was middle school. Remember, they’d hand you a worksheet, fill in the blanks on the worksheet, hand it in, you’ll get your little points.

And that doesn’t prepare you for college. College is the 21st century. Show up if you want to, there’s an essay, there’s a paper, and there’s a final. And you decide how well you do on them, and that’s it. And then after you’re done with that, you get even more autonomy whether you want it or not because you’re an adult now.

Comedians are getting more and more comfortable with the idea that if we’re not successful, it’s not because we haven’t gotten our foot in the door, or nobody’s given us a hand up. We can do that ourselves now. Every single day we can do more and more without you and depend on you less and less.

If we work with you in the future, it’s going to be because we like your product and your choices and your commitment to pushing boundaries and ability to protect the new and difficult.

Here’s the deal, and I think it’s a really good one.

I want you, all of the gatekeepers, to become fans. I want you to become true enthusiasts like me. I want you to become thrill-seekers. I want you to be as excited as I was when I first saw Maria Bamford’s stand-up, or attended The Paul F. Tompkins show, or listened to Sklarbro Country….

I want you to be as charged with hope as I am that we’re looking at the most top-heavy with talent young wave of comedians that this industry have ever had at any time in its history.

And since this new generation was born into post-modern anything, they are wilder and more fearless than anything you’ve ever dealt with. But remind yourselves: Youth isn’t king. Content is king. Lena Dunham’s 26-year-old voice is just as vital as Louis CK’s 42-year-old voice which is just as vital as Eddie Pepitone’s 50-something voice.

Age doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all about what you have to say and what you’re going to say. Please throw the old fucking model away.

Just the tiny sampling at this amazing festival…. I’m excited to not be the funniest person in the room. It makes me work harder and try to be better at what I do. So be as excited and grateful as I am.

And if in the opportunities you give me, you try to cram all this wildness and risk-taking back in to the crappy mimeographic worksheet form of middle school, we’re just going to walk away. We’re not going to work together. No harm no foul. We can just walk away.

You know why we can do that now? Because of these. (Oswalt holds up an iPhone)

In my hand right now I’m holding more filmmaking technology than Orsen Welles had when he filmed Citizen Kane.

I’m holding almost the same amount of cinematography, post-editing, sound editing, and broadcast capabilities as you have at your tv network.

In a couple of years it’s going to be fucking equal. I see what’s fucking coming. This isn’t a threat, this is an offer. We like to create. We’re the ones who love to make shit all the time. You’re the ones who like to discover it and patronize it support it and nurture it and broadcast it. Just get out of our way when we do it.

If you get out of our way and we fuckin’ get out and fall on our face, we won’t blame you like we did in the past. Because we won’t have taken any of your notes, so it’ll truly be on us.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the stuff uploaded to Youtube. There are sitcoms now on the internet, some of them are brilliant, some of them are “meh,” some of them fuckin suck. At about the same ratio that things are brilliant and “meh” and suck on your network.

If you think that we’re somehow going to turn on your later if what we do falls on its face, and blame you because we can’t take criticism? Let me tell you one thing: We have gone through years of open mics to get where we need to get. Criticism is nothing to us, and comment threads are fucking electrons.

Signed,

Patton Oswalt

(hat tip to Sharilyn Johnson of Third Beat, who sat next to me during Oswalt's speech and typed much more furiously than I did)

Internet Pirates Will Always Win

— Nick Bilton, August 2012

STOPPING online piracy is like playing the world’s largest game of Whac-A-Mole.

Hit one, countless others appear. Quickly. And the mallet is heavy and slow.

Take as an example YouTube, where the Recording Industry Association of America almost rules with an iron fist, but doesn’t, because of deceptions like the one involving a cat.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, offers a free tool to the movie studios and television networks called Content ID. When a studio legitimately uploads a clip from a copyrighted film to YouTube, the Google tool automatically finds and blocks copies of the product.

To get around this roadblock, some YouTube users started placing copyrighted videos inside a still photo of a cat that appears to be watching an old JVC television set. The Content ID algorithm has a difficult time seeing that the video is violating any copyright rules; it just sees a cat watching TV.

Sure, it’s annoying for those who want to watch the video, but it works. (Obviously, it’s more than annoying for the company whose product is being pirated.)

Then there are those — possibly tens of millions of users, actually — who engage in peer-to-peer file-sharing on the sites using the BitTorrent protocol.

Earlier this year, after months of legal wrangling, authorities in a number of countries won an injunction against the Pirate Bay, probably the largest and most famous BitTorrent piracy site on the Web. The order blocked people from entering the site.

In retaliation, the Pirate Bay wrapped up the code that runs its entire Web site, and offered it as a free downloadable file for anyone to copy and install on their own servers. People began setting up hundreds of new versions of the site, and the piracy continues unabated.

Thus, whacking one big mole created hundreds of smaller ones.

Although the recording industries might believe they’re winning the fight, the Pirate Bay and others are continually one step ahead. In March, a Pirate Bay collaborator, who goes by the online name Mr. Spock, announced in a blog post that the team hoped to build drones that would float in the air and allow people to download movies and music through wireless radio transmitters.

“This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system,” Mr. Spock posted on the site. “A real act of war.” Some BitTorrent sites have also discussed storing servers in secure bank vaults. Message boards on the Web devoted to piracy have in the past raised the idea that the Pirate Bay has Web servers stored underwater.

“Piracy won’t go away,” said Ernesto Van Der Sar, editor of Torrent Freak, a site that reports on copyright and piracy news. “They’ve tried for years and they’ll keep on trying, but it won’t go away.” Mr. Van Der Sar said companies should stop trying to fight piracy and start experimenting with new ways to distribute content that is inevitably going to be pirated anyway.

According to Torrent Freak, the top pirated TV shows are downloaded several million times a week. Unauthorized movies, music, e-books, software, pornography, comics, photos and video games are watched, read and listened to via these piracy sites millions of times a day.

The copyright holders believe new laws will stop this type of piracy. But many others believe any laws will just push people to find creative new ways of getting the content they want.

“There’s a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it’s an inverse relationship,” said Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit technology organization that is trying to stop new piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. “The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online.”

The hit HBO show “Game of Thrones” is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don’t really want to solve the piracy problem.

“If every TV show was offered at a fair price to everyone in the world, there would definitely be much less copyright infringement,” he said. “But because of the monopoly power of the cable companies and content creators, they might actually make less money.”

The way people download unauthorized content is changing. In the early days of music piracy, people transferred songs to their home or work computers. Now, with cloud-based sites, like Wuala, uTorrent and Tribler, people stream movies and music from third-party storage facilities, often to mobile devices and TV’s. Some of these cloud-based Web sites allow people to set up automatic downloads of new shows the moment they are uploaded to piracy sites. It’s like piracy-on-demand. And it will be much harder to trace and to stop.

It is only going to get worse. Piracy has started to move beyond the Internet and media and into the physical world. People on the fringes of tech, often early adopters of new devices and gadgets, are now working with 3-D printers that can churn out actual physical objects. Say you need a wall hook or want to replace a bit of hardware that fell off your luggage. You can download a file and “print” these objects with printers that spray layers of plastic, metal or ceramics into shapes.

And people are beginning to share files that contain the schematics for physical objects on these BitTorrent sites. Although 3-D printing is still in its infancy, it is soon expected to become as pervasive as illegal music downloading was in the late 1990s.

Content owners will find themselves stuck behind ancient legal walls when trying to stop people from downloading objects online as copyright laws do not apply to standard physical objects deemed “noncreative.”

In the arcade version of Whac-A-Mole, the game eventually ends — often when the player loses. In the piracy arms-race version, there doesn’t seem to be a conclusion. Sooner or later, the people who still believe they can hit the moles with their slow mallets might realize that their time would be better spent playing an entirely different game.

Everything in its Right Pace

— Hannah Donovan, August 2012

Some time ago I realized, with mild panic, that our always-on, real-time communication channels weren't going away. As I was gulping down the day's feeds along with my morning coffee, it occurred to me that even if I wanted to, I couldn't really opt out. My refresh twitch is so habitual now it's almost hard to remember just how experimental things like the early days of Twitter felt.

Of course it once was, like all new things. The real-time web started as something we did because we could. Technological advancements like more efficient ways to retrieve large amounts of data, the cloud, and the little computers we now carry around in our pockets made it just a really sexy problem to solve. Successful experiments turned into trends, and those trends are now becoming unquestioned convention.

But is real time always the right choice? Do we even want everything we consume to move at this pace?

Terminal velocity

We're just embarking on an instrumented era of logging all our personal data and making it available instantly, yet diminishing returns have already started to set in. We struggle not only to keep up with each other's data trails, but more importantly, to know which crumbs in those trails are worth picking up, as well as how to find them again later—like when you want to relax on the sofa after a hectic week and you know there must have been a bunch of cool things to listen to or watch that flew by on Twitter, but gosh, where are they now?

Why is this? The two companies that pioneered real-time interfaces—that brought their users kicking and screaming from one redesign to the next as designers struggled to invent new ways of consuming; whose whales were failing left and right as technologists struggled to tame the data—what do they have in common? Facebook and Twitter are communication channels.

I have a hunch that when we invent new things, the first way we test our new technology is with talk. Our ability to communicate is simply one of the most basic use cases in the design problem of our lives. And not only is it essential and important and the rest of it, it's fun. It makes us laugh. Why wouldn't we?

This real-time barrage of voices works well for talk, because talk is fast, easy, effortless. We do it constantly. So what about things that take longer to make and consume: a song, a book, a film? Trying to squeeze these types of media up into the high-frequency end of the spectrum and expecting that we'll enjoy them whizzing around our heads at the same speed as our daily chatter might create a missed opportunity to explore a whole other end to the spectrum of pace for personal data!

Finding the right pace

At the music company Last.fm I worked alongside Matthew Ogle, helping to shape a service from a firehose of 800 scrobbles per second. When he and I left our respective product and design posts, we started talking more seriously about our remaining itches in online music. We realized we were missing a place where we could wholeheartedly express our musical taste in a way that's more distinctive, more singular, more...tender.

We'd also seen enough attempts at real-time song sharing to know that while having songs tick by like stock prices may look cool, it's not that valuable: How do I know which of those songs really matters to you?

This got us thinking about a service based around just a single piece of data at a time. What would a music service built only from "favorite songs" feel like? This raised the next question: What's the right time-scale for a song? We took a guess that you might have a new favorite song about every week.

These two constraints—one song at a time, for a maximum of seven days—led the design of our new project, thisismyjam.com.

As builders of the next generation of web products, we need to consider the right pace for the personal data in question. Pace should inform how that information is presented, contextualized, and delivered to the user.

Lovers in a dangerous time

IRL, this right pace—or "accepted lengths of time" for media things—is typically bound by the physical limitations of its particular medium, the people who make it, and how it is consumed. As different media industries matured and refined, we found the right pace for their outputs.

For example, when the American superhero comic was maturing as a medium, an artist could draw about a page per day. If you take a month and subtract eight days for weekends, that's the standard length of a monthly single issue comic book—22 pages. It's a somewhat arbitrary cycle, but it works with our other arbitrary monthly cycles, like getting paid. If comic books start coming to shops more frequently, and you have a limited budget, then all of a sudden your focus as a fan and a consumer is disrupted.

The single in the music industry is another example of pace. It's hard to expect everyone to sit down and listen to a whole new album, but one song? That's doable. It's not surprising, either, that the first rule of marketing a single is to allow it enough time to become an earworm before the whole album is released. People need time to take it in.

Constraints breed creativity

As media mature, their pace becomes not just a standard, but a helpful constraint that inspires further creativity.

Constraints have long inspired people who create, and the same is true for you and I. The limitations of the products we use every day inspire us: Twitter's 140 characters; Instagram's one photo at a time; or back in 2006, working within the range of code you could hack to make your MySpace page look unique.

Any network based around the concept of self-expression—the creation of personal data—will be more fun, easier to get started with, and more likely to create whole new genres of art if it includes limitations.

As easily as technology allows us to erase constraints, it gives us the power to create new ones.

Notable data

Like many, I believed that attention data was one of the most valuable types of data to collect when building an online service—because of its honesty. However, at Last.fm I learned that attention data is only valuable in aggregate. The "cold start" (when your profile is empty and recommendations are useless until you start scrobbling) was one of the biggest design challenges I dealt with. When the unit of data is so small, and created so passively, you must reach a tipping point before those single units add up enough that you can extract some value out of them for the user.

A unit of data like your current favorite song may not be as precise, but it's a unit that carries a ton of human meaning. Asking someone what song they've been into lately is almost always a good conversation starter, and a lot can be inferred and asked about based on it. A favorite song is instantly valuable, and a handful of them can go a long way.

I've been calling this notable data. Knowing what song was the soundtrack to that summer, or why you'll always want to wiggle to that guilty pleasure from the '90s, or which track you want played at your funeral, is a piece of personal data so weighty that if done right, it can create network value almost instantly. And its value is twofold: it's not just that it's more special; it's scarce. How many favorite songs can one person have?

In the physical world, the scarcity of something, like a Stradivarius or Michael Jackson's glove, is one of the driving factors of its value. Online, scarcity is almost a forgotten word. But maybe we just need to explore it in a different way?

Notable data starts to get really enticing when that single piece of data is crafted—contextualized with other pieces of data to make it even more valuable. It takes time, so it's bound to happen less often. A Foursquare check-in with a tip has more value than just a check-in; an Instagram photo that's been run through three different apps to get that perfect effect has more value than one that uses the standard filters, which still has more value than just a crappy camera phone pic.

Pace and value: an inverse relationship?

If scarcity breeds value, where can we find it online? Our time. In the virtual world, where we can make endless copies of data and "limited editions" don't exist, the one thing that prevents us from doing even more than we already are is the limits of our brains (and our sanity).

When we pull down to refresh and find a little gem of digital craft—not just an automated personal stat or an off-the-cuff remark, but something that took time to make—it's delightful. It's valuable. But if these valuable, scarce things are slow, you may ask, won't they always be niche? Like slow food and artisan coffee, a rounding error in a world of McDonald's and Starbucks? Am I just some kind of internet hippie who thinks we all need to take a deep breath and slow down? No, there's actually real value in this model. Let's do the math, using This Is My Jam as an example:

- Let's assume you have a favorite radio station. Let's also assume the most new music you can enjoyably consume in a day is an hour, tops. (Listening to all new music is exhausting; there's a reason most radio stations play stuff you've heard before).

- The average length of a pop song is 3.5 minutes, so you need about 17 songs for an hour of new music.

- 17 songs per day x 7 days per week = 119 new songs per week.

- If 1 This Is My Jam user = 1 new song per week, you only need to follow 119 people for an hour of new, handpicked songs to listen to every single day. (My guess is there are also a lot of people who would be quite satisfied with only an hour of new music per week—which would require following 17 just people.)

When you compare that to the number of people you follow on Twitter or are friends with on Facebook, it's probably not as many, or maybe just teetering in the same range. Yet even at this slow pace, it satisfies the use case of discovering new songs, because it's a network that's built around the right pace for music.

Go forth and explore the spectrum

In 1967, when describing the community of the future (our present), Marshall McLuhan predicted "electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of 'time' and 'space' and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men." He was right; this is the real-time state we're currently living in.

I believe it's time to envision another community of the future—one slightly less dystopian than all information and media pouring down on our heads, whether it be night or day, whether it makes sense for that content to travel at high frequencies or not.

As the people who build this next vision of the future, we must consider pace.

If it helps, use analog metaphors to dream up limitations that help create that right pace. Experiment with speed. Try letting this drive the design principles of your work: If it should be at the fast end of the spectrum, how does this dictate how the data should be presented and delivered to the user? Likewise for the slow end of the spectrum: What's the best context for your product? Twitchy pull-to-refresh data works well in your pocket, but what about for the best films your friends have watched this month?

If there is an exciting bit to the slow end of the spectrum, one that plays with scarcity and value, what do we have to lose by investigating it? I mean, the real-time world will always be there when we want it.

How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

An exclusive look inside Ground Truth, the secretive program to build the world's best accurate maps.

— Alexis Madrigal, September 2012

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B -- and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or "Ground Truth," actually works.

Google opened up at a key moment in its evolution. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. But then the mobile world exploded. Where you're searching from has become almost as important as what you're searching for. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple's iOS.

And for good reason. If Google's mission is to organize all the world's information, the most important challenge -- far larger than indexing the web -- is to take the world's physical information and make it accessible and useful.

"If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online," Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. "Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and [the online world], and Maps really plays that part."

This is not just a theoretical concern. Mapping systems matter on phones precisely because they are the interface between the offline and online worlds. If you're at all like me, you use mapping more than any other application except for the communications suite (phone, email, social networks, and text messaging).

Google is locked in a battle with the world's largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. Whereas Apple's strengths are in product design, supply chain management, and retail marketing, Google's most obvious realm of competitive advantage is in information. Geo data -- and the apps built to use it -- are where Google can win just by being Google. That didn't matter on previous generations of iPhones because they used Google Maps, but now Apple's created its own service. How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars.

But that would entail actually building a better map.

***

The office where Google has been building the best representation of the world is not a remarkable place. It has all the free food, ping pong, and Google Maps-inspired Christoph Niemann cartoons that you'd expect, but it's still a low-slung office building just off the 101 in Mountain View in the burbs.

I was slated to meet with Gupta and the engineering ringleader on his team, former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who'd spent his 20 percent time working on Google Mars, and Nick Volmar, an "operator" who actually massages map data.

"So you want to make a map," Weiss-Malik tells me as we sit down in front of a massive monitor. "There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts."

This is what they started out with, the TIGER data from the US Census Bureau (though the base layer could and does come from a variety of sources in different countries).

On first inspection, this data looks great. The roads look like they are all there and you've got the freeways differentiated. This is a good map to the untrained eye. But let's look closer. There are issues where the digital data does not match the physical world. I've circled a few obvious ones below.

And that's just from comparing the map to the satellite imagery. But there are also a variety of other tools at Google's disposal. One is bringing in data from other sources, say the US Geological Survey. But Google's Ground Truthers can also bring another exclusive asset to bear on the maps problem: the Street View cars' tracks and imagery. In keeping with Google's more-data-is-better-data mantra, the maps team, largely driven by Street View, is publishing more imagery data every two weeks than Google possessed total in 2006.*

Let's step back a tiny bit to recall with wonderment the idea that a single company decided to drive cars with custom cameras over every road they could access. Google is up to five million miles driven now. Each drive generates two kinds of really useful data for mapping. One is the actual tracks the cars have taken; these are proof-positive that certain routes can be taken. The other are all the photos. And what's significant about the photographs in Street View is that Google can run algorithms that extract the traffic signs and can even paste them onto the deep map within their Atlas tool. So, for a particularly complicated intersection like this one in downtown San Francisco, that could look like this:

Google Street View wasn't built to create maps like this, but the geo team quickly realized that computer vision could get them incredible data for ground truthing their maps. Not to detour too much, but what you see above is just the beginning of how Google is going to use Street View imagery. Think of them as the early web crawlers (remember those?) going out in the world, looking for the words on pages. That's what Street View is doing. One of its first uses is finding street signs (and addresses) so that Google's maps can better understand the logic of human transportation systems. But as computer vision and OCR improve, any word that is visible from a road will become a part of Google's index of the physical world.

Later in the day, Google Maps VP Brian McClendon put it like this: "We can actually organize the world's physical written information if we can OCR it and place it," McClendon said. "We use that to create our maps right now by extracting street names and addresses, but there is a lot more there."

More like what? "We already have what we call 'view codes' for 6 million businesses and 20 million addresses, where we know exactly what we're looking at," McClendon continued. "We're able to use logo matching and find out where are the Kentucky Fried Chicken signs ... We're able to identify and make a semantic understanding of all the pixels we've acquired. That's fundamental to what we do."

For now, though, computer vision transforming Street View images directly into geo-understanding remains in the future. The best way to figure out if you can make a left turn at a particular intersection is still to have a person look at a sign -- whether that's a human driving or a human looking at an image generated by a Street View car.

There is an analogy to be made to one of Google's other impressive projects: Google Translate. What looks like machine intelligence is actually only a recombination of human intelligence. Translate relies on massive bodies of text that have been translated into different languages by humans; it then is able to extract words and phrases that match up. The algorithms are not actually that complex, but they work because of the massive amounts of data (i.e. human intelligence) that go into the task on the front end.

Google Maps has executed a similar operation. Humans are coding every bit of the logic of the road onto a representation of the world so that computers can simply duplicate (infinitely, instantly) the judgments that a person already made.

This reality is incarnated in Nick Volmar, the operator who has been showing off Atlas while Weiss-Malik and Gupta explain it. He probably uses twenty-five keyboard shortcuts switching between types of data on the map and he shows the kind of twitchy speed that I associate with long-time designers working with Adobe products or professional Starcraft players. Volmar has clearly spent thousands of hours working with this data. Weiss-Malik told me that it takes hundreds of operators to map a country. (Rumor has it many of these people work in the Bangalore office, out of which Gupta was promoted.)

The sheer amount of human effort that goes into Google's maps is just mind-boggling. Every road that you see slightly askew in the top image has been hand-massaged by a human. The most telling moment for me came when we looked at couple of the several thousand user reports of problems with Google Maps that come in every day. The Geo team tries to address the majority of fixable problems within minutes. One complaint reported that Google did not show a new roundabout that had been built in a rural part of the country. The satellite imagery did not show the change, but a Street View car had recently driven down the street and its tracks showed the new road perfectly.

Volmar began to fix the map, quickly drawing the new road and connecting it to the existing infrastructure. In his haste (and perhaps with the added pressure of three people watching his every move), he did not draw a perfect circle of points. Weiss-Malik and I detoured into another conversation for a couple of minutes. By the time I looked back at the screen, Volmar had redrawn the circle with perfect precision and upgraded a few other things while he was at it. The actions were impressively automatic. This is an operation that promotes perfectionism.

And that's how you get your maps to look this this:

Some details are worth pointing out. In the top at the center, trails have been mapped out and coded as places for walking. All the parking lots have been mapped out. All the little roads, say, to the left of the small dirt patch on the right, have also been coded. Several of the actual buildings have been outlined. Down at the bottom left, a road has been marked as a no-go. At each and every intersection, there are arrows that delineate precisely where cars can and cannot turn.

Now imagine doing this for every tile on Google's map in the United States and 30 other countries over the last four years. Every roundabout perfectly circular, every intersection with the correct logic. Every new development. Every one-way street. This is a task of a nearly unimaginable scale. This is not something you can put together with a few dozen smart engineers.

I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company. The secret to this success isn't, as you might expect, Google's facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world. Google's map offerings build in the human intelligence on the front end, and that's what allows its computers to tell you the best route from San Francisco to Boston.

***

It's probably better not to think of Google Maps as a thing like a paper map. Geographic information systems represent a jump from paper maps like the abacus to the computer. "I honestly think we're seeing a more profound change, for map-making, than the switch from manuscript to print in the Renaissance," University of London cartographic historian Jerry Brotton told the Sydney Morning Herald. "That was huge. But this is bigger."

The maps we used to keep folded in our glove compartments were a collection of lines and shapes that we overlaid with human intelligence. Now, as we've seen, a map is a collection of lines and shapes with Nick Volmar's (and hundreds of others') intelligence encoded within.

It's common when we discuss the future of maps to reference the Borgesian dream of a 1:1 map of the entire world. It seems like a ridiculous notion that we would need a complete representation of the world when we already have the world itself. But to take scholar Nathan Jurgenson's conception of augmented reality seriously, we would have to believe that every physical space is, in his words, "interpenetrated" with information. All physical spaces already are also informational spaces. We humans all hold a Borgesian map in our heads of the places we know and we use it to navigate and compute physical space. Google's strategy is to bring all our mental maps together and process them into accessible, useful forms.

Their MapMaker product makes that ambition clear. Project managed by Gupta during his time in India, it's the "bottom up" version of Ground Truth. It's a publicly accessible way to edit Google Maps by adding landmarks and data about your piece of the world. It's a way of sucking data out of human brains and onto the Internet. And it's a lot like Google's open competitor, Open Street Map, which has proven that it, too, can harness the crowd's intelligence.

As we slip and slide into a world where our augmented reality is increasingly visible to us off and online, Google's geographic data may become its most valuable asset. Not solely because of this data alone, but because location data makes everything else Google does and knows more valuable.

Or as my friend and sci-fi novelist Robin Sloan put it to me, "I maintain that this is Google's core asset. In 50 years, Google will be the self-driving car company (powered by this deep map of the world) and, oh, P.S. they still have a search engine somewhere."

Of course, they will always need one more piece of geographic information to make all this effort worthwhile: You. Where you are, that is. Your location is the current that makes Google's giant geodata machine run. They've built this whole playground as an elaborate lure for you. As good and smart and useful as it is, good luck resisting taking the bait.

Purpose is hard to measure.

— Victor Mathieux, September 2012

There’s currently a challenge in trying to make things or lead companies that try to serve a greater purpose. Purpose can be hard to measure.

If we look at the metrics we often use to gauge the success of products or companies, they tell us very little about whether the subject is successful at fulfilling it’s purpose or not.

One of my favorite quotes about the potential downfalls of using the wrong metrics to measure something is by RFK on the topic of using GNP to measure the success of a nation:

The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

In the same way that GNP fails to encapsulate important parts of the bigger picture, I believe many of the metrics we are using to measure the success of our products and companies are also failing to frame things in context of a greater purpose. The truth, is that a product can be profitable and have high user-engagement and retention without leading to any meaningful improvement in people’s lives; sometimes it can even have a negative impact. Let’s call these products “cigarettes”. After all, cigarettes maybe profitable for the companies that create them and they sure have high user-retention, but they create tremendous negative externalities for society.

There are plenty of “cigarettes” in the world of the web and unfortunately, these products are rarely held accountable for the negative externalities they create.

If you’re an entrepreneur, make sure you’re not creating a cigarette business. If you’re an investor, make sure you’re not investing in one just because the metrics look great and the product seems attractive. Cigarettes were attractive once too.

If you’re a person, think about which products you may be using that are cigarettes. Is it time to quit?

On an other note, it’s easy to understand why many of us simply choose to use existing metrics to gauge our success instead of inventing new ones. After all, creating anything new takes time and energy, and these are often two of our scarcest resources. But even if it takes additional effort, I believe the time has come for more of us to start working on new ways to measure our success. If you have ideas about how to do this, I’d love chat.

To those who say, “But investors only care about existing metrics… why should we spend the time and energy to develop new ones?” I don’t think this is true for the longrun. Maybe at first investors will be skeptical of doing something new, but let’s remember that investors are people and people often don’t know what they want until they’re actually presented with it. I’ve met and heard so many angel investors who say they became angels in order to increase the leverage they have in improving people’s lives and making a meaningful contribution to the world. I believe many of them speak their true intentions; however, they are still using basic financial and user engagement metrics to measure success, simply because other better metrics haven’t been created yet. As a result, they turn to the closest symbols of “success” they know of — even if these metrics are poor at assessing what truly matters.

Let’s find new ways of measuring success for two reasons:

1. So investors can stop investing in cigarette companies and start taking bigger risks on teams that actually have a chance at making a meaningful contribution to the world.

2. So we can gain greater awareness of the impact we’re actually having on people’s lives, and more often treat the work we do as a gift — because it is.

Our current metrics can only help us to improve so much, they’re no compass for purpose.

CREDITS:

- Sha Hwang for being a sounding board about this topic.

- Chip Conley for insisting that the way we measure things is important.

- Bret Victor for always encouraging makers to create with purpose in mind, especially in this video.

- Francis Pedraza for inspiring this credit format at the end of a post.

Elon Musk, the 21st Century Industrialist

— Ashlee Vance, September 2012

On Fridays, Elon Musk gathers his engineers in an old hangar in Los Angeles. The building, next to a municipal airport a couple miles south of the Hollywood Park race track and casino, is now a research and development facility for Musk’s electric car company, Tesla Motors (TSLA). Musk uses these meetings to check the team’s progress and give straightforward, often withering, design critiques. During one such session in July, versions of the Model S sedan and the skeletal frame of a forthcoming sport-utility vehicle, the Model X, sit in a corner. Drivetrain prototypes lay on the concrete floor next to interior cabin mock-ups.

Musk’s staff huddles around him as he zeroes in on a sun visor. He hates it. He examines the seam and, noticing how it pushes up the fabric, declares it “fish-lipped.” The screws on the hinges feel like knives stabbing him in the eye. He announces he wants to find the best sun visor in the world, and then make a better one.

Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

The session continues in the parking lot, where a number of competitors’ vehicles—some hybrids, some conventional—await judgment. Musk squeezes his six-foot-two, broad-shouldered frame into the back seat of a luxury sedan from Hyundai and then into an Acura SUV. He scoffs at the cramped third-row seats in the Acura. “That’s like a midget cave,” he says, and the group chuckles on cue. “It’s good to get a sense for just how bad the other cars are.”

Last year alone, Acura’s parent company, Honda Motor (HMC), sold 200,000 hybrids. Toyota Motor (TM) sold 629,000. In nine years, Tesla has built a total of 2,450 vehicles. The auto industry may have had a rough time of late, but Tesla has had buckets of delays, quality issues, and near-death financial crises. That Musk feels no shame dismissing the efforts of vastly larger competitors would not surprise his friends and colleagues, who describe him as Steve Jobs, John D. Rockefeller, and Howard Hughes rolled into one. “He’s a throwback to when people were doing less incrementalist things,” says Peter Thiel, the tech investor who co-founded PayPal with Musk. “The companies he’s started are executing against a vision measured not in years but in decades.” Bruce Leak, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur who once worked with Musk at a video game company, says, “He has that Bill Gates energy where his foot bounces and he’s wiggling just because he’s so smart.” Jon Favreau, a friend and the director of the Iron Man movies, has called Musk the basis for his version of comic book hero Tony Stark, the playboy inventor who builds a flying weaponized suit.

Musk has been having a year good enough for another movie. In May, his Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, successfully launched a 227-foot-tall rocket from a platform in Cape Canaveral, docking one of its Dragon capsules with the International Space Station, orbiting 220 miles above the earth—a feat NASA called “absolutely incredible.” Tesla, which went public in 2010, started shipping the all-electric Model S luxury sedan in June and will soon unveil a nationwide network of charging stations. SolarCity, where Musk is chairman of the board, is a player in the residential and commercial solar markets, with more than 28,000 customers, and is expected to go public imminently at a value of about $1.5 billion. Musk is chief executive officer of Tesla and SpaceX, and is the largest shareholder in all three companies. Following the SolarCity IPO, his net worth could be well north of $3 billion.

If they survive, they’ll continue to be improbable and inspiring businesses. “The next six months will be about really proving things for Tesla,” Musk says. “We need to get in excess of 20,000 units a year and in excess of 25 percent gross margins, which would be close to the highest in the car business.” SpaceX has a backlog of about $3 billion booked from spaceflight customers through 2017, but still has to successfully execute all those launches using equipment it hasn’t finished developing. Musk’s goals go well beyond cash-flow statements, however. “We don’t have sustainable energy production solved,” he says, “and we are not a multiplanetary species.”

Musk, 41, grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, during the last decades of apartheid. He was the oldest of three siblings. His father ran his own construction engineering firm, handling government and commercial projects. His mother was a dietician.

Musk’s parents divorced when he was about 9 years old. Along with Kimbal, his younger brother, he enjoyed an unusual amount of independence. They once tried to ride their bikes the 50 miles or so to Johannesburg. “We thought we knew how to get there, but nobody actually had a map,” says Elon. “We got lost halfway and ended up going through some super-dangerous areas.” He also liked to create homemade explosives and rockets. “It is remarkable how many things you can explode. I’m lucky I have all my fingers.” Musk led his brother and cousins in a number of ventures, such as selling Easter eggs in the neighborhood and starting a video game arcade.

Photograph by Bryce Duffy for Bloomberg Businessweek

Young Elon was a big reader. “He would go through two books in one day,” says Kimbal. In his early teens, Elon had something of an existential crisis and devoured a mountain of philosophical and religious texts. Asked if any work in particular gave him solace, he cites The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the comic science fiction novel. “It taught me that the tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but that once you do that, the rest is really easy,” Musk says, referring to the novel’s revelation that the answer to the ultimate question of “life, the universe, and everything” is 42. “I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”

At age 15, Musk decided that the path to self-actualization traveled through the U.S. His mother was born in Canada, which was close enough. Musk got a Canadian passport, bought a plane ticket, and arrived in Montreal with little money and no home. He spent the year showing up unannounced on the doorsteps of distant Canadian relatives and doing stints on farms, tending vegetable patches, and shoveling grain. The low point was cleaning out boilers at a lumber mill. “You had to put on this hazmat suit and shimmy through this little tunnel,” Musk recalls. “Then you take this steaming goop and shovel it back into the hole you just came through and wait for someone else to put it into a wheelbarrow.”

Musk eventually made his way to Queen’s University in Ontario for two years and then to the University of Pennsylvania, where he got degrees in economics and physics. Musk put himself through Penn by throwing massive parties at a house he lived in with Adeo Ressi, another student. Ressi created day-glo artworks to give the house the feel of a club; Musk managed the finances. Ressi remembers Musk converting one of his works of art into a desk. “I’m like, ‘Dude, that’s like installation art in our party house.’ It wasn’t a desk. It was a work of art. The argument about this went on and on, and maybe today in his infinite wisdom he’ll admit that, ‘Adeo, that was art.’ ” When asked about this, Musk says, “It was a desk.”

As an undergraduate, Musk wrote business plans for an electronic book-scanning service and an “ultra-capacitor” energy storage venture. He bored dates with monologues on the wonders of electric cars. To get any of his grand projects started, he needed a lot of money. So in 1995 he bailed out of a graduate program in applied physics at Stanford and, with Kimbal, started an Internet map and directory venture called Zip2. Four years later, they sold Zip2 to Compaq Computer for more than $300 million.

Musk took his winnings and plowed them into another startup called X.com. This was basically an online bank and would later become PayPal. Musk was the largest shareholder—and, for a time, CEO—until EBay (EBAY) acquired it for $1.5 billion in 2002. He made $180 million.

Musk poured that fortune into SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, and funded a data-center software company called Everdream, among other ventures. He palled around with Hollywood types, which is how he got to know Favreau. Musk executive-produced the satirical 2005 movie Thank You for Smoking.

Tesla almost collapsed in 2008 under the weight of delays and cost overruns, then struggled to raise a new round of venture capital while Musk was pilloried as a dilettante getting his comeuppance. Auto industry blog The Truth About Cars had a running feature called “Tesla Death Watch.” Musk put his last $3 million into Tesla and began borrowing money from friends. His marriage to his college sweetheart Justine unraveled, and they both blogged their takes on the divorce settlement negotiations. “I was just getting pistol-whipped,” Musk says. He sold off his McLaren F1, at the time the most expensive car in the world. “I was like, ‘I’m f—ed. What am I going to do?’ ” And then the rich guy’s deus ex machina arrived when Dell (DELL) acquired Everdream, of which Musk was the major shareholder, for $120 million. “That money arrived in early 2009 and replenished the coffers,” he says. “Thank goodness, man.”

At Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif., the largest building is a half-mile long and a quarter-mile wide. The facility used to build 1,452 vehicles a day for Toyota, a mix of Corollas, Tacomas, and other cars. Musk bought it for $42 million when Toyota shuttered the plant in 2010. At the moment it’s producing six Model S’s each day. Huge sheets of aluminum come in, get cut up into smaller chunks, and are bent and folded by tremendous stamping machines into the Model S’s chassis and body. In other parts of the building, workers assemble lithium ion battery packs. Swiveling red-and-black robots fasten parts with a delicate touch. Some of the robots pick up entire vehicles and hang them from an aerial conveyor.

From top: AP Photo; SpaceX; Tesla Motors; Getty Images

Each finished car goes through a gantlet of tests, including being sprayed with high-pressure water to check for leaks and being driven across surfaces with different textures to see if anything shakes loose. Musk inspects each Model S before it’s shipped. Tesla expects to produce as many as 100 cars per day by the end of the year, says Gilbert Passin, Tesla’s vice president for manufacturing.

Like many of the employees at Tesla and SpaceX, Passin was hired away from an established rival—Toyota in his case. As workers assemble cars with Sweet Child O’ Mine playing on a radio, Passin explains that Tesla offered him a chance to do something bold and new. “We started here with nothing, and now have a chance to show what we can do,” he says.

The Model S starts at about $50,000— after federal tax credits—and is an engineering marvel. It’s a sedan that can hold seven people, get from zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds, and go 300 miles on a charge. With the battery pack forming the base of the vehicle, and the motor about the size of a watermelon, the Model S has far more space than cars with gasoline engines. There’s a trunk, of course, and also what the company calls a frunk—a large compartment in the front where the engine usually goes. Since there’s no gear-shift console between the front seats, there’s extra storage space up front and room for a 17-inch touchscreen.

Tesla doesn’t have conventional dealerships with lots of models on display. It has a chain of small, minimalist retail stores in high-end shopping centers like the ritzy Santana Row in San Jose. Tesla’s outlets resemble Apple stores, which is no accident. In 2010, Musk hired George Blankenship, who came up with Apple’s (AAPL) retail strategy, to oversee Tesla’s stores. At the San Jose location, a red Model S sits in the middle with velvet ropes around it. Nearby, a frame with no body shows off the battery pack, motor, and custom drivetrain. On the walls, touchscreen displays allow prospective customers to gauge how much money they might save by going electric and try out different configurations for their car. Once they settle on a design, they swipe their finger across the screen, and their personalized car appears on a huge screen in the middle of the store.

The salespeople aren’t on commission. “The typical dealer wants to sell you a car on the spot to clear inventory off his lot,” Blankenship says. “The goal here is to develop a relationship with Tesla and with electric vehicles.” As Apple did with the iPod and iPhone, Tesla wants to turn its vehicles into a statement as much as a tool. “We have thousands of reservations for the Model S,” Blankenship says. And that’s without test-drives. Tesla has 24 stores worldwide and plans to add 10 more this year.

Blankenship, who used to work a few doors down from Jobs, credits Musk with hiring experts and letting them work without too much oversight. “This is the first place I’ve worked that’s going to change the world,” he says.

On July 12, Musk turns up late to a screening at the William Morris Endeavor talent agency in Beverly Hills. Musk and his friend, actress Olivia Wilde, executive-produced the evening’s film, Baseball in the Time of Cholera, a 30-minute documentary about a cholera epidemic in Haiti. Rainn Wilson, the actor and star of The Office, emcees the post-screening discussion.

Illustrations by R. Kikuo Johnson

Afterwards, Musk and a couple dozen people head to Mr. Chow, the favorite Chinese restaurant of the Hollywood elite, for a little celebration. Musk is in a chatty mood and lingers on the street outside. He mentions the time NASA officials sat star-struck when Robert Downey Jr. popped in to visit the SpaceX offices. I suggest that he doesn’t come across as Tony Stark, drinking scotch in the back of a Humvee in Afghanistan, so much as a Diet Coke-chugging workaholic nerd. Musk retorts, “Hey, I went to Haiti last Christmas and visited some pretty dangerous parts. I got wasted, too, on some drink they call the Zombie.”

Bryn Mooser, co-director of Baseball in the Time of Cholera, confirms the trip to Haiti. Musk showed up with 450 toys and 35 MacBook Airs for an orphanage. He taught the kids how to fire rockets into the sky during a barbecue, and then set off into the country to visit a village. Did Musk bring all of those presents on his private jet? “Yes, but we don’t mention that,” Mooser says with a wink.

Across town from Beverly Hills, and next door to the Tesla R&D center, is SpaceX’s compound. Musk leased it after Boeing (BA) scaled back production of its 747 fuselages and left the facility. The front section of the SpaceX headquarters looks like your typical technology company office. There are rows of desks arranged in an open floor plan with Musk sitting among the crew in an extra-large corner cubicle. One hundred feet or so beyond, things get unusual. First, there’s an assembly area where people in blue SpaceX lab coats surrounded by oscilloscopes and soldering irons build the company’s custom circuit boards. Further in, the building opens up into a 300,000-square-foot assembly floor. Here, SpaceX makes 80 percent of the parts that go into its spacecraft.

Hundreds of people move about the floor, tending to machinery custom built by SpaceX, amid the din of machines exhaling as they release pressurized air and drill into metal. Merlin engines and Dragon capsules dot the floor; the latter are about 14 feet tall and designed to carry about 13,000 pounds of cargo. One day, Musk hopes they will ferry as many as seven people at a time into space.

One group of workers is assembling the protective casing that will go around a satellite for a potential customer—the governments of both Canada and Thailand are interested, Musk says. Next year, SpaceX looks to launch eight flights, and as many as 16 the following year. If it hits those goals, SpaceX would be handling the majority of the world’s commercial spaceflights. (Companies like Virgin Galactic are offering trips for tourists.) In three years, SpaceX intends to send people to the space station for $20 million each, rather than the $63 million charged today. SpaceX may be Musk’s most solid performer—it already turns a profit as it works through its backlog of orders.

Steve Jurvetson, a SpaceX board member and early investor in everything from Tesla to HotMail to Synthetic Genomics, says Musk has unusual intuition about what will work in space. Jurvetson builds and fires rockets as a hobby and has an office full of space memorabilia—much of which he bought directly from former astronauts. “You can’t finesse your way around this stuff,” he says. “There’s not a lot of room for artistry because the physics will bite you in the ass.” Musk has come up with modular designs for mixing and matching engine configurations depending on the payload, says Jurvetson. He thinks Musk has built the safest, most cost-effective spacecraft yet, which is why SpaceX has ended up as America’s only real answer to date for sending goods and people to and from the space station and perhaps beyond. “We’re not Moon people,” says Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, “but we’re definitely Mars people.”

Musk is not easy to work with. Former employees, none of whom would speak on the record, describe him as autocratic and blunt to the point of offensive. Musk had a long-running feud with Martin Eberhard, co-founder and former CEO of Tesla. Eberhard resigned under contentious circumstances and later sued Musk for libel. For a time, Eberhard kept a blog documenting Musk’s alleged poor treatment of employees. Eventually, the two sides reached an agreement to stop disparaging each other publicly. “Like Jobs, Elon does not tolerate C or D players,” says Jurvetson. “But I’d say he’s nicer than Jobs and a bit more refined than Bill Gates.”

The employees who stick with him seem to love him. The SpaceX staff pulled all-nighters during the recent mission to the space station, and their factory never closes. When the Model S sedans began rolling off the factory lines, Tesla employees waved American flags and shed actual tears of joy.

Musk splits his time between the factories in Los Angeles and Fremont, spending a few days in each location every week. When he’s in Silicon Valley, he crashes at friends’ houses rather than staying at hotels. “We play video games together and eat some food,” says Bill Lee, an early investor in SpaceX and Tesla who hosts Musk at his home.

Freeing mankind from the scourge of carbon, not to mention its terrestrial shackles, has taken a toll on Musk’s personal life. In August he finalized his divorce from his second wife, the actress Talulah Riley. He’s had one vacation in four years. This summer he took his five boys—twins and triplets—to Maui with Kimbal and his family. “I think the time allocated to the businesses and the kids is going fine,” says Musk. “I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours?”

On the assumption that people will be living on earth for some time, Musk is cooking up plans for something he calls the Hyperloop. He won’t share specifics but says it’s some sort of tube capable of taking someone from downtown San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. He calls it a “fifth mode of transportation”—the previous four being train, plane, automobile, and boat. “What you want is something that never crashes, that’s at least twice as fast as a plane, that’s solar powered and that leaves right when you arrive, so there is no waiting for a specific departure time,” Musk says. His friends claim he’s had a Hyperloop technological breakthrough over the summer. “I’d like to talk to the governor and president about it,” Musk continues. “Because the $60 billion bullet train they’re proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile. They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.” The cost of the SF-LA Hyperloop would be in the $6 billion range, he says.

Musk is also planning to develop a new kind of airplane: “Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.”

After a few hours with Musk, hypersonic tubes and jets that take off like rockets start to seem imminent. But interplanetary travel? Really? Musk says he’s on target to get a spacecraft to the red planet in 10 to 15 years, perhaps with him on board. “I would like to die on Mars,” he says. “Just not on impact.”

The Land That Time and Money Forgot

New York City’s housing projects are the last of their kind in the country. And they may be on their way to extinction.

— Mark Jacobson, September 2012

Morrisania Air Rights Houses, the Bronx.   (Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

Asked if he’d heard of Lloyd Blankfein, the man in the Yankees cap standing by 295 Cozine Avenue in East New York muttered, “What he do?”

In the projects, when someone who looks like me comes up to you, it almost has to be bad news: a cop, a process server, a guy from the Housing Authority. But no, I explained. Blankfein was the head of Goldman Sachs. They ruled Wall Street, the Trilateral Commission too, sat at the table with the Illuminati.

“He used to live in this building,” I said.

It was so. Son of a postal clerk and a receptionist at a burglar-alarm factory, Blankfein had grown up right there, at 295 Cozine Avenue, a redbrick building more or less exactly like the other eighteen redbrick buildings at the Linden Houses. That was in the fifties and sixties, before the white people moved out of the projects and East New York became one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Still, the Goldman CEO apparently retained affection for his childhood home, once sending a post to the East New York Project, a website for people nostalgic for the days of egg creams and spaldeens. It said: “Graduate of Jefferson (’71), Gershwin (’68), P.S. 306 (’65) and the Linden Projects. Currently reside in Manhattan with wife Laura and three kids. Lloyd Blankfein lloyd.blankfein@gs.com.”

“King of the world, right here?” the man declared. “No shit.”

My visit to the Linden Houses was part of a self-guided tour of what I’d come to call “Nychaland.” As in NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, a.k.a. the projects.

New York might be a city of neighborhoods, but Nychaland is a zone of its own. It is almost unthinkably huge: 334 “developments” spread from Staten Island’s Berry Houses to Throgs Neck in the Bronx—178,895 apartments in 2,602 buildings situated on an aggregate 2,486 acres, an area three times the size of Central Park. The population of Nychaland is usually cited at 400,000, but this number is universally regarded as too low, since most everyone knows someone living “off lease.” One NYCHA employee says that “600,000 is more like it.” That’s about 8 percent of New York—with 160,000 families on the waiting list. If Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati.

Despite these prodigious stats, the projects remain a mystery to most New Yorkers, a shadow city within the city, out of sight and mind, except when someone gets shot or falls down an elevator shaft—just these bad-news redbrick piles to whiz by on the BQE.

Indeed, perhaps Nychaland’s most compelling attribute is the fact that it exists at all. Across the U.S., public housing, condemned as a tax-draining vector of institutionalized mayhem and poverty, whipping-boy symbol of supposedly foolhardy urban policy, has largely disappeared. Chicago knocked down Cabrini-Green, St. Louis imploded Pruitt-Igoe, New Orleans flattened Lafitte after Katrina. Only in New York does public housing remain on a large scale, remnants of the days when the developments were considered a bulwark of social liberalism, a way to move up.

Not that the passage has been smooth. The eighties and early nineties were the crack era. In the South Bronx, whole families at the Mott Haven houses were addicted, parents copping behind the developments, kids in front, hiding their stash so mom and dad wouldn’t steal it. Then came the gangs, bands of territorial youths calling themselves the 40 Wolves, Gun Clapping Goonies, Broad Day Shooters, and Fuck Shit Up (FSU). Over at the Polo Grounds Towers on Coogan’s Bluff, where the Say Hey Kid once ran free, Bloods and Crips marched by windows in full colors. This was followed by the crash, a greater economic disaster at the Edenwald Houses in the Bronx than on Wall Street. Currently, 26 percent of working-age project residents are unemployed, a nearly threefold rise since 2008.

