self-optimization

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social
by Steffen Mau
Published 12 Jun 2017

Meanwhile, public institutions as well as private businesses are constantly enlarging their pool of data on citizens, customers or employees in order to exert control and be able to target different groups more accurately. This trend is complemented by changes in terms of individual self-management, as reflected in the expanding role of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Bröckling 2016), along with self-enhancement techniques and new forms of self-optimization. Here too, there is a growing tendency to resort to measuring and quantification processes due to their apparent suitability for tracking individual performance curves and ‘measuring’ oneself against others. Society is on the road towards data-driven perpetual stock-taking. Data indicate where a person, product, service or organization stands; they guide evaluations and comparisons; in short, they both generate and reflect status.

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Biopower, Foucault argues, seeks to control individuals and their bodies and organize them in a particular way. It is achieved by interweaving state governing practices and self-governing techniques, so that individuals no longer need to be regulated and controlled by ‘external’ means alone, but are also internally conditioned to strive for self-optimization. We are no longer talking about the mere monitoring or regulation of the population here, but about the ‘government of men’ (cf. Lemke 1997), leading ultimately to the development of a ‘normalizing society’ (Foucault 1998: 126) that combines regulation with discipline. Also relevant, according to Foucault, is the rationalization and professionalization of administrative bodies, with state agencies being gradually enabled to collect data of a certain quality and assemble them into larger, exploitable databases.

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(Boam & Webb 2014) The collective body The boundary separating fitness or wellbeing apps from more sophisticated health apps that measure vital data and make them available for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes is a fluid one, just as there is, in effect, no clear-cut, categorical distinction between illness and health. The treatment of ailments or complaints and the practice of self-optimization to the point of total body control merely constitute opposite poles of the imagined better/worse continuum. At the same time, personal data are subject to norming and standardization processes: they do not stand alone, but are placed in a variety of comparative contexts which in turn inform our judgements of what is normal or desirable.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture
by Designing The Mind and Ryan A Bush
Published 10 Jan 2021

Though they lacked our modern technological metaphors, ancient thinkers began examining and developing counter-algorithms for many of our problematic mental modules. These thinkers had the forethought to write their insights down for posterity, and their wisdom, however scattered and diverse, is the open-source code we can use to program our own minds. My long-term goal is to curate and systematize these tools of software self-optimization and distribute them to as many people as possible. I want to do the next best thing to giving you an instant brain-modification implant. I want to provide you with a handbook for designing and optimizing your own psychological software. Most people who read books to improve themselves do it because they want to advance their careers, lose weight, or make more money.

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The self-mastery triad will provide the organizational backbone of this book, and the chapters will teach you the principles and practices needed to master all three realms. I am not the spiritual guru or venerated professor you may be seeking. My formal background is in the design of systems - physical, digital, and theoretical. But my most relevant credential is a lifelong appetite for introspective investigation, ravenous reading, and obsessive self-optimization. I don’t tend to focus on myself in this book because I find the ancient teachers, practical philosophers, and cognitive scientists who have inspired it to be far more interesting. My philosophical mentors have included Lao Tzu, Siddhārtha Gautama, Aristotle, Epicurus, Diogenes, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Michel de Montaigne, Rene Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Abraham Maslow, Victor Frankl, Aaron Beck, and many more.

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Psychitect's Toolkit FREE PSYCHITECT’S TOOLKIT In addition to this book, readers can download a free, 50-page guide on psychitecture, which includes: • An overview of the basic concepts of psychitecture and psychological algorithms • A breakdown of 8 psychotechnologies you can start using to reprogram your mind • 64 incredible book recommendations related to self mastery and psychitecture • A list of 16 websites, blogs, and podcasts that can aid in self-optimization • Quotes from the great psychitectural visionaries Just go to designingthemind.org/psychitecture to get your Psychitect’s Toolkit. Chapter 1: The Theory and Practice of Psychitecture Mind as Machine In the past, we humans have learned to control the world outside us, but we had very little control over the world inside us

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Published 28 May 2018

Hopefully people will develop direct relationships, even more hopefully with subscriptions, to sources of news and other content. In the meantime, there are many problems with the subsuming of journalism to the god of statistics. Some of the criticisms are familiar: too much clickbait lowers the level of public discourse; writers aren’t given the space to take risks. Remember how BUMMER algorithms are constantly self-optimizing? Except that they fall into ruts? The process was described back in the first argument. Everyone, including journalists, is forced to play the optimization game in hopes of getting the most out of BUMMER. A news source will keep tweaking what it does until further tweaks no longer yield better results.

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It’s all statistical. The results are tiny changes in the behavior of people over time. But small changes add up, like compound interest. This is one reason that BUMMER naturally promotes tribalism and is tearing society apart, even if the techies in a BUMMER company are well meaning. In order for BUMMER code to self-optimize, it naturally and automatically seizes upon any latent tribalism and racism, for these are the neural hashtags waiting out there in everyone’s psyche, which can be accentuated for the purpose of attention monopoly. (I’ll address this problem in more detail in the argument about how social media makes social improvement hopeless.)

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
by William Davies
Published 11 May 2015

Focused resolutely on the individual brain and body, this science clearly offers as much – and probably more – to the powerful and rich as it does to the lonely and marginalized. Once social relationships can be viewed as medical and biological properties of the human body, they can become dragged into the limitless pursuit of self-optimization that counts for happiness in the age of neoliberalism. It is not very long since the internet offered hope for different forms of organization altogether. As the cultural and political theorist Jeremy Gilbert has argued, we should remember that it was only a few years ago that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was completely defeated in its efforts to turn Myspace into a profitable entity.25 The tension between the logic of the open network and the logic of private investment could not be resolved, and Murdoch lost half a billion dollars.

