I love books. I love libraries, both for their practical value and as temples of learning and storehouses of knowledge over time. I like what libraries do, and how the nobility of their missions is often reflected in their architecture, whether grand university libraries or modest but sturdy “Carnegie libraries” in towns all across the US. I’m proud of the fact that the publicly-supported, truly free (no cost to subscribe or borrow) public library is basically an American invention. I actually get a tiny dose of optimism about humanity when I enter a public library and see kids reading or being read to, people using the free computers with Internet access, notices for free services around résumé coaching and job placement in multiple languages… you get the idea.

There’s a bunch of LFLs in my neighborhood too. The first time I saw one of these I was charmed, and I’ve been a regular contributor to (and borrower from) LFLs ever since.

Do these compete with each other? If I want to disseminate good books and encourage reading, is it a zero-sum game in supporting one over the other? Or does each have its place?

There isn’t a lot of scholarly study of this, but there is some, and one thing they agree on is that even though part of the LFLs’ mission is to irrigate “book deserts,” in practice LFLs are most abundant in the neighborhoods that are already most affluent and arguably least in need of them.

There is one rather shrill scholarly paper by Schmidt and Hale arguing that “…the LFL® movement is an example of the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC) in action, and, at street level, reminds us that government funded public libraries are not to be taken for granted in an era of civic crowdfunding where the privileged classes [defined as those meeting or above median household incomes in a given neighbourhood] feel emboldened to take control of traditionally government-funded civic services.” My initial reaction to that is, fuck you. I can assure you that when I drop off a couple of books I’m finished with at one of the LFL boxes, I am manifestly not intending to “take control of traditionally government-funded civic services,” as if I were somehow trying to actively co-opt the services of the (excellent) San Francisco Public Library, which also has a nice little branch in my neighborhood. I can’t imagine the LFL founders are some kind of nonprofit slumlords – I genuinely believe their heart is in the same place as mine: more books available to more people means more reading, and more reading makes a more informed public which is better all around.

The kind of polemic in this paper doesn’t seem to help shed any light on how LFLs and public libraries can or should work together to avoid “competing” for individuals’ support. Perhaps more productive in an article posted on the Wickson Library’s website is the statistic that there are 3 LFLs for every public library in the US (although I’m sure they’re not evenly distributed) that “while much smaller than their public counterparts, tend to complement and increase existing library offerings as they reach farther into the community. No library cards, due dates, or fines!” This last point is a valid one: some public library users get blocked for having accumulated too many fines, so they turn to an LFL instead. (Though arguably LFLs shouldn’t exist to enable this bad behavior, where a better alternative would be to encourage some level of accountability; even fine amnesty isn’t necessarily needed to do this.) Another article reports that some public libraries have sponsored LFL boxes and the programs are very popular with their members, and in some cases have increased library-adjacent volunteerism and wider sense of ownership of the library’s mission; these seem like things that could ultimately benefit libraries.

There are also legitimate concerns about LFLs identified in these articles. Hale and Schmidt found at least one case where LFLs have replaced libraries that either shut down due to lack of funding or found themselves in a position of having to charge for membership to pay the bills. Having LFLs fill that vacuum sets the dangerous precedent that when the tax base is withdrawn, privately-supported LFLs can and will pick up the slack.

As well, the selection and quality of LFL books isn’t curated – for better or worse, it’s stuff people are willing to get rid of. (I can imagine that the quality of books found depends heavily on the neighborhood.)

Most importantly, actual public libraries, as I suggested above, provide far more than a repository of freely-loanable books: they provide services of many kinds, activities, support for finding information, literacy programs, and much more. The irony of this is illustrated in the below cartoon found on one of the LFL pages.

SO…what do I do with the (generally high quality) books I’m willing to part with? My neighborhood is affluent, and surely most of the people who live here could easily afford to buy these books themselves. (We have a great independent new & used bookstore right around the corner from the branch library.) I could donate them to the Friends of the SF Public Library, but my understanding is most donations are destined for fundraising book sales rather than going into circulation. Not that I claim to be a good judge of which books ought to go into circulation; I just want others to be able to benefit from books I found useful, entertaining, or informative, but that I no longer need.