Earlier this year, after a decade of chronic underfunding from the Feds, John Rhea, NYCHA chairman, told the City Council what it already knew: Public housing was in dire straits. For years, NYCHA was considered the most successful public-housing organization in the country, a vast, unwieldy, often-complained-about bureaucracy that somehow managed to maintain at least the illusion of acceptable marginality. But now, the daily operating budget was millions in the red. With older developments like the Red Hook Houses, built in 1939 and sinking into the loam like a Mayan ruin, the capital budget shortfall—the money needed to repair the aging housing stock—exceeded $6 billion and was likely to balloon to a mind-boggling $14 billion by 2016. In the current climate, the prospect of more money from the Feds seemed remote.

Outside Jay-Z’s former apartment, Marcy Houses, Brooklyn.   (Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

Then, last month, with a muscle-memory spasm of old-school kick-ass reporting by the Daily News, the other shoe dropped, hard. According to the News, NYCHA wasn’t quite as broke as it let on. As John Rhea was pleading poverty, NYCHA was reportedly sitting on nearly a billion dollars of unspent federal funds. The question was why the city’s biggest landlord was hoarding that kind of money with more than 300,000 unmet repair requests. Amid accusations of cosmic incompetency, a reformed NYCHA will shed half its board members, along with their $187,000 salaries.

Still, the projects persist. People get up and go to work. Some run gray-market “plate lunch” and beauty parlors out of their apartments. Disability and public-assistance checks keep coming. Why that is—why the projects were built here in such numbers and continue to house as many people as they do, how the developments moved from a source of municipal pride to an invisible society people would rather forget exists, is a key story of the city, as unique to New York as the Statue of Liberty and why people cross against traffic.

When touring the Brooklyn pj’s, as they’re called, you might as well start at 534 Flushing Avenue, on the edge of Bed-Stuy, in the Marcy Houses. There, on the fifth floor, is the childhood home of Shawn Carter, better known as Jay-Z.* Of all the great Nychaland griots, few have been more identified with his home turf than the “B.K. brawler, Marcy Projects hallway loiterer.” No monument marks the former residence of the Atlantic Yard Nets shareholder, but the elevator still smells like piss just to keep it real. Near the doorway of the rapper’s old crib stood a woman in her early twenties wearing a purple T-shirt and holding a crying baby as she yelled into a cell phone. “More Pampers! Don’t fucking forget,” she screamed. At Marcy, the hard-knock life presses on.

Unlike the dense pj fortresses of Harlem and the Lower East Side, the Central Brooklyn developments sprawl in a southeasterly line through the traditional “bad neighborhoods” of Bed-Stuy and Bushwick, on to Brownsville, home to the Howard, Glenmore, Seth Low, Van Dykes, Tilden, Brownsville, and Garvey Houses—79 buildings with some 15,000 residents. Beyond that is East New York, where, after a long, bumpy ride on Linden Boulevard, one arrives at the Louis H. Pink Houses.

In 2009, an Internet poster named “bklocksmith” posted the thread “Pink Houses. Worst Housing Project in Brooklyn? In the US?” Several posters answered in the affirmative. “The Pinks”—built on 31 acres that according to local legend once served as a Mafia hit-man dump—stink. In 2005, Pink Houses Crew made news for knocking over jewelry stores and leaving battered bodies on the shoulder of the Van Wyck Expressway. Late-night gunfire remains a staple. Said one former tenant, “It’s like Saturday night and blam—a shell crashes the window and gets stuck in the ceiling. My sister called NYCHA ten times to get it out.” Even the development’s signature rapper, the ribald Uncle Murda, known for titles like “Bullet, Bullet” and “Stick Up Muzik,” as well as for once claiming on the Wendy Williams show to have self-medicated a gunshot wound with a regimen of “Hennessy and Newports,” left the Pinks for the nearby Cypress Hills Houses. “I had a lot of shootouts in Pink. They don’t like me too much over there,” Murda reported.

That said, I was in the Pinks because of its namesake, Louis H. Pink. Born in Wausau, Wisconsin, in 1882, a former resident of a Lower East Side tenement, Pink was a leader in the fight to rid New York of its slums, which in 1920 reputedly covered seventeen square miles of the city. Three decades after Jacob Riis depicted the horrors of slum life in How the Other Half Lives, city children were “still being brought up in dark, ill-ventilated, overcrowded, unsafe tenement houses,” Pink wrote in his 1928 book, The New Day in Housing. Taking his lead from the Gemeindebau, or “community construction,” built in “Red Vienna” following World War I, Pink felt New York would benefit from “modern, sanitary housing for the great mass of our less well off citizens.”

Pink was joined by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who blamed the TB death of his first wife on the evils of slum living. “Down with rotten, antiquated ratholes! Down with hovels! Down with disease! Down with crime!” the Little Flower proclaimed, saying every New Yorker deserved “a bit of sunshine in every window.” On December 3, 1935, Louis Pink joined La Guardia, Governor Herbert Lehman, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to dedicate First Houses on Avenue A and 3rd Street. It was the beginning of public housing in the United States.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Shawn Carter as Sean Carter.

In 1959, when the Louis H. Pink Houses opened, no First Lady appeared. Public housing was in its stolid middle age, the era of idealism long gone, and NYCHA’s enterprise had morphed into a full-scale building boom pursued with typical assembly-line zeal by the city’s chairman of slum clearance, Robert Moses. Filed under the rubric of “urban renewal” (James Baldwin called it “Negro removal”), slum-clearing was done for private development as well as great municipal feats like the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The displaced, especially white lower-middle-class workers who otherwise would have moved to places like bucolic (and racially segregated) Levittown, were encouraged to move to public high-rises full of Mayor La Guardia’s sunlight.

This was useful history to keep in mind while walking around the Louis H. Pink Houses. There, I ran into Caroline Thunder. A petite African-American senior citizen, Thunder has lived in Louis Pink for 40 years, all of which makes her a fairly typical citizen of Nychaland, where 90.3 percent of current residents are black or Latino, 62.1 percent of residents are women, and 35.7 percent of households are headed by individuals over 62 years of age. Attired in a blue-and-yellow NYCHA windbreaker, Thunder was sitting “resident watch,” something she does most every afternoon between 4 and 8 p.m.

Thunder showed me her gardens, which were marked by hand-painted signs identifying them as “PINK’S GARDEN OF EDEN” and “PINK’S PARADISE.” It didn’t matter that Louis H. Pink was built on a dump; the soil still worked, said Thunder, rightly proud of her first-place finish in a recent NYCHA-wide gardening contest.

Thunder didn’t know much about Louis H. Pink the man. “It’s just a sign to me,” she said, adding that, whatever people said about the place, “Louis H. Pink has been good to me. It is home. You always have a feeling for your home.” Still, Thunder worried, because she’d heard about the problems at NYCHA, the talk about how the projects might go under. “I’m a old lady, I’m retired, so who cares about me?” Thunder said. “But what about these babies? Where they going to go?”

Before the Daily News stories broke, I talked to John Rhea at NYCHA’s downtown office. A Harvard M.B.A. and former Lehman Brothers managing director, Rhea was met with deep skepticism on his 2009 selection by Mayor Bloomberg to head NYCHA. This mostly owed to his Wall Street background and his complete lack of experience in public-housing management. Still, Rhea assured me he was no Cathie Black. He was getting things done. His recently unveiled five-year plan would not only keep NYCHA afloat but also wipe out the authority’s deficit by 2016.

The centerpiece of Rhea’s “public-private solution” for NYCHA has been the city’s 2010 funding deal with Citigroup. In exchange for fifteen years’ worth of guaranteed federal low-income-housing tax credits, the bank helped secure $230 million for 21 troubled developments that were built but no longer funded by the city and/or the state. The arrangement triggered NYCHA’s eligibility for the onetime infusion of $75 million of federal stimulus funds.

“If you want to save the proud tradition of public housing in this city, you’ve got to think differently,” Rhea declared, adding that while heading NYCHA was “by far the biggest challenge” of his career, he had come to love his job and the projects themselves. “NYCHA is supposed to be this great problem,” the chairman said. “But if your rich uncle left you NYCHA in his will, that would be the luckiest day of your life. NYCHA, with its vast holdings, is a tremendous asset for the City of New York.

“We can’t rely on the same old remedies. Too many lives are at stake,” Rhea said with a momentary crack in his voice. “To do nothing is the road to decay, displacement, and demolition.”

A couple of days later, up in Harlem at the Drew-Hamilton Houses, Barbara G. Barber leaned back in her chair and offered a derisive cackle. “The chairman is losing sleep worrying about us? Ha!”

Throughout Nychaland, one encounters many outsize personalities, a high percentage of them older black and Latino women active in resident affairs, but no one has a reputation for being as resolute, loud, or flat-out irascible as Barbara G. Barber. As many tenants, NYCHA workers, and NYPD officers will tell you, often with a pained look: “Barbara G. Barber, she’s a legend.”

Call her on the phone, ask her how she’s doing, and she might yell (as she did when I called), “Doing? I’m trying to save my development from falling into the jaws of hell. What do you think I’m doing?”

Around Drew-Hamilton, some people say that Barbara G. Barber acts like she owns the place, is a petty autocrat and a bit cracked to boot. The day I was there, she went into the NYCHA management office, barked a number of commands, and left muttering about the idiots she was forced to deal with. “Looks like you got them terrorized,” I said. “Why not? They terrorize us,” she replied. It wasn’t easy riding herd on 3,000 people right smack in the middle of Central Harlem. Between NYCHA, the punk 2MafiaFamily dope dealers, and the cops hassling law-abiding citizens with their yahoo stop-and-frisk, Drew-Hamilton was under siege every single day. That wasn’t even counting the crazy stuff, like Antoine Yates’s tiger, Ming.

This dated back to 2003, when it came to light that Yates was keeping a 350-pound Bengal tiger (and a three-foot-long alligator) in his apartment. According to witnesses, Yates and the tiger liked to lie on the bed together watching reruns of The Godfather movies. The animal would occasionally relieve himself on the floor, resulting in a cascade of tiger piss in the apartment below. Barbara G. Barber said she had known Antoine Yates “since he was a little boy,” adding that the former Drew-Hamilton tiger keeper was now living in Las Vegas, which was where he should stay if he knew “what was good for his zoo behind.”

As it turned out, Drew-Hamilton was one of the 21 developments involved in the NYCHA-Citigroup deal John Rhea was touting as a template in the fight to save public housing. How did Barbara G. Barber feel about that? With withering pity, she said, “Are you asking me how I feel about John Rhea selling Drew-Hamilton to Citibank without asking a single individual who lives here about it?” A rejoinder pertaining to how the 21 developments were supposed to be returned to full NYCHA control once the fifteen-year, low-income-tax-credit period ran out elicited only mocking disbelief. What dreamland was I living in?

Paranoia runs deep in Nychaland, but nothing stirs fear like the idea that the projects are being sold to private developers who will throw everyone out to put up luxury apartments. At Wagner Houses in East Harlem, many residents insist Donald Trump already owns the place. A NYCHA official said, “That started after one of our guys was looking around the development. He’s got funny hair. From the twelfth floor, he might have looked like Trump.”

Most assume the fix is in. After all, New York is big, but not that big. The pressure increases each time a fresh-faced college grad steps off a plane to drink in the cool new bar on the (formerly) sketchy side of town. Ten years ago, the sight of the Bushwick projects was a signal to lock the car doors and drive faster. Now they are the backdrop for the romance of the struggling artist con condo. Robert Moses might have done his best to place the developments as far from the main stem as possible, but now the city is coming to the projects.

“We are living in the last days of public housing in New York City,” said Barbara G. Barber, who has never seen so many white people on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. John Rhea was Bloomberg’s “well-dressed executioner”—no more, no less.

Still, Barbara G. Barber did not think to call him the worst NYCHA chairman ever. That title went to Simeon Golar. “Simeon Golar did more damage to us than anyone.”

It was an obscure, unexpected reference requiring a jog of memory. Simeon Golar was Mayor John Lindsay’s NYCHA chairman during what will always be known in housing circles as “Forest Hills,” the 1971–72 dispute that stomped out the do-gooder ideal of public housing for all time. As the projects filled with minorities, Lindsay, anxious to break what he called “this vicious cycle of racial inequality,” backed a program to decentralize the projects by locating them throughout the city. After fierce resistance in the then mostly Italian-American Corona, it was supposed that the reliably liberal Jewish population of Forest Hills would open its arms to the construction of three 24-story project buildings at the corner of 108th Street and 62nd Road. This spectacular miscalculation was met with weeks of demonstrations featuring picket signs saying NO WELFARE TOWERS IN FOREST HILLS and IMPEACH ADOLF LINDSAY.

Simeon Golar, an African-American and the first NYCHA chairman to have actually lived in the projects, became a flash point. Confronting the highly vocal opposition, Golar said that Forest Hills was “populated by people with short memories who still do not know how the other half lives and do not care to.” Words like anti-Semite and racist were tossed around. Eventually, Mario Cuomo was called in to mediate the dispute. A few months later, President Richard Nixon, who called the projects “monstrous, depressing places—run-down, overcrowded, and crime-ridden,” cited the Forest Hills uproar in declaring a moratorium on the building of new public housing.

“Simeon Golar. That’s when we started to have all these problems,” Barbara G. Barber said. “Welfare tenants, lack of funding, crime. Everything we got today.”

Barbara G. Barber did not expand on these comments, but she’d made her point, at least as it pertained to Barbara G. Barber. You couldn’t pigeonhole her, think she was nothing but a crank, because she knew her stuff. John Rhea might imagine himself the emperor of Nychaland, but Barbara G. Barber saw through that Ermenegildo Zegna suit. She was a keeper of the flame; if those Citibank boys planned on taking a bulldozer to Drew-Hamilton, it would be over her dead body.

A noted New York housing expert described the relationship between NYCHA and its residents as “borderline pathological … like an abusive parent-child syndrome.” You could see what he meant this past June, as NYCHA ran a series of citywide roundtables to inform residents on the current state of the system. After two hours of brain-numbing speeches and many pie charts, the residents were afforded a twenty-minute period to offer feedback, i.e., vent their often-heard complaints about leaks, rats, lost paperwork, etc. The NYCHA officials scribbled on pads, said nothing. It was all pretty routine until the subject of the cops came up.

The consensus is project policing started going seriously wrong in 1995, when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani merged the previously distinct NYCHA housing cops with the NYPD. During “the old days,” projects were assigned specific officers. Now each of the nine Police Service Areas (PSAs) cover a number of developments. “You used to know them, now you don’t,” said one resident at the Bronx roundtable. Stop-and-frisk was bad, but people also complained of the indignity of being charged with trespassing in the lobby or hallways of their own building. Cops assigned to the pj’s were often rookies, the residents charged—young, jumpy Caucasians from Massapequa Park freaked to find themselves in close quarters with so many blacks and Latinos.

“They don’t do verticals,” people said, meaning the police rarely go beyond a building’s lobby. “The stairwells, man, you could meet the Alien in there,” said one roundtable attendee. “I get home from work, dead on my feet, and the damn elevator’s broken. Again. I could walk up the ten floors, but I don’t need that kind of exercise. If the cops are afraid to go in there with guns, how am I supposed to feel?”

Many cops agreed. As one ranking officer with long experience in the projects said, “Go into St. Nick’s Houses, or Grant, they hate you on sight. You can feel the waves of it hitting you in the face. It’s just fucking dangerous. There’s a million places to hide. Shit comes at you all angles. Once these guys were on a call at the Polo Grounds Towers. They’re there like five minutes and someone screams, ‘Incoming.’ This massive, Costco-size jar of mayonnaise comes flying out of the 27th-story window and goes through the windshield of a cruiser. Guys were licking their fingers, going, ‘It’s fucking mayonnaise’ … Sometimes you have to ask yourself, What’s the point?”

The kicker to this is, as part of the 1995 deal, NYCHA pays the NYPD an extra fee (currently in excess of $70 million a year) for “above baseline” police services. This is exactly the sort of stuff that drives people like John Johnson crazy. Now 48 and often nattily attired in faux designer sunglasses and Mets cap, Johnson, who has been living in the South Bronx’s Mott Haven Houses since the “Fort Apache” days, is the chair of the Bronx South District Council of Presidents (BSDCOP), the most powerful of NYCHA tenant groups. I first called him after seeing a video on the BSDCOP website. Accompanied by Ray Charles’s version of “America the Beautiful,” the tape shows a man with a bicycle coming out of the project elevator, where he’s stopped by a couple of cops who take away the bike, get into a fight with him, and eventually arrest him.

“Oh, yeah, that’s ours,” Johnson said. “The tenant watch. We watch them watch us.”

Delayed installment of security cameras has been a continuing issue, and after a series of robberies in the neighborhood, Johnson tried to get the Authority to put in the devices at Mott Haven. “NYCHA said I’d have to wait, that it was too expensive, blah, blah, blah. So I found these genius local guys, the Digital Divide Partnership. They set up the cameras so you could see the feed on smartphones and computers. They also put Wi-Fi in the building running off a solar panel for free. It was fantastic.

“But NYCHA blew a gasket. They were mad I didn’t ask permission. People are getting mugged, and they want me to ask permission! They said they’d rip out the cameras. I told them, ‘You’ll have to be taking me to jail before you do that’ … Well, there was a NYCHA party at Gracie Mansion. I see Bloomberg, ten feet away from me. I go up to him with my cell phone, show him the feed. ‘That’s the lobby of my building, right now, in real time,’ I tell him. He said, ‘Wow, that’s terrific. All the developments should have that.’ After that, I got a lot more cooperation on the camera issue.”

Living in public housing would drive you nuts if you let it, Johnson said.

Of all the housing experts I spoke to, Howard Husock, vice-president of policy research at the rightist Manhattan Institute, was the only one to offer a comprehensive plan about what to do about the projects.

“Public housing might have seemed like a good idea in the thirties, but it wasn’t then “and it certainly isn’t now,” Husock said when I visited his office on Vanderbilt Avenue, next door to the Yale Club. John Rhea was doing his best, but he’d been dealt an “impossible hand,” Husock said. As long as NYCHA depended on federal funds, it was doomed to failure. Continued subsidies compounded the faulty logic built into the system by the 1969 passage of the Brooke Amendment, which fixed public-housing residents’ rent at 25 percent (now 30 percent) of their income, thereby assuring that the projects would never pay for themselves. Since then, Husock said, the projects had created a huge “frozen zone” that impeded the “normal turnover of properties,” choking off the construction of other housing, both market rate and affordable.

“People weren’t supposed to live in public housing for 40 years. Where did La Guardia say that? Public housing was supposed to give you a leg up, a way to move on. Not stay forever,” Husock maintained.

Delighting in an opportunity to skewer moldy liberal wrongheadedness, Husock scoffed at the notion that the presence of the Fulton Houses in the middle of million-dollar Chelsea provided welcome diversity to an increasingly monolithic neighborhood. On the contrary, Husock said, the projects were actually a cruel thing, a modern-day gulag, with hundreds of thousands of people mired in an obsolete, thoroughly discredited, ego-debilitating residential system that happened to be taking up some very valuable room. Luckily, the remedy was quite straightforward. First of all, the sheer volume of the projects would have to be significantly reined in. Cutting back to around 60 percent of the current stock would be a good first-phase goal, Husock said. The rest could be repurposed for mixed use or simply sold off. The sale of the more lucrative properties would pay for the upgrade of the remaining developments. To ensure reasonable resident turnover, restrictions on the length of tenancy would be established. Husock thought “five years” would be a reasonable time limit.

“Footprint reduction, sale of attractive properties, time limit on residence, that’s about it,” Husock said.

As I traveled through Nychaland, it was difficult to totally ignore Husock’s modest proposal. Certainly he had a point when it came to long-term tenancy. As the city continues to grow, the difficult housing market has caused people to make use of a crazy patchwork of available domiciles. In Sunset Park, Mexican day workers crammed into basements. In Queens, unrelated working families shared kitchens. Weren’t these the very people public housing was designed to serve? Yet, with little turnover in the system, many immigrants found themselves at the end of four- and five-year-long waiting lists. When Asians, the fastest-growing ethnic group in the city, manage to get an apartment, they are often harassed by residents. Recently, a Chinese family that had been placed at Marcy came home to find the door of their apartment smeared with feces.

The topic came up often during discussions with current residents, eliciting surprisingly little sympathy for newcomers. “I get why people might be upset, but when I got in here in 1977, I knew I wasn’t moving. Where was I supposed to go, a single mother with a disabled child? Great Neck? Hello? Besides, this is a good deal,” said a friend of mine as we checked the river view from the sixteenth-story window of her Harlem project. She currently pays just over $500 for her three-bedroom apartment, slightly more than the NYCHA average of $434. NYCHA has been attempting to “right-size” her down to a one-bedroom, but she’s been resisting. She needs the space. Other relatives lived in the apartment on and off, none of whom were on the lease. Then again, everyone she knew flouted NYCHA rules in one way or another.

Funny how things work out, my friend said, as she changed the channel on her flat-screen TV. “The other day at the bodega I ran into these four white girls. I started talking to them. They said they were living right across the street in this dumpy building paying $800. I thought, Well, that’s all right. Then they say they’re paying $800 apiece! One of them is sleeping on the couch. Sleeping on the couch in their own house! I went back to my apartment, looked at my view, and thought, Maybe my elevator is pissy, but if that’s gentrification, who’s the joke on now?”

“I’ll know the projects are changing when the first hipster applies for admission,” said April Simpson-Taylor, as we sat together on a bench at the Queensbridge projects, where she has lived most of her life. April, whose heritage includes African-American, Native American, Mexican, and “other stuff,” remembered when “a lot” of white people lived in the QB. “When I was a little girl, we had Irish, Italians, Jewish people. All those different cooking smells in the hallways. They were just some other people in the building. I never noticed them until they were gone,” said Simpson-Taylor, who takes pride in being “a Simpson, one of the Queensbridge old-timers. The Simpsons, the Walkers, the Altons, the Hollies, we’re the Mayflower families of the QB.” She laughed.

This made Simpson-Taylor “project royalty,” because, as everyone knows, Queensbridge isn’t just another pj. Located on the East River in Long Island City, the QB, home to 7,000 or more people on 50 acres, is the largest public-housing project in the country. Built in 1939, the QB was considered a quantum leap for subsidized housing. Recommending the project as “a credit to the city,” Louis H. Pink, then head of the New York State Housing Department, wrote that the development’s proximity to the elevated subway line, “where it will be seen by a great many visitors to the World’s Fair,” was “excellent.”

It was a beautiful day, and I was happy to hear Simpson-Taylor tell me her life story, how she’d had her troubles, but now she’d found God and gotten a degree in social work at York College. In a half-hour, at least a dozen people stopped to say hello. Many hugs were exchanged. That was the “blessing” about living in Queensbridge, Simpson-Taylor said, to be surrounded by so many good people. It was sweet right then, to be seen in the company of April Simpson-Taylor. Because, for this moment, you seemed good here, in the flow.

This reverie was snapped, however, when Simpson-Taylor told me not to get too comfortable, because after the sun went down, walking in these parts was to risk meeting “Freddy Krueger and the ice-pick fingers.” Project royalty or not, night and day were, as they say, like night and day. It was enough to summon up the single greatest project rap ever, “Shook Ones, Pt. 2,” by Queensbridge’s own Mobb Deep, with its famous refrain, “Son, they shook … ’cause there ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks, scared to death, scared to look, they shook.”*

We got to talking about the future of the projects. I mentioned Howard Husock’s plan. Simpson-Taylor frowned. “They’re always talking about selling the projects. I don’t listen to it,” she said.

“But, if they did, how much do you think you could get for this place?”

“Queensbridge?”

“Yeah. How much do you think it’s worth?”

The idea had been roiling around for a couple of weeks. Husock mentioned selling the Ingersoll Houses, a twenty-building development tucked under the BQE in Fort Greene. But Queensbridge, 50 acres with all that river frontage, had to be way more valuable. Queensbridge Park, right by the water, was a beauty. The renovated F-train station right on the corner was a mere two stops from Manhattan.

A couple of phone calls to property assessors returned the following information: Despite the image of the teeming projects, the leafy QB is severely underbuilt. The buildings themselves take in 1.6 million square feet, but the area was zoned for a “buildable” total of 3.6 million square feet. With that 3.6 million feet currently going for $80 per, the site could be worth close to $300 million. “Selling Queensbridge,” Simpson-Taylor said mournfully. “You know how many times I’ve thought about moving away from here? Who wants to live their whole life in a project? But I keep coming back. You don’t always get to choose your home, but it is still home, and not just because I grew up here. It’s home because everybody’s here. What happens to everyone then?”

That was the question, the one Howard Husock’s modest proposals didn’t quite cover. He said the best way to pry the people out of the projects was “with carrots, not sticks.” The residents could be “bought out,” in the way landlords in the private sector give tenants money to empty a building. That way, the former residents would be free to move anywhere, Husock said.

Somehow I didn’t think it was going to work that way.

There were reasons why American public housing thrived for a moment in New York, reasons why the projects had become “a problem,” reasons why the poor rarely moved out once they moved in, reasons why so few New Yorkers knew much of anything about the developments. It had to do with visions of social uplift, shifting ideas of how the middle class would live, the exercise of power, and the soul-deadening crush of poverty and race.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Mobb Deep as Mobb Depp.

But in the end, much of it came back to the city itself, the peculiar case of New York. That much was clear a few weeks ago, when I attended a demonstration in front of the NYCHA office at 250 Broadway. A number of unions were upset about the way things were being done, the layoffs, the involvement of outside consultants, the alleged arrogance of the upper-level managers. Robert J. Croghan, head of the Organization of Staff Analysts, spoke to the faithful.

“I remember when the Bronx was on fire,” began Croghan, a tall, thin reed of a man who looks more like a windswept Irish poet than a union leader. “Everything was in flames. I thought the world was coming to an end. Then I saw this building. A project—not a private building. New York City public housing. And in this building, the lights were on! Life continued. I’ll never forget how proud it made me feel of my city. New York City! Proud of how we have always extended a hand to those in need. To me that’s what this city has always been about.”

The projects were a cautionary tale, Easter Island–like relics left from another New York and a different social contract, I thought, as I made my way to the furtherest reach of Nychaland. Twenty-one miles by A train from midtown, they don’t call it Far Rockaway for nothing. Out here, the projects are hard-core. For years, gangs like the G.O.A. (Gang of Apes) and the G.I.B. (Get It in Bricks) have blown each other away on Beach Channel Drive. “We’re off the map here,” said my man in the Redfern Houses, Celeb Prez, a.k.a. FarRock Obama, who released a mixtape called N.Y.C.H.A., or Not Your Common Hip-hop Artist. “Can’t even go swimming,” Prez said. Living six blocks from the ocean all his nineteen years, Prez has only been to the water “like twice … The current sweeps you away; it happened to a kid in my building.” There were plenty of ways to die in Far Rock, Prez said.

I was on my way to see Connie Taylor. Of all the Nychaland matriarchs, Connie Taylor is the oldest and the wisest. Now 91, she was born on West 47th Street, moved up to Sugar Hill in Harlem, where she was a wonderful dancer and didn’t mind a nip of Johnnie Walker Black. After getting married, she came to Far Rock, living the last 38 years in the Ocean Bay Apartments. That is where I found her, in a wool beret and wrapped in a couple of blankets despite the 95-degree heat, sitting resident watch.

“You got to keep an eye out,” Taylor said, squinting across the street at a grocery where some guys were hanging out. “Black people eat a lot of pork,” she said. “But that store don’t sell no pork. It sells drugs.” With that, Taylor revved her motorized chair, shot out the door, bumped across the potholed street, and pulled up in front of the crowd. She just sat there staring. The men wilted under the glare. One pleaded, “Oh, Ms. Taylor, come on.” But they soon dispersed.

“They can’t face me. I shame them,” Taylor said, returning to her spot.

I asked Taylor what she thought about Arverne by the Sea, the large, expensive condo development going up a few blocks away. Some project people were worried about the place, fearful that politicians were in league with the builders and would soon move to take over the developments.

Taylor said she didn’t care about Arverne by the Sea. “They have a sign over there, starts at $559,000! If that where it start, where do it go?” Taylor wanted to know. “We got people in here paying $125 a month. They happy enough.”

Then Taylor started talking about the storm that hit Far Rockaway back in 1970 or ’71. “The water from the bay met the water from the ocean. People were paddling boats to the subway.” As a Bible reader, Taylor knew a giant wave could emerge from the ocean at any time. “What those people with their ‘STARTS AT $559,000’ going to do then?”

No, Taylor said. “I’d rather just stay right here. In my little development. My building is solid. Solid as a rock.”

Looking into Louis H. Pink Houses, Brooklyn.

(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

Frederick Douglass Houses, Manhattan.

(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

Obama's Way

To understand how air-force navigator Tyler Stark ended up in a thornbush in the Libyan desert in March 2011, one must understand what it’s like to be president of the United States—and this president in particular. Hanging around Barack Obama for six months, in the White House, aboard Air Force One, and on the basketball court, Michael Lewis learns the reality of the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sent Stark into combat.

— Michael Lewis, October 2012

BEST FOOT FORWARD Michael Lewis and President Barack Obama in the Colonnade of the White House, heading toward the Oval Office.

Even after his parachute opened, Tyler Stark sensed he was coming down too fast. The last thing he’d heard was the pilot saying, “Bailout! Bailout! Bail—” Before the third call was finished, there’d come the violent kick in the rear from the ejector seat, then a rush of cool air. They called it “opening shock” for a reason. He was disoriented. A minute earlier, when the plane had started to spin—it felt like a car hitting a patch of ice—his first thought had been that everything was going to be fine: My first mission, I had my first close call. He’d since changed his mind. He could see the red light of his jet’s rocket fading away and also, falling more slowly, the pilot’s parachute. He went immediately to his checklist: he untangled himself from his life raft, then checked the canopy of his chute and saw the gash. That’s why he was coming down too fast. How fast he couldn’t say, but he told himself he’d have to execute a perfect landing. It was the middle of the night. The sky was black. Below his feet he could see a few lights and houses, but mainly it was just desert.

When he was two years old, Tyler Stark had told his parents he wanted to fly, like his grandfather who had been shot down by the Germans over Austria. His parents didn’t take him too seriously until he went to college, at Colorado State University, when on the first day of school he had enrolled in the air-force R.O.T.C. program. A misdiagnosis about his eyesight killed his dreams of being a pilot and forced him into the backseat, as a navigator. At first he was crushed by the news, but then he realized that, while an air-force pilot might be assigned to fly cargo planes or even drones, the only planes with navigators in them were fighter jets. So the mix-up about his eyesight had been a blessing in disguise. The first years of his air-force career he’d spent on bases in Florida and North Carolina. In 2009 they’d shipped him to England, and to a position where he might see action. And on the night of March 21, 2011, Captain Tyler Stark took off in an F-15 from a base in Italy, with a pilot he’d only just met, on his first combat mission. He now had reasons to think it might also be his last.

Even so, as he floated down, he felt almost calm. The night air was cool, and there was no sound, only awesome silence. He didn’t really know why he’d been sent here, to Libya, in the first place. He knew his assignment, his specific mission. But he didn’t know the reason for it. He’d never met a Libyan. Drifting high over the desert he had no sense that he was at once an expression of an idea framed late one night in the White House by the president himself, writing with a No. 2 pencil, and also, suddenly, a threat to that idea. He didn’t sense these invisible threads in his existence, only the visible ones yoking him to his torn parachute. His thoughts were only of survival. He realized, If I can see my plane exploding, and my chute in the air, so can the enemy. He’d just turned 27—one of only three facts about himself, along with his name and rank, that he was now prepared to divulge if captured.

He scanned the earth beneath his dangling feet. He was going to hit hard, and there was nothing he could do about it.

At nine o’clock one Saturday morning I made my way to the Diplomatic Reception Room, on the ground floor of the White House. I’d asked to play in the president’s regular basketball game, in part because I wondered how and why a 50-year-old still played a game designed for a 25-year-old body, in part because a good way to get to know someone is to do something with him. I hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of a game it was. The first hint came when a valet passed through bearing, as if they were sacred objects, a pair of slick red-white-and-blue Under Armour high-tops with the president’s number (44) on the side. Then came the president, looking like a boxer before a fight, in sweats and slightly incongruous black rubber shower shoes. As he climbed into the back of a black S.U.V., a worried expression crossed his face. “I forgot my mouth guard,” he said. Your mouth guard? I think. Why would you need a mouth guard?

“Hey, Doc,” he shouted to the van holding the medical staff that travels with him wherever he goes. “You got my mouth guard?” The doc had his mouth guard. Obama relaxed back in his seat and said casually that he didn’t want to get his teeth knocked out this time, “since we’re only 100 days away.” From the election, he meant, then he smiled and showed me which teeth, in some previous basketball game, had been knocked out. “Exactly what kind of game is this?” I asked, and he laughed and told me not to worry. He doesn’t. “What happens is, as I get older, the chances I’m going to play well go down. When I was 30 there was, like, a one-in-two chance. By the time I was 40 it was more like one in three or one in four.” He used to focus on personal achievement, but as he can no longer achieve so much personally, he’s switched to trying to figure out how to make his team win. In his decline he’s maintaining his relevance and sense of purpose.

Basketball hadn’t appeared on the president’s official schedule, and so we traveled the streets of Washington unofficially, almost normally. A single police car rode in front of us, but there were no motorcycles or sirens or whirring lights: we even stopped at red lights. It still took only five minutes to get to the court inside the F.B.I. The president’s game rotates around several federal courts, but he prefers the F.B.I.’s because it is a bit smaller than a regulation court, which reduces also the advantages of youth. A dozen players were warming up. I recognized Arne Duncan, the former captain of the Harvard basketball team and current secretary of education. Apart from him and a couple of disturbingly large and athletic guys in their 40s, everyone appeared to be roughly 28 years old, roughly six and a half feet tall, and the possessor of a 30-inch vertical leap. It was not a normal pickup basketball game; it was a group of serious basketball players who come together three or four times each week. Obama joins when he can. “How many of you played in college?” I asked the only player even close to my height. “All of us,” he replied cheerfully and said he’d played point guard at Florida State. “Most everyone played pro too—except for the president.” Not in the N.B.A., he added, but in Europe and Asia.

Overhearing the conversation, another player tossed me a jersey and said, “That’s my dad on your shirt. He’s the head coach at Miami.” Having highly developed fight-or-flight instincts, I realized in only about 4 seconds that I was in an uncomfortable situation, and it took only another 10 to figure out just how deeply I did not belong. Oh well, I thought, at least I can guard the president. Obama played in high school, on a team that won the Hawaii state championship. But he hadn’t played in college, and even in high school he hadn’t started. Plus, he hadn’t played in several months, and he was days away from his 51st birthday: how good could he be?

The president ran a couple of laps around the gym, then shouted, “Let’s go!” He himself divvied up the teams so each one had roughly the same number of giants and the same number of old people. Having put me on his team, he turned to me and said, “We’ll sit you first, until we get a little bit of a lead.” I thought he was joking, but actually he wasn’t; he was as serious as a heart attack. I was benched. I took my place in the wooden stands, along with a few of the other players, and the White House photographer, the medical team, the Secret Service, and the guy with the buzz cut who carried the nuclear football, to watch the president play.

Obama was 20 or more years older than most of them, and probably not as physically gifted, though it was hard to say because of the age differences. No one held back, no one deferred. Guys on his team dribbled past him and ignored the fact he was wide open. When he drives through the streets, crowds part, but when he drives to the basket large, hostile men slide over to cut him off. It’s revealing that he would seek out a game like this but even more that others would give it to him: no one watching would have been able to guess which guy was president. As a player on the other team, who must have outweighed Obama by a hundred pounds, backed the president of the United States down and knocked the crap out of him, all for the sake of a single layup, I leaned over to the former Florida State point guard.

“No one seems to be taking it easy on him,” I said.

“If you take it easy on him, you’re not invited back,” he explained.

I thought to myself, It must be hard not to take it easy on the president.

The point guard laughed, turned to another guy on the bench, and said, “Remember Rey?”

“Who’s Rey?” I asked.

“Rey pump-faked, turned, and just connected with the president right in the mouth,” the other guy said. “Gave him 16 stitches.”

“Where’s Rey?” I asked.

“Rey hasn’t been back.”

Obama could find a perfectly respectable game with his equals in which he could shoot and score and star, but this is the game he wants to play. It’s ridiculously challenging, and he has very little space to maneuver, but he appears happy. He’s actually just good enough to be useful to his team, as it turns out. Not flashy, but he slides in to take charges, passes well, and does a lot of little things well. The only risk he takes is his shot, but he shoots so seldom, and so carefully, that it actually isn’t much of a risk at all. (He smiles when he misses; when he makes one, he looks even more serious.) “Spacing is big. He knows where to go,” said one of the other players as we watched. “And unlike a lot of lefties, he can go to his right.”

And he chattered constantly. “You can’t leave him open like that!” … “Money!” … “Take that shot!” His team jumped ahead, mainly because it took fewer stupid shots. When I threw one up I discovered the reason for this. When you are on the president’s basketball team and you take a stupid shot, the president of the United States screams at you. “Don’t be looking to the sidelines all sheepish,” he hollered at me. “You got to get back and play D!”

At some point I discreetly moved up to where I belonged, into the stands beside the guy who was operating the clock. His name was Martin Nesbitt. When I had pointed him out to Obama and asked who he was, Obama, sounding like he was about 12 years old, said, “Marty—well, Marty’s my best friend.”

Nesbitt does an extremely good impression of a man who could just barely give a shit that his best friend is the president of the United States. After the fifth game, with the president’s team up 3–2, guys started drifting toward their gym bags in the way they do when everyone thinks it’s over.

“I could go one more,” said Obama.

Nesbitt hooted. “He’s actually going to take the risk of letting this thing get tied up? That’s out of character.”

“He’s that competitive?” I asked.

“Even games we never play. Shuffleboard. I don’t know how to play shuffleboard. He doesn’t know how to play shuffleboard. But if we play, it’s like ‘I can beat you.’”

Martin Nesbitt, C.E.O. of an airport-parking company, met Obama before Obama ever ran for public office, playing pickup basketball with him in Chicago. Well into their friendship he knew next to nothing of Obama’s achievements. Obama had neglected to inform him that he had gone to Harvard Law School, for example, or been editor of its Law Review, or really anything that would convey his status off the basketball court. “At some point after we’d known each other a long time, he gives me this book he’s written,” said Nesbitt. “I, you know, just put it up on the shelf. I thought it was like a self-published thing. I still didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t care.” One day Marty and his wife were cleaning house, and he found the book on the shelf. Dreams from My Father, it was called. “The thing just fell off. So I opened it and started reading. And I was like, ‘Holy shit, this guy can write.’ I tell my wife. She says, ‘Marty, Barack is going to be president one day.’”

From the time his wife goes to bed, around 10 at night, until he finally retires, at 1, Barack Obama enjoys the closest thing he experiences to privacy: no one but him really knows exactly where he is or what he’s up to. He can’t leave his house, of course, but he can watch ESPN, surf his iPad, read books, dial up foreign leaders in different time zones, and any number of other activities that feel almost normal. He can also wrestle his mind back into the state it would need to be if, say, he wanted to write.

And so, in a funny way, the president’s day actually starts the night before. When he awakens at seven, he already has a jump on things. He arrives at the gym on the third floor of the residence, above his bedroom, at 7:30. He works out until 8:30 (cardio one day, weights the next), then showers and dresses in either a blue or gray suit. “My wife makes fun of how routinized I’ve become,” he says. He’d moved a long way in this direction before he became president, but the office has moved him even further. “It’s not my natural state,” he says. “Naturally, I’m just a kid from Hawaii. But at some point in my life I overcompensated.” After a quick breakfast and a glance at the newspapers—most of which he’s already read on his iPad—he reviews his daily security briefing. When he first became president he often was surprised by the secret news; now he seldom is. “Maybe once a month.”

One summer morning I met him outside the private elevator that brings him down from the residence. His morning commute, of roughly 70 yards, started in the ground-floor center hall, and continued past a pair of oil paintings, of Rosalynn Carter and Betty Ford, and through two sets of double doors, guarded by a Secret Service officer. After a short walk along a back porch, guarded by several other men in black, he passed through a set of French doors into the reception area outside the Oval Office. His secretary, Anita, was already at her desk. Anita, he explained, has been with him since he campaigned for the Senate, back in 2004. As political attachments go, eight years isn’t a long time; in his case, it counts as forever. Eight years ago he could have taken a group tour of the White House and no one would have recognized him.

Passing Anita, the president walked into the Oval Office. “When I’m in Washington I spend half my time in this place,” he said. “It’s surprisingly comfortable.” During the week he is never alone in the office, but on weekends he can come down and have the place to himself. The first time Obama set foot in this room was right after he’d been elected, to pay a call on George Bush. The second time was the first day he arrived for work—and the first thing he did was call in several junior people who had been with him since long before anyone cared who he was so they might see how it felt to sit in the Oval Office. “Let’s just stay normal,” he said to them.

When a new president is elected, the White House curatorial staff removes everything from the office the departing president put in it, unless they worry it will cause a political stir—in which case they ask the new president. Right after the last election they removed a few oil paintings of Texas. It took Obama longer than usual to make changes to the office because, as he put it, “we came in when the economy was tanking and our first priority wasn’t redecorating.” Eighteen months into the office he reupholstered the two chairs in his sitting area. (“The chairs were kind of greasy. I was starting to think, Folks are going to start talking about us.”) Then he swapped out the antique coffee table for a contemporary one, and the bust of Winston Churchill lent to Bush by Tony Blair for one of Martin Luther King Jr. And he took one look at the bookshelves, filled with china, and thought, This won’t do. “They had a bunch of plates in there,” he says, a little incredulously. “I’m not a dish guy.” The dishes he replaced with the original applications for several famous patents and patent models—Samuel Morse’s 1849 model for the first telegraph, for instance, which he pointed to and said, “This is the start of the Internet right here.” Finally, he ordered a new oval rug inscribed with his favorite brief quotations from people he admires. “I had a bunch of quotes that didn’t fit [on the rug],” he admitted. One quote that did fit, I saw, was a favorite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

And that’s it—the sum total of the Obamas’ additions and subtractions to his workspace. “I tend to be a spare guy anyway,” he said. But the changes still generated controversy, especially the removal of the Churchill bust, which created so much stupid noise that Mitt Romney on the stump is now pledging that he will return it to the Oval Office.

He’s kept the desk used by Bush—the one with the secret panel made famous by John-John Kennedy. It had been brought in by Jimmy Carter to replace the one with the secret taping system in it, used by Johnson and Nixon. “Is there a taping system in here?” I asked, gazing up at the crown molding.

“No,” he said, then added, “It’d be fun to have a taping system. It’d be wonderful to have a verbatim record of history.” Obama doesn’t come across as political or calculating, but every now and then it seems to occur to him how something would sound, if repeated out of context and then handed as a weapon to people who wish him ill. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got to be careful here [about what I say].”

“When people come here, are they nervous?” I asked him, to change the subject. Even in the White House lobby you can tell who works here and who doesn’t by the sound of their conversation and their body language. The people who don’t work here have the checked-my-actual-personality-at-the-door look of people on TV for the first time in their lives. In the presence of the president himself even celebrities are so distracted that they cease to notice all else. He’d make an excellent accomplice to a pickpocket.

“Yes,” he said. “And what’s true is that it is true of just about everyone who comes here. I think that the space affects them. But when you work here you forget about it.”

He pulled me down a short hallway toward his private office, the place he goes when he wants his staff to leave him be.

Along the way we passed a few other things he had installed—and that he must know his successor is going to have a hell of a time removing: a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation; an odd, stark snapshot of an old, fat Teddy Roosevelt dragging his horse up a hill (“Even the horse looks tired”); the announcement of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. We entered his private study, its desk piled high with novels—on top is Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. He pointed to the patio outside his window. It was built by Reagan, he says, on a lovely quiet spot in the shade of a giant magnolia.

A century ago presidents, when they took office, would auction the contents of the place on the White House lawn. Sixty-five years ago Harry Truman could rip apart the south side of the White House and build himself a new balcony. Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan could create a discreet seating area hidden from public view. Today there is no way any president could build anything that would enhance the White House without being accused of violating some sacred site, or turning the place into a country club, or wasting taxpayer money, or, worst of all, being oblivious to appearances. To the way it will seem. Obama looked at the Reagan patio and laughed at the audacity of building it.

Crossing the White House lawn on the way out that morning I passed a giant crater, surrounded by heavy machinery. For the better part of a year hordes of workmen have been digging and building something deep below the White House—though what it is no one who knows will really say. “Infrastructure” is the answer you get when you ask. But no one really does ask, much less insist on the public’s right to know. The president of the United States can’t move a bust in the Oval Office without facing a firestorm of disapproval. But he can dig a hole deep in his front yard and build an underground labyrinth and no one even asks what he’s up to.

Bruce and Dorene Stark, parents of Tyler, live in the Denver suburb of Littleton, which is actually bigger than you might think. In mid-March of last year, when they heard from their son out of the blue, they’d been planning a trip to England to visit him. “We get this odd e-mail from him,” says Bruce. “It doesn’t even say, ‘Hi, Mom and Dad.’ It says, ‘I’m no longer in the U.K., and I don’t know when I’ll be back.’” They didn’t know what it meant, but, as Dorene Stark puts it, “you get this creepy feeling.” A week later, on a Monday night, the phone rang. “I’m watching some TV show,” recalls Bruce. “I pick up the phone and it says, ‘Out of the area,’ or something like that.” He answered anyway. “It’s Tyler. He doesn’t say hi or anything. He just says, ‘Dad.’ And I say, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ He says, ‘I just need you to do me a favor: I’m going to give you a number, and I want you to call it.’ I say, ‘Hold on. I don’t have anything to write with.’”

Bruce Stark found pen and paper, then picked up the phone again. Tyler then gave his father the phone number of his air-force base in England. “And then,” remembers Bruce, “he says, ‘I just need you to tell them I’m alive and I’m O.K.’

“‘What do you mean you’re alive and you’re O.K.?’” asked Bruce, understandably.

But Tyler was already gone. Bruce Stark hung up, called his wife, and told her he’d just had the strangest phone call from Tyler. “I said to Bruce, ‘Something has happened,’” says Dorene. “As a mother you just get this sixth sense. But Bruce says, ‘Oh no, he sounded fine!’” They still had no idea where in the world their son might be. They searched the news for some hint but found nothing, except a lot of coverage of the Fukushima tsunami and growing nuclear disaster. “I have a pretty good relationship with God,” says Dorene. She decided to pray about it. She drove to her church, but it was locked; she pounded on the door, but no one answered. Seeing how late it was in England, Bruce simply sent his son’s base an e-mail relaying Tyler’s strange message.

At 4:30 the next morning they received a phone call from their son’s commanding officer. The polite lieutenant colonel apologized for waking them but wanted to let them know before they heard it elsewhere that the plane they were now showing on CNN was indeed Tyler’s. “He says they have determined that Tyler is on the ground somewhere and O.K.,” says Dorene. “And I thought, Your definition of O.K. and mine are clearly going to be different. They send people home without limbs.”

The Starks turned on their television and found CNN, where, sure enough, they were airing footage of a completely destroyed airplane, somewhere in the desert of Libya. Until that moment they didn’t know that the United States might have invaded Libya. They did not care for Barack Obama and would never vote for him, but they didn’t question whatever the president had just done, and they didn’t pay much attention to the various criticisms of this new war being made by various TV commentators.