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See also free markets Marshall, Alfred, 58, 61 Martineau, James, 48 Marx, Karl, 55, 214 Maslow, Abraham, 146 mass psychological measurement, 217 mass psychological profiling, 216 mass surveillance, 193, 224, 236, 238 The Mass Observation Project, 100 materialism, 211, 253 mathematics, 47, 49 Mayo, Elton, 121–5, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 189 McGill Pain Questionnaire, 175 McKeen Cattell, James, 83, 84, 85, 86 McKinsey & Co., 119 McNamara, Robert, 235 measurement apparatus of as continually growing, 242 bodily-tracking devices, 240 of experienced utility, 64 happiness measurement, 6, 11, 36–7, 38, 251, 260 of human optimality, 274 as indicating quantity not quality, 146 mass psychological measurement, 217 no single measure of happiness and well-being, 241 objective psychological measurement, 268 of ourselves, 232 of pain, 33, 249 of pleasure, 22, 33, 249 of politics, 145 of positivity, 165 psychic measurement, 59, 60 of punishment, 22 quality of life measures, 126 of speed of mental processes, 77 measurement tools, eighteenth century inventions in, 22–3 Mechanics’ Institutes/Institutions, 47, 48 meditation, 32, 38, 68, 112, 260 Menger, Carl, 54 mental health/mental illness, 107, 108, 126, 127, 252, 254 mental optimization, 242 mental processes, measuring speed of, 77 mental resilience, 135 Merck, 164 metaphysics, 31, 37, 78, 86, 89, 92 Meyer, Adolf, 93, 169 Meyerian psychiatry, 169, 290–291n30 Microsoft, 159 ‘Middletown in Transition’, 99 ‘Middletown Studies’, 98, 100, 101 Miliband, Ed, 191 Mill, John Stuart, 49, 53 mind, 7, 56, 57, 62, 68, 96 mind–body problem, 28 mindfulness, 32, 35, 259, 260, 265, 273 mind-reading technology, 33, 75–6 Minerva Research Initiative (Pentagon), 257 misery, 108, 115, 271 MIT Affective Computing research centre, 221 money, 25–6, 27, 37, 39, 46, 51, 52, 57, 59, 61, 65, 66, 67, 69 monism, 21, 29, 33, 34, 129, 131, 136, 176, 241, 274 monopolies, 155, 158, 159 mood, use of term, 231 mood tracking, 5, 6, 228 Moodscope (app), 228 Moreno, Jacob, 197–205, 207, 208, 210, 214, 264 motivation, 37, 112, 183 Munsterberg, Hugo, 84 Muntaner, Carles, 250, 254 Murdoch, Rupert, 213 Myspace, 213 mysticism, 259, 261 narcissism, 197, 204, 207, 220, 222 National Charity Company, 35, 109 National Health Service (NHS), 111, 247 National Institute of Mental Health, 169 national well-being, 4, 146, 245 Natural Elements of Political Economy (Jennings), 50 natural environment, 247 neo-classical economists/economics, 113, 123, 181 neo-Kraepelinians, 169 neoliberal socialism, 212, 214 neoliberalism, 10, 34, 141, 144, 148, 149, 153, 154, 160, 161, 177, 179, 210, 211, 213, 223, 246, 258, 274 neurasthenia, 116 neurochemicals, 67, 68 neurological monitoring, 38 neurological reward system, 66 neuromarketing, 73, 76, 97, 102, 104, 188, 256, 262 neuropsychology, 68 neuroscience, 4–5, 20–1, 73, 103, 176, 205, 255, 257, 259 new age mysticism, 260 new age religions, 38 new age thinker, Fechner as, 28 New York Training School for Girls, 202 NHS (National Health Service), 111, 247 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 84 Nike, 221 nucleus accumbens, 67 Nudge (Sunstein and Thaler), 88 Nudge Unit (UK), 235, 237 nudging/nudges, 90, 183 Obama, Barack, 255 Obama BRAIN Initiative, 255 occupational health, 132, 134, 254 O’Leary, Michael, 185 online advertising, 96 opinion-polling, 9, 101, 223 optimization definition, 243 human optimality/optimization, 5, 129, 274 managerial cult of, 137 mental optimization, 242 psychic optimization, 177 self-optimization, 213 social optimization, 181–214 well-being optimization, science of, 136 Osheroff, Raphael, 291n32 Osheroff Case, 291n32 outdoors, 245 oxytocin, 195, 256 pain, 19–20, 33, 50, 55, 66, 74, 249, 262, 263 Paine, Thomas, 17 PANAS (Positive and Negative Affect Scale), 228 Pareto, Vilfredo, 61 passivity, 249 paternalism, 90 pay-it-forward, 181–2, 184, 188, 191 Penn Resilience Project, 277n5 Pentagon, 255, 257 performance-related pay, 182 pharmaceutical industry/big pharma, 170, 171, 177, 178, 256, 271 physical activity, 247 physiological monitoring, 38 physiology, 195 Pinkser, Henry, 174 placebos, 290n22 pleasure, 21, 22, 33, 55, 65, 66, 249 pleasure principle, 29 political authority, 34, 63 political economy, 50, 56 politics, 18, 23–6, 32, 37, 76–7, 88, 145, 155, 259 polls, 9, 101, 146–7, 223 polymaths, 33, 121 pop behaviourism, 257 pop-economics, 152 positive affect, 175 positive psychology, 4, 6, 9, 11, 38, 74, 114, 165, 175, 194, 196, 208, 209, 210, 247, 250, 254, 259, 260 positivity, 11, 112, 165 Predictably Irrational (Ariely), 238 predictive shopping, 239 preferences, theory of, 61 price theory, 151, 152, 154 Priestley, Joseph, 13, 14, 47 The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 118 ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ (Coase), 156 Prozac, 163 psychiatric scales, 165 psychic energizers, 164 psychic maximization, 177 psychic measurement, 59, 60 psychic optimization, 177 psychological knowledge, 266 psychological management, 38, 141 psychological surveillance, 219, 223, 228 The Psychological Corporation, 86 psychology in America as having no philosophical heritage, 85, 86 application of American psychology to business problems, 85 association with philosophy, 80, 81 behavioural psychology, 97, 234 as being modelled on physiology or biology, 264 clinical psychology, 250, 254 community psychology, 250, 254 consumer psychology, 74, 85 economics divorce from, 61, 69 experimental psychology, 81 Fechner as key figure in development of, 28 first laboratory for, 77–9 first labs in American universities, 84 group psychology, 124, 125 neuropsychology, 68 positive psychology.

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See positive psychology promise of practical utility of, 91 reunion of with economics, 64, 182 social psychology, 125, 189, 266 theory of, as balancing act, 67 The Psychology of Advertising (Scott), 86 psychopharmacology, 162 psychophysical parallelism, 259 psychophysics, 29, 30, 31 psychosomatic interventions/management/programmes/theories, 122, 124, 128, 135 psychotherapy, 124, 127 pulse rate, 25, 26, 27, 37, 79 punishment, 16, 19, 22, 23, 179, 183, 239 PwC, 119 Qualia, 36 quality of life measures, 126 quantitative sociological research, 98 quantified community, 233, 234 quantified self apps, 221 quantified self movement, 221, 228 quants, 237 questionnaires, 165, 175, 176 random acts of managerial generosity, 184 randomized sampling methods, 97 Rapley, Mark, 250 Rayner, Rosalie, 93 Reagan, Ronald, 144, 149, 159 Realeyes, 72 real-time health data, 137 real-time social trends, 224 recessions, 67–8, 252 Recognizing the Depressed Patient (Ayd), 164 reductionism, 27, 264 research ethics, 91–2, 225 resilience training, 35, 273 Resor, Stanley, 93–4, 95, 96 retail culture, 58 Ricard, Matthieu, 2, 4 Robbins, Lionel, 154 Robins, Eli, 169 Rockefeller Foundation, 97, 99, 121 Rogers, Carl, 146 Roosevelt, Franklin, 101, 146 Rowntree, Joseph, 99 RunKeeper, 240 Ryanair, 185 Salter, Tim, 110 sampling methods, 97–8 Santa Monica, California, 4 São Paolo, Brazil, Clean City Law, 275 scales, 146, 165, 175, 176 scanning technology, 75–6 scent logos, 73 Schrader, Harald, 44 scientific advertising, 215 scientific management, 118–19, 120, 136–7, 235 scientific optimism, 242 scientific politics, 77, 88, 145 scientists, as source of authority, 147–8 Scott, Walter Dill, 83, 85 screen time, 207 second brain, 231 secular religions, 260 selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), 163, 166 self-anchored striving, 147, 166, 175 self-anchoring striving scale, 146 self-forming groups, 200 self-help gurus, 210 self-help literature, 247 self-improvement, 212 self-monitoring, 258 self-optimization, 213 self-reflection, 211 self-surveillance, 221, 230 Seligman, Martin, 165, 277n5 Selye, Hans, 128–31, 133, 264 The Senses and the Intellect (Bain), 48 sentiment analysis/tracking, 6, 221, 223, 261 sexual orientation disturbance, 172 sharing economy, 188 shopping, 58, 74, 93, 188, 239 sick notes, 112 Sing Sing prison, 201 Smail, David, 250 smart cities, 220, 224, 239 smart homes, 239 smart watches, 37 smartphones, 10, 207, 222, 230 smiles/smiling, 36–7, 38 Smith, Adam, 49, 50, 52, 55 social, 1, 36, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 211–12 social analytics, 188, 191, 193, 196 social capitalism, 212 social contagion, science of, 257 social economy, 190 social epidemiology, 9, 250, 254 social media, 188, 189, 199, 203, 207, 208–9, 213, 224, 261, 274 social media addiction, 206, 207 social network analysis, 204, 208 social networks, 193, 194, 195, 196, 213, 225 social neuroscience, 193, 195, 213, 214 social obligation, 184 social optimization, 181–214 social prescribing, 194, 212, 246, 271 social psychology, 125, 189, 266 social research, 98, 202, 226 social science, as converging with physiology into new discipline, 195 sociology, 254 sociometric analysis, 199 sociometric maps, 202 Sociometric Solutions, 239 sociometry, 199, 201, 202, 203 Spengler, Oswald, 121 Spitzer, Robert, 171–3, 176, 271 sponsored conversations, 189 sport, as virtue for political leaders, 140 sporting metaphors, 141 SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), 163, 166 St Louis school of psychiatry, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 179 Stanton, Frank, 99 Stigler, George, 150, 152, 153, 156–7, 158, 160 stress, 37, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 175, 250, 262, 272, 273 Stuckler, David, 252 subjective affect, science of, 6, 7 subjective feelings, relationship with external circumstances, 254 subjective sensation, 30, 45, 55, 61 Suicide (Durkheim), 227 Sully, James, 59, 84 surveillance, 231, 237, 238, 240, 242.