What’s your opinion?

Long before colonization, Africa’s challenge was (and remains) low population density. The continent is so big that people who didn’t like their rulers just moved away and started a new micro monarchy, so no centralized governments ever really had to develop. A scarce resource was not land, but people, so the political structures that did develop focused on controlling them. In other words, internal slavery was endemic: the subject of conflict wasn’t acquiring land, but acquiring people to work it. (And the land wasn’t as productive as in Eurasia nor as amenable to agriculture: for centuries, tsetse flies and marauding elephants wreaked economic disaster.)

When colonization did happen, it was “low budget” colonialism: rather than the overhead of setting up centralized governing structures (even bad ones) in such a population-light place, just pay strongmen of local fiefdoms to run it for you, including selling slaves.
Colonial governments ruled through approved tribal leaders that created them where they did not exist. Yoruba was a colonial construct and many Yoruba speak mutually unintelligible languages even today. what we think of as “traditional” African tribal ethnicities is in fact, largely colonial in origin “The violent process by which state formation took place in Europe was interrupted in Africa. The civil wars that have played the continent after independence are a reflection of this.”

The result of low-budget colonialism is that even when “liberated” from colonization, there was no durable infrastructure or governance systems left behind (oppose India).

but since improvements in life expectancy and infrastructure, poised for major population dividend

What worked to get southeast Asia out of its rut? Investing in sectors that soak up a lot of cheap labor. Initially small family farms, but with government providing credit, access to markets, and other ways to turn the agricultural product into liquidity or other leverage. Then manufacturing, which didn’t require an educated labor force. Then economic policies that regulated capital flow and encouraged investment rather than saving, eg artificially low bank interest rates.

Before Europeans came, 4-6M were enslaved by Muslims from north Africa (since enslaving Muslims was forbidden by the Quran), and even during the Atlantic trade, only about 5% of slaves went to the american colonies as opposed to Latin America and the West Indies. “At the time of the US Civil War, there were probably more slaves in the Muslim states of West Africa than in the confederacy or in Cuba and Brazil.” European colonizers in the late 1800s tried to dismantle international slave trading (although they more or less replaced it with indentured servitude) but more or less ignored domestic slavery in Africa. Notwithstanding, the massive slave trade was the first truly profitable centralized operation that African states started to coagulate around.

In modern times, Africa has urbanized, but urbanization is not densification. Its cities are urban sprawl, so they do not get the economies of density required for building things like intensive infrastructure.

There are reasons to be worried, optimistic, skeptical, exasperated, or whatever regarding AI. I want to focus on just one: protecting your personal assets.

I try to stay a few months ahead of what’s happening on a grander scale, and I hope this article (written in June 2026) succeeds in doing that.

You, personally, will be a target of theft or fraud

TL;DR: AI is alarmingly rapidly enabling a deluge of cyberattacks like nothing we have ever seen. You, personally, are a target. That’s because everyone is. You might wonder why someone would bother to go after you and your modest assets when there are so many wealthier targets in plain sight. If the effort required to go after you were significant, or the likelihood or consequences of getting caught were significant, you’d be right. But they’re not, and you’re in danger.

AI has gotten extremely good at spotting and exploiting vulnerabilities in software. AI has also been creating software that has those very vulnerabilities. Currently, the bad guys are ahead in that arms race.

Software that gates access to your personal assets is going to be compromised, either because it contains sloppy AI-authored code containing security bugs, or because it contains well-crafted code that has highly non-obvious bugs that have been latent for years but are now being ferreted out at a dizzying pace.

What you can do: Be paranoid

Every piece of software you touch that has access to your personal property is an attack surface. You need to minimize the number of attack surfaces and defend them.

Your email is your life. If someone gains access to your email account, you’re screwed, because there are automated scripts that in a matter of minutes will do an automated “I forgot my password, email me a link” on every site you might conceivably have an account on, starting with the obvious candidates like Amazon. Have 1-click ordering turned on? Stuff will be ordered. And if you get locked out of your email, it is extremely difficult to get back in. For Gmail, you should register a separate recovery email address and phone number belonging to a trusted friend that can be used in such cases, although by the time you regain control of your email, the damage may be done.