But the sight of their son’s plane’s smoldering wreckage was deeply disturbing. “That was just a sick feeling at that point,” recalls Bruce. Dorene found it strangely familiar. She turned to her husband and asked, “Doesn’t this remind you of Columbine?” Tyler had been a freshman at Columbine High the year of the shootings. That afternoon, before anyone knew anything, his parents had watched the news and seen that some of the kids who happened to be in the school library at the time had been killed. The shooting had happened during study hall, exactly when Tyler was meant to be in the library. Now as she watched the CNN report of her son’s plane crash she realized she was in the same state of mind she had been in when she’d been watching news reports of the Columbine massacre. “Your body is almost numb,” she says. “Just to protect you from whatever news might happen.”

We were on Air Force One, somewhere between North America and South America, when a hand shook my shoulder, and I gazed up to find Obama staring down at me. I’d been seated in the cabin in the middle of the plane—the place where the seats and tables can be easily removed so that if the president’s body needs to be transported after his death there’s a place to put his coffin. Apparently, I’d fallen asleep. The president’s lips were pursed, impatiently.

“What?” I said, stupidly.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, and gave me one more shake.

There are no wide-open spaces in presidential life, only nooks and crannies, and the front of Air Force One is one of them. When he’s on his plane, small gaps of time sometimes open in his schedule, and there are fewer people around to leap in and consume them. In this case, Obama had just found himself with 30 free minutes.

“What you got for me?” he asked and plopped down in the chair beside his desk. His desk is designed to tilt down when the plane is on the ground so that it might be perfectly flat when the plane is nose up, in flight. It was now perfectly flat.

“I want to play that game again,” I said. “Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president.”

This was the third time I’d put the question to him, in one form or another. The first time, a month earlier in this same cabin, he’d had a lot of trouble getting his mind around the idea that I, not he, was president. He’d started by saying something he knew to be dull and expected but that—he insisted—was nevertheless perfectly true. “Here is what I would tell you,” he’d said. “I would say that your first and principal task is to think about the hopes and dreams the American people invested in you. Everything you are doing has to be viewed through this prism. And I tell you what every president … I actually think every president understands this responsibility. I don’t know George Bush well. I know Bill Clinton better. But I think they both approached the job in that spirit.” Then he added that the world thinks he spends a lot more time worrying about political angles than he actually does.

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

There are several aspects of his job that seem obvious to him but strike me as so deeply weird that I can’t help but bring them up. For example, he has the oddest relationship to the news of any human being on the planet. Wherever it starts out, it quickly finds him and forces him to make some decision about it: whether to respond to it, and shape it, or to leave it be. As the news speeds up, so must our president’s response to it, and then, on top of it all, the news to which he must respond is often about him.

On the leather sofa beside me were the five newspapers that are laid out for him every time he travels. “In every one of those someone is saying something nasty about you,” I said to him. “You turn on the television and you could find people being even nastier. If I’m president, I’m thinking, I’ll just walk around pissed off all the time, looking for someone to punch.”

He shook his head. He doesn’t watch cable news, which he thinks is genuinely toxic. One of his aides told me that once, thinking the president otherwise occupied, he’d made the mistake of switching the Air Force One television from ESPN, which Obama prefers, to a cable news show. The president walked into the room and watched a talking head explain knowingly to his audience why he, Obama, had taken some action. “Oh, so that’s why I did it,” said Obama, and walked out. Now he said, “One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That’s not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you. I learned that on the campaign.” Then he added, “You have to filter stuff, but you can’t filter it so much you live in this fantasyland.”

The other aspect of his job I have trouble getting comfortable with is its bizarre emotional demands. In the span of a few hours, a president will go from celebrating the Super Bowl champions to running meetings on how to fix the financial system, to watching people on TV make up stuff about him, to listening to members of Congress explain why they can’t support a reasonable idea simply because he, the president, is for it, to sitting down with the parents of a young soldier recently killed in action. He spends his day leaping over ravines between vastly different feelings. How does anyone become used to this?

As I was still a little groggy and put my question poorly, he answered a question it hadn’t occurred to me to ask: Why doesn’t he show more emotion? He does this on occasion, even when I’ve put the question clearly—see in what I’ve asked some implicit criticism, usually one he’s heard many times before. As he’s not naturally defensive, it’s pretty clearly an acquired trait. “There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing,” he said. “For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I’m dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I’m not taking the American people seriously. I’m absolutely positive that I’m serving the American people better if I’m maintaining my authenticity. And that’s an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I’m at my best when I believe what I am saying.”

That was not what I had been after. What I had wanted to know was: Where do you put what you actually feel, when there is no place in your job to feel it? When you are president you are not allowed to go numb to protect yourself from whatever news might happen. But it was too late; my time was up; I returned to my seat in the cabin.

When they give you the tour of Air Force One they show you the extra-large doors in the middle of the plane, to accommodate a president’s coffin—as they did Reagan’s. They tell you about the boxes of M&M candies embossed with the presidential seal, the medical room prepared for every emergency (there’s even a bag that says, “Cyanide Antidote Kit”), and the conference room refitted with fancy video equipment since 9/11 so that the president doesn’t need to land to address the nation. What they don’t tell you—though everyone who rides on it nods when you point it out—is how little sense it gives you of your relationship to the ground. There are no announcements from the pilot and no seat-belt signs; people are up and walking around during takeoff and landing. But that’s not all. The president’s plane simply does not give you, the moment before you land, the same feeling of an impending collision that you get in other airplanes. One moment you are up in the air. The next— bam!

Tyler Stark hit the desert floor in what he believed was a perfect position. “I thought I did a pretty good job, but halfway through I hear this ‘pop’ and I fall on my butt.” He’d torn tendons in both his left knee and his left ankle. He looked around for shelter. There was nothing but a few chest-high thornbushes and some small rocks. He was in the middle of a desert; there was no place to hide. I need to get away from this area, he thought. He collected the gear he wanted, stuffed the rest in a thornbush, and began to move. “The moment of serenity had gone away,” he recalled. It was his first combat mission, but he’d felt the way he now felt once before: during Columbine. He’d been shot at once in the cafeteria by one of the killers, and then many times by the other one as he had raced down the hall. He’d heard the bullets zipping past his head and exploding into the metal lockers. “It’s the feeling not really of terror,” he said, “but of not knowing what is going on. You just go with your gut decision to get to safety.” The difference between this and that was that he’d trained for this. “For Columbine I didn’t have any training, so I was just going.”

He wandered the desert until he realized there was no place to go. In the end he found a thornbush a little bigger than the others and got himself inside it as best he could. There he called nato command, to let them know where he was. He established contact, but it wasn’t easy—in part because of the dog. What appeared to be a border collie had found him, and every time he moved to pick up his communications gear the dog moved in on him and started barking. He reached for and armed his 9-mm. pistol, but then thought, What am I going to do? Shoot a dog? He liked dogs.

He’d been on the loose for two hours when he heard voices. “They were coming from the direction where the parachute was. I didn’t speak Arabic, so I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but to me it kind of sounded like ‘Hey, we found a parachute.’” Out of nowhere a spotlight appeared, on top of some sort of vehicle. The light passed right over the thornbush. Tyler was now flat on the ground. “I’m trying to think as thin as possible,” he said. But he could see that the light had stopped moving back and forth and had settled on him. “I initially wouldn’t acknowledge or accept it,” he said. Then someone screamed, “American, come out!” “And I think, Nope. Not quite that easy.” Another shout: “American, come out!” At length, Tyler rose and started walking toward the light.

The gist of Obama’s advice to any would-be president is something like this: You may think that the presidency is essentially a public-relations job. Relations with the public are indeed important, maybe now more than ever, as public opinion is the only tool he has for pressuring an intractable opposition to agree on anything. He admits that he has been guilty, at times, of misreading the public. He badly underestimated, for instance, how little it would cost Republicans politically to oppose ideas they had once advocated, merely because Obama supported them. He thought the other side would pay a bigger price for inflicting damage on the country for the sake of defeating a president. But the idea that he might somehow frighten Congress into doing what he wanted was, to him, clearly absurd. “All of these forces have created an environment in which the incentives for politicians to cooperate don’t function the way they used to,” he said. “L.B.J. operated in an environment in which if he got a couple of committee chairmen to agree he had a deal. Those chairmen didn’t have to worry about a Tea Party challenge. About cable news. That model has progressively shifted for each president. It’s not a fear-versus-a-nice-guy approach that is the choice. The question is: How do you shape public opinion and frame an issue so that it’s hard for the opposition to say no. And these days you don’t do that by saying, ‘I’m going to withhold an earmark,’ or ‘I’m not going to appoint your brother-in-law to the federal bench.’”

But if you happen to be president just now, what you are faced with, mainly, is not a public-relations problem but an endless string of decisions. Putting it the way George W. Bush did sounded silly but he was right: the president is a decider. Many if not most of his decisions are thrust upon the president, out of the blue, by events beyond his control: oil spills, financial panics, pandemics, earthquakes, fires, coups, invasions, underwear bombers, movie-theater shooters, and on and on and on. They don’t order themselves neatly for his consideration but come in waves, jumbled on top of each other. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically.

The second week in March of last year offered a nice illustration of a president’s curious predicament. On March 11 a tsunami rolled over the Japanese village of Fukushima, triggering the meltdown of reactors inside a nuclear power plant in the town—and raising the alarming possibility that a cloud of radiation would waft over the United States. If you happened to be president of the United States, you were woken up and given the news. (In fact, the president seldom is awakened with news of some crisis, but his aides routinely are, to determine if the president’s sleep needs to be disrupted for whatever has just happened. As one nighttime crisis vetter put it, “They’ll say, ‘This just happened in Afghanistan,’ and I’m like, ‘O.K., and what am I supposed to do about it?’”) In the case of Fukushima, if you were able to go back to sleep you did so knowing that radiation clouds were not your most difficult problem. Not even close. At that very moment, you were deciding on whether to approve a ridiculously audacious plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden in his house in Pakistan. You were arguing, as ever, with Republican leaders in Congress about the budget. And you were receiving daily briefings on various revolutions in various Arab countries. In early February, following the lead of the Egyptians and the Tunisians, the Libyan people had revolted against their dictator, who was now bent on crushing them. Muammar Qaddafi and his army of 27,000 men were marching across the Libyan desert toward a city called Benghazi and were promising to exterminate some large number of the 1.2 million people inside.

If you were president just then and you turned your television to some cable news channel you would have seen many Republican senators screaming at you to invade Libya and many Democratic congressmen hollering at you that you had no business putting American lives at risk in Libya. If you flipped over to the networks on March 7 you might have caught ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper saying to your press secretary, Jay Carney, “More than a thousand people have died, according to the United Nations. How many more people have to die before the United States decides, O.K., we’re going to take this one step of a no-fly zone?”

By March 13, Qaddafi appeared to be roughly two weeks from getting to Benghazi. On that day the French announced they were planning to introduce a resolution in the United Nations to use U.N. forces to secure the skies over Libya in order to prevent Libyan planes from flying. A “no-fly zone” this was called, and it forced Obama’s hand. The president had to decide whether to support the no-fly-zone resolution or not. At 4:10 p.m. on March 15 the White House held a meeting to discuss the issue. “Here is what we knew,” recalls Obama, by which he means here is what I knew. “We knew that Qaddafi was moving on Benghazi, and that his history was such that he could carry out a threat to kill tens of thousands of people. We knew we didn’t have a lot of time—somewhere between two days and two weeks. We knew they were moving faster than we originally anticipated. We knew that Europe was proposing a no-fly zone.”

That much had been in the news. One crucial piece of information had not. “We knew that a no-fly zone would not save the people of Benghazi,” says Obama. “The no-fly zone was an expression of concern that didn’t really do anything.” European leaders wanted to create a no-fly zone to stop Qaddafi, but Qaddafi wasn’t flying. His army was racing across the North African desert in jeeps and tanks. Obama had to have wondered just how aware of this were these foreign leaders supposedly interested in the fate of these Libyan civilians. He didn’t know if they knew that a no-fly zone was pointless, but if they’d talked to any military leader for five minutes they would have. And that was not all. “The last thing we knew,” he adds, “is that if you announced a no-fly zone and if it appeared feckless, there would be additional pressure for us to go further. As enthusiastic as France and Britain were about the no-fly zone, there was a danger that if we participated the U.S. would own the operation. Because we had the capacity.”

On March 15 the president had a typically full schedule. Already he’d met with his national-security advisers, given a series of TV interviews on the No Child Left Behind law, lunched with his vice president, celebrated the winners of an Intel high-school science competition, and spent a good chunk of time alone in the Oval Office with a child suffering from an incurable disease, whose final wish had been to meet the president. His last event, before convening a meeting with 18 advisers (which his official schedule listed simply as “The President and the Vice-President Meet With Secretary of Defense Gates”), was to sit down with ESPN. Twenty-five minutes after he’d given the world his March Madness tournament picks Obama walked down to the Situation Room. He’d been there just the day before, to hold his first meeting to discuss how to kill Osama bin Laden.

In White House jargon this was a meeting of “the principals,” which is to say the big shots. In addition to Biden and Gates, it included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (on the phone from Cairo), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, White House chief of staff William Daley, head of the National Security Council Tom Donilon (who had organized the meeting), and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice (on a video screen from New York). The senior people, at least those in the Situation Room, sat around the table. Their subordinates sat around the perimeter of the room. “Obama structures meetings so that they’re not debates,” says one participant. “They’re mini-speeches. He likes to make decisions by having his mind occupying the various positions. He likes to imagine holding the view.” Says another person at the meeting, “He seems very much to want to hear from people. Even when he’s made up his mind he wants to cherry-pick the best arguments to justify what he wants to do.”

Before big meetings the president is given a kind of road map, a list of who will be at the meeting and what they might be called on to contribute. The point of this particular meeting was for the people who knew something about Libya to describe what they thought Qaddafi might do, and then for the Pentagon to give the president his military options. “The intelligence was very abstract,” says one witness. “Obama started asking questions about it. ‘What happens to the people in these cities when the cities fall? When you say Qaddafi takes a town, what happens?’” It didn’t take long to get the picture: if they did nothing they’d be looking at a horrific scenario, with tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered. (Qaddafi himself had given a speech on February 22, saying he planned to “cleanse Libya, house by house.”) The Pentagon then presented the president with two options: establish a no-fly zone or do nothing at all. The idea was that the people in the meeting would debate the merits of each, but Obama surprised the room by rejecting the premise of the meeting. “He instantly went off the road map,” recalls one eyewitness. “He asked, ‘Would a no-fly zone do anything to stop the scenario we just heard?’” After it became clear that it would not, Obama said, “I want to hear from some of the other folks in the room.”

Obama then proceeded to call on every single person for his views, including the most junior people. “What was a little unusual,” Obama admits, “is that I went to people who were not at the table. Because I am trying to get an argument that is not being made.” The argument he had wanted to hear was the case for a more nuanced intervention—and a detailing of the more subtle costs to American interests of allowing the mass slaughter of Libyan civilians. His desire to hear the case raises the obvious question: Why didn’t he just make it himself? “It’s the Heisenberg principle,” he says. “Me asking the question changes the answer. And it also protects my decision-making.” But it’s more than that. His desire to hear out junior people is a warm personality trait as much as a cool tactic, of a piece with his desire to play golf with White House cooks rather than with C.E.O.’s and basketball with people who treat him as just another player on the court; to stay home and read a book rather than go to a Washington cocktail party; and to seek out, in any crowd, not the beautiful people but the old people. The man has his status needs, but they are unusual. And he has a tendency, an unthinking first step, to subvert established status structures. After all, he became president.

Asked if he was surprised that the Pentagon had not presented him with the option to prevent Qaddafi from destroying a city twice the size of New Orleans and killing everyone inside the place, Obama says simply, “No.” Asked why he was not surprised—if I were president I would have been—he adds, “Because it’s a hard problem. What the process is going to do is try to lead you to a binary decision. Here are the pros and cons of going in. Here are the pros and cons of not going in. The process pushes towards black or white answers; it’s less good with shades of gray. Partly because the instinct among the participants was that … ” Here he pauses and decides he doesn’t want to criticize anyone personally. “We were engaged in Afghanistan. We still had equity in Iraq. Our assets are strained. The participants are asking a question: Is there a core national-security issue at stake? As opposed to calibrating our national-security interests in some new way.”

The people who operate the machinery have their own ideas of what the president should decide, and their advice is pitched accordingly. Gates and Mullen didn’t see how core American security interests were at stake; Biden and Daley thought that getting involved in Libya was, politically, nothing but downside. “The funny thing is the system worked,” says one person who witnessed the meeting. “Everyone was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. Gates was right to insist that we had no core national-security issue. Biden was right to say it was politically stupid. He’d be putting his presidency on the line.”

Public opinion at the fringes of the room, as it turned out, was different. Several people sitting there had been deeply affected by the genocide in Rwanda. (“The ghosts of 800,000 Tutsis were in that room,” as one puts it.) Several of these people had been with Obama since before he was president—people who, had it not been for him, would have been unlikely ever to have found themselves in such a meeting. They aren’t political people so much as Obama people. One was Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell, about the moral and political costs the U.S. has paid for largely ignoring modern genocides. Another was Ben Rhodes, who had been a struggling novelist when he went to work as a speechwriter back in 2007 on the first Obama campaign. Whatever Obama decided, Rhodes would have to write the speech explaining the decision, and he said in the meeting that he preferred to explain why the United States had prevented a massacre over why it hadn’t. An N.S.C. staffer named Denis McDonough came out for intervention, as did Antony Blinken, who had been on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council during the Rwandan genocide, but now, awkwardly, worked for Joe Biden. “I have to disagree with my boss on this one,” said Blinken. As a group, the junior staff made the case for saving the Benghazis. But how?

The president may not have been surprised that the Pentagon hadn’t sought to answer that question. He was nevertheless visibly annoyed. “I don’t know why we are even having this meeting,” he said, or words to that effect. “You’re telling me a no-fly zone doesn’t solve the problem, but the only option you’re giving me is a no-fly zone.” He gave his generals two hours to come up with another solution for him to consider, then left to attend the next event on his schedule, a ceremonial White House dinner.

Back on October 9, 2009, Obama had been woken up in the middle of the night to be informed that he’d been given the Nobel Peace Prize. He half thought it might be a prank. “It’s one of the most shocking things that has happened in all of this,” he says. “And I immediately anticipated that it would cause me problems.” The Nobel Prize Committee had just made it a tiny bit harder for him to do the job he’d just been elected to do, as he could not at once be commander in chief of the most powerful force on earth and the face of pacifism. When he sat down some weeks later with Ben Rhodes and another speechwriter, Jon Favreau, to discuss what he wanted to say, he told them he intended to use the acceptance speech to make the case for war. “I need to make sure I was addressing a European audience that had recoiled so badly from the Iraq war, and that may have been viewing the conferring of the Nobel Prize as a vindication of inaction.”

Both Rhodes and Favreau, who have been with Obama since early in his first presidential campaign, are widely viewed as his two most adept mimics when it comes to speeches. They know how the president sounds: his desire to make it seem he is telling a story rather than making an argument; the long sentences strung together by semicolons; the tendency to speak in paragraphs rather than sound bites; the absence of emotion he was unlikely to genuinely feel. (“He really doesn’t do artifice well,” says Favreau.) Normally, Obama takes his speechwriters’ first draft and works from it. “This time he just threw it in the garbage can,” says Rhodes. “The main reason I’m employed here is I have an idea of how his mind works. In this case, I totally screwed up.”

The problem, in Obama’s view, was his own doing. He’d asked his speechwriters to make an argument he had never fully made and to state beliefs that he had never fully expressed. “There are certain speeches that I have to write myself,” says Obama. “There are times when I’ve got to capture what the essence of the thing is.”

Obama asked his speechwriters to dig up for him writings about war by people he admired: Saint Augustine, Churchill, Niebuhr, Gandhi, King. He wanted to reconcile the nonviolent doctrines of two of his heroes, King and Gandhi, with his new role in the violent world. These writings came back to the speechwriters with key passages underlined and notes by the president to himself scrawled in the margin. (Beside Reinhold Niebuhr’s essay “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” Obama had scribbled “Can we analogize al-Qaeda? What level of casualty can we tolerate?”) “Here it wasn’t just that I needed to make a new argument,” says Obama. “It was that I wanted to make an argument that didn’t allow either side to feel too comfortable.”

He’d received the unusable speech on December 8. He was due to be onstage in Oslo on December 10. On December 9 he had 21 meetings, on every subject under the sun. The only slivers of time on his schedule for that day that even faintly resembled “free time to write a speech to the entire world that I have to give in two days” were “Desk Time” from 1:25 to 1:55 and “potus Time” from 5:50 to 6:50. But he also had the night, after his wife and children had gone to bed. And he had something he really wanted to say.

That evening he sat down at his desk in the White House residence, in the Treaty Room, and pulled out a yellow legal pad and a No. 2 pencil. When we think of a presidential speech we think of the bully pulpit—the president trying to persuade the rest of us to think or feel in a certain way. We do not think of the president sitting down and trying to persuade himself to think or feel a certain way first. But Obama does—he subjects himself to a kind of inner bully pulpit.

Actually, he didn’t toss his speechwriters’ work in the garbage can, not right away. Instead he copied it out, their entire 40-minute speech. “It helped organize my thoughts,” he says. “What I had to do is describe a notion of a just war. But also acknowledge that the very notion of a just war can lead you into some dark places. And so you can’t be complacent in labeling something just. You need to constantly ask yourself questions.” He finished around five in the morning. “There are times when I feel like I’ve grabbed onto the truth of something and I’m just hanging on,” he says. “And my best speeches are when I know what I’m saying is true in a fundamental way. People find their strength in different places. That’s where I’m strong.”

A few hours later he handed his speechwriters six sheets of yellow paper filled with his small, tidy script. In receiving a prize for peace, speaking to an audience primed for pacifism, he’d made the case for war.

When the president handed him this speech, Rhodes had two reactions. The first was that there is no obvious political upside to it. His second reaction: “When did he write it? That’s what I wanted to know.”

On the plane to Oslo, Obama would fiddle with the speech a bit more. “We were actually still putting in edits as I was walking onto the stage,” he tells me, laughing. But the words he spoke that evening were mainly those he wrote that long night at his desk in the White House. And they explained not only why he might respond, as he was about to do, to an impending massacre of innocents in Benghazi, but also why, if the circumstances were even a little bit different, he might respond in another way.

The principals reconvened in the Situation Room at 7:30 p.m. The Pentagon now offered the president three options. The first: do nothing at all. The second: establish a no-fly zone, which they had already conceded would not prevent a massacre in Benghazi. The third: secure a resolution from the U.N. to take “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians and then use American airpower to destroy Qaddafi’s army. “By the time I go to the second meeting I’m viewing the choices differently,” says Obama. “I know that I’m definitely not doing a no-fly zone. Because I think it’s just a show to protect backsides, politically.” In his Nobel speech he’d argued that in cases such as these the United States should not act alone. “In these situations we should have a bias towards operating multilaterally,” he says. “Because the very process of building a coalition forces you to ask tough questions. You may think you are acting morally, but you may be fooling yourself.”

He was trying to frame the problem not just for America but for the rest of the world too. “I’m thinking to myself, What are the challenges, and what are the things we can do uniquely?” He wanted to say to the Europeans and to other Arab countries: We’ll do most of the actual bombing because only we can do it quickly, but you have to clean up the mess afterward. “What I didn’t want,” says Obama, “is a month later a call from our allies saying, ‘It’s not working—you need to do more.’ So the question is: How can I cabin our commitment in a way that is useful?”

Obama insists that he still had not made up his mind what to do when he returned to the Situation Room—that he was still considering doing nothing at all. A million people in Benghazi were waiting to find out whether they would live or die, and he honestly did not know. There were things the Pentagon might have said to deter him, for instance. “If somebody had said to me that we could not take out their air defense without putting our fliers at risk in a significant way; if the level of risk for our military personnel had been ratcheted up—that might have changed my decision,” says Obama. “Or if I did not feel Sarkozy or Cameron were far enough out there to follow through. Or if I did not think we could get a U.N resolution passed.”

Once again he polled the people in the room for their views. Of the principals only Susan Rice (enthusiastically) and Hillary Clinton (who would have settled for a no-fly zone) had the view that any sort of intervention made sense. “How are we going to explain to the American people why we’re in Libya,” asked William Daley, according to one of those present. “And Daley had a point: who gives a shit about Libya?”

From the president’s point of view there was a certain benefit in the indifference of the American public to whatever was happening in Libya. It enabled him to do, at least for a moment, pretty much whatever he wanted to do. Libya was the hole in the White House lawn.

Obama made his decision: push for the U.N resolution and effectively invade another Arab country. Of the choice not to intervene he says, “That’s not who we are,” by which he means that’s not who I am. The decision was extraordinarily personal. “No one in the Cabinet was for it,” says one witness. “There was no constituency for doing what he did.” Then Obama went upstairs to the Oval Office to call European heads of state and, as he puts it, “call their bluff.” Cameron first, then Sarkozy. It was three a.m. in Paris when he reached the French president, but Sarkozy insisted he was still awake. (“I’m a young man!”) In formal and stilted tones the European leaders committed to taking over after the initial bombing. The next morning Obama called Medvedev to make sure that the Russians would not block his U.N. resolution. There was no obvious reason why Russia should want to see Qaddafi murder a city of Libyans, but in the president’s foreign dealings the Russians play the role that Republicans currently more or less play in his domestic affairs. The Russians’ view of the world tends to be zero-sum: if an American president is for it, they are, by definition, against it. Obama thought that he had made more progress with the Russians than he had with the Republicans; Medvedev had come to trust him, he felt, and believed him when he said the United States had no intention of moving into Libya for the long term. A senior American official at the United Nations thought that perhaps the Russians let Obama have his resolution only because they thought it would end in disaster for the United States.

And it could have. All that exists for any president are the odds. On March 17 the U.N. gave Obama his resolution. The next day he flew to Brazil and was there on the 19th, when the bombing began. A group of Democrats in Congress issued a statement demanding Obama withdraw from Libya; Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich asked if Obama had just committed an impeachable offense. All sorts of people who had been hounding the president for his inaction now flipped and questioned the wisdom of action. A few days earlier Newt Gingrich, busy running for president, had said, “We don’t need the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening.” Four days after the bombing began, Gingrich went on the Today show to say he wouldn’t have intervened and was quoted on Politico as saying, “It is impossible to make sense of the standard of intervention in Libya except opportunism and news media publicity.” The tone of the news coverage shifted dramatically, too. One day it was “Why aren’t you doing anything?” The next it was “What have you gotten us into?” As one White House staffer puts it, “All the people who had been demanding intervention went nuts after we intervened and said it was outrageous. That’s because the controversy machine is bigger than the reality machine.”

The minute the president made his decision a lot of people were obviously waiting for it to go wrong—for something to happen that could be seized upon to symbolize this curious use of American power and define this curious president. On March 21, Obama flew from Brazil to Chile. He was on a stage with Chilean leaders, listening to a folk-rock band called Los Jaivas singing the story of the earth’s formation (their signature piece) when someone whispered in his ear: one of our F-15s just crashed in the Libyan desert. On his way to dinner afterward his national-security adviser Thomas Donilon told him that the pilot had been rescued but the navigator was missing. “My first thought was how to find the guy,” recalls Obama. “My next thought was that this is a reminder that something can always go wrong. And there are consequences for things going wrong.”

The soldiers from the Libyan rebel militia who found Tyler Stark weren’t entirely sure what to make of him, as he didn’t speak Arabic and they didn’t speak anything else. At any rate, he didn’t seem inclined to talk. The Libyans were now of course aware that someone was dropping bombs on Qaddafi’s troops, but they were a little unclear about who exactly was doing it. After taking a good long look at this pilot who had fallen from the sky they decided he must be French. And so when Bubaker Habib, who owned an English-language school in Tripoli, and was then hunkered down with fellow dissidents in a hotel in Benghazi, received the phone call from a friend of his in the rebel army, the friend asked him if he spoke French. “He tells me there is a French pilot,” says Bubaker. “He’s crashed. Because I spent 2003 in France, I still have some French words. So I said yes.”

The friend asked if Bubaker would mind driving the 30 kilometers or so out of Benghazi to talk to the “French pilot,” so they could figure out the best way to help him. Even though it was the middle of the night, and you could hear bombs exploding and guns firing, Bubaker jumped in his car. “I found Stark sitting there, holding his knee,” says Bubaker. “He was, to be honest with you, frantic. He doesn’t know what is going on. He was surrounded by the militia. He doesn’t know if they are friends or enemies.”

“Bonjour,” said Bubaker, or maybe not—he has forgotten the first thing out of his mouth. But in response Tyler Stark said something and Bubaker instantly recognized the accent. “Are you American?” asked Bubaker. Stark said he was. Bubaker leaned over and told him that he actually had friends in the U.S. Embassy who had fled in the early days of the war, and that if Stark would come with him back to Benghazi he could put them in touch. “He looked at me, astonished,” remembers Bubaker.

On the drive to Benghazi, Bubaker sensed that Stark was both shocked and wary. At any rate, as much as Bubaker might have wanted to know more about why America was dropping bombs on Libya, Stark would not tell him. And so Bubaker put on some 80s music and changed the subject to something other than war. The first song that came on was Diana Ross and Lionel Richie singing “Endless Love.” “You know what,” said Bubaker. “This song reminds me of my second marriage.” They talked the rest of the way, says Bubaker, “and we didn’t mention anything of any military action.” He drove the “American pilot” back to the hotel and instructed the militia to surround the place. Even in Libya they understood the fickle nature of American public opinion. “I told them, ‘We have an American pilot here. If he gets caught or killed it’s the end of the mission. Make sure he is safe and sound.’” Bubaker then called his friend, the former staffer in the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, now removed to Washington, D.C.

It took a few hours for someone to come and fetch Stark. As he waited with Bubaker inside the hotel, word spread of this French pilot who had saved their lives. When they’d arrived at the hotel a man had handed Tyler Stark a rose, which the American found both strange and touching. Now women from across the city came with flowers to the front of the hotel. When Stark entered a room full of people they stood up and gave him a round of applause. “I’m not sure what I was expecting in Libya,” he says, “but I was not expecting a round of applause.”

Bubaker found doctors to treat Stark’s leg and one of the doctors had Skype on his iPod. Stark tried to call his base, but he couldn’t remember the country code for Britain, so he called the most useful phone number he could remember, his parents’.

At some point Bubaker turned to him and asked, “Do you know why you are in Libya?”

“I just have my orders,” said Stark.

“He didn’t know why he’d been sent,” says Bubaker. “So I showed him some video. Of kids being killed.”

At that moment there was a curious balance of power between the leader and the led. Tyler Stark was in harm’s way because of a decision Barack Obama had made, more or less on his own. He was at the mercy of another man’s character. The president’s decision reached forward into the impersonal future—Qaddafi would be killed, Libya would hold its first free elections—but it also reached back into the personal past, to the things that had made Obama capable of walking alone into a room with a pencil and walking out a bit later with a conviction.

At the same time, the president was exposed to Tyler Stark. “That pilot” is the first thing Obama mentioned when asked what might have gone wrong in Libya. He was especially alive to the power of a story to influence the American public. He believed he had been elected chiefly because he had told a story; he thought he had had problems in office because he had, without quite realizing it, ceased to tell it. If the pilot had fallen into the wrong hands, or landed badly, or shot the dog, it would have been the start of a new narrative. Then the story would no longer have been a complex tale ignored by the American public about how the United States had forged a broad international coalition to help people who claimed to share our values rid themselves of a tyrant.

The story would have become a much simpler one, ripe for exploitation by his foes: how a president elected to extract us from a war in one Arab country got Americans killed in another. If Stark had come to grief, the Libyan intervention would no longer have been the hole in the White House lawn. It would have been the Churchill bust. That is why Obama says that, as obvious as it seems in retrospect to have prevented a massacre in Benghazi, it was at the time “one of those 51–49 decisions.”

On the other hand, Obama had helped make his own luck. This time when we invaded an Arab country we Americans were genuinely treated as heroes—because the locals didn’t see our incursion as an act of imperialism.

The president’s schedule on a recent summer day wasn’t quite as full as usual: 30 minutes with Hillary Clinton, another 30 with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, lunch with the vice president, a long talk with his secretary of agriculture to discuss the drought. He’d also hosted the Lady Bears of Baylor national-championship basketball team, done one TV interview, taped his weekly address, stopped in at a fund-raiser in a Washington hotel, and sat down, for the first time, to prepare for the coming debates with Mitt Romney. “The days that are challenging are not when you have a lot on your schedule,” he said. “Today was a little bit tougher than usual.” What made it tough was the bomb that had exploded on a Bulgarian tour bus, killing a bunch of Israeli tourists, and some reports out of Syria about civilians’ being murdered.

A few days earlier I’d asked him the same question I’d put to him on his airplane, about the range of emotional states that the presidency now required, and the speed with which the president was expected to move from one to the other. “One of my most important tasks,” he’d said, “is making sure I stay open to people, and the meaning of what I’m doing, but not to get so overwhelmed by it that it’s paralyzing. Option one is to go through the motions. That I think is a disaster for a president. But there is the other danger.”

“It’s not a natural state,” I had said.

“No,” he had agreed. “It’s not. There are times when I have to save it and let it out at the end of the day.”

I asked if he would take me to his favorite place in the White House. Leaving the Oval Office he retraced his steps along the South Portico. The private elevator rose to the second floor. On the way up Obama seemed just a tiny bit tense, as if for the first time calculating the effects on his own domestic politics of bringing a stranger home unannounced. We exited into a great hall, half the length of a football field, which appeared to function as the family living room. The space, ridiculously impersonal, still felt homey compared with the rest of the White House. Michelle was in Alabama at a public event, but Obama’s mother-in-law sat reading in a deep, soft chair. She looked up, curiously: she wasn’t expecting company.

“Sorry to invade your house,” I said.

She laughed. “It’s his house!” she said.

“My favorite place in the White House,” said the president, “is this way.”

We walked down the living room, passing his study—a huge, formal room with a well-used feel to it. “You know,” he’d said to me once, after I’d asked him what it was like to move into the White House, “the first night you sleep in the White House, you’re thinking, All right. I’m in the White House. And I’m sleeping here.” He laughed. “There’s a time in the middle of the night when you just kind of startle awake. There’s a little bit of a sense of absurdity. There is such an element of randomness in who gets this job. What am I here for? Why am I walking around the Lincoln Bedroom? That doesn’t last long. A week into it you’re on the job.”

We turned right, into an oval room painted yellow, apparently known as the Yellow Room. Obama marched to the French doors on the far end. There he flipped a few locks and stepped outside. “This is the best spot in the whole White House,” he said.

I followed him out onto the Truman Balcony, to the pristine view of the South Lawn. The Washington Monument stood like a soldier in front of the Jefferson Memorial. Potted poinsettias surrounded what amounted to an outdoor living room. “The best spot in the White House,” he said again. “Michelle and I come out here at night and just sit. It’s the closest you can get to feeling outside. To feeling outside the bubble.”

Aboard Air Force One, I’d asked him what he would do if granted a day when no one knew who he was and he could do whatever he pleased. How would he spend it? He didn’t even have to think about it:

When I lived in Hawaii, I’d take a drive from Waikiki to where my grandmother lived—up along the coast heading east, and it takes you past Hanauma Bay. When my mother was pregnant with me she’d take a walk along the beach. . . . You park your car. If the waves are good you sit and watch and ponder it for a while. You grab your car keys in the towel. And you jump in the ocean. And you have to wait until there is a break in the waves. . . . And you put on a fin—and you only have one fin—and if you catch the right wave you cut left because left is west. . . . Then you cut down into the tube there. You might see the crest rolling and you might see the sun glittering. You might see a sea turtle in profile, sideways, like a hieroglyph in the water. . . . And you spend an hour out there. And if you’ve had a good day you’ve caught six or seven good waves and six or seven not so good waves. And you go back to your car. With a soda or a can of juice. And you sit. And you can watch the sun go down …

When he was done, he thought again and said, “And if I had a second day … ” But then the airplane landed, and it was time for us to get off.

“If I were president I think I might keep a list in my head,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “That’s my last piece of advice to you. Keep a list.”

Now, standing on the Truman Balcony, little came between him and the outside world. Crowds milled about on Constitution Avenue, on the other side of the south gate. Had he waved, someone might have noticed him and waved back. He motioned to the place from which, last November, a man with a high-powered rifle fired at the White House. Turning, with only the slightest trace of annoyance, Obama pointed to the spot directly behind his head where the bullet struck.

Back inside I had had a feeling unhelpful to the task at hand: I shouldn’t have been there. When a man with such a taste and talent for spacing is given so little space in which to operate it feels wrong to take the little he does have, like grabbing water to brush one’s teeth from a man dying of thirst. “I feel a little creepy being here,” I said. “Why don’t I get out of your hair?” He laughed. “C’mon,” he said. “As long as you’re up here, there’s one more thing.” He led me down the hall and into the Lincoln Bedroom. There was a desk, upon which rested some obviously sacred object, covered by a green felt cloth. “There are times when you come in here and you’re having a particularly difficult day,” said the president. “Sometimes I come in here.” He pulled back the cloth and revealed a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address. The fifth of five made by Lincoln but the only one he signed, dated, and titled. Six hours earlier the president had been celebrating the Lady Bears of Baylor. Four hours earlier he’d been trying to figure out what, if anything, he would do to save lives of innocents being massacred by their government in Syria. Now he looked down and read the words of another president, who also understood the peculiar power, even over one’s self, that comes from putting your thoughts into them.

The Hunt For "Geronimo"

President Obama saw it as a “50–50” proposition. Admiral Bill McRaven, mission commander, knew something would go wrong. So how did the raid that killed bin Laden get green-lighted? In an adaptation from his new book, Mark Bowden weaves together accounts from Obama and top decision-makers for the full story behind the daring operation.

— Mark Bowden, November 2012

MAY 1, 2011 Barack Obama and his top security advisers in the Situation Room on the day of the raid. From left: the president, National-Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the C.I.A. Leon Panetta, Chief of Staff Bill Daley, and Vice President Joe Biden.

‘In the name of Allah the most gracious the most merciful. Praise Allah and pray on his prophet. To the esteemed brother, Sheikh Mahmud, Allah protect him.”

Holed up in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Osama bin Laden sat at a computer and set down his thoughts in a long letter dated April 26, 2011, to Atiyah Abdul al-Rahman, his third-in-command and the link to his far-flung and beleaguered followers—the man he addressed as Sheikh Mahmud. It was the al-Qaeda leader’s sixth spring of confinement in Abbottabad. His hair and beard had grown white. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden’s life had shrunk to the cramped and crowded space of the upper two floors of a house behind high walls. His days consisted of familiar routines, rarely broken: his meals, his seven daily prayer sessions, his readings, the poetry lessons for his children and grandchildren, the sermons to three of his wives, the brisk daily walk around the vegetable gardens.

In his letter to Sheikh Mahmud, he raced to catch up with the Arab Spring, to interpret the events in light of his own immutable beliefs. Bin Laden also hammered home some advice about security. After more than nine successful years in hiding, he considered himself to be an expert: “It is proven that the American technology and its modern systems cannot arrest a Mujahid if he does not commit a security error that leads them to him,” he wrote. “So adherence to security precautions makes their advanced technology a loss and a disappointment to them.”

The computer turned bin Laden’s words into neat lines of uniform Arabic. He was feeling confident. He had five days to live.

I. The Pacer

Eight months earlier, on a hot day in August, Tom Donilon, then the deputy national-security adviser, had added a brief item to the end of his daily morning briefing for Barack Obama. He said, “Leon and the guys at Langley think they may have come up with something”—something related to bin Laden.

There had been no scent of the al-Qaeda leader for more than eight years, ever since he had slipped away from the mountain outpost of Tora Bora during a botched siege by allied troops. The Bush administration maintained that he was somewhere in the mountainous regions of northwestern Pakistan, but, in truth, they had no idea where he was. On May 26, 2009, Obama had concluded a routine national-security briefing in the Situation Room by pointing to Donilon, Leon Panetta, his newly appointed C.I.A. director, Mike Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff.

“You, you, you, and you,” he said. “Come upstairs.”

The four followed Obama through the warren of narrow West Wing hallways to the Oval Office. They didn’t sit down.

Obama said, “Here’s the deal. I want this hunt for Osama bin Laden and [Ayman] al-Zawahiri to come to the front of the line. I worry that the trail has gone cold. This has to be our top priority and it needs leadership in the tops of your organizations.” He added, “I want regular reports on this to me, and I want them starting in 30 days.”

The conventional wisdom is that the intelligence apparatus had slackened off in its search for bin Laden—and it’s true that President George W. Bush, frustrated by the inability to find him, publicly declared that bin Laden wasn’t important. But among the analysts and operatives, the hunt had always continued. Obama’s order just gave it more focus and intensity. Now, a year later, there was something to talk about. While looking for an al-Qaeda figure who went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—a man known to have once been a trusted aide and courier for bin Laden—intelligence analysts had become aware of a curious compound just outside Abbottabad, a prosperous city about 30 miles northeast of Islamabad. Too wary to use cell phones or Internet links, bin Laden relied on couriers to distribute his letters and occasional video and audio pronouncements. Reversing the paths taken by these tapes or thumb drives always ended one or two steps short of bin Laden’s inner circle. But now they had someone who might take them all the way inside. The search for him had lasted eight years. It had taken the C.I.A. five years just to learn his real name: Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. The trail had ended at this residence.

Panetta brought two of the agency’s bin Laden team leaders to the Oval Office. They handed Obama classified pictures and maps and walked him through the material. What had first intrigued them was the compound itself. Unlike most homes in that affluent neighborhood, it did not have Internet or phone connections. The walls were unusually high, topped by two feet of barbed wire. There was no way to see inside the house itself, from the ground or from above. The agency had learned that the compound was home not only to Ibrahim Ahmed’s family but to his brother Abrar’s family as well. They went by assumed names: Ahmed called himself Arshad Khan, and the brother went by Tariq Khan. They had never been wealthy, but their accommodations were expensive. The brothers were also wary. They burned their trash on-site. None of their children attended school. In telephone calls to distant family members, always made from locations away from the compound itself, they lied about where they were living. The C.I.A. has been known to misinterpret many things, but one thing it recognizes is high operational security.

The agency had been investigating the compound quietly, taking pictures from above and collecting information on the ground. That and telephone intercepts had produced two discoveries.

The first was that living inside the compound on the upper two floors of the central building was a third family. Neighbors in Abbottabad who knew of the Khan brothers were not aware of this third family. The second discovery was that Ahmed still worked for al-Qaeda. Though he was known to have been close to bin Laden years earlier, the agency had no proof that he had retained the connection. But in a telephone conversation with an old friend that summer, a call the C.I.A. monitored, Ahmed was peppered with the standard questions, “What are you doing now? What are you up to?” Ahmed at first didn’t answer. But his friend was insistent, and so he finally gave in, albeit cryptically, explaining, “I’m with the same ones as before.” His friend said, “May Allah be with you,” and quickly dropped the subject. That suggested that whoever Ahmed and his brother were minding in that house was a top al-Qaeda figure.

Those were the new facts presented to the president. “This is the best lead that we have seen since Tora Bora,” said one of the team members. Thinking back on the moment during a long Oval Office conversation, Obama recalled being guarded, “not particularly optimistic.” He found the information intriguing, but only in a general way. The connection to bin Laden was tenuous. Still, he encouraged Panetta and his team to press on. He wanted to nail down the identity of whoever was living upstairs. He also wanted a “close hold” on the information. They were not to let others know about it. They were definitely not to tell Pakistan.

The use of a variety of tools, including agents on the ground and remote surveillance, enabled the team to flesh out life at the compound in detail. There seemed to be no way to determine the identity of the mystery family. The most important clue—the one that would persuade John Brennan, the president’s chief of counterterrorism, that the family was indeed bin Laden’s—was the figure who came to be known as The Pacer, a man in traditional Pakistani attire and prayer cap who regularly took walks around the vegetable garden, part of which had a tarp stretched above to shield it from the sun. Images of The Pacer from overhead cameras were very good, but the angle made it impossible to get a clear look at the man’s face. Efforts were made to gauge the man’s height by measuring his stride and the shadow he cast. The calculations were only precise enough to say this: he was tall and thin. But Brennan, a former C.I.A. officer, had seen Predator imagery of bin Laden back in 2000. He felt he recognized the man, recognized the walk.

Panetta briefed the president periodically throughout the fall. In December, Michael Morell, the head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden team, and several others met with Tom Donilon and Brennan at the White House. An agency team was now living in a house in the neighborhood. They watched the comings and goings of the Ahmed brothers. They counted the pieces of laundry that were hung out to dry. They determined that the hidden family was large: three wives, a young man, and 10 or more children. The number of wives and children corresponded with the number of family members they believed might be living with bin Laden.

On December 14, just before Obama left to join his family in Hawaii, Panetta visited him in the Oval Office. Obama was struck, as were the agency men, by the fact that this third family never left the compound, and also by the compound’s very size. It was atypical of the neighborhood. Whoever had built it had considerable resources and clearly intended to prevent anyone from seeing inside. Obama was also captivated, as others had been, by the video imagery of The Pacer strolling soundlessly inside the high walls.

There was always the possibility, the president knew, that “this was some warlord from Afghanistan who had set up shop, the possibility that this was a drug dealer from the Gulf who valued his privacy or had a mistress or a second family.” But he also understood that The Pacer might be exactly who they thought he was. From what he knew of the man, Obama had never bought the conventional wisdom—the assumption that bin Laden “was living an ascetic life somewhere, in some mountain somewhere.” The evidence was circumstantial, but he agreed that it would be hard to find another explanation that fit all the facts. Obama kept his expectations under control, as he is known to do, but admitted to himself that “this might be for real.”

He instructed Panetta to get creative, to figure out a way to nail it down—to “run it to ground.” He also asked Panetta to start preparing plans for action.

II. “This Is 50–50”

By now, the C.I.A. had its own small armies in the field. When Panetta and Morell returned from the meeting, the first thing they considered was using their own people. The two broad options were to bomb the compound or to send in a raiding party. The latter would require a lot more planning and rehearsal than the former, and would involve a lot more people. Using C.I.A. personnel had the advantage of keeping the secret—now four months old—fairly well contained.

The C.I.A. teams were excited about the mission, and eager to do it themselves—and soon. But Panetta and Morell had time. The president had also told them to work harder on identifying the mystery man in the compound. Before committing to using its own operators, the C.I.A. wanted to at least consult with Admiral Bill McRaven, a navy SEAL who now led the Joint Special Operations Command, an army within an army that during the past decade had conducted thousands of operations around the world, mostly in secret.

All McRaven knew before getting the call was that the C.I.A. had a possible new lead on bin Laden. He had heard that before, and none of these “Elvis sightings” had ever panned out. Early in the war in Afghanistan, his men had spent a lot of time chasing bin Laden’s ghost. This time he was told that the intelligence seemed better than usual, but he didn’t think much of it until summoned to Langley in January. In the deputy director’s seventh-floor office, overlooking the Potomac, McRaven and one of his top aides met with Panetta, Morell, and the heads of the C.I.A.’s own strike force. He was shown pictures of the compound. Everything was heavily couched in maybes. But on that qualified basis, they launched into tactical discussion. If you were going to hit this target, how would you do it?

The C.I.A. men had had a head start. They sketched five different options. That fact alone was telling. McRaven could see at a glance that there was really only one way to do it. The admiral ruled out the bombing option immediately. Whatever the advantages in simplicity and reduced American risk, his educated guess was that it would take upwards of 50,000 pounds of ordnance to destroy a compound of that size and make sure bin Laden, if he was there, did not survive. You had to consider the possibility of tunnels or an underground bunker. That explosive power would kill everyone inside the compound and quite a few people nearby.