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
by Liz Pelly
Published 7 Jan 2025

In his introduction to Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the philosopher Fredric Jameson describes the concept of “autosurveillance,” under which “capital and the state no longer have to do anything to you, because you have learned to do it to yourself.” This was fan culture reshaped by algorithmic ubiquitousness, which is to say, by tools of surveillance.3 11 Sounds for Self-Optimization In 2023, Spotify temporarily prohibited a generative AI start-up called Boomy from releasing new music to the platform. The app has been around since 2018 and claims to have released over 14.5 million songs, which it says account for nearly 14 percent of “the world’s recorded music.” Boomy’s CEO has asserted that his company is not just software but a “platform, label, and publisher representing a new creative class of technology-enabled musicians”—that it’s an indie label just like any other.1 Boomy’s output could hardly be called music, though.

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It’s Her Factory, January 29, 2021, https://itsherfactory.substack.com/p/what-is-a-vibe; “Philosophy and Vibes with Robin James,” Sound Expertise podcast, https://soundexpertise.org/philosophy-and-vibes-with-robin-james/. 3 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 11 Sounds for Self-Optimization 1 Daniel Tencer, “AI Music App Boomy Has Created 14.4m Tracks to Date. Spotify Just Deleted a Bunch of Its Uploads After Detecting ‘Stream Manipulation,’ ” Music Business Worldwide, May 3, 2023, https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/ai-music-app-boomy-spotify-stream-manipulation/. 2 For the Boomy CEO quote, see: https://x.com/MusicAlly/status/1650852184819376128; for the Boomy press release announcing its partnership with Warner, see: https://www.wmg.com/news/boomy-partners-with-ada-worldwide-on-global-distribution-deal. 3 “Spotify Ejects Thousands of AI-Made Songs in Purge of Fake Streams,” Financial Times, May 8, 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/b6802c8f-50e7-4df8-8682-cca794881e30. 4 Elizabeth Dilts Marshall, “Spotify’s Daniel Ek Praises AI’s Potential to Boost Music Creation—and the Company’s Bottom Line,” Billboard, April 25, 2023, https://www.billboard.com/pro/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-praises-artificial-intelligence/. 5 “Music AI Ethics Tracker,” Water & Music, https://www.waterandmusic.com/data/ai-ethics-tracker. 6 Joe Coscarelli, “Capitol Drops ‘Virtual Rapper’ FN Meka After Backlash over Stereotypes,” New York Times, August 23, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/arts/music/fn-meka-dropped-capitol-records.html; “AI rapper FN Meka dropped by Capitol over racial stereotyping,” BBC, August 24, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-62659741; Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, “(A)I, Rapper: Who Voices Hip-Hop’s Future?