Online banking/finance websites. Protect every site login with a very strong password (use 1Password or a similar password manager to help manage them) and use 2-factor authentication everywhere. You know those checkboxes that say “Remember me on this device and skip 2FA”? Don’t check them. 2FA is a minor inconvenience compared to the consequences.

So, lock down your phone. Turn on biometric authentication (Face ID, touch ID) for everything. Set your phone to lock the screen after 30 seconds of inactivity or whenever you turn off the display. Note that while some apps explicitly allow Face ID/touch ID to be used instead of passwords for login, you can force any iPhone app to require Face ID just to open the app. This is particularly valuable for apps that are effectively “always logged in” such as your email app. To do this, press and hold any app icon until it starts to jiggle, and from the pop-up menu, select “Require Face ID”.

For example, the authenticator app I use (Duo Mobile) is protected this way. So if someone is trying to access (say) my bank account, which is protected by authenticator-app-based 2FA, they would need to know my login name and my password, and have access to my phone which is probably locked, and even if it’s unlocked they need to be able to falsify face ID to open the authenticator app to complete 2FA. At that point it’s probably too much work and they’ll move on to trying your phone instead. You don’t have to outrun the bear, just outrun the other guy.

iPhones will self-erase after 10 wrong passcode attempts, so someone who obtains your phone can’t do much if it is locked. And if setting up a brand new phone from scratch sounds like a lot of work, that’s what automatic iCloud Backup of your phone is for. For $2 a month, it’s cheap insurance.

SMS-based 2FA is not as secure as biometric 2FA, authenticator apps like Duo Mobile, or passkey apps like 1Password. If any of those is a choice, prefer it over SMS or “email me a link”. And speaking of passwords, you do use a password manager, right? You definitely don’t record passwords in a Note, a Google Doc, a Word doc, or anything like that, right? 1Password is my favorite of these, but any of them is better than these horribly insecure alternatives.

Encrypt your laptop drive. Apple FileVault or Windows BitLocker are the way to do this. If someone steals your computer, they cannot get at your data even if they remove the drive. Yes, this requires remembering another password, but again, cheap insurance. Imagine what the size of the attack surface would be if someone had unrestricted access to every bit of data on your hard drive. And again, remember they don’t have to spend time sifting through all the crap to find something valuable: they can use AI for that. The effort to find some possibly useful bit of info, and automate its exploitation, is approaching zero.

Beware of payment apps. If you use apps like Venmo or Paypal, and they are tied to your bank account or a credit card, they are also an attack surface. Secure them accordingly.

Beware of “login using Google”. If your Gmail account is compromised, so is every site to which it has access. If any of those sites have a built-in way to spend money, watch out. If you’re able to login to Google before you get locked out of your email, look for the “log out of all sites” option, which attempts to log you out of all sites where you’re currently logged in using Google credentials.

Don’t even use “login using Facebook.” Facebook is a company led by a sociopath who has lost any sense of moral compass he may ever have had, and he controls enough of the company’s voting stock that he sets the direction for the company. The company cannot be trusted. Period.

Don’t install software or browser extensions whose provenance isn’t rock-solid. Even trusted supply chains are now being infected with malware. In fact, I’d suggest avoiding system updates for a while unless it’s an update specifically targeting a recently discovered vulnerability.

Don’t click on links in emails or texts, ever, unless you are absolutely, positively, 100% sure you can vet the sender (and even then, a well-meaning sender may have been fooled into forwarding a poisoned link). SMS text messaging and email are not secure, period. Incoming phone numbers can be spoofed at modest cost, just as is the case with phone calls. You cannot assume the sender is who they claim to be based on the phone number.

Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram, and other end-to-end encrypted messaging apps are far more trustworthy. I prefer Signal because it’s open source so the app code is under constant scrutiny by many eyeballs. Whatsapp’s technology is secure (in fact it was developed by the Signal folks) but the fact that Whatsapp is owned by Facebook means, to me, that in the long run that service cannot be trusted either.