A ground raid, on the other hand, posed relatively few problems. His men had been hitting compounds like this daily for years, often a dozen or more a night. This one was unremarkable. It had a three-story residence, a smaller outbuilding, and high stone walls all around it, which merely indicated the right way to go in—from above.

McRaven explained to Panetta and Morell how special ops would hit the target. The biggest problem was its location in Abbottabad, a “denied” space 150 miles from friendly territory in neighboring Afghanistan, which meant that delivering the force and safely extracting it without triggering a shooting war with Pakistan would be challenging—but doable. It would increase the complexity of the mission, and complexity multiplied the number of things that could go wrong. That aside, attacking the compound and the buildings was old-hat. The tactics McRaven’s teams had developed were built on years of trial and error, missions that had worked and those that hadn’t. Think what one will about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they had produced a new kind of fighting force. McRaven explained what his men would do, and why. He even suggested the right man for the mission: his SEAL Team Six commander, who in 2009 had led the mission that killed three Somalian pirates, rescuing an American freighter-ship captain. McRaven also noted that, no matter how well the operation in Abbottabad was planned, long experience taught that something would go wrong. Something always went wrong, which was why his men’s unrivaled experience would be invaluable.

After listening to McRaven, Panetta and Morell abandoned the idea of a C.I.A. operation. If there was going to be a helicopter raid, McRaven and the SEALs would do it.

On March 14, Obama met with the National Security Council to formally review the intelligence. They gathered in the White House Situation Room, where much of the drama over the next two months would unfold. The Situation Room, informally known as the Woodshed, sits in the basement of the West Wing and, despite the resonant name, is not the sort of space a set designer would create for a great center of national power. The main conference room is nearly filled by the long polished-wood table at its center and the row of high-backed black leather chairs around it. There is barely enough room for staff members to sit on chairs against the beige walls. The lighting is fluorescent, and instead of windows there are flat-screen TVs, six of them, the largest filling the south wall down the long table from the president’s chair. When the room is full, the top leadership of the nation can truly be said to be huddled.

By early March the C.I.A. had determined that the Abbottabad compound definitely held a “high-value target” and that he was most likely Osama bin Laden. The C.I.A.’s team leader, perhaps the most senior analyst on the trail, was close to convinced. He put his confidence level at 95 percent. Brennan felt about the same, but others were less certain—and some were far less certain. The assessment would ultimately be “red-teamed”—worked over by analysts assigned to poke holes in it—three times: by the Counterterrorism Center, by Brennan’s staff, and by another group within the C.I.A. Four veterans at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had reviewed the case and provided their own opinions. Most of those involved placed their confidence level at about 80 percent. Some went as low as 40 or even 30 percent.

“O.K., this is a probability thing,” said Obama. “Leon, talk to me about this.” The director explained that following the agency’s erroneous conviction, a decade earlier, that Saddam Hussein had been hiding weapons of mass destruction—a finding that was used to justify a long and costly war—the C.I.A. had instituted an almost comically elaborate process for weighing certainty. It was like trying to craft a precise formula for good judgment. Analysts up and down the chain were now asked not only to give their opinion but also to place a confidence level on it—high, medium, or low. Then they were required to explain why they had assigned that level. What you ended up with, as the president was discovering, was more confusion.

At one meeting, Obama asked Morell, who was seated in a chair against the wall behind him, under the presidential seal, for his own view. Morell put the probability that The Pacer was bin Laden at 60 percent.

Morell had been personally involved in the flawed analysis of Saddam’s weapons capability and yet had felt more certain about that than he felt about this. “People don’t have differences because they have different intel,” he said. “We are all looking at the same things. I think it depends more on your past experience.” He explained that counterterrorism analysts at work on al-Qaeda over the past five years had enjoyed a remarkable string of successes. They had been crushing the terror group inside Pakistan and systematically killing its top leadership. So they were very confident. Those who had been at work longer, like himself, had known failure. They knew the fragility of even the soundest-seeming intelligence analysis. The W.M.D. story had been a brutal lesson.

“Mr. President,” he said, “if we had a human source who had told us directly that bin Laden was living in that compound, I still wouldn’t be above 60 percent.” Morell said he had spent a lot of time on both questions, W.M.D. and Abbottabad. He had seen no fewer than 13 analytical drafts on the former and at least as many on the latter. “And I’m telling you, the case for W.M.D. wasn’t just stronger—it was much stronger.”

The president listened, but he had already pretty much made up his mind. “One of the things you learn as president is you’re always dealing with probabilities,” he told me. “No issue comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. No issue comes to my desk where there’s 100 percent confidence that this is the right thing to do. Because if people were absolutely certain then it would have been decided by someone else. And that’s true in dealing with the economic crisis. That’s true in order to take a shot at a pirate. That’s true about most of the decisions I make during the course of the day. So I’m accustomed to people offering me probabilities. In this situation, what you started getting was probabilities that disguised uncertainty as opposed to actually providing you with more useful information.” The president had no trouble facing reality. If he acted on this, he was going to be taking a gamble.

The conversation about percentages wore on, and the president finally cut in. “This is 50–50,” he said. That silenced everyone. “This is a flip of the coin. You guys, I can’t base this decision on the notion that we have any greater certainty than that.” What he wanted to know was: if he decided to act, what were his options?

The simplest, and the one that posed the least risk to American forces, was to reduce the compound to dust, along with everyone and everything in and around it. As Peter L. Bergen recounted in Manhunt, the air force calculated that to do the job right would mean dropping upwards of 30 precision bombs, or launching a comparable number of missiles. This would be enough to guarantee that anything on, in, or near that plot of earth would be killed. There would be minimal worry about air defenses, and no chance of having to mix it up with Pakistan’s army or police. Obama asked how many people were living at the compound, and was told that there were four adult males, five or six adult women, and nearly 20 children. He asked about the houses that were close to the compound in the neighborhood. Those, too, would be destroyed.

As McRaven had done earlier, Obama scrapped that plan immediately. He said the only way he would even consider attacking the compound from the air was if the blast area could be drastically reduced.

McRaven explained the raid option. He had not yet brought on a full team to scope out the mission completely. The one thing he could tell the president for sure was that if his team could be delivered to the compound they could clear it and kill or capture bin Laden with minimal loss of life. He presented the still-sketchy ground operation as a simple statement of fact. Without bringing any more people into the planning loop, he said, “I can tell you that we can succeed on the raid. What I can’t tell you yet is how I get in and how I get out. To do that requires detailed planning by air planners who do this for a living Getting out could be a little sporty. I can’t recommend a raid until I do the homework.”

In the days ahead the air force would come back with a plan for smaller bombs and smaller blast circles. They could hit the compound without harming people outside its walls, but the lesser assault meant that they could not guarantee taking out anything underground. There would still be a lot of bodies, women and children included, and no way to tell if one of the dead was bin Laden.

In the aftermath of the raid, the term “air option” has come to be synonymous with “bombing.” In fact, there was a very different air option, not widely known, and this different option was the one that was ultimately taken seriously. The idea had been put forward by General James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs: wait for the tall man in the prayer cap to go for his daily walk and take a shot at him with a small missile fired from a drone. It would require great precision, but the drones had delivered that in the past. There would be no dead wives and children, no collateral damage at all. But it was strictly a one-shot deal. If the drone missed, The Pacer and his entourage would vanish.

In the end, despite all of the potential complications of a helicopter raid, the president told McRaven to start rehearsing that option. It had clear advantages, one of them being that you would know if you had achieved your objective. Another, in the president’s view, was the sheer intelligence value: as he recalls, “there might be the possibility that we would get enough intelligence out of the compound, even in a very short operation, that would help us dismantle other portions of the organization.” At the same time, raiding the compound posed a slew of hard questions that the air option did not. One of the thorniest was what to do if bin Laden was not killed but captured. Obama believed that there was very little chance of this, but it was a possibility.

How the legal system should deal with high-profile terrorists had been a hot political issue for years, and Congress had done nothing to resolve the problem. President Bush had locked most of them away at Guantánamo, and talked about holding military tribunals somewhere down the line. But some, like the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, had already been tried in federal courts and were now serving life sentences. Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of 9/11, on trial at the federal courthouse in Manhattan had run into so much opposition that the administration was forced to reverse itself and announce that he would instead face a military tribunal at Guantánamo.

In the unlikely event that bin Laden surrendered, Obama saw an opportunity to resurrect the idea of a criminal trial. He was ready to bring him back and put him on trial in a federal court. “We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III,” the president told me. “I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was, if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.”

III. The Decision

McRaven’s men undertook their first rehearsal on April 7. They worked on an isolated acre deep inside the sprawling, wooded grounds of Fort Bragg, where a mock-up of the three-story Abbottabad house had been built.

For the first practice session, the SEALs rehearsed what would be, effectively, the last part of the mission, hitting the compound and the target house. They approached aboard two stealth Black Hawk helicopters. One unit roped down to the roof of the building and assaulted from above. The other roped inside the compound walls and assaulted from the ground. This part of the operation took only about 90 seconds to complete. The delivery choppers moved off while the men did their work, then swooped back to pick them up.

McRaven’s men had done this sort of thing so many times they could almost do it blindfolded. For the most part the group consisted of SEAL Team Six, but McRaven had also grabbed men from other units.

SEAL Team Six had rotated home not long before. The men on these elite special-operations teams went to war in shifts. For most of the past 10 years they had been deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan for three-to-four-month tours, where they maintained a very high op tempo, going out on missions sometimes two or three times a night. When deployed, they lived for the most part sequestered from conventional troops, either at their own forward operating bases or on a portion of a larger base that was sealed off. It was a deeply satisfying business. The men in these units tended to stay. Many found it hard to adjust to anything else. The skills required were not readily applicable to other kinds of work. When you have been part of such operations—adrenaline-pumping missions in which you risk your life and good friends die; and when you enjoy the silent admiration of everyone you meet; and when you believe your work is vital to the nation’s security—it is hard to find anything else that compares.

The team re-assembled for a second rehearsal a week later in Nevada, where the heat and the altitude (about 4,000 feet) were similar to Abbottabad’s. This time the rehearsal was designed to duplicate the conditions flying to the target. On the real mission, the helicopters would have to travel 90 minutes before arriving over Abbottabad. They would be flying very low and very fast to avoid Pakistani radar. Mission planners had to work out precisely what the choppers could do at that altitude, and in the anticipated air temperatures. How much of a load could the choppers carry and still perform? In Nevada, they went through the entire scenario. The mock-up of the compound was much cruder; instead of stone walls, there was just a chain-link fence. But the purpose of the rehearsal was not to duplicate the final 10 minutes of the raid—what they had been doing at Fort Bragg. The purpose was to simulate the stresses on the choppers. They would discover only later that they had made one mistake.

Meanwhile, another option was being tested—Vice-Chairman Cartwright’s magic bullet, in the form of a small guided munition that could be fired from a tiny drone. No one involved with planning the mission will discuss its particulars, but the weapon may well have been a newly designed Raytheon G.P.S.-guided missile, about the length and width of a strong man’s forearm. The missile can strike an individual or a vehicle without harming anything nearby. Called simply an S.T.M. (Small Tactical Munition), it weighs just 13 pounds, carries a 5-pound warhead, and can be fired from under the wing of a small drone. It was a “fire-and-forget” missile, which meant you could not guide it once it was released. It would find and explode on the precise coordinates it had been given. Since The Pacer tended to walk in the same place every day, Cartwright believed the missile would kill him, and likely him alone. It placed no American forces at risk.

The weapon had yet to be used in combat, though the technologies involved were hardly new. Still: did you want to hang such a critical opportunity on a single shot, with a missile that had never been fired in anger? If you missed, The Pacer would vanish. And if you hit him, how would you know that you had? If there was no proof that bin Laden was dead, al-Qaeda could theoretically keep him alive for years, raising money and planning attacks in his name.

The final meeting before the raid was held in the Situation Room on Thursday, April 28. Filling the black leather chairs were Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, Vice-Chairman Cartwright, Brennan, Donilon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta and his deputy, Michael Morell. Top staffers ringed the room. Admiral McRaven did not participate: he and the SEAL team were now in Afghanistan.

Everyone sensed that the secret had held about as long as it could. Brennan had asked Mike Leiter to assemble a group from the Counterterrorism Center to perform one last “red-teaming” of the intelligence. The final meeting began with that presentation, which was deflating for almost everyone in the room. Leiter told the president that his group could arrive at only 40 percent certainty that bin Laden was there. This was, as Leiter pointed out, “38 percent better than we’ve been for 10 years.” Obama asked if that estimate was based on new or different information. It was not. The president asked Leiter to explain the disparity. Why was their confidence so much lower than, say, the leader of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden team, whose confidence had been 95 percent? Leiter could not explain this to the president’s satisfaction, and so the new assessment was dismissed. As far as Obama was concerned, the level of certainty was the same as it had been for months: 50–50.

One by one, the principals around the room were asked to choose among three options—a raid, a missile strike, or doing nothing—and then to defend their choice. The president said that he probably would not make a decision until the next morning, but he wanted to hear everyone’s view. It was widely reported in the weeks and months after the raid that most, or at least many, of the president’s top advisers opposed the raid, but this is not true. Nearly everyone present favored it.

The only major dissenters were Biden and Gates, and before the raid was launched, Gates would change his mind.

The vice president was never shy about political calculations. “Mr. President, my suggestion is: don’t go,” he said. “We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.” Biden believed that if the president decided to choose either the air or the ground option, and if the effort failed, Obama could say good-bye to a second term. Biden never hesitated to disagree at meetings like this, and the president had always encouraged him to do so. In this case Biden disagreed with his own top adviser on such matters, Tony Blinken, who was not asked for an opinion at the meeting but had earlier told the president that he strongly favored the raid.

Gates favored taking the shot from the drone. He spoke quietly but forcefully. He acknowledged that it was a difficult call, and that striking from the air would leave them not knowing whether they had gotten bin Laden, but he had been working at the C.I.A. as an analyst in 1980 when the Desert One mission to rescue the hostages in Iran failed. He had, in fact, been in this very Situation Room when the chopper collided with the C-130 at the staging area in the desert and turned that rescue mission into a fireball. It was an experience he did not wish to revisit. He had visibly blanched the first time he had heard that McRaven was planning a helicopter-refueling stop in a remote area outside Abbottabad, similar to what had been done in Iran in 1980. As defense secretary, Gates knew the importance of maintaining the flow of fuel and matériel to American forces fighting in Afghanistan, which depended on Pakistan’s goodwill. There was so much to lose, he said, and the evidence for bin Laden’s presence in the compound was still flimsy.

Cartwright agreed with Gates. He had put the drone option on the table, and he was confident that the small missile would hit the target. It was the simplest and least risky way to go. Leiter, though expressing low confidence that The Pacer was bin Laden, also advocated the drone option.

Everyone else favored sending in the SEALs. Clinton, who had faulted Obama during the primary campaign for asserting that he would send forces to Pakistan unilaterally if there was a good chance of getting bin Laden, now said that she favored the raid. She delivered this opinion after a typically lengthy review of the pros and cons. She noted that the raid would pose a diplomatic nightmare for the State Department. But because the U.S.-Pakistani relationship was built more on mutual dependence than friendship and trust, it would likely survive the crisis. Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave a detailed PowerPoint presentation before delivering his endorsement. Mullen had witnessed McRaven’s rehearsals at Fort Bragg and in Nevada. He had high confidence in the SEAL team

Brennan, Donilon, Clapper, Panetta, and Morell all agreed. The C.I.A. director felt strongly about it, which was not surprising. This had been his project all along, and the analysts who worked for him would have felt betrayed if their boss had changed his mind. Panetta told Obama that he ought to ask himself this question: “What would the average American say if he knew we had the best chance of getting bin Laden since Tora Bora and we didn’t take a shot?”

So the vote in the room was largely in favor of unleashing McRaven and the SEALs, and by the next morning Gates had countermanded his opposition. When his deputies Michael Vickers and Michèle Flournoy had learned that he had voted in favor of a drone strike, they decided to confront him. They went to his office first thing Friday morning. “Boss, we think you are wrong,” said Flournoy.

Like most of the other principals, Gates had been brought into the loop fairly late. Flournoy and Vickers had spent a lot more time on the matter than he had. They believed he didn’t fully understand how well-thought-through McRaven’s plan was. Both had been terrifically impressed by the special-ops commander. They were used to dealing with generals and admirals, and few of them liked being challenged. McRaven had understood from the start that he would have people looking over his shoulder. Flournoy was particularly impressed by McRaven’s willingness to admit that he didn’t have all the answers. “You know, I haven’t thought about that, but I need to,” he would say. He was open to suggestions and made substantial revisions based on the input he was given. They had seen how carefully McRaven picked the members of the team, choosing men who had honed their skills night after night for months.

They also argued that Gates had not adequately considered the downsides of a drone strike. First of all, neither Flournoy nor Vickers bought Cartwright’s optimism about the small missile’s hitting the target. The Pacer, after all, was moving. The missile could not be guided. You have one shot, they reminded Gates, and if you miss, you’ve blown it. Imagine the criticism of the president that would follow: You got the chance of a lifetime and you blew it with something untried?

They talked for an hour, and when they were done, Gates phoned the White House to say that he had changed his mind. So in the end every one of the president’s top advisers except Biden was in favor of taking immediate action. Two, Cartwright and Leiter, wanted to use the drone. Everyone else backed McRaven.

In truth, the president had all but made up his mind to launch the raid when he left the meeting that Thursday afternoon. He had been thinking about it for months. He delayed making the final decision in order to take one last breath. He had been inclined to hit the target for a long time now. He had made his peace with “50–50” months ago. He had been tempted by the air option, but believed that the importance of certainty was too great.

Still, he turned it over in his mind until the small hours. His habit was to stay up much later than Michelle and the girls. That night he was preoccupied not so much with making a decision, but with whether he had considered every element carefully enough. “It was a matter of taking one last breath and just making sure, asking is there something that I haven’t thought of?” Obama explained to me. “Is there something that we need to do? … At that point my estimation was that we weren’t going to be able to do it better a month or two months or three months from now. We weren’t going to have better certainty about whether bin Laden was there, and so it was just a matter of pulling the trigger.” Alone in the Treaty Room, he considered the matter for three or four hours. He woke up several times that night, still mulling it over. In the end, he would recall, the decision would boil down to Obama’s deep confidence in McRaven: “He just never looks like he’s surprised by anything.”

IV. “How Tall Is This Guy?”

The two stealth Black Hawks lifted off from the airfield at Jalalabad at 11 P.M. local time. They were blacked out and, together, carried a full, minutely calculated load: 23 SEALs, a Pashto translator, and a dog—a Belgian Malinois named Cairo. The job of the translator and the dog would be to keep the curious away from the compound while the SEALs did their work. As soon as the Black Hawks crossed the border into Pakistan, three big Chinooks lifted off from Jalalabad. The Chinooks carried the Rapid Reaction Force, to be mobilized in case of trouble. Some have credited Obama for insisting that this force be deployed; if the Pakistanis made trouble, the U.S. would make trouble for them. But McRaven would have deployed it anyway—it was standard procedure. In this instance, one Chinook would set down just inside the border on the Afghan side. The other two would proceed to a staging area north of Abbottabad. McRaven had determined during rehearsals that the drumming chop of the approaching Black Hawks would be faintly audible about two minutes before they reached the target. The helicopters were stealthy, designed to avoid being spotted by radar, and quieter than standard models, but they still created quite a racket as they moved overhead. Approaching the compound from the northwest, the Black Hawks were now visible in the grainy overhead feed from the Sentinel drone to those gazing at screens in the White House and at the C.I.A.

After that, things happened very fast. The reconstruction that follows comes chiefly from civilian and military personnel who participated in the planning and execution of the raid. Some information derives from published accounts.

Biden, Gates, and General Brad Webb, in a conference room in the White House basement, across from the Situation Room, watched with horror as the first chopper, instead of hovering over the compound yard for a few moments to drop the SEAL team, as planned, abruptly wheeled around, clipped the compound wall, and hit the ground. The chopper hadn’t been able to hover—it had “mushed,” or begun to skid uncontrollably. An after-action analysis would conclude that because the compound was encircled by stone walls, whereas the mock target in Nevada had only a chain-link fence, the air beneath the Black Hawk was warmer and less dense than anticipated, and insufficient to bear the helicopter’s weight.

No one watching the small screen in the White House could see exactly what had happened. They could see only that the helicopter was down inside the wall, and everyone knew that had not been part of the plan.

Excruciating moments passed as McRaven sought word from the scene. Every discussion of what could go wrong on this mission had referenced the helicopter that clipped a plane and exploded in the Iranian desert in 1980. Here, in the first seconds of the mission, they already had a helicopter down.

Obama had been following Donilon’s advice up to this point, receiving mission updates secondhand, talking with Panetta via the video hookup and letting others monitor the video feed and chat lines, but when the chopper went down he abruptly got up and crossed the hall.

Clinton watched him go, standing over the food tray in the adjacent room with Ben Rhodes, the chief foreign-policy speechwriter.

“Ben, do you think it’s a good idea for the president to watch this?” she asked.

“He’s not going to be directing anything,” Rhodes said. “It’s just a feed.”

Clinton followed the president. Sitting at the head of the small conference table, Webb stood up to surrender the spot when he noticed Obama enter. The president waved him back down.

“I’ll just take this chair here,” he said, sliding into the corner. “I need to watch this.”

In Jalalabad, the president’s entry was duly noted by Webb on the chat line.

“Sir, the president just walked into the room,” a sergeant major told McRaven.

The admiral didn’t have time to explain things to Washington. He quickly ascertained that no one on the chopper had been hurt. They were already adjusting their approach to the target house. All of these men had long ago proved their talent for adapting quickly. McRaven had lost helicopters before. He told Panetta straightforwardly what had happened—and that he had options.

The White House was still in the dark. A White House photographer snapped a picture at precisely this moment, with Webb at the center in his blue uniform, head down, intently monitoring the video feed and chat line on his laptop screen; Obama seated in the corner with furrowed brow; Donilon standing behind Webb with his arms crossed, flanked by Mullen and Chief of Staff Bill Daley; Clinton with her hand to her mouth; Gates and Biden looking glum; all fixated on an off-camera screen.

The second Black Hawk had diverted from its planned course and landed outside the compound walls in a newly planted field. The mission had called for it to hover briefly outside to drop the translator, the dog, and four SEALs, and then move to a hover directly over the home to drop the rest of the team on its roof. It was clear now that the entire assault plan had gone awry.

Then, without further explanation of what had happened, SEALs could be seen streaming out of both choppers. Those watching in Washington concluded correctly that, whatever had happened, the mission was proceeding. In his flat Texas twang, McRaven could be heard ordering in one of the two Chinooks waiting north of Abbottabad.

The team from the crashed chopper moved quickly along the inside wall, pausing only to blow open a metal door that led to the house. The team from the chopper outside the wall blasted in through another entrance. There were flashes of light on the screen. The men were moving now on the house itself, and then were inside.

Upstairs, the household had been startled awake by a loud crash. One of bin Laden’s adult daughters ran up from the second floor to the third and was told to go back down. Bin Laden instructed his wife Amal to leave the lights off, though they would not have been able to turn them on anyway: C.I.A. operatives had cut the electricity to the entire neighborhood. Bin Laden waited upstairs with Amal.

One group of SEALs entered the garage area of the guesthouse. Teams like this had hit houses that were wired to explode, and had encountered human targets wired to blow themselves up, so they moved very fast, and with adult males in particular they were inclined to shoot on sight. The courier Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed sprayed a wild burst of AK-47 rounds at the SEALs, who returned fire and killed him. His wife, behind him, was hit in the shoulder.

Another part of the team moved on the main house, clearing it methodically, room by room. Abrar Ahmed, the courier’s brother, was in a first-floor bedroom with his wife Bushra. Both were shot dead. The team then cleared the first floor, room by room. When they encountered a locked metal door in the rear, sealing off a stairway to the upper floors, they slapped on a small C-4 charge, blew it off its hinges, and moved up the stairs. Bin Laden’s 23-year-old son, Khalid, a slender bearded man in a white T-shirt, was shot dead at the top of the stairs. There were wailing women and children on this floor, none of whom posed a threat. The team didn’t know it yet, but there was only one adult male left in the compound, and he was in the third-floor bedroom.

Originally, half of the assaulting SEALs were to have come through the third-floor balcony into the top floor, in which case bin Laden would have been encountered immediately, at about the same time the Ahmed brothers were being shot downstairs. Instead, bin Laden had 15 long minutes to wait in the darkness as the SEALs cleared the rooms. Their rifles had silencers, and none of the victims had fired, so he may not have heard shooting, but he would have heard the burst of fire from Ahmed, the shouting, and the sound of the door being blown off. He might have also heard the muted pop of the SEALs’ silenced weapons. He would have heard those sounds moving toward him. The only windows on his secure third floor looked north, out over the compound walls. The downed chopper was in the western corner and the one that landed outside the walls was to the south, so he could only have surmised who was coming for him. He may have thought it was a Pakistani force.

Three SEALs came up the stairs methodically, scanning different angles, searching while protecting one another. The first man up spotted a tall, bearded, swarthy man in a prayer cap wearing traditional Pakistani clothes, a knee-length flowing shirt over pajama-like bottoms. The SEAL fired and the man retreated quickly. The teammates followed. As the first SEAL entered the bedroom, he saw bin Laden on the floor, but first had to contend with Amal, who shouted and moved in front of her husband. The SEAL knocked her aside as his teammates stood over the mortally wounded bin Laden and fired killing shots into his chest.

The engagement was over in seconds. Amal had been shot in the leg. Bin Laden had weapons on a shelf in his bedroom, but had not picked them up. His identity was unmistakable, even with the grotesque hole through his right forehead. When he was shot he had not been surrendering, but neither had he been resisting. It is impossible to second-guess men in a firefight, but the available evidence suggests that if the SEALs’ first priority had been to take bin Laden alive he would be in U.S. custody today. What is more likely is that the SEALs had no intention of taking bin Laden alive, even though no one in the White House or chain of command had issued such an order. It would have taken a strong directive to capture him alive to preempt the instinct to kill him. The men who conducted the raid were hardened to violence and death. Their inclination would have been to shoot bin Laden on sight, just as they shot the other men they encountered in the compound.

McRaven heard the code word, “Geronimo.” It was part of an alphabetical code to report progress, the “mission execution checklist.” Geronimo meant bin Laden. The admiral conveyed the report immediately to Panetta, and it began to spread through the C.I.A. and the White House. In the corner of the crowded conference room, Obama heard the words “Geronimo ID’d.”

“Looks like we got him,” said Obama, only half believing it.

The president knew the ID was still tentative. To the extent he felt relief or excitement or satisfaction, he tried to fight those feelings down. To him, the moment meant that the SEALs could now start extricating themselves—which for all he knew could entail fighting their way out. There had been a chopper crash and explosions at the compound. If the United States was going to have to defend the raiders on their way out—and there was a force ready to do so—it meant the worst might still lie ahead. Hearing the report, the president thought, Get the hell out of there now!

McRaven realized he didn’t know whether bin Laden had been killed or captured. He said, “Find out whether it’s Geronimo E.K.I.A. [Enemy Killed in Action].” The answer came back, “Roger, Geronimo E.K.I.A.” So McRaven passed that on to Panetta. The delay between these two reports would cause some confusion in later accounts, which suggested that the SEALs had first found bin Laden, chased him, and then a few minutes later killed him. The finding and the shooting had together taken place within seconds.

There remained some uncertainty—a point McRaven was careful to make. The president had been deeply aware of the fact. As he would recall, the SEALs had just been through a firefight. They were operating at night, and in the dark. The circumstantial evidence was compelling—and everyone had heard the words “Geronimo ID’d”—but there had as yet been no conclusive confirmation that the man who had been killed was bin Laden. The situation was tense, and it would be until the choppers were in the air.

The video on the screen now showed the team leaving the house, herding the uninjured women and children to one corner of the compound, away from the downed chopper. Some of the men emerged carrying a bag—bin Laden’s body had been zipped into a nylon body bag after being dragged down the stairs. One of bin Laden’s daughters would later say that she heard her father’s head banging on each step, leaving a bloody trail. The SEALs moved deliberately, and Obama remembers feeling that they were taking too long. Everyone was waiting for the Pakistani response.

But the commotion at the compound had, in fact, attracted little interest in the neighborhood or the country. The translator, wearing a Kevlar vest under his traditional long Pakistani shirt, shooed away the few residents who came out for a look. He told them in Pashto to go back to their houses—a “security operation” was under way. There was also the matter of the dog. People retreated.

The Chinook summoned by McRaven now landed loudly outside the compound walls. Men were working on planting explosives on the downed Black Hawk and destroying its sensitive avionics. A medic from the Chinook unzipped bin Laden’s body bag, took swabs of blood, and inserted needles to extract bone marrow for DNA testing. Twenty minutes elapsed before the body bag was carried out to the working Black Hawk. One of the bone-marrow samples was placed on the Chinook. The intelligence haul from bin Laden’s computers was likewise distributed between the two choppers. Finally, the White House audience saw the downed Black Hawk explode. The demolition team scurried to the Chinook, and the choppers lifted off. When Pakistan’s air force finally scrambled two F-16s, the American force was safely across the border. The choppers landed back in Jalalabad. It was three A.M.

McRaven signed off on his narration for about 20 minutes to go and meet the men on the tarmac as they brought out the body bag. It was unzipped, and photos were taken and transmitted immediately to Washington and Langley. The man had been dead for an hour and 40 minutes, and he had taken a shot to the head. The face was swollen and distorted.

McRaven called Langley with a question for the bin Laden team.

“How tall is this guy?” he asked.

He was told, “Between six four and six five.”

The dead man was certainly tall, but no one had a tape measure, so one of the SEALs who was six feet four lay down next to it. The body lengths roughly matched.

Twenty-four hours later, McRaven supervised the disposal of bin Laden’s body. They had decided weeks earlier that the best option would be burial at sea; that way there would be no shrine for the martyr’s followers. So the body was cleaned, photographed from every conceivable angle, and then flown on a V-22 Osprey to the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson cruising in the Arabian Sea. As a formality, the State Department contacted Saudi Arabia’s government and offered to deliver the body to his home country, but bin Laden was as unwanted there in death as he had been in life. Told that the alternative was burial at sea, the Saudi official said, “We like your plan.”

Procedures for a simple Muslim burial were performed on the carrier, with bin Laden’s body being washed again and wrapped in a white shroud. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight, Monday morning, May 2. One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud. The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.

V. Five Days Later

On May 6, 2011, President Obama flew to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to meet with the SEAL team and the chopper pilots. They assembled in a drab classroom on the base. The president was struck by how “ordinary” the group seemed. With only one or two exceptions, the men did not resemble the bulked-up heroes of Hollywood but rather a group of ordinary, fit-looking men. They ranged in age from their late 20s to their early 40s. Some had gray hair. Dressed differently, Obama thought, they could have been bankers or lawyers. It wasn’t physical prowess that distinguished them, he decided. It was savvy and skill. In the front of the classroom was a model of bin Laden’s compound. McRaven had said his men would walk the president through the mission in detail. They would tell him anything he wanted to know, except which of them had killed bin Laden. That secret would stay with the team.

McRaven addressed the group first. Then the helicopter pilot whose Black Hawk had crashed inside the compound stood up. He was a tall, thin man with dark hair who appeared unused to speaking before a group, especially one that included the president of the United States. He described for Obama exactly what had happened with his chopper, and how deliberate his crash had been. He explained that once he realized the craft was going down, he maneuvered it to catch the tail on the wall so that it would land upright.

“Was the weather a factor?” Obama asked.

“Yes,” the pilot said. The air had been warmer inside the compound than the mission plan had anticipated. He explained the aerodynamics.

When he was finished, the SEAL-team commander spoke. He was a short, stocky man who was at once dead serious and perfectly at ease. He began by thanking the chopper pilot. “I am here today,” he said, “because of the amazing work that this guy did.” He then gave a long account of exactly how their successful mission had been “10 years in the making.” The capability he and the other men in the classroom represented had been honed over all those years of combat, he said. Their skills and tactics had been purchased with the lives of others. He mentioned the operating bases in Afghanistan that were named in honor of these men. Then he explained that the success of the mission had depended on every member of the team, and gave examples. He cited the skill of the pilot settling down the chopper upright. He mentioned many others. He cited the Pashto translator, who was able to turn away the curious onlookers outside the compound.

“I don’t know what we would have done if all those people had just started rushing the compound,” he said.

He even mentioned Cairo, the dog.

“You had a dog?” the president asked, surprised.

“Yes, sir, we always have a dog with us,” the commander said.

“Well,” said Obama, “I would like to meet that dog.”

“Mr. President, then I would advise you to bring treats,” said the commander.

Louis C.K. on eating pressure and providing an alternative to The Man

— Nathan Rabin, July 2012

Writing, directing, editing, and starring in a critically acclaimed television show while creating a new hour of stand-up comedy every year would be enough for most entertainers. Hell, it would be more than enough: It would be a grueling, exhausting ticket to a complete nervous breakdown, especially once single parenthood is thrown into the mix. Yet Louis C.K. has somehow managed to find time in his busy schedule of writing, directing, and starring in his acclaimed FX vehicle Louie—as well as creating stand-up material that has made him one of the most respected comedians alive—to completely reinvent the way comedy specials and tickets to comedy shows are disseminated.

In late 2011, C.K. made headlines by selling his latest comedy special, Live At The Beacon Theater, directly to fans through his website, cutting out middlemen like cable channels or DVD distributors. The experiment was such a smashing success that comedians like Jim Gaffigan and Aziz Ansari soon followed suit. Emboldened, C.K. has announced plans to sell tickets to his upcoming stand-up comedy tour through his own website, once again cutting out middlemen like Ticketmaster.

C.K. recently completed shooting on the third season of Louie in addition to preparing for his next stand-up tour. The television auteur has also been cast in a new film from one of his idols, Woody Allen. (In a neat bit of synchronicity, C.K. hired Allen’s former editor, Susan Morse, to edit the third season of Louie, a task he previously handled himself.) The A.V Club recently spoke with the hardest-working man in comedy about his insane workload and enviable work ethic, his shark-like tendencies, and why he won’t he won’t be appearing in a buddy-cop movie with Larry The Cable Guy any time soon.

The A.V. Club: What was the most difficult part of putting together the third season?

Louis C.K.: We shot a lot. It’s a complicated season. There’s a lot more locations than we’re used to shooting in. We traveled a bit. And I wanted the show to keep going forward and keep getting better. It was hard. But I wrote it all ahead of time—that was the smartest thing I did. I wrote the whole season before we started shooting.

AVC: It wasn’t like that in the years before? In the past, did you take breaks from shooting in order to write more?

LCK: Yeah, this time we didn’t do that. This time I got close, and so I called an audible. I said, “Let’s delay production for one month”—this was back in February—and I said, “If you give me a month more to write, I’ll have the entire 13 written.” And one of my producers said back, “Well, if we do that, you get no breaks. We just plow through it.” And so that’s how we did it.

AVC: How can you not be in a perpetual state of complete exhaustion?

LCK: You know what? That’s the central question of my life—how to manage all of that. There’s a woman I see who’s not my therapist, but she’s like an old friend who’s a therapist in profession. She lets me talk to her like a therapist once in a while, and she does a great thing. Whenever I have a big dilemma, like this is a big problem in my life, she always says, “Wow, you’re going to have to figure that out.” [Laughs.] That’s all she says. And so I had to figure it out. I had to put some time and effort into figuring out how to manage energy and time and brain effort and all that stuff. I’ve got a bunch of different things I do. I learned that sharks sleep parts of their brain, like rolling blackouts; they can’t fall asleep because they can’t stop moving or they’ll suffocate. So they sleep sections of their brain at a time. So I do kind of a version of that, where I shut down brain centers. I literally tell myself, “Don’t logistically problem-solve for the next three hours, but you can talk to folks. Driving my kid home from school—don’t think about all the professional things you have to do.”

AVC: How can you do all this without also cracking from pressure?

LCK: I like pressure. Pressure doesn’t make me crack. It’s enabling. I eat pressure, and there might be times when I get a bad feeling in my gut that this might be too much, but you feel pressure when you’re not doing something, you know? When you’re getting ready for something, you feel pressure—when you’re anticipating. But when you’re constantly in activity, there’s no time for pressure to just sit there and make you crack.

AVC: If you were an athlete, you’d be the kind of guy who wants the ball in the last minute.

LCK: I guess that’s true, yeah. Although I really love the feeling of collaboration. To me, it’s very exhilarating when somebody else does a great thing, and it’s not me. When somebody else on the cast or the crew is the one who gets the ball at the last minute, I just love that feeling. I love it. It’s still inside of what I do. It’s really great. I know all of these people; I’ve been working with them for three years.

AVC: How did you come to hire Susan Morse to edit the new season?

LCK: Well, I was really having a hard time with the editing last year. I love editing, and I still do it, but I needed help. I figured I wanted to get the best help there is in the world, and I kind of threw out, almost as a joke, “Let’s try to get Susan Morse.” And, lo and behold, she was available. She was just finishing a documentary, and the timing was good for her, and I think she was keen on trying television. She had never worked in television. And if there’s any TV show she was going to do, this was the perfect one. So it just was a really good fit.

AVC: Was your interest in her based on her work with Woody Allen?

LCK: Well, sure. Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of the other movies. [Laughs.] She did edit The Warriors, which is another great movie. And Arthur. She’s got a great pedigree.

AVC: Was Woody Allen a formative influence on you, as a filmmaker and as a comedian?

LCK: Absolutely. He is the guy who took comedy and added an artistic, challenging filmmaking element to it. And so that’s obviously a great role model for me. And also I love Woody, just as a fan.

AVC: You two are famous for your ferocious work ethics. Did you relate to him on that level as well?

LCK: Yeah, and also the way he works. He’s a no-bullshit filmmaker. He doesn’t add the Hollywood spectacle to what he does, and he just does it his way. He also makes movies uniquely, and he doesn’t waste any time or money. That’s the MO on him that I understand, and that’s the way I do it. We get an enormous amount done for the amount of money we spend on the show, because we know what we’re doing. We’re a very pragmatic company. I think Woody’s like that too. With Hollywood movies, there’s 70 trailers and a lot of drama between actors, and inflated salaries based on somebody’s other movies. All that kind of shit.  So why not try the model, “Let’s make this movie, everybody gets scale, and you’re done in a week?” [Laughs.] That’s a good role model.

AVC: You’re in Woody Allen’s next film. How did that come about?

LCK: That was a really big deal. In show business, when you really have a career that takes a while, you don’t get those big moments. You don’t get those “Oh my God, it’s me” things. You get the call—“You’re playing Carnegie Hall”—and then you go, “Yeah, well, what are they paying me?” Because how you get to Carnegie Hall is you sell out Town Hall twice in a year, and now you sell enough tickets to do a show at Carnegie Hall. Carnegie Hall is a shitty deal: They have a high-paid crew, and the rent is high, and you don’t make that much money. So that moment that you think is going to be a guy in a tuxedo bringing you a pearly telephone and saying, “You’re playing Carnegie Hall”—it doesn’t happen. You have worked your way there in tiny steps, so by the time you get to Carnegie Hall, it’s as natural as playing anywhere else. [Laughs.] I’ve had a few times where I’ve been told, “You might be getting this thing that’s going to make you feel amazing,” and then it doesn’t happen that way, usually. You work in little steps. This, by the way, isn’t a huge career boost. It’s just for me; it’s personal. But I got a call that Woody’s making a movie and that his casting people wanted to show him my stuff, and so they asked us what to show him. And we said, “Some standup, some episodes, and maybe Parks And Rec.” And I guess we showed him some good stuff. Then I got an email saying, “Woody wants to meet with you and have you read for a part.” And that was a big deal, to know that I’m going to meet him.

AVC: You had to audition.

LCK: Yeah, I was told he wanted me to read. The story I always hear is that he meets you for 10 seconds, and then he decides. He wanted me to read, but he also wanted to meet me. Because the other option is always that you either read for Julia Taylor or you meet Woody, that’s what I’ve heard. You hear these things. There’s a lot of different versions out there. But anyway, I went to his office. I got there early because I was scared to be late, and then I went in to his little office and… very nice people—his assistant, his casting director. Then I was brought into this little room, and he’s standing there, waiting for me, in a sweater. And he looks just like Woody Allen.

That thought was in my head, that he looks just like Woody Allen. And he was very sweet. He said, “Look, I don’t mean to make you read because I think you can’t act. I know you can act. I’m just not sure that you can be this kind of guy. This is a very tough guy.” So he told me to go take the sides outside, think about it, read them, and come back. And when I went outside, I was overcome emotionally. I couldn’t believe I just met him. He was very kind to me, and I met him. It was a big deal for me; I didn’t care if I got the part or not. I really didn’t care. And I went back in and read it, and my heart rate was too high, I couldn’t control it, I didn’t do a perfect job, and they didn’t give me the part. But he found something else for me. So I got a personal letter from Woody saying, “You were too nice to be this guy, but how about this other guy?” The letter was very nice, and it’s my prized possession. It’s framed. If there’s a fire, I grab my kids and then the letter.

AVC: Did you read the letter in Woody Allen’s voice?

LCK: [Laughs.] Well this is what’s lonely about it, is that I read it not in his cartoon character’s voice, but in the voice that he spoke to me in in person, and I felt so happy to have that voice in my head when I read it. It was great. It felt really great. And I’m only in the movie for a week—I just do a week. So it worked out for me. The other part I was reading for was honestly too much. I couldn’t have done all that. I would have had to trade in time with my kids, and I didn’t want to do that this summer. I really need to be with them this summer. So I do a week with Woody, and then I go to my kids.

AVC: You said earlier you don’t have a lot of “holy shit” moments in your career, but you’ve had to have some as of late, like when you made over a million dollars on PayPal selling your special online, or when you were nominated for four Emmys in a single year.

LCK: Yeah, those were definitely big. The show has been a massive thing. That’s been huge. The show has definitely not been, “Yeah, sure, of course I’m getting this.” The show has been a precious thing to me, and it’s been something I’m horribly grateful for. It’s just such a big deal to me that I’m getting to do this. I’m aware of how fleeting it is. I’m aware that, at best, it’ll go eight years, and that a year after those eight years are over, it’ll feel like a distant memory. I’m aware of that.

That’s one reason that I’m working really hard on it. I’m physically pretty banged up from this season from shit that I did. I fucking jumped into a boat that was 10 feet off a dock, and I really hurt my knee. I’ve taken such a beating. But I do it because I know I’m not going to get an opportunity to do this for very long. This is going to feel like it was only a few years as soon as it’s over. I’m trying to really slow down time while it’s going on. And it’s really important to me that I earn it, that I earn what I’ve got in front of me by doing the show as well as possible. So that’s how I feel about it. It’s a big fucking deal. The web thing was a huge euphoria. It was a crazy feeling. It was like physically altering. Looking at my phone and watching the sales come, like a thousand per fucking minute, was insane. I was in a bathroom at LAX, looking at the sales for the web thing on my phone, and I started laughing. I couldn’t control it. And I realized I was laughing like Laurence Olivier when he’s getting his diamonds in the bank in Marathon Man. [Laughs.] He just starts giggling, like, “I can’t believe what’s happening here.” And I had a similar moment like that these last two days, because I put all these tickets on sale [for the upcoming tour] on the Internet in the same way, and it’s crazy. It’s gangbusters. I mean, half the tour is sold out, and we’ve added shows in like eight cities.

We made a million bucks in two hours with the tickets. [Laughs.] Last time I checked, [in] 20 hours we had sold 25,000 tickets around the country, and the box-office gross was $3.5 million. This is the gross; I have to share this with venues, it’s not money I’m making. But that’s how much revenue the tickets have made. And we’ve sold out 15 shows out of the original 30. None of these shows start until October. And it’s been less than a whole day. All over the country we’re adding shows, and those are selling pretty well, too.

AVC: How did both those things come about, putting up the special by yourself, and also handling the tickets for this tour?

LCK: Yeah, well, I like to try stuff. I like to try to see if something can work. It’s really satisfying to figure out, “What if we try it this way? What if we made it way more pleasurable and cheaper to come see me? Or to watch my show online? And if we do this right, how much benefit were we getting from the giant companies?” The first time I ever toured in theaters—the first time I toured, really. You do comedy clubs, it’s just working clubs, but the first time I went on a tour in theaters—they were like 500-to-700-seat theaters, my agent asked me some blanket questions, like, “Here’s what’s going to come up,” and he said, “What is your radio tolerance?” That’s what he asked me. He said, “What presence are you willing to let radio people have at your shows?” and I said, “Give me an example.” And he goes, “Well, here’s all the things they will ask for in every city: Thing one is that the radio personality gets to come onstage and introduce the show. And the second thing they’re going to want is a van outside, broadcasting from the show. Then they’re going to want a banner onstage, with the name of the radio on it. Then they’re going to want a table out in the lobby with bumper stickers.”

He just made a list of, “Here’s the things that they will want.” Another one was meet-and-greets. They get to give away tickets, and the DJ introduces you to the contest winners who won the meet-and-greets. Ten minutes with you alone in a room where you take pictures and stuff. So they said, “What of these things are you willing to do?” And I said, “Let’s say no to all of this.” [Laughs.] One hundred percent of it. As a professional courtesy, if a radio DJ wants free tickets, he can come to the show. He can’t come backstage. He certainly can’t come onstage. They may not have their logo on any of the shit on the stage, anywhere near it. I want people to come to the theater and feel like they’re just coming to see this; they’re not being promoted to. I don’t think there’s anything more obnoxious than when someone has paid to be somewhere, to be promoting to them. That they’re paying to be advertised to is really annoying to me.

I said to him, “Let’s do none of it.” And he said, “Well, here’s the thing: If you let them do these things, then they talk about your show all the time. They talk about your show on the air, and you get more free promotion from radio stations. If they get to say, ‘I’m going to be there,’ they’ll get more into it.” And I said, “Well, first of all, I don’t want people at my shows that are there to see the DJ. I just don’t want them to come.” And I said to my agent, “Let’s find out if this is a huge mistake. Let’s find out. I’m willing to sacrifice my first theater tour and have the places empty and identify that it’s because I wouldn’t let the radio people participate. But we also might find out that it didn’t make a difference and that I never have to do it.” [Laughs.] Because you can’t roll that shit back once you’ve started.

[pagebreak]

Anyway, the obvious story is that it didn’t make a fucking difference. It didn’t matter. It’s like, there’s some joke about a guy with a banana in his ear to keep the crocodiles away and he says, “It’s working.” You can’t really tell how much you need folks. And the thing that was a little painful to me was that I was trying to bring down my ticket prices in the last couple years. Because I guess, the tour before this last one, I made enough. I started making enough money about two years ago on shows. I mean literally making enough. I reached a point where I felt like, “I don’t need to earn more than this doing stand-up comedy. It’s enough. That’s loads of money.”