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Edison, Inc.), 40–42 Morris, Jeremy Wade, 30, 90 Morrison, Matthew D., 131 Muchitsch, Veronika, 90 music, supporting and revaluing, 234–35 Music Business Worldwide, 59, 178, 187, 188 Musicians’ Union, 150, 153–4, 209, 231 music industry artists disempowered by, 148–49 blogging, 21–22, 94–95, 173–74 capitalist structure of, 5–6 profits/corporate greed in, 2–3 (see also payola) “saving” of, 13–14, 20–21, 23 See also record labels, independent; record labels, major music information retrieval (MIR), 93 music labor movement AFM strike, 207–8 on copyright violations, 206–7 during COVID-19 lockdowns, 205–6 “Justice at Spotify” campaign, 205, 208–10 MWA, 206–8 protests for artists’ rights, 204–5 within Spotify, 213–14 in Sweden, 213–14 on unionization, 207 See also UMAW Music Workers Alliance (MWA), 204, 206–8 Muzak/muzak, 42–48, 50, 52, 55–56, 65, 71, 73, 127, 155 mxmtoon, 179 Myspace Music, 17, 19 Napster, 2–4, 24 Native Ads, 162, 192 Naxos, 22 NDAs, 23, 152, 195 Neiburger, Eli, 225–26, 228 neuromarketing, 140–42 New Feeling, 222 New York Times, 82, 110, 179 “The Next Big Thing,” 28 Noble, Safiya Umoja, 24 Norstrom, Alex, 202 Northzone, 18–19 NOYB, 141, 143 Obama, Barack, 197–99 Ogle, Matthew, 97 Oliveros, Pauline, 36 Owen, David, 43 Pandora, 17, 24, 86, 92, 94, 200 Parker, Sean, 24 Parks, Ken, 16 Parrish, Ben, 175 Pärson, Pär-Jörgen, 18 Paulios, Jason, 225 Pavitt, Bruce, 43–44 payola, viii, 59, 88, 149, 185–96, 203, 205, 234 PC Music, 109–10, 112 Pemberton, Rollie, 227–28 performance rights organizations (PROs), 72 PFC (perfect fit content), 58–59, 61–70, 74–77, 122, 132, 136, 194 piracy, 1–10, 14–15 Piratbyrån, 2, 5–6, 15 Pirate Bay, 2, 4–5, 9–11, 14–15 Pitchfork, 25, 133, 152–54, 198 platform capitalism, 83, 158–59, 161 playlists, viii, 31–35, 49, 92, 94 algotorial, 54, 64, 66, 97–98, 104, 187 on apps, 25 (see also Spotify for Artists) bedroom pop, 115–16, 179, 181 cottagecore, 120–22 curation practices for, 28–34, 92, 113–14 data-driven, 31–35, 79–80 daylist, 97, 107, 109, 113 flagship, 84–85, 127, 132, 178 gamification of, 28, 50, 66 hyperpop, 109–13, 181 “Lorem,” 114, 140, 180–82 as mixtapes, 29–30 mood-/emotion-based, 25–29, 39–40, 44 (see also PFC) as music therapy, 52–53 “oddly specific,” 119–21 personalized, 29, 97–100, 103–5, 107, 127 “POLLEN,” 113–15, 140, 180, 190 radio vs. streaming, 30, 32, 35 royalties from, 22–23, 49, 148–52, 154–57, 159–60, 183, 204 (see also artist-centric payment system; payola; pro rata payment system) for sleep, 36, 37 on Spotify (see under Spotify) See also Tunigo podcasts, 185, 199 Politico, 146–47, 199 pop music/culture, 3, 30, 33–34, 43, 45, 74, 79–91 Pre-Campaign Insights (PCI), 189 PressPlay, 3–4 Press-Reynolds, Kieran, 109, 112 Prey, Robert, 142 Prince, Jonathan, 197 privacy, 142–46, 197, 201 See also surveillance production music, 61, 68–69, 71, 73–74, 77 programmed streamshare, xi–xii, 185–86 pro rata payment system, 22–23, 148–51, 183, 205 Protect Working Musicians Act, 208, 235 Pure Moods, 55 Radio app, 96, 188–89 Real Networks, 3 Recording Industries’ Music Performance Trust Funds, 207 Recording Industry of America (RIAA), 3–4, 243n2 record labels, independent licenses with streaming services, 19–20 vs. major labels, streaming rates paid to, 22–23 media ecosystem of, 21–22, 94–95, 173–74 Merlin, 19–20, 150, 188 See also under Spotify record labels, major data collected by, 90–91 payola by (see payola) playlists, 27 revenue fluctuations, 57 and Spotify (see under Spotify) See also Sony; Universal; Warner Refused, 5 Regalado, Mary, 210 Repertoire Discount Program, 188 Resonate, 222 Rhapsody, 4 RIAA (Recording Industry of America), 3–4, 243n2 Rogan, Joe, 199, 202 Rolling Stone, 22, 25, 179, 192–93 Romdhane, Andreas, 65 Rossetti, Stefano, 141–43 royalties, 22–23, 49, 148–52, 154–57, 159–60, 183, 204, 211–12 See also artist-centric payment system; payola; pro rata payment system Sargent, Kevin, 72–73 Satie, Erik, 46 Saunier, Greg, 176 Seattle Public Library, 228 Seaver, Nick, 92–93, 95, 100–101 Secretly Group, 54–55 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 201 self-driving music, 106–16 self-optimization sounds, 125–36 Shetty, Josephine, 206, 208 short-form video, 86–87, 131 Showcase, 190–92 Simon, Noah, 110–12 Simple Machines, 6 Slack, 58–59, 64–65, 122, 188, 192–93 Snowfish, 28, 247n8 Söderström, Gustav, 107, 202 solidarity economy, 218 Sony, ix, 3–4, 18, 22, 27, 128, 150–52, 178 SoundCloud, 48, 110, 112 Spotify, vii–viii advertisements sold to musicians, 161–62, 164, 190–91 advertising/marketing by, 9–10, 13, 29, 139–42 artist tiers, 159–60 branding, 15 Browse page, 97 business model, 16–18 Consumption Shifting, 98–99 Creator team, 161–63, 166–67, 193–94 data, artists’ use of (see streambait) data collected, 93–94, 96, 102, 107–11, 111, 138–44 Discover page, 92, 97 “Discover Weekly” playlist, 32, 97, 101, 126, 146 executives’ wealth, 201–2 “Follow” function, 26 founding/early days, vii, 2, 4–5, 14–16 frictionless user experience on, 12–15, 40 funding, 11, 18–19, 24, 73 and independent artists/record labels, 33–35, 83, 152–53, 177, 180–84 launch in the U.S., 24–25 licensing by, 15–16, 19–20 lobbying by, 197–200, 201–2 and major record labels, 17–19, 33, 57, 151–52, 177 market research by, 25–26 and Merlin, 19–20 new markets for, 9 official launch, 13–14, 18–19, 22 organization chart, 100 patents of, mood-/emotion-related, 144 PFC at, 62–67, 71, 73–74 as a pirate service, 9, 15 programmed streamshare used by, xi–xii as publicly traded on NYSE, vii–viii, 19, 82, 100, 159, 166 reviews/media coverage of, 21–22, 25 as saving the music industry, 13–14, 57 search engine, 24 shareholders of, 201–2 songwriting camps of, 84–85, 170 spotifycore, 82 Strategic Programming, 64–66, 122, 136 TikTok’s influence on, 88–89, 131 tracks’ playlist history, 81, 251n.4 users influenced by, xi–xii, 56 website, 26 “Wrapped” campaign, 97, 102, 107–8, 138, 170 See also playlists Spotify: A Product Story (podcast), 245n11 Spotify for Artists (S4A), 34, 50–51, 79–80, 84, 161–69, 172–73, 190–91, 251n.1 “Spotify Stages,” 117–18 Spotify Workers Union, 214 Squier, George, 42 Stewart, Luke, 220–21 stock music, 51, 58, 69, 70–71, 75, 77, 134, 184 See also background music streambait, 40, 80–81, 87, 90, 91 streaming AI’s impact on, xi emergence of, 3–4, 17 by libraries, 223–29 licenses for, 3–4, 16–17 passivity championed by, 35–36 percentage of recorded music revenues, xi pop music influenced by, 80–81 record labels as benefiting from, ix subscription, 3–4, 17–18, 42, 71, 73, 150–52, 158, 219 value of, and income from, streams, 148–60 See also Pandora; Spotify Strigeus, Ludvig, 14 Sunde, Peter, 5, 9–10 surveillance, 29, 123–24, 137–47 Svedlund, Josef, 65 Sweden anti-globalization activism in, 1–2 digital music piracy in, vii, 4–5, 8–9 ghost labels in, 60–61 music culture/schools in, 230 PFC providers from, 65, 71 (see also Epidemic Sound) privacy authorities in, 143–44 Swift, Taylor, 81, 127, 162, 182 sync, 71–73, 77 Szabo, Lizzy, 110 Tamaryn, 153 Taylor, Astra, x, 166 technology, 198 fixing the problems via, 217, 236 ideological attitudes toward, 5, 7 in music distribution, 89–90 music’s impact on, 6 music tech start-ups, 128–29 subscription, 17 Teibel, Irv, 133 Tiber Creek Group, 199 TikTok, 36, 71, 81, 86–89, 110, 118, 126, 131, 168–69, 181 Tlaib, Rashida, 148, 209–13 Toomey, Jenny, 6–7 Tradedoubler, 12–13, 16 transparency, viii Tsunami, 6 Tunigo, 27–29, 31, 92, 94 UMAW (United Musicians and Allied Workers), 148–50, 205–6, 208–15, 234 UMG (Universal Music Group), 16, 87, 131, 133–36, 155–56, 178, 183, 188 Universal, ix, 3, 17, 22–23, 27, 128, 150 universal basic income, 231 uTorrent, 14–15 Vail, Maggie, 174–75 Van Arman, Darius, 54–55 Vandermark, Ken, 218–20 venture capital (VC) funding, 4, 16, 18–19, 24, 73, 126, 165, 175, 217 vibes, xi, 122–23, 158 See also specific vibes Vogel, Paul, 202 Volodkin, Anthony, 17 von Doom, Jesse, 165 Walkman, 29 Wall, Matt, 140 Warner, ix, 9, 22, 27, 90, 150, 178, 183 Warner Music Group (WMG), 90, 126, 133, 188 Westman, Jakob, 247n8 Wheeler, Simon, 171, 177 Whittaker, Meredith, 144 WMG (Warner Music Group), 90, 126, 133, 188 World Trade Organization, 1, 8–9 WPP, 142 Wragg, Barney, 16–17 Yesco, 43 YouTube, 6, 16, 48–49, 71, 206–7 Zuboff, Shoshana, 137 An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2025 by Liz Pelly All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