If an email or text claims to be from an institution with which you have a relationship (e.g. a bank, an airline) and looks legitimate or needs attention, manually type in the institution’s URL in a browser, log in, and locate the service portal or message portal or whatever. There is nothing they can send you via a link that cannot also be accessed by manually signing into the site and navigating somewhere. Or look up the company’s official fraud or customer service phone number, call it yourself, and give the name and contact information of whoever tried to contact you. I’ve been phished more than once in this way.

Don’t re-use passwords. This is a cliche for a reason. If an attacker is able to somehow discover or infer your password for a particular site, they will immediately try that same email/password combination on a very long list of known sites. And when I say “they will try,” I really mean “They have a script that will automate trying thousands of sites in parallel in a few seconds,” so you won’t have time to go manually changing your password everywhere. Ask yourself this question regarding the security of a site password: How would you feel about using this site if it had no password protection? If the answer is that it would make you uneasy in any way, then you’d better choose a strong and unique password for it, since dictionary attacks are easier than ever to mount. And if remembering a zillion strong and unique passwords sounds like a pain, that’s what password managers are for. It sucks that we have to do this but it’s the world we live in.

Assume all of your personally identifying data is public. If you form passwords by using your birthday, a part of any address where you have ever lived, your Social Security number, the address of a place you used to live, a phone number you once had, your old student ID number, your parents’ anniversary date, your mother’s maiden name, etc., all of that information is relatively easy to get. It is transacted on the black market in large catalogs that are fed to targeting agents. The unfortunate irony is that the only strong password is one that you yourself have difficulty remembering. There are some bright spots here: a combination of numbers and letters that has meaning to you but no one else is somewhat harder, such as “giraffe-2578-orange-197701”. But since significant chunks of such a password follow a pattern (by being dictionary words), the entropy per character is lower than if you include non-alphanumeric symbols, so the password needs to be up to twice as long to compensate. (That is: a password consisting of 8 random characters including non-alphanumerics has about the same entropy as a 16-20 character password consisting of dictionary words and numbers.)

All of that said, passwords aren’t usually the weak link. Most successful intrusions aren’t the result of cracking a password. They may be the result of guessing a weak password, or tricking the user into leaking it some other way, such as by directing them to a fake but realistic-looking site with a URL that is off in a difficult-to-detect way, or one that includes a legitimate-looking fragment carrying the name of the spoofed site. A really clumsy example would be gooogle.com (which the real Google kindly redirects to their actual site, but you might not be so lucky). The fake site uses the same login flow as the real site, but harvests your password, then redirects you to the real site with some sort of one-off error message. Most people say “It’s probably just a glitch” and login again, not realizing that that isn’t a thing.

Older folks are particularly susceptible to phishing. If you have aging relatives, the credentials to access their accounts should be exclusively in the possession of paranoid loved ones. Enough has been written on that topic that I don’t need to go into it here, but older folks as a group are just plain easier to scam and intimidate, and can often be tricked into revealing information that compromises others in their family as well.

Smart devices are likely to be Trojan horses. Internet-connected picture frames, “smart” fridges and washing machines and dishwashers, “smart” doorbells, and basically anything that asks for permission to connect to your home network should be suspect. Ask yourself: does this product need Internet access to do its job? A TV has one job—display a picture from a video input. It does not need Internet access to do that. A washing machine has one job—to wash your clothes. It does not need Internet access to do that. The same goes for your dishwasher, fridge, microwave, etc.

There are at least two reasons to be very wary of “smart” devices. First, any device connected to your home network is in a position to essentially rent out your home Internet service to others. Why would anyone want to rent your home internet service? Usually to do things they wouldn’t want do from their own home, or to recruit your smart device for a distributed denial of service attack, possibly on national or state civilian or military infrastructure. There is widespread concern that shadow entities, possibly state sponsored, are paying manufacturers to bundle malware into these devices that enables just such attacks. More banal but equally disturbing, companies are doing this themselves for profit: here’s a streaming stick you can buy that, while you’re streaming video, rents out your Internet connection to who-knows-whom, and when you’re not streaming video, becomes a bot in clickfraud advertising scheme. Shockingly, it’s made by a Chinese company that also owns server farm capacity and an ad-serving network.