Some entertainers don’t pay attention to what’s going on around them. They just go, “Oh, cool, I’m playing this place.” They just do it, and they take the money. But if you pay attention, you find out that the economics are very simple. If you want more money, the fans pay for it. They just pay. And so I decided, “Okay, I’m making enough. Let’s drive the ticket prices down a bit.” I decided to do that a couple years ago, especially because the economy was shitty. So as I drove the prices down, first of all, I found out that they weren’t really going down because the ticket charges were so high. And the other thing that I was finding out was that folks are buying the tickets and just speculating. Because they’re cheaper, my tickets became more attractive to ticket speculators. Anyway, this is all jargon. But this kind of stuff bothers me. And it’s worth it to me to think about it. And to think, “Is there another way to do this? Is it possible not to do it this way?” Same thing with the [Live At The] Beacon special: I didn’t have a great, satisfactory way to put the special out. I didn’t love the idea of it being on Showtime, where it’s not really a comedy place. I didn’t want it to be on Comedy Central with commercials and bleeping. So I thought of some options, and the least predictable and funnest way to do it was to try to do something totally new. It’s so fun to be on the front row of a thing that’s changing. It’s a really fun thing. And the feeling you get when you try to set the values and parameters on a product or a thing that you’re putting out to a certain place and try to feel what people will want and have some empathy for them… When you put it out there and money starts flowing into it, it’s a really weird feeling. [Laughs.] It’s really strange. And so with these tickets, it’s a lot bigger than the Beacon thing was because it’s a relief to people. And also I haven’t toured for a while; a lot of these cities I haven’t played for a long time.

AVC: Were excessive service charges on tickets something that had bothered you for a long time?

LCK: Well, obviously the problem of my fans paying too much to see me wasn’t a problem when I was struggling. It’s a new thing. I don’t know. I don’t like when I’m prevented from doing things the way I think they should be done. I do something called “recession tipping.” I make more than some other people in the world, so if I’m in a restaurant, I tip over 20 percent—I tip more. Because I know that other people can’t. Tipping is a thing where you can actually steal money from a waiter; you can just not give them any. A lot of people, when they go out to eat during a recession, they just don’t tip, and I’m aware of that. It’s just my quiet thing that I do. I’ll tip over 20 percent because I can afford it. It’s just my own voluntary Buffett Rule. That’s all it is. When I negotiate with somebody who I’m working with on a crew, like if I hire a first A.D. or something, the way I work it in my head is, I tell them my economic realities—this is a low-budget show—and then I ask them to tell me how much they want. Say the guy says, “I want $500 an hour.” That’s not realistic; I’m just making it up. Then I’ll say, “Okay, I’ll give you $550.” You know what I mean? I ask him to think about what he really needs; when he tells me, I give him a little more. It buys me goodwill with this person; I feel good about what I’m paying them. I like to give people a little more than they want, and I like to ask people for a little less than they’re willing to give. So when I found that through selling tickets I wasn’t able to do this, it was frustrating to me, that I literally couldn’t do that the way that I believe it should be done, but just by me. Not by other people. I don’t judge anybody else. And I think these ticket services are very well run, they’re really smart, they got it all set up. And if I was them I’d do it the same way. Or no I wouldn’t. [Laughs.]

AVC: You wouldn’t because you’re doing it your way. It’s different than the way Ticketmaster does things.

LCK: Right. I’m just staying away from criticizing anybody else. The point of it, to me, isn’t to stick it to somebody else or out of anger toward something else…

AVC: You’re not about sticking it to The Man?

LCK: No. It’s really providing an alternative. And there are many theaters that we went to with this ticketing service and my show who said, “We don’t want to do it because of our economics.” And then we would politely say, “Thanks anyway,” and keep looking in every city until we could find a place that could accommodate us. That it didn’t hurt them, that they didn’t have a conflicting affiliation, and that it could make them a profit. So that’s why we’re playing this place in Chicago. Last year I was at the Chicago Theatre, and I love the Chicago Theatre. And I’m grateful for the shows I did there with the promoters and ticketing services that they use.

AVC: On your website you wrote a post telling people what you did with the money you made from the special. Why engage in that kind of transparency?

LCK: Well, it’s interesting, because when I got to $1 million as quickly as I did… I mean, when the smoke cleared on the first day, I had something like $200,000. I think we hit that before a day was over, and that was just stunning to me. And then when we hit a million, I thought, “This is crazy.” It didn’t feel like it was just about me; a lot of people had sort of voted with this money. It was an expression. This money that was in my hands now was a united expression by a lot of people of an idea. That sounds really lofty, but it’s not. A lot of people had a feeling, and they injected money with that feeling. Like they came money on me. [Laughs.]

AVC: In the most pure, beautiful way imaginable.

LCK: Exactly. They came all over my face with dollars. And I’d never had anyone come on my face at all, so it was a new experience. So I’m laying there with this pool of money around me, and I’m like, “What just happened?” I know it wasn’t just about me. I had been fielding phone calls from foreign press… Like fucking Forbes Magazine UK and all these very serious economists were calling me. So I knew that this was something people were paying attention to—how it was going—and it was way more interesting to me than that I just made some money. It was a thing that happened.

So I was talking to my mom about it, and I said, “I kind of feel like I should tell people.” But the people that work for me had said, “Don’t. Look, you’re being looked at as a Robin Hood-y kind of guy here, and if you tell them you made a bunch of money then they’re not going to like you anymore, or they’re going to start to pirate it.” But my mom said, “Tell everybody right now how much you have. Tell them everything. And then never tell them after that.” [Laughs.] She said, “Tell them now, you hit a million, tell them, and don’t tell again.” And then I thought about telling them what I spent because, if everyone was tracking this as a model for how to make money as an individual on a mass scale, then I thought it might be good if the end of the story was a model for them, too. If the next person that tried it, if they didn’t give some of the money away, that might get noticed. I don’t spend my whole life giving money to charity, but in this case I felt like this money came too quick for me to keep it. I have to definitely give some of it back to the people who work for me. They should get a windfall, not just a salary. And then again I talked to my mom, who’s a great confidant for me, and I told her, “I’m thinking of giving a shitload of this money away.” And she similarly said, “Do it. You’ll never miss it. In a million years you won’t miss the money. Just let it go out into the world and work. It’s better than it being in your bank account.” And that’s how I feel about money. Money is a resource. It’s an energy that you can inject into things, and it makes stuff happen. This money was like an intention that was pushed toward me, and I thought, “If I keep pushing it around, this is good. This makes me happy.” And I still keep fucking $220,000 that’s pure profit.

AVC: And how did it feel to have people like Aziz Ansari and Jim Gaffigan very overtly say, “I’m doing what Louis C.K. is doing” by releasing their specials directly to fans via the Internet as well?

LCK: Those two guys are both friends of mine, and if it benefits them, great. I care about comedy as a culture, so to me, any comedian that does well is helping every comedian. Every time a comedian does well, it interests people in stand-up and in comedy. Every comedian benefits when a comedian prospers.

AVC: You’ve similarly talked about how you’ve run your company with a certain degree of pragmatism, but it also seems like in the way you conduct your business and your creative affairs, that there’s also a lot of idealism in that as well. Do you see yourself as a moral, idealistic person?

LCK: I don’t know. I’d be afraid to call myself that. I think I’m more just very curious. I do have a lot of energy, so I will try stuff. Doing stuff like this is really, really hard work. Putting this tour together was a huge amount of work, and it did mean being a little bit brave, because it’s scary. I don’t want to upset any of these people who do this shit. [Laughs.] You know what I mean? So some of it that’s not just practical is that I will try to do stuff that can be a little scary but feels right to me, even if it’s harder. So that’s what I would identify as feeling like that. Outside of just trying to get it done. It’s worth it. And also, it’s exhilarating.

AVC: How big of an organization do you have to do all these ambitious things more or less simultaneously?

LCK: Well, kind of in the same way that I have the shark sleep, I have different groups working on different stuff at the same time. My agent did this whole tour, Mike Berkowitz. He really made this shit happen. I gave him the parameters. I told him what I was willing to do, I told him the tickets could only be available on my site, I told him, “Nobody else can have the customers mailing list unless they ask to be on the mailing list,” all this stuff. So he would report to me once in a while and say, “Here’s what these cities are saying, here’s what this…” and I would say yes or no, and we’d talk about it. So my Mike Berkowitz phone calls have been all throughout the last eight months on this thing. I do that phone call when I can. My show has a very small but dedicated group of people. And we’re much smaller than most crews. There was a guy who acted in my show this year who’s kind of like a big deal—I don’t want to say who it is, but…

AVC: Is it Allan Havey?

LCK: [Laughs.] No, it’s not Allan Havey. You haven’t seen the guy yet, in the first five shows. But he’s a bit of a mogul. He’s been very successful. And so he agreed to be on the show, and he came and… What I found out later was that on the flight back, he told his assistant, “Please give them back all they paid us. I had no idea how little help he has.” [Laughs.] Like he felt bad that he drew a paycheck from me. Because once he worked on the show… He had a really good time, and the crew was really small, really small amount of equipment, and so whatever we negotiated to pay him, they returned all his checks to us, the travel money, everything. Because we flew him in from L.A. We have like, two of everybody: We have two art, two carpenters, two lighting people, two camera, two sound, and that’s it.

AVC: It seems like the smaller and more manageable things are, the easier it becomes to experiment and take chances.

LCK: That’s exactly right. I can say, “Hey Sean, let’s do it this way,” instead of, “Let’s have a sound meeting.”

AVC: In your last interview with us, you said if you could make a movie with the same freedom you do your television show, you’d do it in a heartbeat. Have you thought about funding a movie through Kickstarter? There would definitely be a lot of interest and enthusiasm there.

LCK: I think about doing that sometimes, but it feels cleaner to me that I just sort of show up with stuff and say, “Here, if you want it, it’s pretty cheap. Enjoy it if it’s for you.” You know what I mean? I feel like it’s cleaner. That’s how we did the Beacon, that’s how we did this—it just showed up on the site. I mean, we didn’t even advertise the tickets. We just went, “Here. Here’s this. Here’s a gift for you. It costs $45.” If I do a movie I would love to try to do something similar with it, but I would rather that the movie came out of me, from the audience’s point of view, magically. [Laughs.] You know what I mean? When you meet somebody and you really care for them, and you’re really exhilarated and dizzy with the newness of knowing them, and everything’s great, and then they ask you for money and your smile just fades. [Laughs.] I don’t want to borrow money from these people. I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m not shutting off the world to it, because it’s an interesting idea. I do want to make a movie, but right now I’m awfully busy.

AVC: Have you been getting offers from movie folks eager to get into the Louis C.K. business?

LCK: Yeah, I have had those. I get offered to be in movies a lot these days, and I just pretty much say no to all of them except for Woody. In Hollywood you take a lot of meetings, and that’s what it takes. To have that conversation you have to actually go to the place where the guy works, sit down with him, and have him say it to your face. You have to park your car and get it validated and fucking sit. And his assistant gives you a water. You really have to be there for that. But if you just work and do your job, you’re just not around for that conversation. I don’t know. I’m looking into something right now that may turn into a movie in the next couple years, but I have no idea how it’s going to… We’ll see.

AVC: The problem with the way you’ve conducted yourself and your career is that if you do, say, a big-budget buddy-cop movie with Larry The Cable Guy for a big payday, people will feel very let down and disappointed.

LCK: Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

AVC: You’ve closed off that kind of sellout move.

LCK: No, if somebody came to me and offered me, let’s say… This would never happen, but if somebody offered me $30 million to be in a comedy movie, I’d just say no instantly. There’s no way I would say yes to that. And if I do, you have license to use this against me. If you’re recording it, you can use this recording of my voice to tell everybody—like Yul Brynner, when he put out “Don’t Smoke” ads after he died—don’t go see this movie that I’m in for $30 million. It’s just not worth it.

AVC: It could be a gotcha moment.

LCK: Yeah, exactly. Just don’t do it. I might make a movie next year, and I’ll be in it, and it’ll be funny, but it won’t be that. If it’s a $30 million comedy, and there’s either a dramatic actor like Mel Gibson in it or, you know, what did you say? Larry The Cable Guy? Great guy, by the way—Dan Whitney. Great guy. But, yes, if Dan Whitney and I are in a movie together playing cops, don’t go see it. Punish me for taking the money.

AVC: In a blog post on your website you wrote, “I hope with all my heart that I stay funny.” Is that something that you’re worried about? That this could all fall apart tomorrow, that the skill set you built up could somehow evaporate?

LCK: The skill set will stay because those are just basically know-how stuff. But the basic little engine, the fucking whatever is, the Iron Man glow-y heart thing… [Laughs.]

AVC: Creativity.

LCK: Yeah, that thing. Sure. That could flame out at any second. No idea. I have no reason to be able to count on it. It’s just there. I can do a lot with hard work and no creativity. I could do it. When you really become a professional at this stuff, what’s important is how well you can do when you’re not inspired. If that’s still workable, then you have a career.

AVC: Have you felt that way while you were working on Louie, that, “The spirit just isn’t in me, but I have to get this done”?

LCK: Yeah, different levels. There’s days where I come to the set, and we make a game of a scene, and we find great, inspired things to do inside of a scene. There’s other days where I just feel stale, and I’m just fucking shooting a master and two close-ups, and I’m just saying the lines. It happens. It’s a fucking bummer. Hopefully it doesn’t happen throughout an episode. And you find ways to fix it in post. But it does happen, sure.

AVC: In a conversation with fans on Reddit, you wrote that one of the last jobs you had before becoming a comedian was covering football games for local cable-access. That seems like, on one hand, terrible and an incredibly tedious gig, but on the other hand really useful in terms of learning how to put something together.

LCK: Totally. Really useful. Yeah. Covering football games—

AVC: How do you get a job like that?

LCK: Well, I was technical director of a cable station, so I had to do everything. But you get it by going to a local-access cable station—I don’t know if they still have those. But I was a volunteer intern, and I was in high school. And I learned how to use every machine in that place. My biggest advice to people would be key on the technical. If you learn how to use these machines—cameras and editing systems and stuff like that—then you will have the tools to do stuff creatively. There’s some people who turn up their nose to the technical side of production. It’s the dumbest thing that people do, because then you need to get permission and crews to shoot for you. But I learned how to fix the fucking cameras at this local-access cable station. I knew how to do everything. So I could be trusted with the equipment. That’s really all it ever comes down to, is insurance. They can’t fucking give you the equipment unless there’s somebody qualified to run it. And I learned how to do this stuff when I was 16 years old. So out of high school, I worked at a cable station, and I covered the football games. And so I had to drive this little remote van with a switcher in it and cameras and three big, fucking heavy cases. And there’d be, like, three volunteers with me. Had to drag these cameras up to vantage points around the football field, and the clock is ticking and people are showing up for the game, and start placing the cameras, register the cameras—which is a really weird technical process with tiny screwdrivers—plug them into the van, fucking fire up the van, get all the shots right, punch in all the fucking names of the players and their numbers, and get ready, and here comes the game. It’s a lot of pressure. Yeah, huge training ground. Great benefit.

AVC: One of the things that’s interesting and unusual about your career, especially for a comedian, is that you’re deeply interested and invested in the business, technical, and artistic elements of everything you do, not just the creative side.

LCK: Well, it’s all so interesting. It’s all so goddamn interesting. It really is. I love knowing why I was able to sell out in one town, and why I wasn’t in another town. I love knowing what goes into everything—the economics, the technical aspect, and how to create the ideas in the show. It’s great. If you can have access to all of that, why the fuck would you not want to know? I just love learning. I think learning is how you live. The verb of my life is learning.

An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic's Lens

— Austin Carr, October 2012

If Lucas Buick's company Hipstamatic is on the verge of bankruptcy, you couldn't tell by the dinner spread. It's mid-September and we're at the Isola restaurant in the Mondrian Soho, an expensive hotel-cum-lounge where you're never quite sure you're wearing the right style of Warby Parkers. Under the airy space's glass ceiling and sparkling chandeliers, Buick and "director of fun" Mario Estrada knock back espresso martinis and old-fashioneds, while digging into tuna and pine nut crudos and fennel sausage pizza with herbed ricotta--delicious fare just begging to be photographed, filtered, and shared with friends.

"This is it. We're clearly falling apart," says Buick, laughing. "If this is the last supper, then I wish we had a bigger table."

Despite a rough couple of weeks, the Hipstamatic cofounder and CEO is in good spirits. In late July, over lobsters and bottles of Prosecco, Buick told me he wanted Hipstamatic, a $1.99 photo app that takes analog-style photographs on your iPhone, to become the "Kodak for the digital era." He envisioned a time when his company could be the industry leader for selling digital lenses, films, and flashes, as well as providing third-party camera and printing services.

But then just 16 days later, Buick laid off five of his employees, roughly half the company’s workforce, including its entire developer team and social media and office managers. The decision sparked a swath of bad press and ex-employee backlash, and led many to question the San Francisco-based startup's viability. "Suddenly I was getting calls from friends asking, 'Do you still have a job?'" Estrada recalls. "We're going bankrupt? When did all this happen?"

Lucas Buick

“It got a little ugly,” admits Buick, who turns 30 this week. With a doughy face and ginger scruff, the former graphic designer carries a soft, seemingly happy-go-lucky demeanor, which juxtaposes his otherwise serious look: black G-Star jacket, black shirt, and black-framed glasses. "I didn't even like coming to work,” he says. “When you're the guy who built the company and you don't even want to work there yourself, something just isn't right."

Hipstamatic's journey over the past year has been tumultuous, to say the least. As Fast Company has learned from speaking to more than a dozen players involved, Hipstamatic has wrestled with ever-growing social competition, internal tensions, and a lack of product vision--not to mention juggling acquisition interest and worsening term sheets in a post-Facebook IPO world.

“In late January of 2012, Twitter's Jessica Verrilli got in touch with Buick regarding a potential acquisition.”

But what the startup has most struggled with is remaining relevant in an unforgiving app market dominated by one of the hottest spaces in tech: photos. Photos are considered the killer app of any platform, web or mobile. They're the driving force behind Facebook's social success, and the reason for its blockbuster acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram, which recently surpassed Twitter in U.S. smartphone engagement. They're why Marissa Mayer is said to be rethinking Flickr as she takes up the reins at Yahoo; why Google recently bought Snapseed; and why a slew of hot Internet startups from Tumblr to Pinterest to Camera+ have gained popularity. Even Apple introduced photo-stream sharing capabilities in its latest version of iOS.

Hipstamatic was one of the first startups to crack the photo formula in the mobile space--then it watched similar services gain ground and eventually blaze by. The company’s experience proves that no startup can rest on its laurels in the age of the iPhone, when the time between innovation and disruption is ever shortening, and when IPOs and fast exits are valued over establishing long-term viable businesses. And perhaps most significantly, Hipstamatic proves that no modern startup can ignore the siren call of social, even if at its own peril.

In October 2010, Hipstamatic was booming. Its business model of selling in-app digital lenses and films, which effectively turned your iPhone into an old-school Polaroid camera, was attracting millions of users and millions of dollars in revenue, especially from its fast-growing community of shutterbugs in industries ranging from fashion to media. Soon, Apple would name Hipstamatic the app of the year; not long after, The New York Times’ Damon Winter would win a prestigious photography award for a series of Hipstamatic photos he took on assignment in Afghanistan.

So on Oct. 6, when an ex-Googler named Kevin Systrom launched a photo-sharing service called Instagram, there was no way of knowing that it would mark the beginning of the end of Hipstamatic’s honeymoon. Like Hipstamatic, the iPhone app enabled users to add vintage-era filters to photographs, but there were two key differences: Instagram was free and inherently social; Hipstamatic was not. If Hipstamatic was the camera utility used to enhance your photos, then Instagram was the network where you'd share those photos.

By March of 2011, when Hipstamatic hired its new designer, Laura Polkus, Instagram had already rocketed to 2.2 million users, and was growing by 130,000 users per week. But Polkus says the team largely ignored Instagram. “There wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid there,” says Polkus, who was later let go. “The conversation internally was, ‘Well, we’re completely different. They are a social network, and we are not. Who cares what’s going on with them? We’ll just continue to do what we do.’ But from the public’s perspective, that’s obviously not the way things were seen.”

"As Instagram started to build, everyone was like, 'You guys should do this or that,'" recalls Buick, who was hesitant to enter the social game at first. "That's not what we wanted to build."“One former employee recalls leaving for dinner after the company released a new pack of photo filters; by the time he had returned an hour later, the release had already generated high five-figure sales.”

It was impossible for Buick to ignore the temptation of social, however. Despite Buick’s resistance toward changing Hipstamatic’s direction, the company embarked on a series of toe-in-the-water attempts at social. The first was Family Album, which launched in the summer of 2011, a product that enabled users to create and co-curate photo albums together. The other, D Series, was an app that aimed to capture a retro, disposable camera experience on the iPhone. Friends could purchase various packs of digital cameras together for 99 cents, and take and share up to 24 shots per roll--before having to buy another pack of cameras. “It was definitely a reaction to the social photography wave,” Polkus says. “The products were in response to people saying, ‘Okay, well we can take pictures, but how do other people see them without using Instagram?’”

“It was more or less a veiled attempt to take on Instagram, without being blatant about it,” says Stuart Norrie, then a UI designer at Hipstamatic.

Both products flopped. Family Album was incredibly confusing, especially compared to the simplicity of sharing on Instagram or Facebook. (Wrote one reviewer, “One of the biggest problems for Hipstamatic‘s Family Album is understanding what it is.”) When D Series went live in December of 2011, after months of work, the team was excited to introduce a new product before the Christmas break. “But on the day of the launch, we were there until midnight because there were so many complaints and tweaks needed,” recalls Polkus, who was monitoring the social feeds for the company at that time. “The thing I remember is all the people who were so enraged, so angry that they had to pay for these disposable cameras but were only getting a limited amount of pictures. They just kept calling us greedy. Everyone had this pit in their stomachs like, ‘Oh fuck.’”

The "Haus of Hipstamatic" on Langton Street in SOMA, San Francisco

Whereas Hipstamatic’s user base has peaked at roughly 4 million active users, by January 2012, Instagram had blossomed to 15 million users, who were sharing an average of 60 photos per second. It was clear how much had changed in so little time: Apple gave its app-of-the-year prize to Instagram. By then, in fact, one of the top tags on Instagram was “#Hipstamatic,” indicating a large amount of users were snapping images on Hipstamatic but sharing them on Instagram.

The massive growth of Instagram’s platform only brought more attention to Hipstamatic from outside companies, which were looking to capitalize on the explosion of mobile photo sharing. A knowledgeable source says Facebook expressed "quite a bit" of interest in working with Hipstamatic. (Facebook declined to comment.) When Instagram originally launched, sources say Dave Morin reached out to Buick to work together on Path, his private mobile social network, to collaborate on products. (Path confirms the company did discuss partnering with Hipstamatic, but denies the discussions were related to Instagram's launch.)

And in late January of 2012, multiple sources confirm that Jessica Verrilli, who works in strategy and corporate development at Twitter, got in touch with Buick regarding a potential acquisition. The two met at Sightglass Coffee in SOMA, outside Hipstamatic's office. One source says no terms were discussed then, while other sources tell Fast Company that Buick said he wasn't interested in being acquired. (It wouldn't be the last time Twitter reached out to express interest in Hipstamatic.) Both Hipstamatic and Twitter declined to comment on this matter.

At that time, the bootstrapped startup’s business was still growing at a fast clip, despite its lack of social capabilities. One former employee recalls leaving for dinner after the company released a new pack of photo filters; by the time he had returned an hour later, the release had already generated high five-figure sales, not an uncommon amount, says the source, who estimates the company has 100,000 core users who "will buy almost anything." (Hipstamatic declined to comment on specific sales figures.)

But Buick was starting to consider a larger role for Hipstamatic in the social world. “It was right after the launch of D Series--Lucas seemed burnt out, but he was like, ‘I want to make another app,’” recalls Sam Soffes, a former iOS engineer at the company, who would later have a dustup with Buick. “We were sitting around and when I asked him what he wanted to make, he was like, 'I don't know. I want to kill Instagram.'”

Hipstamatic denies that Buick ever said he wanted to "kill Instagram." Buick specifies, "We've never really tried to compete with Instagram."

For a startup that prides itself on the originality and creativity of its users, Hipstamatic spent much of 2012 chasing many other companies’ ideas. It was, in the most regrettable ways, becoming Kodak. Like the once venerable brand, which failed to keep pace with industry changes during the 1990s, Hipstamatic was struggling to adapt to the daily chaos and external pressures of the social app world. "I can honestly say that there was a lot of talk about Instagram, Path, and social," Buick says of his company's internal discussions. "Ultimately, that’s what shifted our focus away from who we really are.”

It had arrived at a crossroads that many other startups inevitably encounter: Hipstamatic had to pivot. So in February of 2012, an engineer started work on a project internally called CS9, which would expand Hipstamatic's filters to video, similar to the 18-month-old service Viddy, which is often called the Instagram of video. (According to Buick, the idea was on the “product list for two years,” but only kicked into gear again in February.) Around that time, another team began developing a prototype web service and iPhone app codenamed Timeline. ("It was a horrible name," acknowledges one former employee. "I was confused by it so much I begged them to rename it internally just so I could keep up with the differences between Facebook Timeline and our Timeline app.") Timeline would aggregate photos from a user's fragmented social networks, pulling images from Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter into one unified stream; the team also had plans to add Facebook photos and implement cross-network interactions for commenting and liking.

“During the meeting everyone was like, 'You know this is Instagram, right?' It was voiced several times: 'This sounds a lot like Instagram.'”

Also on the docket was Hipstamatic Classic, the internal name for the new version of the original photo app, which would have more mainstream, point-and-shoot-camera-like functionality. (The social app would assume the Hipstamatic branding, or possibly be called Hipstamatic Next, sources say, though nothing was ever finalized.) "They wanted to make a Camera+ killer--it was actually described in those terms," says Jonathan Wight, a former engineer at the company, referring to the popular camera app that had become one of the top-selling photography services on iTunes.

(Molli Sullivan, Hipstamatic’s director of communications, disputes Wight’s recollection. “There were no conversations around app killers--there was nothing around any type of killing of other companies,” she says. “When we looked at the competitive landscape, we would have discussions around other companies, but it was never malicious. That’s not what the conversations were like.” However, at least one other source says it wasn’t uncommon to refer to the product as a “Camera+ killer.”)

In March, Hipstamatic held a demo for Timeline and a companywide meeting about the product. Buick distributed questionnaires to employees afterward to gather feedback about the prototype, but their feelings had already become evident at the meeting. "Once you attached Timeline to a camera app, it became Instagram," Wight says. "During the meeting everyone was like, 'You know this is Instagram, right?' It was voiced several times: 'This sounds a lot like Instagram.'"

One former developer, who was also present in the meeting, recalls, "People raised concerns that it didn't offer anything more than an Instagram feed of photos, and that we would basically be mimicking all the functionality that Instagram already had."

Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick and CTO Ryan Dorshorst

“At the beginning of the meeting, Lucas was very vocal and upbeat, but the second that was said--that it was basically just a version of Instagram--he immediately shut down, became quiet, and seemed pissed off,” says Stuart Norrie, the former designer. “It was very clear those comments touched a nerve.”

Sullivan confirms the meeting took place, but clarifies, “There were a lot of questions about [Timeline]. We were testing a lot of different technology. I wouldn’t put so much focus on Instagram--it wouldn’t be right to focus entirely on comparing things to Instagram. While Instagram may have been mentioned, there were other companies [mentioned]. When you're looking at the competitive landscape, more than one company comes up.”

“...We saw [Facebook CEO] Mark [Zuckerberg]’s blog post. And it was like, ‘Wait, one billion? Like, a billion dollars? What? What does that mean for us? Does that mean that [Instagram] won?’”Indeed, by that time, rather than viewing Instagram as a competitor needing to be challenged, Buick had actually decided to partner with Instagram. He and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, who Buick refers to as his "best frenemy," had been in talks for weeks over ways to team up. (The two are friendly and get drinks together every so often. Says Buick, “I'm a whisky drinker, though not quite as hardcore a whisky drinker as Kevin is.”) In late March, the companies unveiled an exclusive partnership that would allow Hipstamatic photos to be seamlessly shared on Instagram's network with one click. "When we launched, it was all about Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, and now we're seeing a huge shift in our user base toward Instagram," Buick told me at the time.

The partnership provided additional exposure to Hipstamatic on Instagram's platform. By then, Instagram boasted 27 million users, while Hipstamatic had peaked at roughly 4 million active users.

But what the partnership most demonstrated was the powerful social pull that Instagram wielded. "We started to see how many people were sharing to Instagram, and I think [Buick] felt like he was missing out on all that," says Soffes.

Then, just 19 days later, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be acquiring Instagram for $1 billion. “People were shocked,” says the former developer. “[Creative director] Aravind [Kaimal] was upset.”

“I was sitting next to Jon [Wight] who just said aloud, ‘Oh, Facebook bought Instagram?’ I think it was [CTO] Ryan [Dorshorst] who was like, ‘No way--that’s a joke.’ We all thought it was a headline on The Onion,” recalls Laura Polkus, the former designer. “Then we saw Mark's blog post. And it was like, ‘Wait, one billion? Like, a billion dollars? What? What does that mean for us? Does that mean that [Instagram] won?’” The team spent most of that April morning reading stories about the acquisition.

Buick was on a plane landing in New York from London when he heard the news. He sent Systrom a congratulatory note, but otherwise didn’t return to Hipstamatic’s headquarters for several days. “It was never our goal to be acquired,” explains Buick, who adds that, if anything, he was happy for Systrom. “We weren’t building that type of company.”

“He didn’t have much of an outward reaction. He was more like, ‘Well, that’s fine; we didn’t want to be bought,’” confirms Polkus. “At least that’s what he told us, regardless if it’s true. I mean, I don’t know who wouldn’t want a billion dollars. It would’ve gone through my head if I was in his position: Why not us?”

Lucas Buick was shopping at Uniqlo when he received a phone call. It was mid-April, not long after Facebook had announced it would be acquiring Instagram. (Some sources say it was on the day of the announcement.) The call Buick received, it turned out, was from Twitter, which again expressed interest in acquiring Hipstamatic, sources say. Before Facebook beat it to the punch, Twitter was reportedly interested in purchasing Instagram in order to bolster photo sharing on its network. Perhaps Hipstamatic wasn’t such a bad secondary option. Buick entertained the idea, sources say, but never seriously considered it. (Hipstamatic and Twitter declined to comment on this matter.)

By that point, the Hipstamatic team already had enough on its plate without potential acquisition offers. Outside CS9, Timeline, and Hipstamatic Classic, multiple sources say the company was juggling an ever-growing number of projects, including a physical Hipstamatic camera. “There were plans to do a photography field guide, a bunch of community initiatives, and always talk of physical products,” says one source. “I guess none of that really happened. Products would get shelved, ideas would get thrown away, and new things would take their place.”

In the spring of 2012, for example, after both Timeline and CS9 had died, another social idea started to take priority: The Hipstamatic team began work on a new product that Buick says was a cross "between Tumblr and Instagram." It would be a private social network, like Path, designed to share the photographs you still find yourself inefficiently sending to friends via email or text or showing them in person. (The sharing feature was internally called PhotoMail, sources say.) As Buick explains, "It all comes down to brunch. After some shit goes down on Saturday night, there's always the great iPhone swap over brunch. These are photos that you don't want on Facebook but you want your friends to have."

But nearly all involved say the experience never came together in any coherent way. "They wanted it to be everything: to be Camera+; to be Path; to be Pinterest," the former employee says. "It was kind of like the new [group photo-sharing] Flock app--that's pretty much what we wanted to do." Even “director of fun” Mario Estrada, who is still with the company, admits, "None of us could really identify it. We kept on talking about the elevator pitch to describe what the product was. The product never really made complete sense."

Despite the internal confusion, Buick knew that if his company were to seriously compete in social, it would need to raise a round of funding. Hipstamatic's pivot toward social would be a huge risk for the company. In order to scale a private social network and achieve viral growth numbers, Hipstamatic would have to become a free service, Buick explains, which would upend its business model and cut off its revenue stream. Buick also had hoped to triple the size of the startup's team. Over the summer, he set out on a financing tour to meet with as many investors as possible, in hopes of raising between $15 million and $20 million.

"We didn't need money to operate the type of business that we had," Buick says. "What we needed money for was scaling the social network--to build another fucking social network."

"At a company meeting they announced they were going after VC money, which we thought was kind of strange because we had a good amount of money coming in. Well, supposedly. I didn't get to see the financials," Wight recalls. "I started to wonder if the financial situation was worse than I thought. When they decided to go for venture capital money, that's when things went a little bit crazy."

As the summer progressed, multiple sources say Hipstamatic’s product plans only became more complicated. “Whenever Lucas came in, he would have another crazy idea,” says Wight. At one point, the team started experimenting with a Zynga-like virtual goods store where users could purchase Hipstamatic credits that could be spent on individual photo filters. “The idea was you’d go to this store and spend $1 to get 50 credits,” Wight recalls. “I had very strong objections because it was basically relying on the end users being dumb to get more money out of them.”

The team also explored the concept of digital galleries, which were going to be akin to Pinterest pinboards but for Hipstamatic photos, so users could start their own galleries and list their favorite pictures. Another idea involved situation-specific filters: say, a filter for night photography, or for taking pictures of food.

Sources say the product kept changing from week to week, with little or no concrete direction from higher-ups. Says the former developer, "There was a lot of direction change--a lot of, 'We're going to do this! No! We're going to do that instead! No, that doesn't matter; this matters now!'"

“We didn’t know what we were supposed to keep adding to this social app without getting any feedback,” the former employee explains. “At a certain point, we would come to work and just talk for hours. They kept pushing everything off, and it got to the point where by the end, we were just twiddling our thumbs trying to find stuff to do.”

Hipstamatic disputes this characterization of the company. When asked about the startup's seemingly haphazard product roadmap, Buick says, "I feel like we're reliving our whiteboards here."

"It's just not true that there was a new idea every single week," says Molli Sullivan, the company's spokesperson. "Absolutely, we would whiteboard. Everyone would talk and throw ideas out about what the product could look like. But to lay this out like Lucas and [CTO] Ryan [Dorshorst] were changing their minds every other week is not accurate, and it's not fair to what the process was like."

Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick and CTO Ryan Dorshorst

Stuart Norrie, the former designer, describes a different atmosphere at the company. “There were 9 billion ideas on the table and nobody was saying what to do,” he says. “They didn't really know what their next move was, and it was very apparent that they were paralyzed in making decisions. They were constantly switching back and forth. I’d ask them for feedback and they would never have an answer. They'd be like, ‘We'll talk about it next week.’ I’m like, ‘But it's only Tuesday! What am I supposed to do?’ It was the most unproductive time of my life, and I'm including grade school.”

As if the company didn’t already have enough projects in the pipeline, in June of 2012, Hipstamatic released yet another side project called Snap Magazine. Snap was an iPad magazine that would give Hipstamatic an editorial voice, and enable the company to highlight exemplary user photography as well as potentially push advertising and in-app purchases down the road.

In a sea of stop-and-go projects, Snap Magazine somehow turned out to be a big success. Its first several issues over the summer received more than 100,000 downloads, and Apple would eventually feature Snap on billboards and in an iPad commercial.

“The entire company basically saw the CEO of this company give the double finger to a developer.”

But despite the external success of the product, internally, tension had reached a boiling point, and demonstrated Buick's growing disconnect with Hipstamatic's developers, in terms of both product development and company direction. The tension spoke to a larger divide between the company’s designers and engineers, an obstacle that most startups face at some point. As Buick tells me, his founding team, which was composed mostly of designers, "never operated [Hipstamatic] as a software company. As we started building that type of company, we ended up with really talented engineers who were not used to our creative process. There was tension. There was separation on the teams."

The “teams” that Buick describes can be divvied up into two groups: the new hires, composed mostly of the development team, and the members of the founding team, who call themselves the “Wolfpack,” a likely reference to the film The Hangover. The “Wolfpack” includes Buick, Dorshurst, Mario Estrada, and creative director Aravind Kaimal, most of whom were friends from the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. The “Wolfpack” became a source of resentment for the new hires, who felt the clique created unnecessary splintering within the small startup. “It was not a well-loved term by nonmembers of this group because it felt divisive and, for some, just further evidence that there was an in- and out-crowd within the company,” says the former developer.

“I shit you not: They’d actually be like, ‘Wolfpack is going to lunch,’ or ‘Wolfpack just got back from Vegas,’” recalls Norrie. “It was like, good god.” Another source confirms that it was common for the founding team to say, "I want it to just be a Wolfpack thing this weekend.”

The tension between the “Wolfpack” and other hires reached a breaking point during the development of Snap. At the time, the team was discussing whether to build an in-house solution for the magazine or to outsource it to Adobe's publishing platform. The latter solution, which is used by publishers such as Condé Nast and Fast Company, would allow the company to quickly get to market, but it would also cost upward of $75,000 for an annual license. Hipstamatic’s team could build its own publishing platform, but in one watershed meeting, Buick directly questioned whether his developers could even build the product themselves.

The discussion became heated, and a war of words erupted between Buick and Sam Soffes, the former iOS engineer, who argued he could build a solution that was just as good as or better than Adobe’s platform. "It was a big argument right in the big open area of the office," recalls Wight.

Music was blaring through the headphones worn by Laura Polkus and Stuart Norrie when the two heard shouting between Buick and Soffes. “My music was really loud but I started hearing raised voices, so I sent an IM to Laura and was like, ‘Are you hearing this?’” Norrie recalls. “I hit pause and all of sudden F-bombs were dropping like it's D-Day.”

"I remember I was like, 'You're completely wrong. I can pull up graphs on my computer and show you how much faster we can build it,'" Soffes recalls. "And he goes, 'I got two graphs for you.' And then he gave me the finger in both hands."

“The double bird,” Polkus recalls.

"The entire company basically saw the CEO of this company give the double finger to a developer," Wight says. "It wasn't in jest either. It was, 'I'm angry, so fuck off.' Lucas walked out. That pretty much sums up the company for me. You just don't do that as the CEO."

Buick acknowledges that the argument took place, but says he wanted to go with Adobe’s platform only because there “were not enough engineering resources to go around.” Buick also clarifies that he hadn’t realized how expensive it would be to use Adobe’s platform yet. “I mean, I certainly feel bad about it,” he adds, referring to the exchange. “I don’t feel like an adult about what I did, but it happens. Shit happens. Let’s move on.”

Of course, it's far from uncommon for tensions to spill over in any environment where strong-willed personalities tend to prevail. But the tenseness of the relationship between designers and engineers at Hipstamatic was palpable, ex-employees say. In fact, Soffes left Hipstamatic not long after his argument with Buick.

The quarrel also highlighted bigger issues simmering within the company regarding its overall vision. To Buick, Snap Magazine was an opportunity to further cultivate its growing photography community, in industries ranging from fashion to media. It was part of his strategy to make Hipstamatic a “lifestyle brand,” as he calls it.

But others inside the organization felt that idea made little sense. To some, between D Series and Family Album, two past, semi-social products soon to be discontinued; Timeline and CS9, which were both killed; and ongoing plans to make a social app, remake its camera app, and develop potential hardware products--in addition to Snap Magazine and two other previously released photo products called Incredibooth and Swankolab--Buick’s referral to Hipstamatic as a “lifestyle brand” was simply wishy-washy jargon meant to mask the company’s floundering product strategy. "They kept pitching us, 'We're a lifestyle brand,' whatever the fuck that means," says the former employee. "We didn't know what to do because there was no direction. It was a bunch of art school kids that didn't know how to run a software company.”

“Most of my time was trying to convince the development team of what the lifestyle brand was, and then trying to convince the lifestyle people what the development team was doing,” acknowledges Buick. “Ultimately, we never got on the same page.

"We may have been a lifestyle brand," says Wight, "but we also make software. And we had to get serious about making software. We had the loosest, most disorganized plan I have ever seen--there weren’t even regular developer meetings. We needed someone who could lead the development team."

“Very clearly there was a growing disconnect between the teams. It’s a company of designers versus guys who are engineers, so it’s not always easy to speak the same language. Did we experiment with a lot of different ideas over the course of the last year? Absolutely,” says Sullivan, the company’s spokesperson. “These engineers are very used to a certain structure or company or schedule, and maybe that wasn’t quite aligned with the vision we had.”

Says the former developer, "Hipstamatic needed to transition to a software company, but it failed to do that.”

If it’s common wisdom for founders to heed the call of social, then Hipstamatic proves that every founder should be wary of conventional Silicon Valley wisdom. Social for Hipstamatic was a siren song, and its turbulent journey over the last year only demonstrates the oft-overlooked dangers of pivots, especially ill-conceived ones that damage a startup’s core business so deeply that no amount of venture capital can repair it.

“The real problem is that Hipstamatic is perceived as a copycat that desires to be Instagram, and VCs don’t want to be in a me-too deal.”

Throughout the summer of 2012, Buick says he and his cofounders took meetings with investors, hoping to raise the company's first round of funding. But the team could never find the right terms, Buick says, partly because of Facebook's bungled IPO. "We went down this path one other time, and the term sheets have gotten worse since the Facebook IPO, just from what we've seen," Buick says.

The other issue, ironically, was Hipstamatic's bottom-line, Buick says. While startups with no revenue can often drum up seemingly arbitrarily high valuations, Hipstamatic was plagued by its own market success. Instagram had generated no revenue since it launched, yet sold at a market valuation of roughly $1 billion. Hipstamatic didn't have the same “advantage.” According to Inc. magazine, the self-funded startup pulled in $10 million last year, and was on track to more than double its revenue in 2012. "For us, raising money was always super awkward because we made money," Buick says. "It fucked everything up and we'd get a different valuation. Like, 'Oh you have numbers? Well, I'm going to put the X here and the Y here, and this is what you're worth.' It's like, 'No, no, no, we don't make money! I lied!'"

"They thought raising VC money would be really easy--that they'd basically be picking money off trees," says Jonathan Wight, the former engineer. "Every few weeks we'd get an update, and it would be, 'Oh it's a lot harder than we thought,' or, 'The terms aren't what we want.' Blah blah blah."

Fast Company reached out to a slew of top-tier VCs but was unable to find one who had met with or even looked at the company. Two of the VCs surmised the startup would have a very difficult time raising money after the Instagram acquisition. “Another billion-dollar photo-sharing exit is hard to imagine. The category is over and done with, and I’d be surprised if they can even raise,” says one of the topflight VCs.

The investor agrees that general market sentiment for social media investments is down because of Zynga’s and Facebook’s declining market caps. However, the VC disagrees with Buick’s argument that having revenue would hurt its chances to raise funding. “The real problem is that Hipstamatic is perceived as a copycat that desires to be Instagram, and VCs don’t want to be in a me-too deal,” the investor says. “Having revenue absolutely won’t hurt; if anything, it helps, though the idea and market size matter much more.”

“All of us were like, ‘Dude, you’re never going to IPO.'”

At that point, however, Hipstamatic's biggest problem was finding the right idea, regardless of the size of its market or revenue. And its development team back in San Francisco felt completely disconnected from whatever the founders were planning. "They were gone for weeks and were impossible to reach," says the former employee. "Apparently they were meeting with VCs, but I don't know. We were just trying to ship this new product that was already behind. The original goal was to ship it when the new iPhone came out, but there was no fucking way we could do it. All we had was what we hacked together for them to demo to VCs." (Hipstamatic denies that its cofounders were impossible to reach during this time.)

By the time the “Wolfpack,” the self-appointed nickname for the company founders, decided to offer other members of the team stock in the company, many had already lost faith, multiple sources say. “All of us were like, ‘Dude, you’re never going to IPO,’” recalls Stuart Norrie, the former designer.

In late July, Buick and his cofounders went to New York, which Wight says felt like the “last chance to get VC money." (Hipstamatic denies that it was the company’s last chance for VC funding. It’s also worth noting that I had met with the team during their visit, and none of the products herein described were mentioned at that meeting. Buick was focused more then on ways to work Hipstamatic into third-party services.) When the team returned, however, there was no news of a round being raised. "Nothing was said. It was like, 'Well, I guess we didn't get any money,'" Wight recalls. "I confronted Lucas about it and he said, 'Yeah, we didn't find any terms that we liked, but we have something in China.' It was kind of obvious then that they weren't going to get VC funding."

Wight also says he pressed Buick on whether they could still go ahead with the social product without raising capital. "Lucas said, 'Yeah, we're going to mortgage [Hipstamatic's] building if we need to,'" Wight recalls. "He actually said, 'Our backup plan is to mortgage the building.' At that point, all my alarm bells went off. It was obvious that something crazy was going on. As far as I could tell, they were running out of money. That was about a week or two before the layoffs."

Hipstamatic says that it’s simply not true that the company considered mortgaging the building as an option. Hipstamatic also denies that anyone ever indicated the company was prepared to go forward with the social product without raising a round of funding.

“People would be getting drunk at night and end up sleeping on the floor of the company.”

If Hipstamatic’s product roadmap seemed slapdash, the rapidly evolving landscape of the photography space was only making its business even more chaotic. By mid-August, Instagram was racing toward 100 million users, in part due to the app’s successful launch on Android. Viddy, arguably the model for CS9, Hipstamatic’s squashed video product, had raised a $30 million round at a reported $370 million valuation. Path, Dave Morin’s private social network, had raised $40 million at a reported $250 million valuation. Camera+, its camera app competitor, was nearing 9 million users, more than double Hipstamatic’s user base, and would soon launch on the iPad. And Tumblr, Pinterest, and any number of other white-hot startups, which arguably served as inspiration for Hipstamatic’s social products, were flying into the upper-echelon of Silicon Valley superstardom.

But even in such a hectic time for the company, Buick was starting consider yet another pivot for Hipstamatic. Pivots, Eric Ries’ term for a change in company direction, are usually reserved to describe companies that have made successful shift in focus: Instagram, for example, is famous for pivoting away from its unsuccessful, complicated earlier iteration, called Burbn, which included a host of random features, such as game mechanics and future check-ins. Pivots are also used to designate startups that have lost focus, as was the case with Color, the proximity based photo-sharing app, which has become a punch line in the Valley for a startup desperately spiraling in all different directions.

But Hipstamatic never truly pivoted. If anything, it lurched. The startup performed a series of missteps throughout 2012 that snowballed and left the company stagnant by the summer’s end.

In further violation of Ries’s revered business principles, Hipstamatic seemed almost incapable of putting out a minimum viable product: most every prototype product was either killed or not given the attention it needed to get to market.

Worse yet, the company was not run like a lean startup. The company's headquarters, for example, a wide brick building on Langton Street in SOMA called the "Haus of Hipstamatic," cost roughly $1 million. Additionally, the cofounders decided to renovate the building's rooftop with deck and minibar, an upgrade that cost at least $800,000, explains Sam Soffes, the former engineer, who says he saw an invoice for the construction. “Lucas told me the stain for the deck had been imported from Belgium, and I was like, 'Dude, there's a Home Depot in Daly City--we could’ve just gotten it for way less than you paid to have that shit imported form Belgium!'" recalls Norrie. (Hipstamatic confirmed the cost of the building, but declined to confirm the cost of rooftop construction.)

Inside the $1 million "Haus of Hipstamatic"

Parties at company headquarters were frequent. As Buick once told me, "Our entire lifestyle is built on the philosophy that work and play are one."

"It felt like a bloody frat house," says Wight, who says he was told the company's alcohol budget was $20,000. "I've never worked at a startup with an alcohol budget. People would be getting drunk at night and end up sleeping on the floor of the company. I think Lucas wanted a certain amount of rock n' roll there."

(Buick denies that the company had an alcohol budget, though he adds, “I mean, if we did have one, I’d be curious what it would be.” Buick also clarifies that, with all parties thrown--for product launches, say, or app updates--he always considered whether they’d generate short-term income or long-term revenue. Molli Sullivan, the director of communications, says that much of the money spent on parties and other “fun events” was designed for team building.)

"We had a ton of parties--maybe that's what they meant by having a 'lifestyle brand,'" says the former developer, referring to Buick's company motto.

So while Hipstamatic was still generating revenue, it's perhaps no surprise why some employees started to wonder if the company was speeding toward bankruptcy. Employees were not privy to the startup's earnings; they only knew of revenue figures that had been reported by the press. When it became clear the company was not going to raise a round of funding, some started to think the worst. "I inferred that they were running out of money--that they had just gone through money way too quickly," says the former employee. "You've seen the office--it's really expensive. They all have really lavish lifestyles. I figured they were seeking out funding because they needed more runway to keep the ship afloat."