At first fixing something that isn’t broken will feel uncomfortable, because doing so often requires breaking it. But optimization is the only path to excellence. A journey’s positive slope, where peaks are incrementally higher, is the result of the repeat cycle of evaluating, deconstructing, and building a better team, product, and self. OPTIMIZING YOUR TEAM Great teams are more than the assembly of great people. On the contrary, great teams are ultimately grown, not gathered. They’re made through endless iteration of roles, cultures, processes, structures, and tackling toxins whenever they emerge. The only way to build a great team is through endless optimization of how a team works together, and clearing their path to solutions.

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(Hogan-Brun), 107 LinkedIn, 181, 258 listening, 321 lists, 374 living and dying, 26, 368–69, 373–75 Livingston, Jessica, 101–2 local maxima, 242, 243–44, 289 Loewenstein, George, 272 long-term goals, 26–27, 66, 299, 304, 350 Loup Ventures, 35 Louvre Pyramid, 200–202 Lyft, 191 Macdonald, Hugo, 37–38 Macworld, 295 Maeda, John, 107, 186, 308, 354 magic of engagement, 273 Making Ideas Happen (Belsky), 159, 190, 222 Managed by Q, 221 Marcus Aurelius, 39 market-product fit, 256 Marquet, David, 167 Mastercard, 275, 303–4 Match.com, 259 Maupassant, Guy de, 201 maximizers, 229, 284–85 McKenna, Luke, 217 McKinsey & Company, 72 Meerkat, 265 meetings, 44, 78, 176 Meetup, 168, 243–44 Mehta, Monica, 26 merchandising, internal, 158–60 metrics and measures, 28, 29, 297–99 microwave ovens, 325 middle, 1, 3–4, 7–8, 14–15, 20, 40, 209, 211, 375 volatility of, 1, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14–16, 21, 209 milestones, 25, 27, 31, 40 minimum viable product (MVP), 86, 186, 195, 252 Minshew, Kathryn, 72–73 misalignment, 153–55 mistakes, 324–25, 336 Mitterand, François, 201 Mix, 256 Mizrahi, Isaac, 324 mock-ups, 161–63 momentum, 29 money, raising, 30–31, 102 Monocle, 37 Morin, Dave, 273 motivation, 24 multilingualism, 107–9 Murphy, James, 92 Muse, The, 72, 73 Musk, Elon, 168, 273 Muslims, 302–3 Myspace, 89, 187–88, 349 mystery, 271–73 naivety, 308–9 Narayan, Shantanu, 289 narrative and storytelling, 40–42, 75, 87, 271 building, before product, 255–57 culture and, 134–36 National Day of Unplugging, 328 naysayers, 295 negotiation, 286–87 Negroponte, Nicholas, 107 Nest, 63 Netflix, 83–84, 126 networking, 138–39 networks, 258–61, 283, 284, 320–21 Newsweek, 38 New York Times, 63, 122, 275 Next, 141 99U Conference, 9–10, 26, 138, 167, 181, 197, 220, 221, 360 no, saying, 282–84, 285, 319, 371, 372 Noguchi, Isamu, 141 noise and signal, 320–21 Northwestern Mutual, 66 novelty, and utility, 240–41 NPR, 196 “NYC Deli Problem,” 174 Oates, Joyce Carol, 192 OBECALP, 59–61 obsession, 104–5, 229, 313, 326 Oculus, 350 Odeo, 36 office space, 140–41 openness, 308–9, 350 OpenTable, 79 opinions, 64, 305–7, 317 opportunities, 282–85, 319, 324, 325, 371 optimization, 8, 14–15, 16, 93–338 see also product, optimizing; self, optimizing; team, optimizing Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (Sandberg and Grant), 39 options, managing, 284–85 organizational debt, 178–79 outlasting, 90 outsiders, 88, 105 Page, Larry, 60 Pain, 59 Paperless Post, 239 Paradox of Choice, The: Why More Is Less (Schwartz), 284 parallel processing, 33 parenting, 371, 372 Partpic, 120 passion, empathy and humility before, 248–50 path of least resistance, 85 patience, 78, 80–85, 196 cultural systems for, 81–82, 85 personal pursuit of, 84–85 structural systems for, 83–84, 85 “pebbles” and “boulders,” 182, 268 Pei, I.