The truth according to Buick is, by mid-August, the company had several different options. Buick could've continued down the path toward social and raised a round of funding at less-than-pleasing terms. He also could've sold the company. ("We can't comment on who [we could’ve sold to], but it just seemed like a shitty option--it felt like giving up to cash in a check and buy a boat," Buick says.) Or he could've pivoted backward, scaled down the company's ambitions, and refocused on Hipstamatic's original photo app.

“I think we totally got caught up in the San Francisco bubble. If you don't leave enough, you forget that not everyone has an iPhone, and not everyone reads TechCrunch. The rest of the world doesn't care about that stuff.”

After much deliberation, Buick says he went with the last option. (Also in early August, one of the company’s iOS developers quit voluntarily, which helped reinforce Buick’s decision, he acknowledges.)

Over dinner in mid-August, Buick presented the plan of scaling back to several other founding members of the startup. "From the time we decided to pull the trigger to the time we executed was about 48 hours," Buick says.

On Aug. 16, the company began laying off employees, either in the office, over the phone, or over coffee. Employees were (not surprisingly) unhappy when they were told the news. "Yeah, I got my pink slip, or plaid slip, whatever hipster term you want to call it," says the former employee.

At the Mondrian Soho in mid-September, over dinner and drinks, Buick appears genuinely unfazed by the internal drama at Hipstamatic and the way it negatively spilled into the press after employees were let go. Later, when I ask Buick whether Hipstamatic is going bankrupt, he immediately responds, “No, we are not.” And even when I press him about the startup’s runway and burn-rate, he retorts with a giggle, “You're using startup terms that we've never internally used. I mean, I've heard burn-rate and runway, but let me say this: I have no idea what our burn rate is. I have no idea how long our runway is.”

Throughout our dinner, Buick’s general nonchalance gave the impression that the layoffs were not a financial decision, regardless of whether they actually were or not. (The company’s spokesperson says the company is not running out of money, and explains the layoffs had nothing to do with “paying the bills.”)

"The honest truth is I took a lot of bad advice and started building stuff we weren’t passionate about," he says. "That whole product development was all about how to make money and maximize users, and we were focusing on the shit that we didn't really care about. We started focusing on money and talking to a whole different scene, and we started to lose touch with our community--the photographers, for example, who totally got ignored for a year. I don't know what the trigger was but the honest truth was we hadn't shipped anything, and that drove me nuts. And what we were building was still so far away from being available that I didn't even like coming to work.”

Ex-employees can’t speak fast enough to list off the many problems that plagued the company: a lack of transparency, an incoherent product roadmap, and so forth. Almost every source I spoke was offended that Buick would say the layoffs were due to not shipping products—the ex-employees chalk up the dearth of shipped products to the company’s poor leadership. And many sources place the blame on the ever-mounting disconnect between the cofounders and new hires, who say they were not given the agency to push new developments forward. (At least three sources I spoke with said the cofounders had a “death grip” on the original Hipstamatic app, for example, and only gave developers read-only access to the service for much of their time at the company.)

While one could certainly argue Hipstamatic had many original ideas, Hipstamatic’s central problem was execution—and it was a problem that worsened as the team’s cohesion deteriorated. The startup could not act as a functional whole.

When I ask Buick what went wrong, he reflects for a moment, and answers, "I think we totally got caught up in the San Francisco bubble. If you don't leave enough, you forget that not everyone has an iPhone, and not everyone reads TechCrunch. The rest of the world doesn't care about that stuff. The San Francisco bubble is a sounding board for the same idea heard over and over in a thousand different ways. We fell into that, and it led to a lot of frustration and wasted time and resources. So we took a left turn."

Adds Buick, "We should coin this the unpivot."

Stuart Norrie, the former designer, summarizes the company’s issues most eloquently: “In this industry, it’s inevitable that you’re going to pivot. You should be expected to be switching direction at a moment’s notice. But not weekly--not changing direction completely every week. They were trying to become Camera+ and Instagram, and that’s a losing battle. It’s suicide to take them on. And if you focus too much on your competitors, you’re going to lose sight of your own business, and that’s what really happened.”

He continues, “The biggest problem with Hipstamatic is that [Lucas] didn’t focus on Hipstamatic. What did Instagram do when lightning struck? They did nothing but focus on Instagram. What happened when Hipstamatic got successful? They made [separate products such as] Swankolab, Incredibooth, D Series, Family Album, Snap Magazine, and splintered off in so many different directions. They lost sight from the very beginning, and it still makes me sad because it was a golden opportunity to make something really amazing.”

Other members of the team echo Norrie’s sentiment. Says one former employee, "The people I worked with at Hipstamatic were the best people I've ever worked with."

Buick agrees. "It sucked," he says. "We've let people go before but it was always justified because they weren't doing their work. This had nothing to do with that. They were all really awesome and talented. What we did was build a Ferrari and we didn't know how to drive stick. So we had this awesome machine that wasn't able to perform like it should. We built the wrong type of team to solve the wrong kind of problem.”

Finishing up his second or third old-fashioned at the Mondrian Soho, Buick transitions away from the past to talk about Hipstamatic's future. As he takes me through the roadmap, I can't help but be intrigued by what he and the company might have to offer--if the surviving team can even pull it off. All the while, a song by a French pop band blares over the restaurant's sound system. Then, later, another song by the same group. Then a third in the course of an hour. The band is Phoenix, the name for the mythical firebird that rises from its own ashes--not that anyone catches the heavy-handed, trite symbolism. Says Buick, "This fall we're launching a bunch of stuff…"

[Image: Flickr user Jim]

Startup = Growth

— Paul Graham, September 2012

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

If you want to start one it's important to understand that. Startups are so hard that you can't be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you're after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.

Redwoods

Let's start with a distinction that should be obvious but is often overlooked: not every newly founded company is a startup. Millions of companies are started every year in the US. Only a tiny fraction are startups. Most are service businesses—restaurants, barbershops, plumbers, and so on. These are not startups, except in a few unusual cases. A barbershop isn't designed to grow fast. Whereas a search engine, for example, is.

When I say startups are designed to grow fast, I mean it in two senses. Partly I mean designed in the sense of intended, because most startups fail. But I also mean startups are different by nature, in the same way a redwood seedling has a different destiny from a bean sprout.

That difference is why there's a distinct word, "startup," for companies designed to grow fast. If all companies were essentially similar, but some through luck or the efforts of their founders ended up growing very fast, we wouldn't need a separate word. We could just talk about super-successful companies and less successful ones. But in fact startups do have a different sort of DNA from other businesses. Google is not just a barbershop whose founders were unusually lucky and hard-working. Google was different from the beginning.

To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That's the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn't scale.

For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. Barbershops are doing fine in the (a) department. Almost everyone needs their hair cut. The problem for a barbershop, as for any retail establishment, is (b). A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. And even if they did the barbershop couldn't accomodate them. [1]

Writing software is a great way to solve (b), but you can still end up constrained in (a). If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarian speakers, you'll be able to reach most of the people who want it, but there won't be many of them. If you make software to teach English to Chinese speakers, however, you're in startup territory.

Most businesses are tightly constrained in (a) or (b). The distinctive feature of successful startups is that they're not.

Ideas

It might seem that it would always be better to start a startup than an ordinary business. If you're going to start a company, why not start the type with the most potential? The catch is that this is a (fairly) efficient market. If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarians, you won't have much competition. If you write software to teach English to Chinese speakers, you'll face ferocious competition, precisely because that's such a larger prize. [2]

The constraints that limit ordinary companies also protect them. That's the tradeoff. If you start a barbershop, you only have to compete with other local barbers. If you start a search engine you have to compete with the whole world.

The most important thing that the constraints on a normal business protect it from is not competition, however, but the difficulty of coming up with new ideas. If you open a bar in a particular neighborhood, as well as limiting your potential and protecting you from competitors, that geographic constraint also helps define your company. Bar + neighborhood is a sufficient idea for a small business. Similarly for companies constrained in (a). Your niche both protects and defines you.

Whereas if you want to start a startup, you're probably going to have to think of something fairly novel. A startup has to make something it can deliver to a large market, and ideas of that type are so valuable that all the obvious ones are already taken.

That space of ideas has been so thoroughly picked over that a startup generally has to work on something everyone else has overlooked. I was going to write that one has to make a conscious effort to find ideas everyone else has overlooked. But that's not how most startups get started. Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them. Perhaps later they step back and notice they've found an idea in everyone else's blind spot, and from that point make a deliberate effort to stay there. [3] But at the moment when successful startups get started, much of the innovation is unconscious.

What's different about successful founders is that they can see different problems. It's a particularly good combination both to be good at technology and to face problems that can be solved by it, because technology changes so rapidly that formerly bad ideas often become good without anyone noticing. Steve Wozniak's problem was that he wanted his own computer. That was an unusual problem to have in 1975. But technological change was about to make it a much more common one. Because he not only wanted a computer but knew how to build them, Wozniak was able to make himself one. And the problem he solved for himself became one that Apple solved for millions of people in the coming years. But by the time it was obvious to ordinary people that this was a big market, Apple was already established.

Google has similar origins. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to search the web. But unlike most people they had the technical expertise both to notice that existing search engines were not as good as they could be, and to know how to improve them. Over the next few years their problem became everyone's problem, as the web grew to a size where you didn't have to be a picky search expert to notice the old algorithms weren't good enough. But as happened with Apple, by the time everyone else realized how important search was, Google was entrenched.

That's one connection between startup ideas and technology. Rapid change in one area uncovers big, soluble problems in other areas. Sometimes the changes are advances, and what they change is solubility. That was the kind of change that yielded Apple; advances in chip technology finally let Steve Wozniak design a computer he could afford. But in Google's case the most important change was the growth of the web. What changed there was not solubility but bigness.

The other connection between startups and technology is that startups create new ways of doing things, and new ways of doing things are, in the broader sense of the word, new technology. When a startup both begins with an idea exposed by technological change and makes a product consisting of technology in the narrower sense (what used to be called "high technology"), it's easy to conflate the two. But the two connections are distinct and in principle one could start a startup that was neither driven by technological change, nor whose product consisted of technology except in the broader sense. [4]

Rate

How fast does a company have to grow to be considered a startup? There's no precise answer to that. "Startup" is a pole, not a threshold. Starting one is at first no more than a declaration of one's ambitions. You're committing not just to starting a company, but to starting a fast growing one, and you're thus committing to search for one of the rare ideas of that type. But at first you have no more than commitment. Starting a startup is like being an actor in that respect. "Actor" too is a pole rather than a threshold. At the beginning of his career, an actor is a waiter who goes to auditions. Getting work makes him a successful actor, but he doesn't only become an actor when he's successful.

So the real question is not what growth rate makes a company a startup, but what growth rate successful startups tend to have. For founders that's more than a theoretical question, because it's equivalent to asking if they're on the right path.

The growth of a successful startup usually has three phases:

1. There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it's doing.

2. As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those people, there's a period of rapid growth.

3. Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company. Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the markets it serves. [5]

Together these three phases produce an S-curve. The phase whose growth defines the startup is the second one, the ascent. Its length and slope determine how big the company will be.

The slope is the company's growth rate. If there's one number every founder should always know, it's the company's growth rate. That's the measure of a startup. If you don't know that number, you don't even know if you're doing well or badly.

When I first meet founders and ask what their growth rate is, sometimes they tell me "we get about a hundred new customers a month." That's not a rate. What matters is not the absolute number of new customers, but the ratio of new customers to existing ones. If you're really getting a constant number of new customers every month, you're in trouble, because that means your growth rate is decreasing.

During Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week, partly because there is so little time before Demo Day, and partly because startups early on need frequent feedback from their users to tweak what they're doing. [6]

A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing.

The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users. That's a reasonable proxy for revenue growth because whenever the startup does start trying to make money, their revenues will probably be a constant multiple of active users. [7]

Compass

We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit, and then just try to hit it every week. The key word here is "just." If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, they're successful for that week. There's nothing more they need to do. But if they don't hit it, they've failed in the only thing that mattered, and should be correspondingly alarmed.

Programmers will recognize what we're doing here. We're turning starting a startup into an optimization problem. And anyone who has tried optimizing code knows how wonderfully effective that sort of narrow focus can be. Optimizing code means taking an existing program and changing it to use less of something, usually time or memory. You don't have to think about what the program should do, just make it faster. For most programmers this is very satisfying work. The narrow focus makes it a sort of puzzle, and you're generally surprised how fast you can solve it.

Focusing on hitting a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup to a single problem. You can use that target growth rate to make all your decisions for you; anything that gets you the growth you need is ipso facto right. Should you spend two days at a conference? Should you hire another programmer? Should you focus more on marketing? Should you spend time courting some big customer? Should you add x feature? Whatever gets you your target growth rate. [8]

Judging yourself by weekly growth doesn't mean you can look no more than a week ahead. Once you experience the pain of missing your target one week (it was the only thing that mattered, and you failed at it), you become interested in anything that could spare you such pain in the future. So you'll be willing for example to hire another programmer, who won't contribute to this week's growth but perhaps in a month will have implemented some new feature that will get you more users. But only if (a) the distraction of hiring someone won't make you miss your numbers in the short term, and (b) you're sufficiently worried about whether you can keep hitting your numbers without hiring someone new.

It's not that you don't think about the future, just that you think about it no more than necessary.

In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum. But in practice that never happens. Having to hit a growth number every week forces founders to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of succeeding. Nine times out of ten, sitting around strategizing is just a form of procrastination. Whereas founders' intuitions about which hill to climb are usually better than they realize. Plus the maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated. Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.

The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can actually discover startup ideas. You can use the need for growth as a form of evolutionary pressure. If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with.

There's a parallel here to small businesses. Just as the constraint of being located in a particular neighborhood helps define a bar, the constraint of growing at a certain rate can help define a startup.

You'll generally do best to follow that constraint wherever it leads rather than being influenced by some initial vision, just as a scientist is better off following the truth wherever it leads rather than being influenced by what he wishes were the case. When Richard Feynman said that the imagination of nature was greater than the imagination of man, he meant that if you just keep following the truth you'll discover cooler things than you could ever have made up. For startups, growth is a constraint much like truth. Every successful startup is at least partly a product of the imagination of growth. [9]

Value

It's hard to find something that grows consistently at several percent a week, but if you do you may have found something surprisingly valuable. If we project forward we see why.

weekly

yearly

1%

1.7x

2%

2.8x

5%

12.6x

7%

33.7x

10%

142.0x

A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month. [10]

Our ancestors must rarely have encountered cases of exponential growth, because our intutitions are no guide here. What happens to fast growing startups tends to surprise even the founders.

Small variations in growth rate produce qualitatively different outcomes. That's why there's a separate word for startups, and why startups do things that ordinary companies don't, like raising money and getting acquired. And, strangely enough, it's also why they fail so frequently.

Considering how valuable a successful startup can become, anyone familiar with the concept of expected value would be surprised if the failure rate weren't high. If a successful startup could make a founder $100 million, then even if the chance of succeeding were only 1%, the expected value of starting one would be $1 million. And the probability of a group of sufficiently smart and determined founders succeeding on that scale might be significantly over 1%. For the right people—e.g. the young Bill Gates—the probability might be 20% or even 50%. So it's not surprising that so many want to take a shot at it. In an efficient market, the number of failed startups should be proportionate to the size of the successes. And since the latter is huge the former should be too. [11]

What this means is that at any given time, the great majority of startups will be working on something that's never going to go anywhere, and yet glorifying their doomed efforts with the grandiose title of "startup."

This doesn't bother me. It's the same with other high-beta vocations, like being an actor or a novelist. I've long since gotten used to it. But it seems to bother a lot of people, particularly those who've started ordinary businesses. Many are annoyed that these so-called startups get all the attention, when hardly any of them will amount to anything.

If they stepped back and looked at the whole picture they might be less indignant. The mistake they're making is that by basing their opinions on anecdotal evidence they're implicitly judging by the median rather than the average. If you judge by the median startup, the whole concept of a startup seems like a fraud. You have to invent a bubble to explain why founders want to start them or investors want to fund them. But it's a mistake to use the median in a domain with so much variation. If you look at the average outcome rather than the median, you can understand why investors like them, and why, if they aren't median people, it's a rational choice for founders to start them.

Deals

Why do investors like startups so much? Why are they so hot to invest in photo-sharing apps, rather than solid money-making businesses? Not only for the obvious reason.

The test of any investment is the ratio of return to risk. Startups pass that test because although they're appallingly risky, the returns when they do succeed are so high. But that's not the only reason investors like startups. An ordinary slower-growing business might have just as good a ratio of return to risk, if both were lower. So why are VCs interested only in high-growth companies? The reason is that they get paid by getting their capital back, ideally after the startup IPOs, or failing that when it's acquired.

The other way to get returns from an investment is in the form of dividends. Why isn't there a parallel VC industry that invests in ordinary companies in return for a percentage of their profits? Because it's too easy for people who control a private company to funnel its revenues to themselves (e.g. by buying overpriced components from a supplier they control) while making it look like the company is making little profit. Anyone who invested in private companies in return for dividends would have to pay close attention to their books.

The reason VCs like to invest in startups is not simply the returns, but also because such investments are so easy to oversee. The founders can't enrich themselves without also enriching the investors. [12]

Why do founders want to take the VCs' money? Growth, again. The constraint between good ideas and growth operates in both directions. It's not merely that you need a scalable idea to grow. If you have such an idea and don't grow fast enough, competitors will. Growing too slowly is particularly dangerous in a business with network effects, which the best startups usually have to some degree.

Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started. But startups often raise money even when they are or could be profitable. It might seem foolish to sell stock in a profitable company for less than you think it will later be worth, but it's no more foolish than buying insurance. Fundamentally that's how the most successful startups view fundraising. They could grow the company on its own revenues, but the extra money and help supplied by VCs will let them grow even faster. Raising money lets you choose your growth rate.

Money to grow faster is always at the command of the most successful startups, because the VCs need them more than they need the VCs. A profitable startup could if it wanted just grow on its own revenues. Growing slower might be slightly dangerous, but chances are it wouldn't kill them. Whereas VCs need to invest in startups, and in particular the most successful startups, or they'll be out of business. Which means that any sufficiently promising startup will be offered money on terms they'd be crazy to refuse. And yet because of the scale of the successes in the startup business, VCs can still make money from such investments. You'd have to be crazy to believe your company was going to become as valuable as a high growth rate can make it, but some do.

Pretty much every successful startup will get acquisition offers too. Why? What is it about startups that makes other companies want to buy them? [13]

Fundamentally the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock of successful startups: a rapidly growing company is valuable. It's a good thing eBay bought Paypal, for example, because Paypal is now responsible for 43% of their sales and probably more of their growth.

But acquirers have an additional reason to want startups. A rapidly growing company is not merely valuable, but dangerous. If it keeps expanding, it might expand into the acquirer's own territory. Most product acquisitions have some component of fear. Even if an acquirer isn't threatened by the startup itself, they might be alarmed at the thought of what a competitor could do with it. And because startups are in this sense doubly valuable to acquirers, acquirers will often pay more than an ordinary investor would. [14]

Understand

The combination of founders, investors, and acquirers forms a natural ecosystem. It works so well that those who don't understand it are driven to invent conspiracy theories to explain how neatly things sometimes turn out. Just as our ancestors did to explain the apparently too neat workings of the natural world. But there is no secret cabal making it all work.

If you start from the mistaken assumption that Instagram was worthless, you have to invent a secret boss to force Mark Zuckerberg to buy it. To anyone who knows Mark Zuckerberg that is the reductio ad absurdum of the initial assumption. The reason he bought Instagram was that it was valuable and dangerous, and what made it so was growth.

If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. Growth is why startups usually work on technology—because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change. Growth is why it's a rational choice economically for so many founders to try starting a startup: growth makes the successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high even though the risk is too. Growth is why VCs want to invest in startups: not just because the returns are high but also because generating returns from capital gains is easier to manage than generating returns from dividends. Growth explains why the most successful startups take VC money even if they don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate. And growth explains why successful startups almost invariably get acquisition offers. To acquirers a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous too.

It's not just that if you want to succeed in some domain, you have to understand the forces driving it. Understanding growth is what starting a startup consists of. What you're really doing (and to the dismay of some observers, all you're really doing) when you start a startup is committing to solve a harder type of problem than ordinary businesses do. You're committing to search for one of the rare ideas that generates rapid growth. Because these ideas are so valuable, finding one is hard. The startup is the embodiment of your discoveries so far. Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be a research scientist: you're not committing to solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems are soluble; but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew before. A startup founder is in effect an economic research scientist. Most don't discover anything that remarkable, but some discover relativity.

Notes

[] Strictly speaking it's not lots of customers you need but a big market, meaning a high product of number of customers times how much they'll pay. But it's dangerous to have too few customers even if they pay a lot, or the power that individual customers have over you could turn you into a de facto consulting firm. So whatever market you're in, you'll usually do best to err on the side of making the broadest type of product for it.

[] One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to start businesses to use a restaurant as a model. What he meant, I believe, is that it's fine to start software companies constrained in (a) in the same way a restaurant is constrained in (b). I agree. Most people should not try to start startups.

[] That sort of stepping back is one of the things we focus on at Y Combinator. It's common for founders to have discovered something intuitively without understanding all its implications. That's probably true of the biggest discoveries in any field.

[] I got it wrong in "How to Make Wealth" when I said that a startup was a small company that takes on a hard technical problem. That is the most common recipe but not the only one.

[] In principle companies aren't limited by the size of the markets they serve, because they could just expand into new markets. But there seem to be limits on the ability of big companies to do that. Which means the slowdown that comes from bumping up against the limits of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which internal limits are expressed.

It may be that some of these limits could be overcome by changing the shape of the organization—specifically by sharding it.

[] This is, obviously, only for startups that have already launched or can launch during YC. A startup building a new database will probably not do that. On the other hand, launching something small and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any company that could start this way probably should.

[] If the startup is taking the Facebook/Twitter route and building something they hope will be very popular but from which they don't yet have a definite plan to make money, the growth rate has to be higher, even though it's a proxy for revenue growth, because such companies need huge numbers of users to succeed at all.

Beware too of the edge case where something spreads rapidly but the churn is high as well, so that you have good net growth till you run through all the potential users, at which point it suddenly stops.

[] Within YC when we say it's ipso facto right to do whatever gets you growth, it's implicit that this excludes trickery like buying users for more than their lifetime value, counting users as active when they're really not, bleeding out invites at a regularly increasing rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc. Even if you were able to fool investors with such tricks, you'd ultimately be hurting yourself, because you're throwing off your own compass.

[] Which is why it's such a dangerous mistake to believe that successful startups are simply the embodiment of some brilliant initial idea. What you're looking for initially is not so much a great idea as an idea that could evolve into a great one. The danger is that promising ideas are not merely blurry versions of great ones. They're often different in kind, because the early adopters you evolve the idea upon have different needs from the rest of the market. For example, the idea that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a subset of Facebook; the idea that evolves into Facebook is a site for Harvard undergrads.

[] What if a company grew at 1.7x a year for a really long time? Could it not grow just as big as any successful startup? In principle yes, of course. If our hypothetical company making $1000 a month grew at 1% a week for 19 years, it would grow as big as a company growing at 5% a week for 4 years. But while such trajectories may be common in, say, real estate development, you don't see them much in the technology business. In technology, companies that grow slowly tend not to grow as big.

[] Any expected value calculation varies from person to person depending on their utility function for money. I.e. the first million is worth more to most people than subsequent millions. How much more depends on the person. For founders who are younger or more ambitious the utility function is flatter. Which is probably part of the reason the founders of the most successful startups of all tend to be on the young side.

[] More precisely, this is the case in the biggest winners, which is where all the returns come from. A startup founder could pull the same trick of enriching himself at the company's expense by selling them overpriced components. But it wouldn't be worth it for the founders of Google to do that. Only founders of failing startups would even be tempted, but those are writeoffs from the VCs' point of view anyway.

[] Acquisitions fall into two categories: those where the acquirer wants the business, and those where the acquirer just wants the employees. The latter type is sometimes called an HR acquisition. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a scale that has a significant effect on the expected value calculation for potential founders, HR acquisitions are viewed by acquirers as more akin to hiring bonuses.

[] I once explained this to some founders who had recently arrived from Russia. They found it novel that if you threatened a company they'd pay a premium for you. "In Russia they just kill you," they said, and they were only partly joking. Economically, the fact that established companies can't simply eliminate new competitors may be one of the most valuable aspects of the rule of law. And so to the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we should worry, not because it's a departure from the rule of law per se but from what the rule of law is aiming at.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.

A Brief Pause

— Ethan Kaplan, October 2012

I have a lot of ideas for blog posts, some even written, but today I want to briefly touch upon something that is occupying my mind.

This weekend I went to the funeral for a five year old boy. He was the son of one of my best friends in school from sixth grade and Junior High and High School to a degree. We all are fucked up people in high school, me especially, so we had a bit of a falling out, as it happens.

From 1997 to 2004 I lost touch with everyone I had known for the most part. My life consisted mostly of commuting between work and school and where I lived (a stretch of up to 80 miles each direction), and working, 80 miles from school, 60 miles from home. I knew no one in any permanent way. Those I had known in high school and elsewhere had their own lives, and our lives were easier to exist isolated than incorporated, as the means of incorporation demanded active participation.

Then Facebook. Suddenly the lives were incorporated passively.

I picked up where I left off in 2004, and through happenstance, reunions, being in the same fields of work and otherwise, managed to reconnect with most of those I called friends at one time.

I watched this little boy grow up, saw the struggles he had from his disability, saw how amazing his parents were. I occasionally saw my friend outside of a news feed. I never met his wife.

Last Thursday I was in a meeting and opened Facebook on my phone and saw that this little boy had passed away two days prior. My heart stopped and for a second I couldn’t breathe. I tapped through to the profile that posted it, and was confronted by the fissure between two posts prior and this one. A smile and a tragedy.

I never met him, or his mom. I grew up with his dad. On Sunday I found myself among all my friends from high school and before trying to offer support, and trying to hold my emotions at bay. It’s hard to see the memories of a child’s life and not superimpose your own child on top of it. It’s an unfathomable level of despair I can’t imagine ever dealing with, nor do I ever want to.

We were there though. Among hundreds of others. Older than we were. But still supporting someone who was and is a friend.

I missed seven years of people because I had no means of finding them. Finding them over the last seven years lead me being there for a friend, however I could, in a time of the greatest need. I can fault Facebook for a lot, and scholars and critics can fault computer mediated communication for a lot, but I can never give enough credit to both for making that possible.

I often spoke about, did art about and studied the concept of the difference between my corporeal self, and that “self” which I made virtual. Through my work with Murmurs.com and other places, I maintained these distinctly. This was by necessity as it was impossible to be both at the same time do to the lack of pervasive connectivity and ubiquitous computing.

The complication of this duality lead me to putting more investment into the virtual “me” than the real. As these two concepts progressed, my identities merged. It was uncomfortable. It still is, and I still find myself shedding remnants of both.

Now the merger of the virtual and reified is inexorable. The virtual is reified, the real is virtualized.

I’m no longer separated from myself virtually in any meaningful way. I don’t desire anonymity, or choose to represent who I am in that space any differently than I am in reality. By entrusting those who I talk to with the same level authenticity and diminished artifice, we are acknowledging the act of communicating via computers is different, but as emotionally resonant as we want to make it.

But it is different. It’s compressed and without the fade of memory. In times of tragedy this makes it much more evident.

While this merging of the corporeal and virtual is there, it’ll never be full. The corporeal fades. Time, memory, age and intent all diminish through the years. We are never who we were. But the “me” of 2006 is still intact in various places, as is the “me” from 1998. Formatively, those “me” and the current one are still ASCII, binary, IP addresses and sites. I am different in reality, but time doesn’t matter in a space that has no entropy.

For me it’s embarrassment. For my friend it’s pain. A smile, and two days later the loss. A two day window of time that will always be there as it was on the day it occurred.

We will always fetishize the merger of real and virtual, of corporeal self and virtual. It’s exciting. Wetware, biometrics, embedded systems into our mastoid bone like in the Diamond Age.

But the real consequence is the loss of time, and the loss of the fade associated with it.

I don’t want to forget the post that shook me up so much last week. That made me really reevaluate my approaches to a lot of things in my life. I don’t want to forget the boy I never met. Or my friend and his wife who raised him with such joy and now face such a loss.

I don’t want to forget, but it’s often easier and less painful to. Forgetting is freedom. Forgetting lets us move forward unencumbered by the pain of memory.

But we can’t forget.

People will grow older, people will fade, and people will die. Time will march on. We will feel pain, but pain and memory will fade too if we let it.

But, that’s only true for one half of ourselves. For the other half - the virtual half - time has no meaning. We can delete it or choose to ignore it.

Without time, without its effect on the clarity of memory, memory itself is amplified. Good and bad pile up in an exponential manner.

I don’t fear growing older, but I do fear the amplification of the memory of what I had in my life as the good and the bad pile up like so many records in so many databases.

So many two day gaps between happiness and loss.

The Last Viridian Note

— Bruce Sterling

Key concepts:

summaries, farewells, Papal_Imperial sermons, the end of a design movement

Attention Conservation Notice:

This is the last one.

Links:

A new steampunk manifesto. Wow, steampunk is a LOT older than Viridian, and look how lively steampunk is now. This implies a Viridian revival someday – "Neo-Viridian," "retroviridian"... "greenpunk" even. Lo, it was ever thus.

http://gogbot.nl.vedor.com/thema/

Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a few meditative suggestions.

As I explained in the first Viridian speech, any design movement – social movements of any kind, really – should be designed with an explicit expiration date. The year 2012 would have been the extreme to which Viridian could have persisted. Since the course of history has grown quite jittery, this longer term was spared us.

Some Viridian principles can be lightly re-phrased, buffed-up and likely made of practical use in days to come. Others are period notions to be gently tossed into the cultural compost. I could try to describe which are which – but that's a proper job for someone younger.

I'm following current events with keen interest. There's never been a better time for major political and financial interventions in the green space. However, Viridian List is about design interventions, it was not about politics or finance, so a decent reticence is in order at this juncture.

I would like to cordially thank Viridian readers and contributors and advisors for their patience and their generous help over nine years. I hope you feel you derived some benefit from it. I did my best with the effort, I learned a lot by it, and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I can't say what Viridian may have done for you; that's up to you to judge. Since this is last Viridian note, however, I'd like to describe what Viridian did for me.

Since the halcyon days of 1999 my life has changed radically.

Rather than "thinking globally and acting locally," as in the old futurist theme, I now live and think glocally. I once had a stable, settled life within a single city, state and nation. Nowadays, I divide my time between three different polities: the United States, the European Union and the Balkans. With various junkets elsewhere.

The 400-year-old Westphalian System doesn't approve of my lifestyle, although it's increasingly common, especially among people half my age. It's stressful to live glocally. Not that I myself feel stressed by this. As long as I've got broadband, I'm perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet's surface is arbitrary. It's the nation-state system that is visibly stressed by these changes – it's freaking out over currency flows, migration through airports, offshoring, and similar phenomena.

I know that, by the cultural standards of the 20th century, my newfangled glocal lifestyle ought to bother me. I ought to feel deracinated, and I should suffer from culture shock, and I should stoically endure the mournful silence and exile of a writer torn from the kindly matrix of his national culture. A traditional story.

However, I've been at this life for years now; I really tried; the traditional regret is just not happening. Clearly the existence of the net has obliterated many former operational difficulties.

Furthermore, my sensibility no longer operates in that 20th-century framework. That's become an archaic way to feel, and I just can't get there from here.

Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It's got its practical drawbacks, but I'm much more perturbed about contemporary indignities such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry of cellphone roaming. This is what's troublesome. The rest of it, I'm rather at ease about. Unless I'm physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don't think I'm going to stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in truth.

Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion – purportedly mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively pernicious.

Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any effective way. It doesn't do or say anything conceptually novel – nor is it practical, or a working path to a better life.

My personal relations to goods and services – especially goods – have been revolutionized since 1999. Let me try your patience by describing this change in some detail, because it really is a different mode of being in the world.

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is "sustainability?" Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It's not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It's not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Do not "economize." Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It's melting the North Pole. So "economization" is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don't seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It's in your time most, it's in your space most. It is "where it is at," and it is "what is going on."

It takes a while to get this through your head, because it's the opposite of the legendry of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too much money on a bed – (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact I do not). You're spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious notice. See it. Replace it.

Sell – even give away– anything you never use. Fancy ball gowns, tuxedos, beautiful shoes wrapped in bubblepak that you never wear, useless Christmas gifts from well-meaning relatives, junk that you inherited. Sell that stuff. Take the money, get a real bed. Get radically improved everyday things.

The same goes for a working chair. Notice it. Take action. Bad chairs can seriously injure you from repetitive stresses. Get a decent ergonomic chair. Someone may accuse you of "indulging yourself" because you possess a chair that functions properly. This guy is a reactionary. He is useless to futurity. Listen carefully to whatever else he says, and do the opposite. You will benefit greatly.

Expensive clothing is generally designed to make you look like an aristocrat who can afford couture. Unless you are a celebrity on professional display, forget this consumer theatricality. You should buy relatively-expensive clothing that is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy.

Anything placed next to your skin for long periods is of high priority. Shoes are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear. You really need to work on selecting these – yes, on "shopping for shoes." You should spend more time on shoes than you do on cars, unless you're in a car during pretty much every waking moment. In which case, God help you.

I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.

A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.

Do not lug around an enormous toolchest or a full set of post-earthquake gear unless you are Stewart Brand. Furthermore, unless you are a professional emergency worker, you can abstain from post-apocalyptic "bug-out bags" and omnicompetent heaps of survivalist rations. Do not stock the fort with tiresome, life-consuming, freeze-dried everything, unless you can clearly sense the visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder. The clearest way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have left your area. If that's the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and prepare to knuckle down.

Now to confront the possessions you already have. This will require serious design work, and this will be painful. It is a good idea to get a friend or several friends to help you.

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

1. Beautiful things.

2. Emotionally important things.

3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.

4. Everything else.

"Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren't born with it. You won't be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

Beautiful things are important. If they're truly beautiful, they should be so beautiful that you are showing them to people. They should be on display: you should be sharing their beauty with others. Your pride in these things should enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.

They're not really that beautiful? Then they're not really beautiful. Take a picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.

Emotionally important things. All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we can't bear to part with. We also have many other objects which simply provoke a panicky sense of potential loss – they don't help us to establish who we are, or to become the person we want to be. They subject us to emotional blackmail.

Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with your friends, your children, your grandchildren? Or are you just using this clutter as emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing yourself better?

Think about that. Take a picture. You might want to write the story down. Then – yes – away with it.

You are not "losing things" by these acts of material hygiene. You are gaining time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will certainly soar. Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where they matter – in the everyday.

Not in Oz or in some museum vitrine. In the every day. For sustainability, it is every day that matters. Not green Manhattan Projects, green moon shots, green New Years' resolutions, or wild scifi speculations. Those are for dabblers and amateurs. The sustainable is about the every day.

Now for category three, tools and appliances. They're not beautiful and you are not emotionally attached to them. So they should be held to keen technical standards.

Is your home a museum? Do you have curatorial skills? If not, then entropy is attacking everything in there. Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays. Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact. Expect this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke anguished spasms of denial.

You will be told that you should "make do" with broken or semi-broken tools, devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.

This material culture of today is not sustainable. Most of the things you own are almost certainly made to 20th century standards, which are very bad. If we stick with the malignant possessions we already have, through some hairshirt notion of thrift, then we are going to be baling seawater. This will not do.

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today's. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest: the experimental ones. The world is full of complicated, time-sucking, partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos. Some are fun to mess with; fun in life is important. Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay. Eagerly collecting semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the worst thing in the world. However, it can become a vice. If you are going to wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really need to wrangle them. Get good at doing it.

Good experiments are well-designed experiments. Real experiments need a theory. They need something to prove or disprove. Experiments need to be slotted into some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to other practitioners. That's what makes them true "experiments" instead of private fetishes.

If you're buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you'll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

If you're becoming a techie magpie packrat who never leaves your couch – that's not good. Forget the shiny gadget. You need to look in the shiny mirror.

So. This approach seems to be working for me. More or less. I'm not urging you to do any of this right away. Do not jump up from the screen right now and go reform your entire material circumstances. That resolve will not last. Because it's not sustainable.

Instead, I am urging you to think hard about it. Tuck it into the back of your mind. Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly find your comfortable habits disrupted.

That could be a new job, a transfer to a new city, a marriage, the birth or departure of a child. It could be a death in the family: we are mortal, they happen. Moments like these are part of the human condition. Suddenly you will find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes. That is the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup. Seize that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and sustainable constitution.

But – you may well ask – what if I backslide into the ancien regime? Well, there is a form of hygiene workable here as well. Every time you move some new object into your time and space – buy it, receive it as a gift, inherit it, whatever – remove some equivalent object.

That discipline is not as hard as it sounds. As the design of your immediate surroundings improves, it'll become obvious to you that more and more of these time-sucking barnacles are just not up to your standards. They're ugly, or they're broken, or they're obsolete, or they are visible emblems of nasty, uncivilized material processes.

Their blissful absence from your life makes new time and space for something better for you – and for the changed world you want to live to see.

So: that summarizes it. Forgive the Pope-Emperor this last comprehensive sermon; it is what I learned by doing all this, and you won't be troubled henceforth.

Now. If you've read this far, you're a diehard. So you may be interested in my next, post-Viridian, project. And yes, of course I have one. It's not so direct, confrontational and strident as the Viridian Movement; instead, it suits a guy of my increasingly scholastic and professorial temperament.

Viridian "imaginary products" were always a major theme of ours, and, since I'm both a science fiction writer and a design critic, I want to do some innovative work in this space – yes, the realm of imaginary products. Conceptual designs; imaginary designs; critical designs; fantastic and impossible designs.

This new effort of mine is a scholarly work exploring material culture, use-value, ethics, and the relationship between materiality and the imagination. However, since nobody's easily interested in that huge, grandiose topic, I'm disguising it as a nifty and attractive gadget book. I plan to call it "The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets."

My first step in composing this new book is to methodically survey the space of all possible imaginary gadgets. It's rather like the exploratory work of "Dead Media Project."

I'm not yet sure what form this new research effort will take. There will likely be a mailing list. I may be turning my Wired blog into something of a gadget site. There might be a wiki or a social network, depending on who wants to help me, and what they want out of that effort. Still: "design fiction," "critical design," "futurist scenario design," and the personal, individual, pocket-and-purse sized approach to postindustriality: this is something I need to know a lot more about.

If you want to play, send email.

Bruce Sterling

bruces@well.com

O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=c=O

Borgo Medioevale

Torino, Italia WORLD CAPITAL OF DESIGN

November 2008

O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=C=O O=c=O

Napster, Udacity, and the Academy

— Clay Shirky, November 2012

Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Frauenhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn’t a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side effect: Frauenhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3.

The recording industry concluded this new audio format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD at the record store? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen.

If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. That’s not what happened. Instead, Pandora happened. Last.fm happened. Spotify happened. ITunes happened. Amazon began selling songs in the hated MP3 format.

How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? How did they achieve such a decisive victory over Napster, then fail to regain control of even legal distribution channels? They crushed Napster’s organization. They poisoned Napster’s brand. They outlawed Napster’s tools. They one thing they couldn’t kill was the story Napster told.

The story the recording industry used to tell us went something like this: “Hey kids, Alanis Morisette just recorded three kickin’ songs! You can have them, so long as you pay for the ten mediocrities she recorded at the same time.” Napster told us a different story. Napster said “You want just the three songs? Fine. Just ‘You Oughta Know’? No problem. Every cover of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ ever made? Help yourself. You’re in charge.”

The people in the music industry weren’t stupid, of course. They had access to the same internet the rest of us did. They just couldn’t imagine—and I mean this in the most ordinarily descriptive way possible—could not imagine that the old way of doing things might fail. Yet things did fail, in large part because, after Napster, the industry’s insistence that digital distribution be as expensive and inconvenient as a trip to the record store suddenly struck millions of people as a completely terrible idea.

Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.

It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralized and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.

* * *

A massive open online class is usually a series of video lectures with associated written materials and self-scoring tests, open to anyone. That’s what makes them OOCs. The M part, though, comes from the world. As we learned from Wikipedia, demand for knowledge is so enormous that good, free online materials can attract extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world.

Last year, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, an online course from Stanford taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted 160,000 potential students, of whom 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs anything possible on a physical campus. As Thrun put it, “Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined.” Seeing this, he quit and founded Udacity, an educational institution designed to offer MOOCs.

The size of Thrun and Norvig’s course, and the attention attracted by Udacity (and similar organizations like Coursera, P2PU, and University of the People), have many academics worrying about the effect on higher education. The loudest such worrying so far has been The Trouble With Online Education, a New York Times OpEd by Mark Edmunson of the University of Virginia. As most critics do, Edmundson focussed on the issue of quality, asking and answering his own question: “[C]an online education ever be education of the very best sort?”

Now you and I know what he means by “the very best sort”—the intimate college seminar, preferably conducted by tenured faculty. He’s telling the story of the liberal arts education in a selective residential college and asking “Why would anyone take an online class when they can buy a better education at UVA?”

But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18 year old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of MOOCs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn’t what education of “the very best sort” looks like, but what the whole system looks like.

Edmundson isn’t crazy enough to argue that all college experiences are good, so he hedges. He tells us “Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition”, without providing an analogy for the non-memorable ones. He assures us that “large lectures can also create genuine intellectual community”, which of course means they can also not do that. (He doesn’t say how many large lectures fail his test.) He says “real courses create intellectual joy,” a statement that can be accurate only as a tautology. (The MOOC Criticism Drinking Game: take a swig whenever someone says “real”, “true”, or “genuine” to hide the fact that they are only talking about elite schools instead of the median college experience.)

I was fortunate enough to get the kind of undergraduate education Edmundson praises: four years at Yale, in an incredible intellectual community, where even big lecture classes were taught by seriously brilliant people. Decades later, I can still remember my art history professor’s description of the Arnolfini Wedding, and the survey of modern poetry didn’t just expose me to Ezra Pound and HD, it changed how I thought about the 20th century.

But you know what? Those classes weren’t like jazz compositions. They didn’t create genuine intellectual community. They didn’t even create ersatz intellectual community. They were just great lectures: we showed up, we listened, we took notes, and we left, ready to discuss what we’d heard in smaller sections.

And did the professors also teach our sections too? No, of course not; those were taught by graduate students. Heaven knows what they were being paid to teach us, but it wasn’t a big fraction of a professor’s salary. The large lecture isn’t a tool for producing intellectual joy; it’s a tool for reducing the expense of introductory classes.

* * *

Higher education has a bad case of cost disease (sometimes called Baumol’s cost disease, after one of its theorizers.) The classic example is the string quartet; performing a 15-minute quartet took a cumulative hour of musician time in 1850, and takes that same hour today. This is not true of the production of food, or clothing, or transportation, all of which have seen massive increases in value created per hour of labor. Unfortunately, the obvious ways to make production more efficient—fewer musicians playing faster—wouldn’t work as well for the production of music as for the production of cars.

An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price. For live music, this means hiring less-talented musicians, selling more tickets per performance, writing grant applications, or, of course, raising ticket prices. For colleges, this means more graduate and adjunct instructors, increased enrollments and class size, fundraising, or, of course, raising tuition.

The great work on college and cost-disease is Robert Archibald and David Feldman’s Why Does College Cost So Much? Archibald and Feldman conclude that institution-specific explanations—spoiled students expecting a climbing wall; management self-aggrandizement at the expense of educational mission—hold up less well than the generic observation: colleges need a lot of highly skilled people, people whose wages, benefits, and support costs have risen faster than inflation for the last thirty years.

Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time. The minute you try to explain exactly why we do it this way, though, the setup starts to seem a little bizarre. What would it be like to teach at a university where a you could only assign books you yourself had written? Where you could only ask your students to read journal articles written by your fellow faculty members? Ridiculous. Unimaginable.

Every college provides access to a huge collection of potential readings, and to a tiny collection of potential lectures. We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning. Sometimes you’re at a place where the best lecture your professor can give is the best in the world. But mostly not. And the only thing that kept this system from seeming strange was that we’ve never had a good way of publishing lectures.

This is the huge difference between music and education. Starting with Edison’s wax cylinders, and continuing through to Pandora and the iPod, the biggest change in musical consumption has come not from production but playback. Hearing an excellent string quartet play live in an intimate venue has indeed become a very expensive proposition, as cost disease would suggest, but at the same time, the vast majority of music listened to on any given day is no longer recreated live.

* * *

Harvard, where I was fortunate enough to have a visiting lectureship a couple of years ago, is our agreed-upon Best Institution, and it is indeed an extraordinary place. But this very transcendence should make us suspicious. Harvard’s endowment, 31 billion dollars, is over three hundred times the median, and only one college in five has an endowment in the first place. Harvard also educates only about a tenth of a percent of the 18 million or so students enrolled in higher education in any given year. Any sentence that begins “Let’s take Harvard as an example…” should immediately be followed up with “No, let’s not do that.”

This atypical bent of our elite institutions covers more than just Harvard. The top 50 colleges on the US News and World Report list (which includes most of the ones you’ve heard of) only educate something like 3% of the current student population. The entire list, about 250 colleges, educates fewer than 25%.

The upper reaches of the US college system work like a potlatch, those festivals of ostentatious giving. The very things the US News list of top colleges prizes—low average class size, ratio of staff to students—mean that any institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list. This is why most of the early work on MOOCs is coming out of Stanford and Harvard and MIT. As Ian Bogost says, MOOCs are marketing for elite schools.

Outside the elite institutions, though, the other 75% of students—over 13 million of them—are enrolled in the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of: Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. Bridgerland Applied Technology College. The Laboratory Institute of Merchandising. When we talk about college education in the US, these institutions are usually left out of the conversation, but Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrolls as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.

* * *

The fight over MOOCs isn’t about the value of college; a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education. For-profit schools like Kaplan’s and the University of Phoenix enroll around one student in eight, but account for nearly half of all loan defaults, and the vast majority of their enrollees fail to get a degree even after six years. Reading the academic press, you wouldn’t think that these statistics represented a more serious defection from our mission than helping people learn something about Artificial Intelligence for free.

The fight over MOOCs isn’t even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them. If critics of online education were consistent, they would believe that the University of Virginia’s Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies or Rutger’s MLIS degree are abominations, or else they would have to believe that there is a credit-worthy way to do online education, one MOOCs could emulate. Neither argument is much in evidence.

That’s because the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. The most widely told story about college focuses obsessively on elite schools and answers a crazy mix of questions: How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instill reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidize the professor’s work?

MOOCs simply ignore a lot of those questions. The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.

Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible.

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.

If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine, and Stanford, and Swarthmore, and Duke. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. University of Arkansas at Little Rock? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.

* * *

Udacity and its peers don’t even pretend to tell the story of an 18-year old earning a Bachelor’s degree in four years from a selective college, a story that only applies to a small minority of students in the US, much less the world. Meanwhile, they try to answer some new questions, questions that the traditional academy—me and my people—often don’t even recognize as legitimate, like “How do we spin up 10,000 competent programmers a year, all over the world, at a cost too cheap to meter?”

Udacity may or may not survive, but as with Napster, there’s no containing the story it tells: “It’s possible to educate a thousand people at a time, in a single class, all around the world, for free.” To a traditional academic, this sounds like crazy talk. Earlier this fall, a math instructor writing under the pen name Delta enrolled in Thrun’s Statistics 101 class, and, after experiencing it first-hand, concluded that the course was

…amazingly, shockingly awful. It is poorly structured; it evidences an almost complete lack of planning for the lectures; it routinely fails to properly define or use standard terms or notation; it necessitates occasional massive gaps where “magic” happens; and it results in nonstandard computations that would not be accepted in normal statistical work.

Delta posted ten specific criticisms of the the content (Normal Curve Calculations), teaching methods (Quiz Regime) and the MOOC itself (Lack of Updates). About this last one, Delta said:

So in theory, any of the problems that I’ve noted above could be revisited and fixed on future pass-throughs of the course. But will that happen at Udacity, or any other massive online academic program?

The very next day, Thrun answered that question. Conceding that Delta “points out a number of shortcomings that warrant improvements”, Thrun detailed how they were going to update the class. Delta, to his credit, then noted that Thrun had answered several of his criticisms, and went on to tell a depressing story of a fellow instructor at his own institution who had failed to define the mathematical terms he was using despite student requests.

Tellingly, when Delta was criticizing his peer, he didn’t name the professor, the course, or even his institution. He could observe every aspect of Udacity’s Statistics 101 (as can you) and discuss them in public, but when criticizing his own institution, he pulled his punches.

Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better. And once you imagine educating a thousand people in a single class, it becomes clear that open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrollment.

College mottos run the gamut from Bryn Mawr’s Veritatem Dilexi (I Delight In The Truth) to the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising’s Where Business Meets Fashion, but there’s a new one that now hangs over many of them: Non Potest Quae Non Manent. Things That Can’t Last Don’t. The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.

In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true.

How to Get Startup Ideas

— Paul Graham, November 2012

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

Problems

Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.

I made it myself. In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries online. But galleries didn't want to be online. It's not how the art business works. So why did I spend 6 months working on this stupid idea? Because I didn't pay attention to users. I invented a model of the world that didn't correspond to reality, and worked from that. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried to convince users to pay for what we'd built. Even then I took embarrassingly long to catch on. I was attached to my model of the world, and I'd spent a lot of time on the software. They had to want it!

Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad.

For example, a social network for pet owners. It doesn't sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets. Often they care a lot about their pets and spend a lot of money on them. Surely many of these people would like a site where they could talk to other pet owners. Not all of them perhaps, but if just 2 or 3 percent were regular visitors, you could have millions of users. You could serve them targeted offers, and maybe charge for premium features. [1]

The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users. [2]

Well

When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.

Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might want what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they want it. If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can envision companies as holes. Google is an immense crater: hundreds of millions of people use it, and they need it a lot. A startup just starting out can't expect to excavate that much volume. So you have two choices about the shape of hole you start with. You can either dig a hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow and deep, like a well.

Made-up startup ideas are usually of the first type. Lots of people are mildly interested in a social network for pet owners.

Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type. Microsoft was a well when they made Altair Basic. There were only a couple thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of which there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users wanted it a lot.

When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad. [3]

You don't need the narrowness of the well per se. It's depth you need; you get narrowness as a byproduct of optimizing for depth (and speed). But you almost always do get it. In practice the link between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user.

But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for a good startup idea, it's not a sufficient one. If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could only ever have appealed to Harvard students, it would not have been a good startup idea. Facebook was a good idea because it started with a small market there was a fast path out of. Colleges are similar enough that if you build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will work at any college. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. Once you have all the college students, you get everyone else simply by letting them in.

Similarly for Microsoft: Basic for the Altair; Basic for other machines; other languages besides Basic; operating systems; applications; IPO.

Self

How do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea? How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a niche product? Often you can't. The founders of Airbnb didn't realize at first how big a market they were tapping. Initially they had a much narrower idea. They were going to let hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions. They didn't foresee the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually. All they knew at first is that they were onto something. That's probably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first.

Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of the initial niche. And sometimes I can see a path that's not immediately obvious; that's one of our specialties at YC. But there are limits to how well this can be done, no matter how much experience you have. The most important thing to understand about paths out of the initial idea is the meta-fact that these are hard to see.

So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says:

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

I've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school. I'm not sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically, but it fits this situation well. Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.

Being at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be one of the people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural.

Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future." Combine that with Pirsig and you get:

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got started. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be companies at first. They grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a gap in the world.

If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think "I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it." Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented.

The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.

That may not have been what you wanted to hear. You may have expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is to have a mind that's prepared in the right way. But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth. And it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.

If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder. [4]

You don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast. Other domains change fast. But while learning to hack is not necessary, it is for the forseeable future sufficient. As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run.

Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be able to implement them. That's not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) but it's an advantage. It's a big advantage, when you're considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if instead of merely thinking "That's an interesting idea," you can think instead "That's an interesting idea. I'll try building an initial version tonight." It's even better when you're both a programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.

Noticing

Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing. If you're really at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there will be things that are obviously missing. What won't be obvious is that they're startup ideas. So if you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?" There's plenty of time to apply that test later. But if you're thinking about that initially, it may not not only filter out lots of good ideas, but also cause you to focus on bad ones.

Most things that are missing will take some time to see. You almost have to trick yourself into seeing the ideas around you.

But you know the ideas are out there. This is not one of those problems where there might not be an answer. It's impossibly unlikely that this is the exact moment when technological progress stops. You can be sure people are going to build things in the next few years that will make you think "What did I do before x?"

And when these problems get solved, they will probably seem flamingly obvious in retrospect. What you need to do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them. The most powerful is simply taking the current state of the world for granted. Even the most radically open-minded of us mostly do that. You couldn't get from your bed to the front door if you stopped to question everything.

But if you're looking for startup ideas you can sacrifice some of the efficiency of taking the status quo for granted and start to question things. Why is your inbox overflowing? Because you get a lot of email, or because it's hard to get email out of your inbox? Why do you get so much email? What problems are people trying to solve by sending you email? Are there better ways to solve them? And why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox? Why do you keep emails around after you've read them? Is an inbox the optimal tool for that?

Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. The advantage of taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life (locally) more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable. If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find life present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future.

When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. When we started Viaweb, all the online stores were built by hand, by web designers making individual HTML pages. It was obvious to us as programmers that these sites would have to be generated by software. [5]

Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.

Since what you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may be best not to make too much of a direct frontal attack on the problem—i.e. to sit down and try to think of ideas. The best plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiousity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies. [6]

Give yourself some time. You have a lot of control over the rate at which you turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it. If Bill Gates and Paul Allen had constrained themselves to come up with a startup idea in one month, what if they'd chosen a month before the Altair appeared? They probably would have worked on a less promising idea. Drew Houston did work on a less promising idea before Dropbox: an SAT prep startup. But Dropbox was a much better idea, both in the absolute sense and also as a match for his skills. [7]

A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool. If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are missing. It wouldn't seem as interesting to build something that already existed.

Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.

At YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that we could imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys. To us that's positive evidence an idea is good.

If you can afford to take a long view (and arguably you can't afford not to), you can turn "Live in the future and build what's missing" into something even better:

Live in the future and build what seems interesting.

School

That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn about "entrepreneurship." "Entrepreneurship" is something you learn best by doing it. The examples of the most successful founders make that clear. What you should be spending your time on in college is ratcheting yourself into the future. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that. What a waste to sacrifice an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup—becoming the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas—by spending time learning about the easy part. Especially since you won't even really learn about it, any more than you'd learn about sex in a class. All you'll learn is the words for things.

The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could solve. In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.

So if you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a class on, say, genetics. Or better still, go work for a biotech company. CS majors normally get summer jobs at computer hardware or software companies. But if you want to find startup ideas, you might do better to get a summer job in some unrelated field. [8]

Or don't take any extra classes, and just build things. It's no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. At Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they're supposed to be studying for finals. [9]

But don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things. Preferably with other students. It's not just the classes that make a university such a good place to crank oneself into the future. You're also surrounded by other people trying to do the same thing. If you work together with them on projects, you'll end up producing not just organic ideas, but organic ideas with organic founding teams—and that, empirically, is the best combination.

Beware of research. If an undergrad writes something all his friends start using, it's quite likely to represent a good startup idea. Whereas a PhD dissertation is extremely unlikely to. For some reason, the more a project has to count as research, the less likely it is to be something that could be turned into a startup. [10] I think the reason is that the subset of ideas that count as research is so narrow that it's unlikely that a project that satisfied that constraint would also satisfy the orthogonal constraint of solving users' problems. Whereas when students (or professors) build something as a side-project, they automatically gravitate toward solving users' problems—perhaps even with an additional energy that comes from being freed from the constraints of research.

Competition

Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late. Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. Ten minutes of searching the web will usually settle the question. Even if you find someone else working on the same thing, you're probably not too late. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors—so rare that you can almost discount the possibility. So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.

If you're uncertain, ask users. The question of whether you're too late is subsumed by the question of whether anyone urgently needs what you plan to make. If you have something that no competitor does and that some subset of users urgently need, you have a beachhead. [11]

The question then is whether that beachhead is big enough. Or more importantly, who's in it: if the beachhead consists of people doing something lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how small it is. For example, if you're building something differentiated from competitors by the fact that it works on phones, but it only works on the newest phones, that's probably a big enough beachhead.

Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.

You don't need to worry about entering a "crowded market" so long as you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking. In fact that's a very promising starting point. Google was that type of idea. Your thesis has to be more precise than "we're going to make an x that doesn't suck" though. You have to be able to phrase it in terms of something the incumbents are overlooking. Best of all is when you can say that they didn't have the courage of their convictions, and that your plan is what they'd have done if they'd followed through on their own insights. Google was that type of idea too. The search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical implications of what they were doing—particularly that the better a job they did, the faster users would leave.

A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough. A startup can't hope to enter a market that's obviously big and yet in which they have no competitors. So any startup that succeeds is either going to be entering a market with existing competitors, but armed with some secret weapon that will get them all the users (like Google), or entering a market that looks small but which will turn out to be big (like Microsoft). [12]

Filters

There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.

Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing some brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay them lots of money. They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. Which is a reasonable preference, because such things slow you down. But this preference is so widespread that the space of convenient startup ideas has been stripped pretty clean. If you let your mind wander a few blocks down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you'll find valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented.

The schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay about the condition it induces, which I called schlep blindness. I gave Stripe as an example of a startup that benefited from turning off this filter, and a pretty striking example it is. Thousands of programmers were in a position to see this idea; thousands of programmers knew how painful it was to process payments before Stripe. But when they looked for startup ideas they didn't see this one, because unconsciously they shrank from having to deal with payments. And dealing with payments is a schlep for Stripe, but not an intolerable one. In fact they might have had net less pain; because the fear of dealing with payments kept most people away from this idea, Stripe has had comparatively smooth sailing in other areas that are sometimes painful, like user acquisition. They didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard by users, because users were desperately waiting for what they were building.

The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. We overcame this one to work on Viaweb. There were interesting things about the architecture of our software, but we weren't interested in ecommerce per se. We could see the problem was one that needed to be solved though.

Turning off the schlep filter is more important than turning off the unsexy filter, because the schlep filter is more likely to be an illusion. And even to the degree it isn't, it's a worse form of self-indulgence. Starting a successful startup is going to be fairly laborious no matter what. Even if the product doesn't entail a lot of schleps, you'll still have plenty dealing with investors, hiring and firing people, and so on. So if there's some idea you think would be cool but you're kept away from by fear of the schleps involved, don't worry: any sufficiently good idea will have as many.

The unsexy filter, while still a source of error, is not as entirely useless as the schlep filter. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing rapidly, your ideas about what's sexy will be somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice. Particularly as you get older and more experienced. Plus if you find an idea sexy, you'll work on it more enthusiastically. [13]

Recipes

While the best way to discover startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them and then build whatever interests you, sometimes you don't have that luxury. Sometimes you need an idea now. For example, if you're working on a startup and your initial idea turns out to be bad.

For the rest of this essay I'll talk about tricks for coming up with startup ideas on demand. Although empirically you're better off using the organic strategy, you could succeed this way. You just have to be more disciplined. When you use the organic method, you don't even notice an idea unless it's evidence that something is truly missing. But when you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, you have to replace this natural constraint with self-discipline. You'll see a lot more ideas, most of them bad, so you need to be able to filter them.

One of the biggest dangers of not using the organic method is the example of the organic method. Organic ideas feel like inspirations. There are a lot of stories about successful startups that began when the founders had what seemed a crazy idea but "just knew" it was promising. When you feel that about an idea you've had while trying to come up with startup ideas, you're probably mistaken.

When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.

The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There must be things you need. [14]

One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in a second." If you can think of any x people said that about, you probably have an idea. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that are impossible to build.

More generally, try asking yourself whether there's something unusual about you that makes your needs different from most other people's. You're probably not the only one. It's especially good if you're different in a way people will increasingly be.

If you're changing ideas, one unusual thing about you is the idea you'd previously been working on. Did you discover any needs while working on it? Several well-known startups began this way. Hotmail began as something its founders wrote to talk about their previous startup idea while they were working at their day jobs. [15]

A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young. Some of the most valuable new ideas take root first among people in their teens and early twenties. And while young founders are at a disadvantage in some respects, they're the only ones who really understand their peers. It would have been very hard for someone who wasn't a college student to start Facebook. So if you're a young founder (under 23 say), are there things you and your friends would like to do that current technology won't let you?

The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else. Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps they find in the world. What's missing? What would they like to do that they can't? What's tedious or annoying, particularly in their work? Let the conversation get general; don't be trying too hard to find startup ideas. You're just looking for something to spark a thought. Maybe you'll notice a problem they didn't consciously realize they had, because you know how to solve it.

When you find an unmet need that isn't your own, it may be somewhat blurry at first. The person who needs something may not know exactly what they need. In that case I often recommend that founders act like consultants—that they do what they'd do if they'd been retained to solve the problems of this one user. People's problems are similar enough that nearly all the code you write this way will be reusable, and whatever isn't will be a small price to start out certain that you've reached the bottom of the well. [16]

One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems is to make them your own. When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. That may seem like taking things to extremes, but startups are extreme. We love it when founders do such things.

In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is not merely to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to seek out ideas that are unsexy or involve schleps. Don't try to start Twitter. Those ideas are so rare that you can't find them by looking for them. Make something unsexy that people will pay you for.

A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy filter is to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that you could use it. What would you pay for right now?

Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve to, and try to imagine what kind of company would profit from their demise. For example, journalism is in free fall at the moment. But there may still be money to be made from something like journalism. What sort of company might cause people in the future to say "this replaced journalism" on some axis?

But imagine asking that in the future, not now. When one company or industry replaces another, it usually comes in from the side. So don't look for a replacement for x; look for something that people will later say turned out to be a replacement for x. And be imaginative about the axis along which the replacement occurs. Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and to get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of advertising. It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has already started to be on most).

When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore. It's particularly good if there's an admixture of disdain in the big players' attitude, because that often misleads them. For example, after Steve Wozniak built the computer that became the Apple I, he felt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard the option to produce it. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one of the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which seemed intolerably déclassé to a high-end hardware company like HP was at the time. [17]

Are there groups of scruffy but sophisticated users like the early microcomputer "hobbyists" that are currently being ignored by the big players? A startup with its sights set on bigger things can often capture a small market easily by expending an effort that wouldn't be justified by that market alone.

Similarly, since the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for waves and ask how one could benefit from them. The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. What new things will we be able to do in the new world we'll have in a few years? What are we unconsciously ruling out as impossible that will soon be possible?

Organic

But talking about looking explicitly for waves makes it clear that such recipes are plan B for getting startup ideas. Looking for waves is essentially a way to simulate the organic method. If you're at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you don't have to look for waves; you are the wave.

Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most people who try fail so miserably. It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But even then, not immediately. It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting.

Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe.

Notes

[] This form of bad idea has been around as long as the web. It was common in the 1990s, except then people who had it used to say they were going to create a portal for x instead of a social network for x. Structurally the idea is stone soup: you post a sign saying "this is the place for people interested in x," and all those people show up and you make money from them. What lures founders into this sort of idea are statistics about the millions of people who might be interested in each type of x. What they forget is that any given person might have 20 affinities by this standard, and no one is going to visit 20 different communities regularly.

[] I'm not saying, incidentally, that I know for sure a social network for pet owners is a bad idea. I know it's a bad idea the way I know randomly generated DNA would not produce a viable organism. The set of plausible sounding startup ideas is many times larger than the set of good ones, and many of the good ones don't even sound that plausible. So if all you know about a startup idea is that it sounds plausible, you have to assume it's bad.

[] More precisely, the users' need has to give them sufficient activation energy to start using whatever you make, which can vary a lot. For example, the activation energy for enterprise software sold through traditional channels is very high, so you'd have to be a lot better to get users to switch. Whereas the activation energy required to switch to a new search engine is low. Which in turn is why search engines are so much better than enterprise software.

[] This gets harder as you get older. While the space of ideas doesn't have dangerous local maxima, the space of careers does. There are fairly high walls between most of the paths people take through life, and the older you get, the higher the walls become.

[] It was also obvious to us that the web was going to be a big deal. Few non-programmers grasped that in 1995, but the programmers had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers.

[] Maybe it would work to have this second self keep a journal, and each night to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day. Not startup ideas, just the raw gaps and anomalies.

[] Sam Altman points out that taking time to come up with an idea is not merely a better strategy in an absolute sense, but also like an undervalued stock in that so few founders do it.

There's comparatively little competition for the best ideas, because few founders are willing to put in the time required to notice them. Whereas there is a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, because when people make up startup ideas, they tend to make up the same ones.

[] For the computer hardware and software companies, summer jobs are the first phase of the recruiting funnel. But if you're good you can skip the first phase. If you're good you'll have no trouble getting hired by these companies when you graduate, regardless of how you spent your summers.

[] The empirical evidence suggests that if colleges want to help their students start startups, the best thing they can do is leave them alone in the right way.

[] I'm speaking here of IT startups; in biotech things are different.

[] This is an instance of a more general rule: focus on users, not competitors. The most important information about competitors is what you learn via users anyway.

[] In practice most successful startups have elements of both. And you can describe each strategy in terms of the other by adjusting the boundaries of what you call the market. But it's useful to consider these two ideas seperately.

[] I almost hesitate to raise that point though. Startups are businesses; the point of a business is to make money; and with that additional constraint, you can't expect you'll be able to spend all your time working on what interests you most.

[] need has to be a strong one. You can retroactively describe any made-up idea as something you need. But do you really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb?

Quite often at YC I find myself asking founders "Would you use this thing yourself, if you hadn't written it?" and you'd be surprised how often the answer is no.

[] Paul Buchheit points out that trying to sell something bad can be a source of better ideas:

"The best technique I've found for dealing with YC companies that have bad ideas is to tell them to go sell the product ASAP (before wasting time building it). Not only do they learn that nobody wants what they are building, they very often come back with a real idea that they discovered in the process of trying to sell the bad idea."

[] Here's a recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if you're college students. If you have a connection to one of the more powerful sororities at your school, approach the queen bees thereof and offer to be their personal IT consultants, building anything they could imagine needing in their social lives that didn't already exist. Anything that got built this way would be very promising, because such users are not just the most demanding but also the perfect point to spread from.

I have no idea whether this would work.

[] And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems. He, like most of his peers, couldn't afford a monitor.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Mike Arrington, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this, and Marc Andreessen, Joe Gebbia, Reid Hoffman, Shel Kaphan, Mike Moritz and Kevin Systrom for answering my questions about startup history.

The End of the Future

— Peter Thiel, October 2012

When He opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come and see.” So I looked, and behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not harm the oil and the wine.” (Revelation 6:5–6)

Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. Taken together, these two interrelated domains reassure us that the 19th-century story of never-ending progress remains intact. Without them, the arguments that we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment — would gather far more force. Liberals often assert that science and technology remain essentially healthy; conservatives sometimes counter that these are false utopias; but the two sides of the culture wars silently agree that the accelerating development and application of the natural sciences continues apace.

Yet during the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and has no end in sight, these great expectations have been supplemented by a desperate necessity. We need high-paying jobs to avoid thinking about how to compete with China and India for low-paying jobs. We need rapid growth to meet the wishful expectations of our retirement plans and our runaway welfare states. We need science and technology to dig us out of our deep economic and financial hole, even though most of us cannot separate science from superstition or technology from magic. In our hearts and minds, we know that desperate optimism will not save us. Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare. Indeed, the unique history of the West proves the exception to the rule that most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state. But there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West must continue. So we could do worse than to inquire into the widely held opinion that America is on the wrong track (and has been for some time), to wonder whether Progress is not doing as well as advertised, and perhaps to take exceptional measures to arrest and reverse any decline.

The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific and technological fields have become? When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields? For now, let us acknowledge this measurement problem — I will return to it later — but not let it stop our inquiry into modernity before it has even begun.

II.

When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.

The official explanation for the slowdown in travel centers on the high cost of fuel, which points to the much larger failure in energy innovation. Real oil prices today exceed those of the Carter catastrophe of 1979–80. Nixon’s 1974 call for full energy independence by 1980 has given way to Obama’s 2011 call for one-third oil independence by 2020. Even before Fukushima, the nuclear industry and its 1954 promise of “electrical energy too cheap to meter” had long since been defeated by environmentalism and nuclear-proliferation concerns. One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career. “Clean tech” has become a euphemism for “energy too expensive to afford,” and in Silicon Valley it has also become an increasingly toxic term for near-certain ways to lose money. Without dramatic breakthroughs, the alternative to more-expensive oil may turn out to be not cleaner and much-more-expensive wind, algae, or solar, but rather less-expensive and dirtier coal.

Warren Buffett massively capitalized on both of these trends with his $44 billion investment, most made in late 2009, in BNSF Railway — making it the largest non-financial company in the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. Understandably, the Oracle of Omaha proclaimed “an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States” and downplayed any doubts he might have harbored. For present purposes, it suffices to note that 40 percent of railroad freight involves the transport of coal, and that railroads will do especially well if the travel and energy consumption patterns of the 21st century involve a regression to the past.

In the past decade, the unresolved energy challenges of the 1970s have broadened into a more general commodity shock, which has been greater in magnitude than the price spikes of the two world wars and has undone the price improvements of the previous century. In the case of agriculture, at least, technological famine may lead to real old-fashioned famine. The fading of the true Green Revolution — which increased grain yields by 126 percent from 1950 to 1980, but has improved them by only 47 percent in the years since, barely keeping pace with global population growth — has encouraged another, more highly publicized “green revolution” of a more political and less certain character. We may embellish the 2011 Arab Spring as the hopeful by-product of the information age, but we should not downplay the primary role of runaway food prices and of the many desperate people who became more hungry than scared.

While innovation in medicine and biotechnology has not stalled completely, here too signs of slowed progress and reduced expectations abound. In 1970, Congress promised victory over cancer in six years’ time; four decades later, we may be 41 years closer, but victory remains elusive and appears much farther away. Today’s politicians would find it much harder to persuade a more skeptical public to start a comparably serious war on Alzheimer’s disease — even though nearly a third of America’s 85-year-olds suffer from some form of dementia. The cruder measure of U.S. life expectancy continues to rise, but with some deceleration, from 67.1 years for men in 1970 to 71.8 years in 1990 to 75.6 years in 2010. Looking forward, we see far fewer blockbuster drugs in the pipeline — perhaps because of the intransigence of the FDA, perhaps because of the fecklessness of today’s biological scientists, and perhaps because of the incredible complexity of human biology. In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one-third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and a half.

III.

By default, computers have become the single great hope for the technological future. The speedup in information technology contrasts dramatically with the slowdown everywhere else. Moore’s Law, which predicted a doubling of the number of transistors that can be packed onto a computer chip every 18 to 24 months, has remained broadly true for much longer than anyone (including Moore) would have imagined back in 1965. We have moved without rest from mainframes to home computers to the Internet. Cellphones in 2011 contain more computing power than the entire Apollo space program in 1969.

From the perspective of Palo Alto, a return to the party year of 1999 appears almost within reach. All that glitters seems to be golden. Thousands of new Internet startups launch each year, and valuations of Web 2.0 businesses have surged; and not entirely without reason, as maybe two to six per year of these newly minted ventures will break into the billion-dollar-plus valuation zone within five years of their founding. In tandem with this new life for the new economy, Google has led a parallel move towards a near-doubling of wages for the most talented computer engineers, all in just the last three years. Beyond the dollars, one must look no farther than The Social Network to see the ways in which Facebook and its 750 million users have captured the new zeitgeist.

The economic decoupling of computers from everything else leads to more questions than answers, and barely hints at the strange future where today’s trends simply continue. Would supercomputers become powerful engines for the miraculous creation of wholly new forms of economic value, or would they simply become powerful weapons for reshuffling existing structures — for Nature, red in tooth and claw? More simply, how does one measure the difference between progress and mere change? How much is there of each?

IV.

Let us now try to tackle this very thorny measurement problem from a very different angle. If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may be offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress. Therefore, to the extent that economic growth is easier to quantify than scientific or technological progress, economic numbers will contain indirect but important clues to our larger investigation.

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.

Taken at face value, the economic numbers suggest that the notion of breathtaking and across-the-board progress is far from the mark. If one believes the economic data, then one must reject the optimism of the scientific establishment. Indeed, if one shares the widely held view that the U.S. government may have understated the true rate of inflation — perhaps by ignoring the runaway inflation in government itself, notably in education and health care (where much higher spending has yielded no improvement in the former and only modest improvement in the latter) — then one may be inclined to take gold prices seriously and conclude that real incomes have fared even worse than the official data indicate.

This dismal and straightforward conclusion tends to be obscured by a range of secondary issues, which are important but do not really change the larger point about trends since 1973:

Mean incomes outperformed median incomes (inflation-adjusted in both cases), and there was a trend towards greater inequality. Median incomes rose by only 10 percent. Mean incomes rose by 29 percent, which works out to a glacial pace of only about 0.7 percent per year — much slower than in the preceding four decades.

Non-wage benefits, mostly health care, increased by about $2,600 per worker, for an additional 0.2 percent per year since 1973. So if the U.S. government has underestimated inflation by only 0.9 percentage points per year, then mean wages and benefits have been completely stagnant.

Corporate profits increased from 9 percent to 12 percent of GDP — again, a significant but easily exaggerated shift.

Women were hired in the 1980s and men were fired in the 2000s.

College graduates did better, and high-school graduates did worse. But both became worse off in the years after 2000, especially when one includes the rapidly escalating costs of college.

The era of globalization improved living standards by making labor and goods cheaper, but also hurt living standards through increased competition for limited resources. Free-trade advocates tend to think that the first effect dominates the second.

Economic progress may lag behind scientific and technological achievement, but 38 years seems like an awfully long time.

The economic future looked very different in the 1960s. In his 1967 bestseller The American Challenge, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber argued that accelerating technological progress would widen the gap between the United States and the rest of the world, and that by 2000, “the post-industrial societies will be, in this order: the United States, Japan, Canada, Sweden. That is all.” According to Servan-Schreiber, the difference between the United States and the rest of Europe would grow from a difference of degree into a difference of kind, comparable to the difference between Europe and Egypt or Nigeria. As a result of this steady divergence, Americans would face less pressure to compete:

In 30 years America will be a post-industrial society. . . . There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. With weekends and holidays this makes 147 work days a year and 218 free days a year. All this within a single generation.

We need to resist the temptation to dismiss Servan-Schreiber’s space-age optimism so that we can better understand how the consensus he represented could have been so terribly wrong — and how, instead, for many Americans, the Fourth Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy”) has been effectively forgotten.

Like technology, credit also makes claims on the future. “I will gladly pay you a dollar on Tuesday for a hamburger today” works only if a dollar gets earned by Tuesday. A credit crisis happens when earnings disappoint and the present does not live up to past expectations of the future.

The current crisis of housing and financial leverage contains many hidden links to broader questions concerning long-term progress in science and technology. On one hand, the lack of easy progress makes leverage more dangerous, because when something goes wrong, macroeconomic growth cannot offer a salve; time will not cure liquidity or solvency problems in a world where little grows or improves with time. On the other hand, the lack of easy progress also makes leverage far more tempting, as unleveraged real returns fall below the expectations of pension funds and other investors.

This analysis suggests an explanation for the strange way the technology bubble of the 1990s gave rise to the real-estate bubble of the 2000s. After betting heavily on technology growth that did not materialize, investors tried to achieve the needed double-digit returns through massive leverage in seemingly safe real-estate investments. This did not work either, because a major reason for the bubble in real estate turned out to be the same as the reason for the bubble in technology: a mistaken but nearly universal background assumption about easy progress. Without fundamental gains in productivity (presumably driven by technology), real-estate values could not go up forever. Leverage is not a substitute for scientific progress.

VI.

The technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth. The give-and-take of Western democracies depends on the idea that we can craft political solutions that enable most people to win most of the time. But in a world without growth, we can expect a loser for every winner. Many will suspect that the winners are involved in some sort of racket, so we can expect an increasingly nasty edge to our politics. We may be witnessing the beginnings of such a zero-sum system in politics in the U.S. and Western Europe, as the risks shift from winning less to losing more, and as our leaders desperately cast about for macroeconomic solutions to problems that have not been primarily about economics for a long time.

The most common name for a misplaced emphasis on macroeconomic policy is “Keynesianism.” Despite his brilliance, John Maynard Keynes was always a bit of a fraud, and there is always a bit of clever trickery in massive fiscal stimulus and the related printing of paper money. But we must acknowledge that this fraud strangely seemed to work for many decades. (The great scientific and technological tailwind of the 20th century powered many economically delusional ideas.) Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, innovation expanded new and emerging fields as divergent as radio, movies, aeronautics, household appliances, polymer chemistry, and secondary oil recovery. In spite of their many mistakes, the New Dealers pushed technological innovation very hard.

The New Deal deficits, however misguided, were easily repaid by the growth of subsequent decades. During the Great Recession of the 2010s, by contrast, our policy leaders narrowly debate fiscal and monetary questions with much greater erudition, but have adopted a cargo-cult mentality with respect to the question of future innovation. As the years pass and the cargo fails to arrive, we eventually may doubt whether it will ever return. The age of monetary bubbles naturally ends in real austerity.

On the political right, we are seeing a quiet shift from the optimism of Jack Kemp to the pessimism of Ron Paul, from supply-side economics to the Tea Party, and from the idea that we can combine tax cuts with more spending to the idea that money is either hard or fake. A mischievous person might even ask whether “supply-side economics” really was just a sort of code word for “Keynesianism.” For now it suffices to acknowledge that lower marginal tax rates might not happen and would not substitute for the much-needed construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors.

VII.

We have seen that even the simple question of whether a technology slowdown has occurred is far from straightforward. The critical question of why such a slowdown seems to have occurred is harder still, and we do not have the space to tackle it fully here. Let us end with the related question of what can now be done. Most narrowly, can our government restart the stalled innovation engine?

The state can successfully push science; there is no sense denying it. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo program remind us of this possibility. Free markets may not fund as much basic research as needed. On the day after Hiroshima, the New York Times could with some reason pontificate about the superiority of centralized planning in matters scientific: “End result: An invention [the nuclear bomb] was given to the world in three years which it would have taken perhaps half a century to develop if we had to rely on prima donna research scientists who work alone.”

But in practice, we all sense that such gloating belongs to a very different time. Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.

Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless fake cultural wars around identity politics are the main reason we have been able to ignore the tech slowdown for so long.

However that may be, after 40 years of wandering, it is not easy to find a path back to the future. If there is to be a future, we would do well to reflect about it more. The first and the hardest step is to see that we now find ourselves in a desert, and not in an enchanted forest.

— Peter Thiel, the founding CEO of PayPal, is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. As an undergraduate he founded the Stanford Review, a conservative/libertarian newspaper at Stanford University. The Hertog/Simon Fund for Policy Analysis provided funding for this article.

One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education

— Michael Noer, November 2012

The headquarters of what has rapidly become the largest school in the world, at 10 million students strong, is stuffed into a few large communal rooms in a decaying 1960s office building hard by the commuter rail tracks in Mountain View, Calif. Despite the cramped, dowdy circumstances, youthful optimism at the Khan Academy abounds. At the weekly organization-wide meeting, discussion about translating their offerings into dozens of languages is sandwiched between a video of staffers doing weird dances with their hands and plans for upcoming camping and ski trips.

Pivoting, Salman Khan, the 36-year-old founder, cracks a sports joke appropriate for someone who holds multiple degrees from MIT and Harvard. It involves LeBron James (a Khan Academy fan), three-point shots and sophisticated algorithms called Monte Carlo simulations. The company’s 37 employees, mostly software developers with stints at places like Google and Facebook, are the types who know when to laugh. And they do.

It’s a prototypical Silicon Valley ethos, with one exception: The Khan Academy, which features 3,400 short instructional videos along with interactive quizzes and tools for teachers to chart student progress, is a nonprofit, boasting a mission of “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” There is no employee equity; there will be no IPO; funding comes from philanthropists, not venture capitalists.

“I could have started a for-profit, venture-backed business that has a good spirit, and I think there are many of them–Google for instance,” says Khan, his eyes dancing below his self-described unibrow. “Maybe I could reach a billion people. That is high impact, but what happens in 50 years?”

It’s a fair question, with an increasingly sure answer: The next half-century of education innovation is being shaped right now. After decades of yammering about “reform,” with more and more money spent on declining results, technology is finally poised to disrupt how people learn. And that creates immense opportunities for both for-profit entrepreneurs and nonprofit agitators like Khan.

How immense? According to a report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, global spending on education is $3.9 trillion, or 5.6% of planetary GDP. America spends the most–about $1.3 trillion a year–yet the U.S. ranks 25th out of the 34 OECD countries in mathematics, 17th in science and 14th in reading. And, as in so many other areas of American life, those averages obscure a deeper divide: The U.S. is the only developed country to have high proportions of both top and bottom performers. About a fifth of American 15-year-olds do not have basic competence in science; 23% can’t use math in daily life.

It’s those latter statistics that motivate Khan. The site covers a staggering array of topics–from basic arithmetic and algebra to the electoral college and the French Revolution. The videos are quirky affairs where you never see the instructor (usually Salman Khan himself, who personally has created nearly 3,000 of them). Instead, students are confronted with a blank digital blackboard, which, over the course of a ten-minute lesson narrated in Khan’s soothing baritone, is gradually filled up with neon-colored scrawls illustrating key concepts. The intended effect is working through homework at the kitchen table with your favorite uncle looking over your shoulder.

Or make that the planet’s favorite uncle. Over the past two years Khan Academy videos have been viewed more than 200 million times. The site is used by 6 million unique students each month (about 45 million total over the last 12 months), who have collectively solved more than 750 million problems (about 2 million a day), and the material, which is provided at no cost, is (formally or informally) part of the curriculum in 20,000 classrooms around the world. Volunteers have translated Khan’s videos into 24 different languages, including Urdu, Swahili and Chinese.

“Sal is the world’s first superstar teacher,” says Yuri Milner, the Russian physicist turned venture capitalist who was an early investor in Facebook, Twitter and Groupon.

Beyond admirers like Milner, Khan’s meteoric success has attracted the financial support of a bevy of high-profile, socially minded backers, including Ann Doerr, the wife of billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr; Bill Gates; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; NewSchools Venture Fund, whose CEO is the former president of the California State Board of Education; and Google, whose chairman, Eric Schmidt, serves on the academy’s board. In total Khan has raised $16.5 million, with assurances of more to come.

“The numbers get really crazy when you look at the impact per dollar,” says Khan. “We have a $7 million operating budget, and we are reaching, over the course of a year, about 10 million students in a meaningful way. If you put any reasonable value on it, say $10 a year–and keep in mind we serve most students better than tutoring–and you are looking at, what, a 1,000% return?”

Even in Internet terms that’s impressive for an organization that 24 months ago consisted of one man working alone in a walk-in closet and 12 months prior to that was the oddball hobby of an intellectually hyper-active hedge fund analyst. But Salman Khan’s ambitions go much further. “Now that there are these tools, where students can learn at their own pace and master the concepts before moving on, can we rethink this educational model that has been standard practice for hundreds of years?”

Internet-based technology long ago figured out how to revolutionize and democratize everything from retail to auctions to maps. So what took so long to disrupt perhaps the largest, most dysfunctional field of all? With education several things were needed that until this decade hadn’t materialized: widespread broadband, low content costs (both creation and distribution) and rapidly proliferating mobile devices. And just as critically, a shift in social norms that accepts the efficacy of online learning coupled with a generation of digital natives willing to wholeheartedly embrace it.

And this perfect storm is finally attracting investment. According to GSV Capital, a publicly traded venture fund based in Woodside, Calif., a measly $3.4 billion worth of venture money was plowed into education over the past decade–but the deal pace accelerated sharply (see chart, p. 90) . Of the 428 deals financed during those ten years, 207 of them closed in 2010 or 2011, accounting for 45% of the funding.

“Importantly, it’s not just a lot of capital that is coming in or a growing amount of capital,” says GSV CEO Michael Moe. “It’s the people who are always early and usually right. It’s Kleiner Perkins. It’s Sequoia. It’s Benchmark. It’s NEA. It’s Greylock. It’s Bessemer. The very best venture firms are not just making casual investments in education–they are making it a big part of what they are doing.”

Online education isn’t entirely new. In a limited fashion Harvard began offering course material online way back in 1997, Rice University followed suit in 1999 and MIT in 2002. What is new and startling is the scale of these enterprises. A single (and rather difficult) electrical engineering course from MIT attracted 155,000 students this past spring, and Coursera, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup that hosts classes from 33 different universities (and received $16 million in venture funding earlier this year), claims 1.7 million people have signed up for at least one of its courses.

Perhaps most dramatically, Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun recently resigned his tenured professorship to start Udacity, a for-profit venture that offers courses in science, engineering and entrepreneurship. Thrun, a computer scientist and roboticist who spearheaded the development of Google’s driverless car, took the leap after 160,000 students signed up for his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class when he first offered it for free online in 2011. Almost 15% of the online students completed the course at Stanford-level, and 170 out of his 200 traditional students preferred the virtual Thrun to the live one.

“They found the online medium so much more satisfying that they chose not to come to class anymore,” Thrun says. “And in my midterm and final exams their outcome was a full letter-grade higher. I’ve been giving these exams for a long time, and the questions were of comparable difficulty.”

The biggest opportunities of all may be in the developing world. Although broadband connectivity is more limited there than in richer countries, it is far from nonexistent, and ultracheap tablets like the $40 Aakash are starting to come to market. That makes alternative delivery systems possible. Dozens of Khan Academy videos, for instance, could fit on a single thumb drive.

“This decade is the first opportunity we have ever had to extend quality secondary education to every kid on the planet,” says Tom Vander Ark, a venture capitalist who headed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s educational programs through 2006. “When you combine mobile devices, free content and an inexpensive, blended learning model, you can serve kids in the slums of Nairobi for $4 a month and you can start to imagine a $100-a-year high school that is quite high quality.”

Much of our current education system derives from the so-called Prussian model, and it dates to the late 1700s when the King of Prussia introduced free, compulsory elementary schooling. Those schools were dedicated to teaching citizens the three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic), with the secondary, more cynical, objective of creating a docile working class accustomed to submitting to authority. A great deal of our educational scaffolding, including separating students by age and separating subjects by ringing bells, dates from Prussian times.

The Prussian model, which was imported into the U.S. by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century, had a number of advantages. It guaranteed all Americans a free, relatively good education and guaranteed employers a time-disciplined workforce with a set of common skills. It played no small part in lifting millions into the middle classes. And given the state of technology at the time, it was arguably the most cost-effective way of doing so. But it also had significant drawbacks, most notably its factorylike pacing.

“We have a one-size-fits-all, one-speed-fits-all, one-path-fits-all model,” says Thrun. “And that is the result of one simple assumption that we are questioning. The assumption is that education takes place from teacher to student by spoken word–by synchronous, not recorded, spoken word. That means that all the students have to be at the same place at the same time. If everyone really learned at the same speed on the same path then you could fill a stadium and still have useful learning. But you can’t.”

Thrun, Khan and many of their fellow educational disruptors want to upend that. Broadly termed “flipping the classroom,” the idea is that students watch lectures and work through problem sets on their own time, at their own pace. Once they prove mastery of a concept, adaptive software will suggest new ones, much like Amazon recommends new books. Teachers are kept abreast of students’ progress through back-end dashboards. Class time once reserved for lectures would be devoted to mentoring and one-on-one tutoring.

Watch: The History of Education

Knewton, a New York City-based startup that has raised $54 million in funding from a gaggle of A-list firms, including the Founder’s Fund, Accel Partners and Bessemer, is taking this concept to new levels. The company has created a software platform that can be used by any content creator from a megapublisher like Pearson down to an individual teacher or prep school. Knewton’s software data-mines each student’s performance and deeply customizes his or her learning experience. Ultimately they expect to be able to track you and your learning habits from grammar school through grad school.

“Once you have device-based learning, you are producing so much data we know everything about what you know and how you learn best,” says Knewton CEO Jose Ferreira. “You learn math best in the morning, between 9:30 and 11 a.m. We know that. That 40 minute burst you do at lunch every day? You aren’t retaining any of that–go hang out with your friends. You learn science best with videoclips or games instead of text or in addition to text? You learn history best in 22-minute bite sizes, and at the 24-minute mark your click-rate always declines? We know everything about how you learn.”

But where does this brave new world leave teachers?

“What gets exciting is that you can imagine a lot of differentiation of teacher roles in the future,” says Michael Horn, coauthor with Clayton Christensen and Curtis Johnson of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns . “Some people might be content experts, some who are mentors and some who are handling nonacademic problems. That is significant change.”

Emerging communication technologies have long been touted as a panacea for our educational woes. In the 1920s, as radio boomed, more than 200 educational stations were formed with the hope “that through the connectivity of radio, a single dazzling teacher could inspire thousands of bored students,” as William Bianchi writes in his history of the movement. By 1937 only 38 had survived. The dawn of television spawned similar utopian dreams. Sunrise Semester , a production of CBS and New York University, ran for nearly 25 years starting in 1957 and offered watch-at-home courses for credit. In the 1980s personal computers became common in schools; in the last decade broadband Internet did. None of it helped very much.

“This happens over and over,” says Steven Gilbert, president of the TLT Group, a nonprofit educational technology consultancy. “As a kid I watched a physics course on TV–in the 1950s. And if you were self-motivated enough and had various other things helping you, you could learn physics in an okay way. The same thing is happening with the Khan Academy videos, and for the most part they are very good videos. What is missing is the recognition that a whole lot of humans don’t like to learn that way or can’t. And we have enormous historical evidence that that is the case.”

But like the good revolutionaries they are, the entrepreneurs on the front lines either dismiss that history as irrelevant or read something entirely different into it.

“Recent history teaches us that the Internet ultimately revolutionizes any industry that has an information or media-based product,” says Knewton’s Ferreira. “If you can put a chunk of that product–not all of it, but a lot of it–through a pipe and get it to people directly, it’s inevitable. The last two that haven’t changed yet are video and education, and I think both needed more broadband and better devices.”

“It is the naysayers that say nothing new,” sighs Udacity’s Thrun. “Almost any recent success you see in society was quote-unquote ‘nothing new.’ There were lots of people who said the Internet was nothing new. After all, we have books already and can send them by mail. If there was nothing new, Salman Khan wouldn’t have hundreds of millions of views.”

Watch: Teaching With Salman Khan

Much like the story of Bill Hewlett and David Packard founding Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage during the depths of the Great Depression, a fine dust of hagiography is already settling around Salman Khan’s life story and the origins of the Khan Academy.

Khan’s Road to Damascus moment came in 2009. By that point he had been creating YouTube videos for three years (they grew out of tutoring sessions with his cousin Nadia when he was living in Boston and she was in New Orleans), and they were garnering tens of thousands of views every day. But despite the time he was putting into the project, Khan viewed it as largely a hobby.

Then Khan received an e-mail from a young man who had, despite some pretty long odds, managed to get accepted into college. But he was still far behind his classmates, particularly in math. Then he discovered Khan’s videos. “Spent the entire summer on your YouTube page … and I just wanted to thank you for everything you are doing,” he wrote. “Last week I tested for a math placement exam and am now in Honors Math 200. … I can say without any doubt that you have changed my life and the lives of everyone in my family.”

The words struck Khan deeply, especially since he had grown up poor, raised by a single mom in Metairie, La. at a time when that town’s claim to fame was electing a white supremacist, former Klan leader David Duke, to the state legislature. It was only his intellectual gifts–he had competed in regional and national math competitions in high school–that allowed him to escape to Cambridge, Mass. and MIT. Once there Khan distinguished himself both by his rebellious look–he had played in a death-metal band in high school and still sported muscle Ts, wild hair, pierced ears–and the quality of his mind.

“What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master’s in four years,” Khan recalls. “It wasn’t slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everything than sitting in lectures.”

But by 2009 Sal’s rebel days were long behind him. He had a lucrative job as a hedge fund analyst, an infant son and a wife who was still training for her medical career. And despite the finance job, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, the two had far less than $1 million in savings. Making YouTube videos full-time seemed unthinkable. But that e-mail pushed Khan over the edge. He quit his job, installed himself in a walk-in closet off the bedroom and started cranking out videos. His wife said he could do it for a year. Ten months later Khan still had no financing and was almost on the verge of giving up. Then Ann Doerr wrote him his first check.

“I decided I wanted to send a little contribution,” Doerr recalls. “What was honestly stunning to me was that Sal had been on a number of news shows–CNN and the like–and I just assumed that he was well set financially. Then I found out I was his biggest contributor. The other thing I found out that he was about ready to call it a day and get a ‘real’ job, which was to me equally frightening.”

Khan has recently published a book, The One World Schoolhouse (Twelve, 2012), that recounts the story of Khan Academy and outlines a radical vision of the future of education. Khan would like to re-create the once common mixed-age classrooms that he believes encourage older kids to take responsibility for younger ones. He wants multiteacher classrooms to provide students with different perspectives. He would abolish summer vacation–”a monumental waste of time and money.” And he would eliminate letter grades altogether, preferring a more qualitative approach to assessment, what he terms a “running multiyear narrative.”

It is heady, dreamy stuff and about as likely to happen as, well, a single teacher inspiring millions of students around the world using nothing more than crudely drawn YouTube videos.

“Sal Khan is arguably the most impactful educator in the world, and he has done it in 24 months,” says GSV’s Moe. “That’s really cool and exciting and motivating. He is leading the revolution. My only disappointment is I think he could have done just as well as a for-profit–although it’s hard to argue he made the wrong strategic decision.”

Khan is nonplussed. “Being a billionaire is sort of pass?,” he shrugs. “It’s ironic. When I used to try and describe what the Khan Academy was, I would tell people that if it were a for-profit I would be on the cover of FORBES.”

Much like the story of Bill Hewlett and David Packard founding Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage during the depths of the Great Depression, a fine dust of hagiography is already settling around Salman Khan’s life story and the origins of the Khan Academy.

Khan’s Road to Damascus moment came in 2009. By that point he had been creating YouTube videos for three years (they grew out of tutoring sessions with his cousin Nadia when he was living in Boston and she was in New Orleans), and they were garnering tens of thousands of views every day. But despite the time he was putting into the project, Khan viewed it as largely a hobby.

Then Khan received an e-mail from a young man who had, despite some pretty long odds, managed to get accepted into college. But he was still far behind his classmates, particularly in math. Then he discovered Khan’s videos. “Spent the entire summer on your YouTube page … and I just wanted to thank you for everything you are doing,” he wrote. “Last week I tested for a math placement exam and am now in Honors Math 200. … I can say without any doubt that you have changed my life and the lives of everyone in my family.”