…

M., 201 Pentagram, 274–75 performance, and productivity, 214 Periscope, 10, 69–70, 112, 204, 233, 252, 264–65 Twitter’s acquisition of, 69, 264–65 permission, asking for forgiveness vs., 199–202 perseverance, persistence, 62, 79, 85 perspective, 40–42, 66, 74, 326 quitting and, 62–64 Photoshop, 10, 144, 159, 162, 185, 206–7, 238–39, 270, 347 Pine Street, 125 Pinterest, 10, 64, 86–87, 94, 112, 158–59, 165, 174, 204, 233, 248, 319 Pixar, 141 placebo, 59–61 planning, 93, 280–81 polarizing people, 114–15 PolitiFact, 303 positive feedback, and hard truths, 28–31 Post-it notes, 325 pragmatists, 295, 296 Prefer, 28, 298, 299 preparedness, 16 presenting ideas, vs. promoting, 164–65 press, 265–66, 336 Pretty Young Professionals (PYP), 72–73 Principles (Dalio), 306, 307 problem solving, 209 big vs. small problems, 180–82, 322 explicitness and, 173–74 process, 153–57 Proctor & Gamble, 143 product(s), 8, 29 brand fit and, 256, 257 complexity in, 209–10, 217 explicitness in, 174–75, 271 founder fit and, 256 life cycle of, 209–10, 217 market fit and, 256 minimum viable (MVP), 86, 186, 195, 252 paradox of success of, 216 power users of, 217 products used to create, 143–45 simplicity in, 209, 210–11, 216–18, 271 product, optimizing, 17, 209–75 anchoring to your customers, 247–75 being first, 264–66 disproportionate impact and, 267–68 empathy and humility before passion, 248–50 engaging the right customers at the right time, 251–54 and measuring each feature by its own measure, 269–70 mystery and engagement in, 271–73 narrative in, 255–57 and playing to the middle, 274–75 and role of leaders in communities, 258–61 sales and, 262–63 simplifying and iterating, 213–46 and believing in the product, 223–25 creativity and familiarity in, 226–27 and design as invisible, 230–31 doing, showing, and explaining, 238–39 “first mile” and, 232–34 identifying what you’re willing to be bad at, 214–15 inbred innovations and, 245–46 incrementalism and assumptions in, 242–44 killing your darlings, 219–22 for laziness, vanity, and selfishness, 235–37 making one subtraction for every addition, 216–18 novelty and utility in, 240–41 scrutiny and flaws in, 228–29 productivity, 179, 180–82, 187, 322, 324, 325 measures of, 78–79 performance and, 214 promoting ideas, vs. presenting, 164–65 promotions, 130 progress, 24–25, 31, 40, 47, 64, 75, 83, 85, 160, 179, 181, 349 conflict avoidance and, 185–86 process and, 154 progress bars, 181 prototypes and mock-ups, 161–63 Psychological Bulletin, 272 psychological safety, 122 Psychological Science, 272–73 psychology, 316, 317 Quartz, 37–38, 108, 301 questions, 69–71, 183–84, 321 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 220 Quinn, Megan, 303–4 quitting, perspective and, 62–64 Quora, 138, 167 Rad, Sean, 259 Radcliffe, Jack, 197 Rams, Dieter, 230 reactionary workflow, 327, 328 Ready, The, 179 reality-distortion field, 41 Reboot, 327 Reddit, 261, 300, 302 rejection, 58 relatability, 57 relationships: commitments and, 283–84 and how others perceive you, 316–17 negotiation and, 286–87 REMIX, 165 resets, 63–64, 72–75 resistance, fighting, 35–36 resourcefulness, and resources, 100–102 reward system, short-circuiting, 24–27 Rhode Island School of Design, 186, 354 rhythm of making, 16 Ries, Eric, 194 risk, 122, 316, 337 ritual, 328 rock gardens, 67–68 routines, 323 ruckus, making, 337–38 Saatchi Online, 89 Sabbath Manifesto, 327–28 safety, psychological, 122 Sakurada, Isuzu, 361–62 salaries, 141–42 sales, salespeople, 262–63 Salesforce, 159, 204 Sandberg, Sheryl, 39 Santa Fe, USS, 167 satisficers, 229, 284–85 scalability, 242 Schouwenburg, Kegan, 50–51 Schwartz, Barry, 284–85 science vs. art of business, 310–13 Seinfeld, Jerry, 250 self, optimizing, 8, 17, 277–338 crafting business instincts, 293–313 auditing measures instead of blindly optimizing, 297–99 data vs. intuition in, 300–304 mining contradictory advice and developing intuition, 294–96 naivety and openness in, 308–9 science vs. art of business, 310–13 stress-testing opinions with truthfulness, 305–7 planning and making decisions, 279–92 focus and choice, 282–85 making a plan vs. sticking to it, 280–81 negotiation in, 286–87 sunk costs and, 291–92 timing and, 288–90 sharpening your edge, 315–28 building a network and increasing signal, 320–21 commitments and, 318–19 disconnecting, 326–28 and how you appear to others, 316–17 leaving margins for the unexpected, 324–25 values and time use, 322–23 staying permeable and relatable, 329–38 attention and, 335–36 credit-seeking and, 330–32 and making a ruckus, 337–38 removing yourself to allow for others’ ideas, 333–34 self-awareness, 54–56, 305–7 selfishness, laziness, and vanity, 235–37 setbacks, 41 70/20/10 model for leadership development, 125 Shapeways, 50 Shiva, 374 shortcuts, 85 signal and noise, 320–21 Silberman, Ben, 86–87, 94, 112, 165, 319 Silicon Valley, 86 Simon, Herbert, 229, 284 SimpleGeo, 267 Sinclair, Jake, 334 skills, and choosing commitments, 283–84 Skybox, 101 sky decks, 117 Slack, 139, 210, 241 Slashdot, 295 Smarter Faster Better (Duhigg), 180 Smith, Brad, 373 Snapchat, 70, 189, 210, 227, 249 Snowden, Eric, 48, 162 Social Capital, 107 social media, 70, 139, 195, 210, 235–36, 243 solar eclipse, 300–302 SOLS, 50–51 Song Exploder, 333 Sonnad, Nikhil, 301–2 Sonos, 275 Southwest Airlines, 214–15 Soyer, Emre, 32–33 SpaceX, 168 Spark, 303 speed, 194–98 Spiegel, Evan, 249 Spot, 256, 257 Square, 303–4 Squarespace, 312 Stafford, Tom, 291 stand-ins, 297–98 start, 1, 6–8, 13, 209, 331 Statue of Liberty, 200 Stein, Dave, 280 Steinberg, Jon, 44–45, 313 Stitch Fix, 79 story, see narrative and storytelling Stratechery, 135 strategy, patience and, 80–85 strengths, 29, 54, 95, 214 stretch assignments, 130 structure, rules for, 150–52 StumbleUpon, 112, 256 Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert), 196 suffering, 35–36, 131 Summers, Larry, 108 sunk costs, 64, 71, 185, 291–92 Super Bowl, 273 superiority, sense of, 331–32 suspension of disbelief, 60–61 Suster, Mark, 204–5 Swarthmore College, 229 sweetgreen, 10, 151, 217, 221, 233, 245–46, 310 Systemized Intelligence Lab, 306 Systems Thinking, 283 Systrom, Kevin, 36 Taflinger, Richard, 38 talent, 119–25, 127, 187 Talk of the Nation, 196 TaskRabbit, 259 team, 39, 331, 332 energy and, 43–45 perspective and, 40–42 team, optimizing, 8, 17, 97–207, 211 building, hiring, and firing, 99–131 discussions and, 112–13 diversity in, 106–9 firing people to keep good people, 126–28 grafting and recruiting talent, 119–25 hiring people who have endured adversity, 110–11 immune system in, 116–18 initiative and experience in, 103–5 keeping people moving, 129–31 polarizing people and, 114–15 resourcefulness and resources in, 100–102 clearing the path to solutions, 177–207 big and small problems, 180–82 bureaucracy, 183–84 competitive energy, 187–91 conflict avoidance, 185–86 conviction vs. consensus, 203–5 creative block, 192–93 forgiveness vs. permission, 199–202 organization debt, 178–79 and resistance to change, 206–7 speed in, 194–98 culture, tools, and space, 133–48 attribution of credit, 146–48 free radicals and, 137–39 frugality and, 140–42 stories and, 134–36 tools, 143–45 structure and communication, 149–76 communication, 170–76 delegation, 166–69 merchandising, internal, 158–60 mock-ups for sharing vision, 161–63 presenting vs. promoting ideas, 164–65 process in, 153–57 rules in, 150–52 technology, 328, 371 TED, 62, 116, 305 teleportation, 70, 264 Temps, 201 10 Principles of Good Design (Rams), 230 Teran, Dan, 221 Tesla, 273 think blend, 33 Thomas, Frank, 222 Thompson, Ben, 135 Threadless, 267 time, use of, 210, 283, 299 leaving margins, 324–25 money and, 370–72 values and, 322–23 time-outs, 74 timing, 288–90, 332 decision making and, 289–90 investment and, 290 leader and, 288–89 Tinder, 259–60 Tiny, 294 Todd, Charlie, 113 Todoist, 229 tools, 143–45 Topick, 249 transparency, 259–60, 287 triggers, 55 Trump, Donald, 273, 302–3 truth(s), 71, 174, 193, 331, 338 creative block and, 192–93 hard, 28–31 stress-testing opinions with, 305–7 about time use, 323 Turn the Ship Around!