The words struck Khan deeply, especially since he had grown up poor, raised by a single mom in Metairie, La. at a time when that town’s claim to fame was electing a white supremacist, former Klan leader David Duke, to the state legislature. It was only his intellectual gifts–he had competed in regional and national math competitions in high school–that allowed him to escape to Cambridge, Mass. and MIT. Once there Khan distinguished himself both by his rebellious look–he had played in a death-metal band in high school and still sported muscle Ts, wild hair, pierced ears–and the quality of his mind.

“What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master’s in four years,” Khan recalls. “It wasn’t slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everything than sitting in lectures.”

But by 2009 Sal’s rebel days were long behind him. He had a lucrative job as a hedge fund analyst, an infant son and a wife who was still training for her medical career. And despite the finance job, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, the two had far less than $1 million in savings. Making YouTube videos full-time seemed unthinkable. But that e-mail pushed Khan over the edge. He quit his job, installed himself in a walk-in closet off the bedroom and started cranking out videos. His wife said he could do it for a year. Ten months later Khan still had no financing and was almost on the verge of giving up. Then Ann Doerr wrote him his first check.

“I decided I wanted to send a little contribution,” Doerr recalls. “What was honestly stunning to me was that Sal had been on a number of news shows–CNN and the like–and I just assumed that he was well set financially. Then I found out I was his biggest contributor. The other thing I found out that he was about ready to call it a day and get a ‘real’ job, which was to me equally frightening.”

Khan has recently published a book, The One World Schoolhouse (Twelve, 2012), that recounts the story of Khan Academy and outlines a radical vision of the future of education. Khan would like to re-create the once common mixed-age classrooms that he believes encourage older kids to take responsibility for younger ones. He wants multiteacher classrooms to provide students with different perspectives. He would abolish summer vacation–”a monumental waste of time and money.” And he would eliminate letter grades altogether, preferring a more qualitative approach to assessment, what he terms a “running multiyear narrative.”

It is heady, dreamy stuff and about as likely to happen as, well, a single teacher inspiring millions of students around the world using nothing more than crudely drawn YouTube videos.

“Sal Khan is arguably the most impactful educator in the world, and he has done it in 24 months,” says GSV’s Moe. “That’s really cool and exciting and motivating. He is leading the revolution. My only disappointment is I think he could have done just as well as a for-profit–although it’s hard to argue he made the wrong strategic decision.”

Khan is nonplussed. “Being a billionaire is sort of pass?,” he shrugs. “It’s ironic. When I used to try and describe what the Khan Academy was, I would tell people that if it were a for-profit I would be on the cover of FORBES.”

The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes

A treasure trove of unearthed interviews, conducted by the writer who knew him best, reveals how Jobs's ultimate success at Apple can be traced directly to his so-called wilderness years.

— Brent Schlender, April 2012

All illustrations drawn on iPad by Jorge Colombo

If Steve Jobs's life were staged as an opera, it would be a tragedy in three acts. And the titles would go something like this: Act I--The Founding of Apple Computer and the Invention of the PC Industry; Act II--The Wilderness Years; and Act III--A Triumphant Return and Tragic Demise.

The first act would be a piquant comedy about the brashness of genius and the audacity of youth, abruptly turning ominous when our young hero is cast out of his own kingdom. The closing act would plumb the profound irony of a balding and domesticated high-tech rock star coming back to transform Apple far beyond even his own lofty expectations, only to fall mortally ill and then slowly, excruciatingly wither away, even as his original creation miraculously bulks up into the biggest digital dynamo of them all. Both acts are picaresque tales that end with a surge of deep pathos worthy of Shakespeare.

But that second act--The Wilderness Years--would be altogether different in tone and spirit. In fact, the soul of this act would undermine its title, a convenient phrase journalists and biographers use to describe his 1985 to 1996 hiatus from Apple, as if the only meaningful times in Jobs's life were those spent in Cupertino. In fact, this middle period was the most pivotal of his life. And perhaps the happiest. He finally settled down, married, and had a family. He learned the value of patience and the ability to feign it when he lost it. Most important, his work with the two companies he led during that time, NeXT and Pixar, turned him into the kind of man, and leader, who would spur Apple to unimaginable heights upon his return.

Indeed, what at first glance seems like more wandering for

the barefoot hippie who dropped out of Reed College to hitchhike around India, is in truth the equivalent of Steve Jobs attending business school. In other words, he grew. By leaps and bounds. In every aspect of his being. With a little massaging, this middle act could even be the plotline for a Pixar movie. It certainly fits the simple mantra John Lasseter ascribes to all the studio's successes, from Toy Story to Up: "It's gotta be about how the main character changes for the better."

I had covered Jobs for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal since 1985, but I didn't come to fully appreciate the importance of these "lost" years until after his death last fall. Rummaging through the storage shed, I discovered some three dozen tapes holding recordings of extended interviews--some lasting as long as three hours--that I'd conducted with him periodically over the past 25 years. (Snippets are scattered throughout this story.) Many I had never replayed--a couple hadn't even been transcribed before now. Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him. Listening to them again with the benefit of hindsight, the ones that took place during that interregnum jump out as especially enlightening.

The lessons are powerful: Jobs matured as a manager and a boss; learned how to make the most of partnerships; found a way to turn his native stubbornness into a productive perseverance. He became a corporate architect, coming to appreciate the scaffolding of a business just as much as the skeletons of real buildings, which always fascinated him. He mastered the art of negotiation by immersing himself in Hollywood, and learned how to successfully manage creative talent, namely the artists at Pixar. Perhaps most important, he developed an astonishing adaptability that was critical to the hit-after-hit-after-hit climb of Apple's last decade. All this, during a time many remember as his most disappointing.

Eleven years is a big chunk of a lifetime. Especially when one's time on earth is cut short. Moreover, many people--particularly creative types--are often their most prolific during their thirties and early forties. With all the heady success of Apple during Jobs's last 14 years, it's all too easy to dismiss these "lost" years. But in truth, they transformed everything. As I listened again to those hours and hours of tapes, I realized they were, in fact, his most productive.

Steve Jobs did not wander aimlessly into the wilderness after being ousted from Apple in 1985. No happy camper, he was loaded for bear; burning to wreak revenge upon those who had spuriously shoved him into exile, and obsessed with proving to the world that he was no one-trick pony. Within days, he abruptly sold off all but one share of his Apple stock and, flush with a small fortune of about $70 million, set about creating another computer company, this one called NeXT. The startup ostensibly was a vehicle for revolutionizing higher education with powerful, beautiful computers. In reality, it was a bet that one day he would get the better of Apple.

Steve Jobs drove a hard bargain with George Lucas, buying the group that became Pixar for a mere $5 million. Lucas never regretted the sale, however. In fact, much of Pixar's postproduction was done at his studios on Skywalker Ranch.

Jorge Colombo's iPad Illustrations Of Steve Jobs

Launch slideshow

Over all the years Jobs was away from Apple, I can't recall him saying one good thing about the company's brass. Early on, he whined about how CEO John Sculley had "poisoned" the culture of the place. As the years went by, and Apple's fortunes dimmed, Jobs's attacks became more pointed: "Right now it's like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz: 'I'm melting. I'm melting,' " he told me in the mid-1990s. "The jig is up. They can't seem to come out with a great computer to save their lives. They need to spend big on industrial design, reintroduce the hipness factor. But no, they hire [Gil] Amelio [as CEO]. It's as if Nike hired the guy that ran Kinney shoes."

At NeXT, Jobs was damn well going to deliver a great computer. He was going to do it with massive resources, raising well over $100 million from the likes of H. Ross Perot, Japanese printer maker Canon, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was going to do it with an astonishing automated factory in Fremont, California, where every surface and piece of equipment would be painted in specific shades of gray, black, and white. He was going to do it in style, working with a full-time architect to give the corporate headquarters in Redwood City a distinctive, austere aesthetic; NeXT HQ looked much like the interior of one of today's Apple Stores. The centerpiece was a staircase that seemed to float in air.

He was also going to do it with a revolutionary organization, something he dubbed the Open Corporation. "Think of it this way," he explained. "If you look at your own body, your cells are specialized, but every single one of them has the master plan for the whole body. We think our company will be the best possible company if every single person working here understands the whole master plan and can use that as a yardstick to make decisions against. We think a lot of little and medium and big decisions will be made better if all our people know that." It was a bold theory.

If Jobs's time in exile can be seen as an extended trip through business school, the heady start of NeXT represents those early days when a student thinks he knows everything and is in a rush to show that to the world. In fact, Jobs had just about every detail wrong. The Open Corporation was a dismal failure in practice. Its hallmark was that employee salaries were not kept secret; there was even an attempt to impose uniform compensation. It didn't work, of course; all kinds of side deals were cut to satiate key employees.

More concretely, Jobs had the whole business plan wrong. It would be two years before NeXT delivered anything to customers. When the NeXTcube computer finally did arrive, it proved too expensive to ever command a serious market. Ultimately, Jobs was forced to admit that the undeniably beautiful machine he and his engineering team concocted was a flop. He laid off most of the staff and turned the company from hardware to software, first to rewrite NeXT's operating system, called NextSTEP, for Intel-based computers. The company also engineered an ingenious development environment called WebObjects, which eventually became its best-selling program.

Jobs didn't know that WebObjects would later prove instrumental in building the online store for Apple and for iTunes, or that NextSTEP would be his ticket back to Apple. The road for NeXT was always rocky, perhaps appropriate for something that was born out of a desire for revenge. It was a good thing he had something else going on the side.

Of the three companies Jobs helped create, Pixar was the purest corporate and organizational expression of his nature. If NeXT was a travail of spite and malice, Pixar was a labor of love.

The Pixar story began even before Jobs left Apple. In early 1985, Apple fellow Alan Kay called his attention to the computer Graphics Group (GG) skunk works in San Rafael, California, an ill-fitting piece of the filmmaking production puzzle George Lucas had assembled for his Skywalker Ranch studios. It was little more than a team of 25 engineers--including a young "user interface designer" named John Lasseter--who desperately wanted to continue to work together even though Lucas, then embroiled in the costly aftermath of a divorce, was looking to sell.

Jobs's trip to take a look-see left an indelible impression. GG's head geek, Ed Catmull, showed him some short demo films made by Lasseter, who was neither a programmer nor a user interface designer, but a talented animator who had left Disney and been given his faux title by Catmull as a way to convince Lucas to put him on the payroll. The films weren't much to look at, but they were three-dimensional, they were generated by computer rather than hand-drawn, and they displayed the whimsy of a master storyteller.

Fascinated, Jobs tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Apple's board to buy the group. "These guys were way ahead of us on graphics, way ahead," Jobs remembered. "They were way ahead of anybody. I just knew in my bones that this was going to be very important." After getting bounced from Apple, Jobs went back to Lucas and drove a hard bargain. He paid $5 million for the group's assets and provided another $5 million in working capital for the company, which was christened Pixar. In hindsight, the price was a pittance. But in 1985, nobody would have expected Pixar to one day outstrip NeXT. Certainly not Jobs: He didn't build any fancy digs for his motley crew of animators and engineers, who for years made do with used furniture and dowdy offices.

Once again, what Jobs knew in his bones didn't translate into getting the details right. As with NeXT, Jobs initially intended the company to be a purveyor of high-performance computer hardware, this time for two frightfully niche markets: the special-effects departments of Hollywood studios and medical-imaging specialists. By 1989, however, Pixar had sold only a few hundred of its Pixar Image Computers, faux-granite painted cubes originally stickered at $135,000, that had to be paired with expensive engineering workstations to do anything.

This time, the strategy pivot came from the talent. In 1990, Lasseter and Catmull told Jobs they could make a business of creating computer-animated TV commercials--perhaps one day they could even make, and sell, cartoons! Jobs was smitten with Catmull and Lasseter. They were always teaching him something new. Could they deliver on the ultimate promise of the place, to use computers to create an entirely new kind of animation for the cinema and thus upend the entire business model of animation? Jobs decided to focus on this one disruptive opportunity. It was an instinct he would return to, repeatedly, when he rejoined Apple.

In 1991, he fired much of the Pixar staff, announced the new direction to the survivors, and reorganized so that the studio could pursue one animated project at a time. "I got everybody together," Jobs said, "and I said, 'At our heart, we really are a content company. Let's transition out of everything else. Let's go for it. This is why I bought into Pixar. This is why most of you are here. Let's go for it. It's a higher-risk strategy, but the rewards are gonna be much higher, and it's where our hearts are.' " Then he and CFO Lawrence Levy went to work learning everything they could about the dynamics and economics of the animation business. If they were going to start making cartoons, they were going to do it right.

The shift at Pixar occurred at about the same time as the major turn in Jobs's personal life: the blossoming of his romance with Laurene Powell. In 1991, two years after she met him following an informal lecture at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, Laurene was his pregnant bride, married by a Buddhist monk at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.

Jobs had never seemed like the marrying type and hadn't shown much of a sense of responsibility for Lisa, his first daughter, who was born out of wedlock in 1978. He denied paternity initially, even though he had named an Apple computer after her. Egotistical, narcissistic, and manipulative since childhood, Jobs often behaved like a spoiled brat who was accustomed to getting his way.

His personality didn't change overnight after meeting Laurene, but his selfish ways did begin to moderate, especially after his children, Reed, Erin, and Eve, came into the family in 1991, 1995, and 1998, respectively. As is often the case with new parents, Jobs behaved as if he were the first person in the world to discover and fully appreciate the joys of family life. He literally stayed closer to home, converting a clapboard storefront building catty-corner from the Palo Alto Whole Foods into a satellite office so his commute would be a short bike ride. (He didn't use the office all that much after returning to Apple.)

My bureau was a block up the street, and occasionally I'd see him out for a stroll, usually with someone in tow. He always said he could think better when he walked. During these years, his fame had subsided somewhat, so it wasn't like encountering one of the Beatles at the supermarket. People pretty much left him alone.

I bumped into him on one of those walks when he was alone, and wound up joining him as he shopped for a new bicycle for Laurene's upcoming birthday. This was before you could do your homework on the Internet, but he had done his research, so there wasn't much shopping involved. We were in and out of Palo Alto Bicycles in 10 minutes. "I'd never have Andrea do something like this," he said, referring to his longtime administrative assistant. "I like buying presents for my family myself."

Even after he went back to Apple, there was nothing Jobs liked more than spending time at home. Not that he wasn't a workaholic. We were iChat buddies for several years, so his name would pop up whenever he was working at his computer at home. Almost invariably, he was in front of his Mac until after midnight. We'd occasionally have a video chat, and if it took place early in the evening, I'd often see one of his children in the background looking on.

Running Pixar was a pleasure for Jobs. He loved to come down to the studios to watch talented actors like Tom Hanks voice their lines. He deeply admired the company's chief creative officer, John Lasseter, who directed Toy Story and A Bug's Life.

In hindsight, Jobs's having a real family might have been the best thing to happen to Pixar. He was most effective as a marketer and a business leader when he could think of himself as the primary customer. What would he want from a computer-animated movie, both for himself and for his kids? That was the only market-research question he ever asked. He had always demanded great production values and design for his computer products. He was just as picky about what Pixar produced. Lasseter and Catmull couldn't have asked for a more empathetic benefactor.

Shortly after his decision in 1990 to let Lasseter and Catmull start producing commercials and short films, Jobs pulled a rabbit out of his hat: He negotiated a $26 million marketing distribution deal with Disney that provided enough capital to make a full-length, computer-animated motion picture. Because Disney had been a Pixar customer, licensing its software for managing conventional animators, then-CEO Michael Eisner and his head of animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg, were fully aware that the company's technology was solid and unique, and that Lasseter showed flashes of genius as a new breed of animator.

Jobs was candid about the two Disney execs, telling me that both "make the mistake of not appreciating technology. They just assume that they can throw money at things and fix them. They don't have a clue." Once upon a time, he would have been enraged by the ignorance he perceived. When I asked him what had soured an earlier partnership between IBM and NeXT, he ranted: "The people at the top of IBM knew nothing about computers. Nothing. Nothing. The people at the top of Disney," on the other hand, "know a lot about what a really good film is and what is not."

Even though he believed that Katzenberg and Eisner "had no clue" about how far Pixar could take them--Jobs was convinced that Pixar's technology could revolutionize the business model for animation, which was then primarily a hand-drawn art--he recognized that the partnership had more or less saved the company: "It's the biggest thing I've done for Pixar," he said. So he found a common bond between the companies. "There was a certain amount of fear and trepidation, but what always happened was that making a great movie was the focal point of everybody's concerns. One way to drive fear out of a relationship is to realize that your partner's values are the same as yours, that what you care about is exactly what they care about. In my opinion, that drives fear out and makes for a great partnership, whether it's a corporate partnership or a marriage."

Then he set about designing an organization that could deliver a great movie--and many more. His foray into Hollywood had taught him a great deal. "I started to learn about how films are made. Basically, it's bands of gypsies getting together to make a film. After the film, they disband. The problem with that is we want to build a company, not just make a single movie."

This time, there was no flighty discussion of an "open" corporation. "Incentive structures work," he told me. "So you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do, because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can't anticipate. Everybody at Pixar is incented to build the company: whether they're working on the film; whether they're working on a potential direct-to-video product; whether they're working on a CD-ROM. Whatever their combination of creative and technical talent may be, we want them incented to make the whole company successful."

There was another compensation detail that reflected how completely Jobs was able to mesh the values of Silicon Valley with Hollywood. Pixar paid its animators just as well as its software geniuses (beginning an escalation in salaries that Katzenberg accelerated later that decade at DreamWorks). "We value them both equally," Jobs said of Pixar's two talent camps. "Some people say we should value one higher than the other, but we value them equally, we pay them equally, they have stock equally. We made that decision very early. Ed Catmull made that decision, actually. We will always do that; that's one of Pixar's core values."

These were the decisions that cemented the company's future success. When Disney surprised Jobs by scheduling Pixar's first movie as its 1995 holiday feature, his team was ready, with a little picture called Toy Story. And Jobs, armed with a renegotiated Disney deal for three pictures, was ready too; Pixar went public 10 days after Toy Story's stunning debut, raising nearly $100 million.

After that, it was as if the company hit the fast-forward button. And for the rest of his life, Jobs enjoyed Pixar as he enjoyed little else. Now was the time to throw away the used furniture and build a proper studio in Emeryville, California. He relished this so much more than the NeXT headquarters--after all, this time he and his team had earned it. The design blended aspects of a Hollywood lot and an old-fashioned brick factory building, perfect for his star animators and programmers, perfect for working with Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, Owen Wilson, and all the other stars who enjoyed voicing Pixar characters. The custom-made bricks came in 12 shades, and if the colors weren't distributed evenly enough, Jobs would have the bricklayers pull them down and do it again. He would visit the construction site as often as he could as it came together, often clambering around the buildings at night, when no one but the security guards were around.

He also created something called Pixar University for the staff, where his brilliant engineers and clever artists and smart financial people could take classes in all kinds of subjects, to better appreciate what their coworkers did. There were classes in the visual arts, dance, computer programming, foreign languages, drama, mathematics, creative writing, and even accounting. "It is," he once told me, "the coolest place to work in the world."

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of the first things he did was trim the product line, focusing employees on four clear projects. He liked to explain his strategy while drawing on a whiteboard, like a professor of management.

For all the joy that Pixar brought Jobs, it was NeXT that got him back to Apple. After failing to develop new software architecture for the Mac and bungling a joint venture with IBM, Apple was on its deathbed in 1996. NeXT had a powerful, modern operating system and one very persuasive storyteller, who managed to convince CEO Amelio that his stepchild could be Apple's salvation. In late 1996, Jobs sold NeXT to Apple for $400 million, which he used to pay back Perot, Canon, and some other early investors. Within six months, Jobs had mounted a putsch and became Apple's "iCEO," with the i standing for what proved to be a deeply false "interim."

The ensuing tale, the saga of the modern Apple, is simply the story of the man who emerged from that 11-year business school and implemented the lessons he had learned along the way. As was true when he started at Pixar and NeXT, Jobs had many of the details wrong when he first returned to the Apple helm. He imagined that the company's business would always be selling computers. He thought that what was then called the "information highway" would be primarily of interest to businesses. He dismissed the idea that computer networks would carry lots of video.

But some of the tougher years at NeXT and Pixar had taught him how to stretch a company's finances, which helped him ride out his first couple of years back, when Apple was still reliant on a weak jumble of offerings. With newfound discipline, he quickly streamlined the company's product lines. And just as he had at Pixar, he aligned the company behind those projects. In a way that had never been done before at a technology company--but that looked a lot like an animation studio bent on delivering one great movie a year--Jobs created the organizational strength to deliver one hit after another, each an extension of Apple's position as the consumer's digital hub, each as strong as its predecessor. If there's anything that parallels Apple's decade-long string of hits--iMac, PowerBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, to list just the blockbusters--it's Pixar's string of winners, including Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up. These insanely great products could have come only from insanely great companies, and that's what Jobs had learned to build.

Jobs had learned how to treat talent at Pixar; he spoke to me about his colleagues there differently from the way he discussed his NeXT coworkers. When he returned to Apple, he often described his very top management team in the same warm terms, with the occasional notable exception. As he had with animators and programmers at Pixar, he integrated designers and technologists at Apple. He cultivated a team he could count on, including the great designer Jonathan Ive, who is to Apple what Lasseter is to Pixar. "We've done so many hardware products where Jony and I have looked at each other and said, 'We don't know how to make it any better than this, we just don't know how to make it,' " Jobs told me. "But we always do; we realize another way. And then it's not long after the new thing comes out that we look at the older thing and go, 'How can we ever have done that?' "

In the months before the official launch of the iPod, Jobs loved testing out demo versions. But he couldn't do so in public because he didn't want anyone asking about his new device. One place where he could experiment was the corporate jet.

When I listened to this quote again last month, I was struck by something else in it: the combination of adaptability and intuition that proved so critical to Apple's rise. Jobs may have been impulsive at times, but he was always methodical. This kind of nature suited an autodidact with eclectic tastes, empowering him either to obsess impatiently about a pressing problem that had to be dealt with immediately--much like an engineer--or else to let an idea steep and incubate until he got it right. This is why Jobs was so often right on the big picture, even when he got the details wrong. Open salaries was a dumb detail of the Open Corporation, but its core idea, of a workplace where every single person understands the company's goals, is something that most organizations get wrong and that Apple has gotten so right for well over a decade. If Jobs was initially wrong about Apple getting into phones and handheld devices, he was right on about the big idea of the computer at the center of a whirling digital universe. Hence Apple's ability to deliver a great iTunes store after the iPod, even though it was never planned. Hence the great iPhone, despite Jobs's dismissal of "Swiss Army knife" digital devices.

There was one other big lesson he learned from his Hollywood adventure: People remember stories more than products. "The technology we've been laboring on over the past 20 years becomes part of the sedimentary layer," he told me once. "But when Snow White was re-released [on DVD, in 2001], we were one of the 28 million families that went out and bought a copy of it. This was a film that is 60 years old, and my son was watching it and loving it. I don't think anybody's going to be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now."

Once he realized he really was going to die, Jobs quietly began to think more seriously about the story of his own life and creations. At his memorial service, Laurene remarked that what struck her most upon really getting to know him was his "fully formed aesthetic sense." He knew exactly what he liked, and he analyzed it until he could tell you precisely why. Jobs always felt that architecture could be a truly lasting expression of one's aesthetic, reaching beyond the limits of one's lifetime. It wasn't incidental, then, that his last public appearance was at a Cupertino City Council meeting to unveil the breathtaking four-story, doughnut-shaped "mother ship" that's nearly a half-mile in diameter and that will one day become Apple's headquarters.

Of course, Jobs wanted his own official story to measure up. So he enlisted Walter Isaacson--creator of a virtual Mount Rushmore of best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger--to tell his tale. Like those giants, Jobs is a man whose history will be told many a time, with fresh insights and new reporting. In the retelling, it may well be that the lessons from his "lost" years in the "wilderness" are the ones that will prove most inspiring.

Kill The Blockbuster

— Matt Wigham, March 2012

Let’s talk about movies for a moment. According to a recent article in GQ magazine, here’s what Hollywood has on tap for us this summer:

“Four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.” (source)

Why does Hollywood continue to rehash the same formulaic ideas over and over again? Because that’s the safer bet. More people are likely to go see Transformers 19 than sit through an Oscar-winning dramatic film. Sure, a couple of these blockbuster movies are bound to be pretty good, but the bottom line is that it’s never been more difficult for filmmakers to get an original story made. It’s too risky. It doesn’t test well in focus groups. It’s not made for everyone.

Luckily there’s a talented group of independent filmmakers that will fight endlessly to get their films made, in the face of a system built against them. Of course, these films have small budgets, don’t have huge grosses or opening days, don’t always feature big names, and might not be suitable for all audiences, but without them we would be without some of the most important art of our lifetime.

Why do I bring this up? Because it’s happening in my industry too.

In the internet startup world, we have our own version of Hollywood – Silicon Valley. Just like Hollywood, Silicon Valley is investing heavily in finding the next big blockbuster. Unfortunately they also suffer from the mentality of repeatedly rehashing the same recycled ideas.

Every day on the tech blogs you read about the new social networking site that promises to be the next MyFace, and received 80 bazillion dollars of Series A funding, or the hot new iPhone app that is a mix of Twitter and Flickr that will change the way people eat and breathe. Entrepreneurs around the world are clamoring to come up with that next big sequel, and they’re racing to find venture capitalists and angel investors to back their blockbuster idea.

Unfortunately, just like Hollywood, this system is broken. Sure, a couple of these companies will be pretty good, but the majority will be as unoriginal, short-lived, and forgettable as Transformers 19. Is that what you want for your company? I hope not.

I’m here to invite you to join an independent movement.

I run a company called Big Cartel that helps bands, designers, crafters, and other artists sell their stuff online. I founded the company with a friend back in 2005 because I needed a way to sell my band’s merch online, and since I’d been making band websites for years, I figured I could build something better for my needs than the complicated e- commerce software that was available at the time.

We worked on the site on top of our day jobs, spending countless hours obsessing over design details, improving features and functionality, and helping our customers use our product. We did no marketing, and instead relied on the product being good enough for people to tell their friends about. Finally, after two years, the business was making enough money for the two of us to quit our jobs and work on Big Cartel full-time. It was a great feeling.

Over the last six years we’ve grown from just my band’s store to over 200,000 stores, and we’re doubling that every year. We’ve slowly built the company itself from the two founders to a twelve person company, using only the profits generated by the business. We’ve also been able to help our customers make a living doing what they love. Last year our stores generated over 100 million dollars of revenue, and we’ve seen a staggering amount of new brands and entrepreneurs bootstrap and hustle their way to success using our service.

Of course, we’re not talking about Facebook type of money, we’ll never get Twitter type of press, and we may seem boring compared to the glitz and glamour of the Silicon Valley celebrities, but what we have is even more valuable – freedom. Now, just like the independent filmmakers, we can build something with a heart and soul, that cares more about the art and culture of our craft than just doing what is most profitable.

The ironic part is, we never really set out to build a business, we just started doing something we loved and the money part took care of itself. In fact, since we have no investors or shareholders beyond my partner and I, we rarely even talk about money. Instead we’re able to focus all of our attention on whatever we want to do next. It’s incredibly liberating.

Now you may think we’re a fluke, or perhaps we just got lucky, but I don’t. Money is a natural byproduct of doing something valuable – so why not focus on doing something you love, that is valuable to you, and I think you’ll be surprised to see how valuable it is to others. Luckily we have it a lot easier than our filmmaking counterparts. We don’t need millions of dollars for sets, cameras, actors, editors, costumes, and the rest. All we need is an idea, some hard work, and a cheap server to get started.

I want to challenge you to forget about the Hollywood dream of huge rounds of funding and giant acquisitions, and instead focus on building something you’re proud of. I think you’ll find that the joy of doing something you love, and the freedom to control the vision to be uniquely yours, is worth much more.

The Digital Physical

— Craig Mod, October 2012

The Weight

We had been on a long journey but I couldn’t see it anywhere.

There's a stage in a product cycle where you know it’s going to ship. Where you can see the end. It's right there, sitting at the corner of Emerson St. and University Ave. Or maybe sipping coffee at Fraiche.

Oh, hello, it waves — there. In front of you. The End. (Or, An End.) And seeing this puts you in a special space that when you think about it — think about all the work that it took the team to get there, to bring that end so close — you are overwhelmed with a flood of emotions.

It was November 2011 when we arrived at that point. Soon there would be an app in the Apple iOS App Store — something representing the top slice of tremendous work. But that version 1.0 … how long would it last? How long before version 1.1 and 1.2? 2.0? Before we couldn’t even remember how 1.0 worked or what the path there looked like?

I became curious. What had we created?

Poking around, I found:

997 design comps in a shared folder,

9,695 git commits,

a bundle of notebooks full of sketches,

and dozens of photographs from launch night.

And so I asked myself a simple question: What does that weigh?

The Bits

Eight pounds.

What?

Eight pounds. That's what it weights.

But we'll get to that in a minute.

On / Off

In James Gleick's The Information, there's a moment where the very idea of information is abstracted to on and off states. Bits:

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract — a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no.

And then, applied:

[Licklider] was working on an idea for quantizing speech — taking speech waves and reducing them to the smallest quantities that could be reproduced by a "flip-flop."

We've entered a similar binary on/off era for physicality. Big physicality. Star Trek style. To go digital-physical and back again is increasingly frictionless.

And so:

What do we gain from these jumps?

How can they reframe experiences to help us better understand them?

These are questions I’ve found myself returning to repeatedly these past few years.

Abstractly, you can think about going from digital to physical as going from boundless to bounded. A space without implicit edges to one composed entirely of edges.

For a while now it had been clear to all of us that edges are a critical framing aid in helping us consume [1] but it wasn’t until last year — helping build Flipboard for iPhone — that I began to understand how critical they are to gain perspective on creation. To gain perspective on a journey captured in bits.

This is an essay about recognizing and reorganizing our journeys that live largely in digital space. How do we ground and bind those experiences? What is the value in giving them edges so we may hold them in our hands and hope to understand, perhaps, the weight of the work we produce?

The App

December 2011

The team had spent a great deal of the year crafting, refining, building and rebuilding Flipboard for iPhone. It was a demanding journey during which a prodigious number of ideas were challenged. Time and time again, the team reconsidered a button here, a transition (or two) there.

Flipboard for iPhone v1

By December, every piece of the application had been disassembled, scrubbed, and oiled from a user experience, surface design, and information architecture perspective. Furthermore, every piece of the underlying engineering had been hammered and abused in testing for solidity: just try to crash the thing.

Clearly we were making stuff. Lots of it.

I mention all of this to emphasize the great experiential texture we felt during the process of building this application. Clearly, we were making stuff. Lots of it. Making and throwing away and making more stuff. Building upon and learning from the ever growing pile of experiments. Throughout, the team iterated in parallel on several design and engineering loops across everything. The final application is a piece of genuine craftsmanship produced by a full-stack team of genuine craftsman.

This layered process happened almost entirely in digital space. Design comps were produced in Photoshop or Fireworks, screens mirrored to iPhones. Folders were shared throughout the team. And the IA was specced in Illustrator or InDesign.

Even the iOS software changes were captured with an atomic granularity. In most contemporary development environments, when an engineer modifies a program, that modification is checked back into the main source code repository along with what’s called a "commit message.” In this message is a brief description of the changes made by that programmer. In big projects, there can easily be thousands of commits. Some may be tiny: "Changed transition speed to 0.6 from 0.4 seconds." Others, much longer or more affecting: "Switching to live servers!" The codebase for Flipboard for iPhone is composed of nearly 10,000 such commits.[2]

The more we created, the more digital detritus built up.

And so we built. Commits were committed, design folders filled up, and screenshots cluttered up the photo folders on our devices. In other words, the more we iterated the more digital detritus built up.

Digitally Thin

There’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It's a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things we’re creating feel in our minds.[3] Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time.

Perceptually, beyond some low threshold, data becomes boundless to us. Cloud storage compounds this: we don't even worry about HDs filling up anymore! Even when digital streams have clear beginnings and ends, I think we — humans — do a bad job at keeping those edges in view. In trying to reflect upon vast experiences or datasets captured entirely in bits with most standard interfaces, we run into the same wall as in trying to imagine infinity: we can’t.[4]

Finishing iPhone

As Flipboard for iPhone was nearing completion, I began to think about this detritus — our narrative; the proof of our journey. What struck me is that despite knowing we had been on a long journey, it didn’t feel like that journey was manifest anywhere.

Sure, you could open the design folder and cover flow through our thousand design comps. You could peek in the git repository and scroll through the near infinite number of commit messages. But, still: that thinness! The experiential texture of the journey was butting against the singularity — that fog of immateriality — that information enters when made digital.

I was leaving the company at the end of the year and I needed something to represent that journey. To give it edges, for me. For the company. So I did what I do — I flip-flopped the data. I made a book.

The Umbrellas

But let’s digress for a second.

Books have always excelled at capturing process. But perhaps not the process we’re talking about here. And this is an important distinction.

As the sun rose on October 9, 1991, Christo and Jeanne-Claude unveiled one of their temporary "gentle disturbances” [5] — The Umbrellas. Across portions of the eastern coast of Japan and the western coast of the US, they opened 3,100 massive umbrellas. In their words:

"This Japan-USA temporary work of art reflected the similarities and differences in the ways of life and the use of the land in two inland valleys, one 12 miles (19 kilometers) long in Japan, and the other 18 miles (29 kilometers) long in the USA.” [6]

This was the result:

The Umbrellas — California Side

Wonderful stuff.

Years ago, standing in a small bookshop in London, I happened upon a large table far off in the back corner. Atop it were two hulking volumes. Together they comprised the Taschen collectors edition for The Umbrellas; I was mesmerized.

For hours I stood there plying through those two objects which so well captured Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s creative process. Documented within was the residue of engineering a dreamscape and overcoming endless bureaucratic snafus. That book — the physicality of it — codified the great effort behind their beautiful mountainside and rice paddy installations. It memorialized their efforts and journey. But for whom was this book created? I suppose it was for me — someone on the outside.

The Umbrellas, the book(s)

I would argue, however, that for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the book simply formalized much of what they already knew. Their work benches were covered in schematics, file cabinets filled with correspondence between farmers and governments and architects and textile manufacturers and engineers. In other words — to them the magnitude and grandiose nature of their work was present all around their home, their work space. It manifest physically in those files and papers and cabinets. For them, a monster book like this didn’t illuminate the enormity of their undertaking — they were aware of The Umbrellas’ bombasity every time they opened their studio door.

It’s also important to note that Christo and Jeanne-Claude didn’t directly take money from outsiders. In fact, they funded much of their projects by selling the detritus of their process:

[The] 26 million dollar temporary work of art was entirely financed … through the sale of the studies, preparatory drawings, collages, scale models, early works, and original lithographs. [7]

Twenty-six million dollars of sketches! You can imagine just how viscerally aware they were of process by raising that kind of cash through selling off the very goop of their creativity.

Prepatory Sketches

— The California Side

Prepatory Sketches

— The Japan Side

Their monograph gave form to their creative process for those of us not privy to studio access; to those of us who had never seen their chaotic lair of physical detritus.

So this book about The Umbrellas is for us. It captures their process and — if not entirely making sense of it — at least gives us a frame by which to view it. Edges. But for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the book was simply a formality. If anything, it shrank their sense of the project from something full of physicality to just a couple of books.

Which brings us back to the previous point: Something curious happens to our ability to understand scope when we move all that goop of process and narrative into a computer. Even for those of us doing the making: the insiders. The Christos, if you will.

When all the correspondence, designing, thinking, sketching — the entirety of the creative process — happens in bits, we lose a connection. It's as if all that process is conceptually reduced to a single point — something weightless and unbounded. Compounded over time, the understanding of where one is as a creative in a digital landscape collapses to the just-a-little-while-ago, the now, and maybe the tomorrow. [8]

At the end of the Flipboard for iPhone project I wondered if we could find value by exploding that singular point into a form we could grasp. That form could have taken many shapes but it's easier than ever to make a book. Although, this would be a book to serve the precise opposite role of The Umbrellas monograph. It wouldn't shrink our creation. Instead, it would hopefully give shape and weight to the amorphous nature of our digital production processes.

The Book

And so:

997 design comps in a shared folder,

9,695 git commits,

a bundle of notebooks full of sketches,

and dozens of photographs from launch night.

What does that weigh?

At 276 pages long and 1 foot by 1 foot square, it weighs nearly 8lbs.

It begins on the cover with a commit message — the first push to the main code-base. A hack. A test, a possibility. The exact moment development begins on a software project is always fuzzy. Lots of development happened before this moment. Other intense cycles happened after. But this moment marks the first time in the code stack that the product had an identity — the seed for what was to come.

Flipboard for iPhone the book — First Commit, detail

I love the hyper granularity of time — 9:35pm and 55 seconds on a Saturday night on the west coast (GMT -0800) of the United States. So specific!

Romantics like to correlate the loss of physicality in our digital shifts with a certain loss of humanity. Often cited are the correspondences between Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish in which we see clearly — thanks to the pencil strokes and marginalia of their found letters[9] — just how instrumental Lish was in shaping Carver’s voice. [10]

Lish's changes to Carver's story Beginners

Those early edits[11] were so grandiose — pulling the text into such a minimalist place — that when Carver dropped Lish and used other editors later in his career, readers misattributed the shift in writing style:

… those who viewed Carver’s later stories as more expansive than his early work, simply never knew that he had always been expansive.[12]

If we're excited by the voyeuristic insight of that, we should be doubly excited about where things are going.

This — this hyper-hyper granularity of time on the Flipboard for iPhone book cover — 9:35pm and 55 seconds; digital atomic precision of that moment — is just the tip of the commit-stack for what kinds of meta-data are now — or soon will be — generated within the digital texts we produce.

Perhaps the next Carver’s manuscript will contain the entire typing history of the document including GPS data of where he was when he wrote it. We will be able to replay the entire composition process. Shadow, if you so desire, a particular Hemingway through a certain Spain as he writes a new The Sun Also Rises.

Here's that voyeurism made real: In 2011 the startup Stypi released a product[13] which already allows you to replay document creation. Every keystroke. By sharing the URL of a document, readers play back your thought process. YCombinator founder Paul Graham (and Stypi investor) used this application to compose his November 2011 essay, Startups in 13 Sentences.[14] It's fascinating and illuminating to watch Paul write. We gain an insight — a very human, very intimate one — into how he crafts his essays.

Flipboard for iPhone the book — Front Cover

Flipboard for iPhone the book — Back Cover

So the Flipboard for iPhone book begins with some of this meta-specificity on the front cover and ends with the final commit message on the back. It uses the natural digital boundaries of version one of the app — first and final commits — to define the boundaries of the digital-physical version.

The first commit happened as a late Saturday night hack. The final commit happened on a Thursday at 4:47am after a marathon week of coding. There's something about this specificity that's perversely romantic. As if you can imagine the very moment the engineers hit the return key to finalize these decisions. Flipboard for iPhone was born precisely, and it was finished precisely.

The book then steps through, month-by-month, the design and engineering of the product. It begins in February with HTML comps, and ends in December with version one of the application.

What we’re able to see in this form — printed — perhaps better than we can in cover flow, is the sheer tightness of our design iteration loops. Pages of information architecture comps, sketches from our notebooks, and views of the various grids through which we iterated take on new clarity in this digital to physical flip-flop.[15]

Flipboard for iPhone the book

— Iterate iterate iterate

Flipboard for iPhone the book

— Iterate iterate iterate, more

Flipboard for iPhone the book

— IA Definition

Flipboard for iPhone the book

— Grid it up

Then at the back: the commits. All 9,569 of them.[16] As you flip through this high-resolution macro view of the commit stack, the very texture of the page changes as new developers join the project; as the software jumps into different phases of development.

And finally, at the very end, pages and pages of the photos from our launch night. They were covertly assembled via geotagged searches across Instagram and Flickr.

9,569 Commits

Launch Photos

All the digital intangibility of iPhone development is inscribed into this eight pound book, wrapped in an immutability. It's a digital-physical. An explosion of months of ethereality into something human parseable.

The Delivery

UPS

The book arrived from the print on demand company Blurb[17] without fanfare — a square box from UPS simply appeared on my desk one morning.

So this is what all of that design and development weighs. As I opened the box and pulled out the book, there was something deeply satisfying about its imposing physicality. An emotional response you couldn't intuit from the Indesign templates. This feeling, of course, speaks to the cognitive dissonance we experience when jumping between digital and physical representations of the same thing. Especially when they're composed of the same data.

The Fellowship

The post-launch project breakdown happened in a quiet, sunlit room in the early afternoon. The Flipboard for iPhone team gathered around a giant wooden table. Ten or fifteen of us. What went right? What went wrong? What could we do better next time?

We talked about what a wild journey we had been on. But, I piped up, I worried that the journey — and with it lessons we learned — seemed to be fading in the post-launch quickness that often characterizes Silicon Valley. What did we do right and wrong are great question, but even more generally: What did we do?

It represented closure on a process that often has no closure.

I pulled from my bag the giant book and placed it on the table with a thud. And as the team began to flip through it and understand what it was, you could feel the room swell with a strange relief. Finally there were edges to this intensely immaterial process we had all been through. The book represented, I believe, closure on a process that often has no closure. And pragmatically, it would now serve as a repository of the rich interface experiments we had conducted.

The book wasn't made for anyone outside of the company. It is, weirdly, an object for the folks who made the very thing it’s about. It’s for the people who should be most intimate with the project and process but who — because of the nature of digital — may have a hard time seeing the edges and understanding the weight of what they had created.

The Umbrellas

Flipboard for iPhone

The Umbrellas is for the consumers.

Flipboard for iPhone is for the producers.

YES/NO, ON/OFF

It's worth remembering that a hardcover book like this is as much a product of the digital publishing shift as any .epub or .mobi file. Flipboard for iPhone would have been nearly impossible to make five years ago. I produced two copies. Two copies! of this huge thing, printed in full color. And they arrived ten days after submitting the files. A miracle of sorts.

… a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no.

Digital ↔ Physical.

In Part

What could possibly represent that scale of emotion?

Of course, Flipboard for iPhone is not an accurate representation of the full production process. Anyone who has been involved with a startup can attest — imbued in a company's output is an incalculable amount of team energy. Lost sleep, lost muscle mass, stress, highs as a beautiful solution to an engineering or design problem emerges, lows when you realize the next solution obviates the first, bonds born from late night hacking sessions, design reviews, inside jokes, sclaps, animated gifs, high-fives, scowls. All of this is manifest in the final product somewhere. It's in there. All of that and more. Of course you can never show it all. What could possibly represent that scale of emotion? A mountain? All you can hope to find is something — a scaffolding — to represent a clear subset of the process. A well defined space onto which the team can affix those experiences.

And so what projects like this speak to is the unique and increasingly important value we can give data by abstracting physicality. Jumping back and forth. Creating that space. Capturing a journey effortlessly in bits, and then giving it edges. This dance makes our digital experiences more understandable, parseable, consumable.

Edges are about feeling as much as seeing. With edges comes a sense of weight. And with that comes the ability to feel — physically and psychically. And with that, a better understanding of what we've built and where we've been.

Referenced or Noted

1. It’s one reason, for example, it feels so good to scroll down to most e-mailed on nytimes.com — it’s bounded, doesn’t update much, and you feel like you can read it all.↩

2. If you want to geek out on this stuff, you can learn all about version control and software like git here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control ↩

3. I believe part of the recent surge in the desire to do "real" stuff with our "hands" is driven by the digital thinness we're wrapped in. Conferences like Do Lectures, new shops selling pickles in Brooklyn, woodsy digital refuges. It feels like there's a renewed momentum around craft and physicality. All circumstantial, of course, and perhaps just a product of my generation getting sick of screens. ↩

4. Of course, this is mainly an interface problem. That is to say — printing stuff out isn't the only way to draw edges, combat the feeling of thinness, or help us keep digital data in perspective. Collating and printing is just one kind of interface with which to attack this problem. Higher resolution screens with smarter design solutions can and should also help us solve this problem. ↩

5. http://www.artagogo.com/commentary/christo/christo.htm ↩

6. http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/major_umbrellas.shtml ↩

7. http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/major_umbrellas.shtml ↩

8. This is why great project managers are so critical — their job is to keep the entirety of the production process in view, both the long-before and the long-after our now. They are masters at framing all the intangibility of a software project into something with clear edges, and making sure all the pieces — front and back-end engineering, design, marketing, etc — are all moving at the right speed, at the right place within the context of this greater whole. Kind of like a rally car co-driver. ↩

9. Excerpts from their letters: Letters to an Editor, The New Yorker, 2007 ↩

10. The full edit of the Beginners text is available on newyorker.com: "Beginners," Edited: The transformation of a Raymond Carver classic., The New Yorker, 2007 ↩

11. Being Raymond Carver, The New Yorker ↩

12. The Real Carver: Expansive or Minimal?, Motoko Rich, The New York Times, October 17, 2007 ↩

13. Based off of Etherpad which was acquired by Google in 2009, open sourced and the original site shutdown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad ↩

14. Paul originally linked to the article on his blog. You can see the original 'performance' on Stypi (nice URLs!). And read the reactions to the piece here on Graham's own Hacker News. ↩

15. Again — one of the qualities we're benefitting from in printing these out is resolution and size. If we have paper-resolution screens (like the 2012 iPad) at a larger size, then I think we can achieve aspects of the experience we get from printing it out on paper. ↩

16. git log --pretty=format:'%h %an %ai %s' {{{first_commit_hash}}}..HEAD --reverse > everything.txt :: More on hacking git logs. ↩

17. I've been using Blurb to do print on demand books for years now. They provide InDesign templates on their site as well as PDF specifications. They offer branding free (for a fee) books with a variety of great paper and binding options. Also, as a bonus, Blurb is a great company and Eileen Gittins, their CEO, is wholly devoted to making beautiful books accessible. ↩

About the Author

Craig Mod is an independent writer, publisher and designer based in the California Bay Area (and often in Tokyo). He is a MacDowell Colony writing fellow, a 2012 TechFellow, and was employed by Flipboard from October 2010 - January 2012, working mainly on the Flipboard for iPhone product. His writing has appeared in New Scientist, The New York Times, Codex Journal of Typography and elsewhere.

Thank you

For their generous advice/inspiration on this text: Evan Doll, Peter Collingridge, Bret Victor, Dylan Field, Marcos Weskamp, Liz Danzico, Lynn Tillman, the MacDowell Foundation.

Copyright

All images and text © Craig Mod, 2011-2012.

This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. If you wish to use reproduce any of this context in a commercial context, explicit permission is required. Please contact me directly.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

What'd you think?

I'd love to hear what you thought of this collection and if you'd like to see another one in 2013. Send a message my way, @sawyerh.

Table of Contents

Pocket 2012

The Slow Web

Subcompact Publishing

10 Timeframes

Ernest Hemingway, an Interview

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future

Tyler Brûlé: the man who sold the world

The Cocktail Creationist

These Days Sample

The VICE Guide to Adulthood

Good design is invisible: an interview with iA's Oliver Reichenstein

Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both Sides: His keynote address at Montreal’s Just For Laughs 2012

Internet Pirates Will Always Win

Everything in its Right Pace

How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything

Purpose is hard to measure.

Elon Musk, the 21st Century Industrialist

The Land That Time and Money Forgot

Obama’s Way

The Hunt For “Geronimo”

Louis C.K. on eating pressure and providing an alternative to The Man

An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic's Lens

Startup = Growth

A Brief Pause

The Last Viridian Note

Napster, Udacity, and the Academy

How to Get Startup Ideas

The End of the Future

One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education

The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes

Kill the Blockbuster

The Digital Physical