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

As many critical technology scholars have argued, the oversights of major tech companies and small startups can cause harm to marginalized people while furthering racist, sexist, and xenophobic ideologies through their technologies and corporate practices.71 From the standard test image of Lena, a real Playboy centerfold from 1972 used as a proxy, to facial analysis algorithms’ inability to identify women with darker skin tones, white male design decisions have far-reaching implications.72 Large tech companies have repeatedly made unpopular decisions regarding inactive accounts, forgetting that people have affective relationships with the profiles of dead loved ones. Platforms’ policies regarding inactive accounts and digital estate–planning startups treat digital belongings as one person’s content, ignoring the networked production of communicative traces and the significance of digital remains to multiple groups of people. No amount of planning and self-optimization can guarantee a smooth continuation of profiles or smart home settings after someone dies. What happens when the sterile world of Silicon Valley information technology encounters the messiness of death? Startup culture and venture capital do not readily accommodate the time span of forever.

…

Like the operating system Samantha in Her, who is both a ghostwriter and a love interest, Siri fulfills a starkly gendered role, flitting from secretary to companion to matchmaker. According to Gruber, Siri can be the perfect messenger or go-between, bridging human souls. Gruber says that the magic of virtual assistants like Siri is that they allow for self-optimization, wellness, and heightened productivity in home environments.55 Human memories are flawed, Gruber laments; they “decay over time, like ‘Where did the 1960s go, and can I go there, too?’ ” The smart object remembers things for you, and it calculates everything you need to know. Virtual assistants do more than merely enhance your productivity: they help you become a shinier version of you.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

If this version of mindfulness had a mantra, its adherents would be chanting “I, me and mine.” As my colleague C.W. Huntington observes, the first question most Westerners ask when considering the practice is: “What is in it for me?”10 Mindfulness is sold and marketed as a vehicle for personal gain and gratification. Self-optimization is the name of the game. I want to reduce my stress. I want to enhance my concentration. I want to improve my productivity and performance. One invests in mindfulness as one would invest in a stock hoping to receive a handsome dividend. Another fellow skeptic, David Forbes, sums this up in his book Mindfulness and Its Discontents: Which self wants to be de-stressed and happy?

The Nature of Technology
by W. Brian Arthur
Published 6 Aug 2009

Thus, as modern technology organizes itself increasingly into networks of parts that sense, configure, and execute appropriately, it displays some degree of cognition. We are moving toward “smart” systems. The arrival of genomics and nanotechnology will enhance this. In fact, not only will these systems in the future be self-configuring, self-optimizing, and cognitive, they will be self-assembling, self-healing, and self-protecting. My purpose here is not to point to some science fiction future, or to discuss the implications of these trends. Others have done this elsewhere. I want to call attention to something else: words such as self-configuring, self-healing, and cognitive are not ones we would have associated with technology in the past.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

Autonomic computing’s central metaphor is that of the human body’s central nervous system. In the same way that the body regulates temperature, breathing and heart rate, without us having to be consciously aware of what is happening, so too is the dream of autonomic computing for algorithms to self-manage, self-configure and self-optimize—without the need for physical or mental input on the part of users. One example of Ambient Law might be the “smart office,” which continuously monitors its own internal temperature and compares these levels to those stipulated by health and safety regulations. In the event that a specified legal limit is exceeded, an alarm could be programmed to sound.

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
by Jeff Sutherland and Jj Sutherland
Published 29 Sep 2014

Here was something that was doing exactly what I was trained to do flying in Vietnam: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. It was taking in its environment and behaving decisively based on the data from that environment. “What would happen,” I asked Brooks, “if we could come up with a simple instruction set for teams of people to work together just like those legs? They would self-organize and self-optimize, just like that robot.” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Why don’t you try it and let me know how it works out?” Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls More and more I realized that, if I could create a system that, like that robot, could coordinate independent thinkers with constant feedback about their environment, much higher levels of performance would be achieved.

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
by Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter
Published 14 Sep 2020

We should be outraged. And then, we should fix it (more on that in chapter 5). The Partisan Takeover of Congress Just like the sore-loser law in our elections, the Hastert Rule in Congress is just one of many ways in which the invisible machinery shaping our legislative process has been appropriated and self-optimized by the duopoly. To understand just how complete the partisan takeover of our nation’s legislative machinery has been, let’s take a step back.37 From World War II until the early 1970s, the way the House and Senate worked is sometimes referred to by political scientists as the “textbook Congress.”38 For those of us who are not political scientists, we may know it better as the Schoolhouse Rock Congress—the one portrayed in the animated musical series.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

The machine, as Dennett suggests, can do a lot of calculating with an immense amount of formal logic and processing reams of data, but it cannot frame. Much has changed in AI since Dennett wrote his three scenarios. AI no longer relies on humans feeding abstract rules into machines. Instead, the most popular methods today, such as machine learning and deep learning, involve systems partially self-optimizing from massive amounts of data. But although the process is different, the difficulty hasn’t gone away. Even with lots of training data, when a robot encounters a novel situation like a ticking bomb, it can be at an utter loss. Framing—capturing some essence of reality through a mental model in order to devise an effective course of action—is something humans do and machines cannot.

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook
by Michael Lopp
Published 20 Jul 2010

These reports vary from subtle adjustments to the truth to outright lies. As an aside and in defense of managers who are doing their best, this optimization for the self is natural human behavior. It's not that you believe that the world revolves around you; it's just from where you're sitting, it seems like it might. The problem with this self-optimization relative to management is that they have the unique responsibility to optimize both for themselves and for you, and there are situations where those separate goals are in conflict. Think of it like this. Your manager is going to have their world-altering Moment just like you, and the question is: are they going to look out for their interests or yours?

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It
by Kelly McGonigal
Published 1 Dec 2011

The brain’s habit of treating the future self like another person has major consequences for self-control. Studies show that the less active your brain’s self-reflection system is when you contemplate your future self, the more likely you are to say “screw you” to future you, and “yes” to immediate gratification. A FUND-RAISER USES FUTURE-SELF OPTIMISM FOR GOOD Anna Breman, an economist at the University of Arizona, wondered whether there was a way for nonprofit organizations to take advantage of people’s tendency to think of their future selves as more magnanimous than their present selves. Could fund-raisers exploit the future-self bias by asking people to pledge their future selves’ money instead of giving money now?

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
by Anne Helen Petersen
Published 14 Jan 2021

Part of the problem is that these digital technologies, from cell phones to Apple Watches, from Instagram to Slack, encourage our worst habits. They stymie our best-laid plans for self-preservation. They ransack our free time. They make it increasingly impossible to do the things that actually ground us. They turn a run in the woods into an opportunity for self-optimization. They are the neediest and most selfish entity in every interaction I have with others. They compel us to frame experiences, as we are experiencing them, with future captions, and to conceive of travel as worthwhile only when documented for public consumption. They steal joy and solitude and leave only exhaustion and regret.

The Simulation Hypothesis
by Rizwan Virk
Published 31 Mar 2019

The fact that error-correction codes are needed for qubits to maintain integrity and that that may be the underlying mechanism for coherence of space-time itself is a promising area of investigation. Finally, it’s clear that quantum entanglement, as mysterious as it is, is somehow fundamental to how particles work and provides even further evidence that the universe may be a self-optimizing computer. Fractals and Evidence of Computation in Nature Turning from quantum computers back to regular computers, if we can find evidence of computation in nature, not only at a subatomic level but at the level of everyday objects we are familiar with, this would boost the simulation hypothesis.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

I had long been saying that reducing journalism to page views commoditized our work, and since our journalism was being distributed on social media, which rewarded the opposite incentives, our audience reach was limited because we could never compete on outrage. It goes against our standards and ethics manuals. “The journalism is coerced into self-optimization for social media.” Shoshana finished my thought. Social media was shaping journalism, much like Facebook told advertisers and publishers that video would get greater distribution11 so news groups around the world had laid off editorial staff and hired video teams and advertisers had placed their ads on video on Facebook.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut
by Nicholas Schmidle
Published 3 May 2021

(Sascha, his older daughter, had moved to Phoenix with her husband, Jonathan, and their two children, and another on the way, whom Sascha was homeschooling, while running her own business: an overachiever. “I get that from my dad,” said Sascha. She’d hired a “high performance coach” to help her “self-optimize” after realizing, “I was hitting my upper limits.” Lauren, his younger daughter, was living in L.A. with her husband, with whom she had eloped.) Stucky and Dillon frequently went paragliding together, but honestly Stucky didn’t much care what they did. He just enjoyed being in Dillon’s company, laughing at his jokes, hearing about his latest rehearsal—watching his son become a man.

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber
Published 29 Oct 2024

We’ve shifted fully into the “universal economization of spiritual life,” 65 which seems to have peaked with the proliferation of meditation apps and the rise of a priestly caste of pseudo-spiritual TikTok influencers. While meditation and yoga certainly have their benefits, this retreat into the sanctum of the self reflects a scaling down of our ambitions. With no definitive vision to guide and structure action on an individual or societal level—with perpetual self-optimization replacing the hope for transcendent redemption and the promise of salvation—this shift toward interiority means there is no exit from an “eternal present.” 66 The return to more individualized modes of spirituality and therapeutics may even be a symptom of a broader cultural form of collective depression: A large-scale study of 14 million works of literature published over the past 125 years in English, Spanish, and German found that over the last two decades, textual analogs of cognitive distortions, including disorders such as depression and anxiety, have surged well above historical levels—including during World Wars I and II—after declining or stabilizing for most of the 20th century. 67 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the use of antidepressants and the practice of self-medicating via hallucinogens and pacifying drugs like cannabis are steadily on the rise. 68 The outcome of such hyper-subjective interiority is an elimination of the need to take risks or make sacrifices. 69 It is a condition much like that of Nietzsche’s “last man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

NORTON Professor of business administration, Harvard Business School; coauthor (with Elizabeth Dunn), Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending A pervasive human fear emerged in the twentieth century, one that grows stronger with each new doomsday prediction: Inevitably, as artificial intelligence advances, some unforeseen computer bug will cause computers to revolt and take over the world. My concern is the opposite: that as artificial intelligence advances, it will not be buggy enough. Thinking machines that are perfectly self-correcting, self-optimizing, and self-perfecting, so that the square peg always ends perfectly in the square hole, will also be machines that fail to inculcate the random sparks of insight coming from the human tendency to be buggy—to try to fit square pegs into round holes, or, more broadly speaking, to notice the accidental but powerful insights that can arise as a by-product of solving a shape/hole problem.

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money
by Steven Drobny
Published 18 Mar 2010

I would not run them exactly the same way, although I believe the optimally diversified portfolio remains the best bet for maximizing risk-adjusted returns, whether the time horizon is long or short. However, if I could get fired due to short-term underperformance, agency risk is introduced into the equation. As any self-optimizing individual would do, I would take measures to hedge out this agency risk, and there are several ways that this can be accomplished. One way is to optionalize the portfolio, essentially putting a floor on my interim returns. This would entail costs to the fund over the long term because I am essentially buying insurance on my job and billing my employer for the premium.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

Lord Salisbury, the UK prime minister, explained in an 1898 address that “you may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying.” Indigenous peoples were, in this telling, the pre-dead, with extermination merely serving to accelerate the inevitable timeline. These are the histories currently being conjured up in mainstream wellness culture, which has adopted Silicon Valley’s notion of self-optimization, itself a by-product of the personal-branding culture that torments so many young people today. Every step counted. Every sleep measured. Every meal “clean.” And it is this context that has prepared the ground for a redux of the 1930s fascist/New Age alliance. The very idea that humans can and should be “optimized” lends itself to a fascistic worldview—because if your food is extra-clean, it can easily mean other people’s food is extra-dirty.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
Published 28 Jul 2008

Many places in the United States are essentially down to two modes: cars and trucks. Geetam Tiwari, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, has posited that what may look like anarchy in the eyes of conventional traffic engineering (and Western drivers) actually has a logic all its own. Far from breaking down into gridlock, she suggests, the “self-optimized” system of Delhi can actually move more people at the busiest times than the standard models would imply. When traffic is moving briskly on two- and three-lane roads, bicycles tend to form an impromptu bike lane in the curb lane; the more bikes, the wider the lane. But when traffic begins to get congested, when the flows approach 2,000 cars per lane per hour and 6,000 bikes per lane per hour, the system undergoes a change.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
by Annie Jacobsen
Published 14 Sep 2015

If one of the LANdroids is destroyed in battle, the others rearrange themselves accordingly. The LANdroids program aims to develop “intelligent autonomous radio drones,” a concept that is critical to understanding where the Pentagon’s army of robots is headed over the next twenty-five years. “The program seeks to demonstrate the capabilities of self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, tethering, and power management,” according to DARPA. In this sense, DARPA’s LANdroids program is a prototype for future robotic systems that aim toward autonomy, or self-governance. Autonomy lies at the heart of the Pentagon’s newest revolution in military affairs. To be clear about what “autonomy” is, the concept is spelled out by the Pentagon, using a drone as an example: “When an aircraft is under remote control, it is not autonomous.

Leviathan Wakes
by James S. A. Corey
Published 14 Jun 2011

Those were decisions for Fred and his attachés to make. Miller had taken more than enough initiative for one day. Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of. Now, as he escorted a dozen captives in Protogen uniforms to a docked transport heading God-knew-where, the word was taking on new meaning.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

Software to control software is itself rapidly increasing in complexity. IBM is pioneering the concept of autonomic computing, in which routine information-technology support functions will be automated.7 These systems will be programmed with models of their own behavior and will be capable, according to IBM, of being "self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting." The software to support autonomic computing will be measured in tens of millions of lines of code (with each line containing tens of bytes of information). So in terms of information complexity, software already exceeds the tens of millions of bytes of usable information in the human genome and its supporting molecules.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

Rather, everything exists in relation to “the other.” The new science was called systems theory, and it put in doubt the older thinking about the nature of nature. Systems theory also cast a shadow on the rest of the Enlightenment project, including the idea of the autonomous being functioning in a detached, self-optimizing world, populated by other autonomous beings, each maximizing his or her own individual utility. Systems theory holds that the nature of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s because it is the relationship between the parts that creates something qualitatively different at the level of the whole.

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices)
by Steve McConnell
Published 8 Jun 2004

If I had any doubts about the value of formal inspections, my experience in creating the second edition of Code Complete eliminated them. Inspection Summary Inspection checklists encourage focused concentration. The inspection process is systematic because of its standard checklists and standard roles. It is also self-optimizing because it uses a formal feedback loop to improve the checklists and to monitor preparation and inspection rates. With this control over the process and continuing optimization, inspection quickly becomes a powerful technique almost no matter how it begins. Further Reading For more details on the SEI's concept of developmental maturity, see Managing the Software Process (Humphrey 1989).