Second, even “non-malicious” smart devices connected to your home network have access to all traffic to and from every other device on that network, and can sell that data. (Your actual transactions with Web sites are encrypted, but the names and pages of the sites you visit and the times you’re active are readable by any device on the network.) But non-malicious isn’t the same as benign: “smart TVs” are explicitly designed to gather and sell data about what you’re watching. Smart thermostats and smart doorbells know a lot about when you’re probably not home. Of course, some devices legitimately need Internet access to do their job, such as a streaming box or digital photo frame. How much do you trust the company that produces the device? Roku or Google are probably OK; a discount Chinese knockoff product, not so much. And as I mentioned earlier, AI has made it much easier to compromise and subvert benign devices.

Summing it all up – if you do nothing else, do these things

• Turn on drive-level encryption on your laptop.

• Turn on 2FA for everything that could possibly touch money, preferring biometric, passkey, or authenticator app 2FA over SMS or email-based 2FA

• Register a recovery email and recovery phone number for your email account–either a secondary (e.g. work) email you reliably have access to, or a trusted loved one who can help you out

• Use strong random passwords and use a password manager like 1Password to track them

• Don’t click on links in email or messages unless you’re 100% sure who the sender is, and sometimes not even then

• Use secure messaging apps (Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram) whenever possible instead of SMS

• Prefer dumb appliances and keep them off your network

Note: This book was long out of print but has now been reissued by the Project for Public Spaces, New York, and is available directly through their web site.

This is a little gem of a book by the author of the iconic The Organization Man. It’s analogous to Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but where the latter focuses primarily on residential/neighborhood fabric, this book is a well-observed set of essays focused on how indoor and outdoor urban public spaces are effectively used by the public (or not).

Like Jacobs, Whyte observes public behavior at a variety of actual indoor and outdoor spaces (the book was published in 1980) and tries to draw inferences about why some spaces work better than others, which could then be used as design guidelines when creating new spaces.

Some of the observations from those who have written about suburbanization are repeated here, such as the ineffectiveness of buildings that present an unfriendly face to the public (solid wall, tinted windows, etc., essentially a firewall between the interior and exterior.

One difference worth keeping in mind is that developers of commercial projects must provide a certain amount of public space as part of a deal to build something, or are incentivized to do so in exchange for being allowed to build more revenue-generating square footage or add height. So there’s a built in opportunity as a side-effect of commercial development to get this right (or wrong).

What makes outdoor spaces work?

People are attracted most by the presence of other people (the “self-congestion” effect) and visible activity. So the question is how to bootstrap that positive feedback loop. Much of the advice focuses on how to at least not thwart it.

• Places to sit. Sometimes, planters and berms can become unintentional places to sit. Chairs work best when they’re not fixed to the ground – despite the fact that in places with freely-movable chairs, few people move them more than a foor or so, if at all. However, architects and planners often deliberately make surfaces bad for sitting (wrong height, “decorative” iron spikes or grillwork, etc.) to prevent “undesirables” from using them. Yet as Jacobs and others have observed, the most effective way to achieve that is to have enough “desirable” people using the space: “undesirables” tend to occupy the places no one else wants to occupy. (Also, it’s debatable whether a place designed to filter its occupants is truly a “public” space.) Even stairs can attract sitters, as long as they don’t completely block the access function of the steps. In those cases, people tend to congregate near corners, where they can sit face to face rather than strictly side by side.

• Sun, grass, trees; and the relative absence of wind. Even reflected sunlight (e.g. off the side of a glass building) is better than none, and having trees for shade allows the space to be appealing even when the sun is more intense. And the draft effects of wind drafting between tall closely-packed buildings can make an otherwise pleasant space unusable.

• Food. If food is not built into the space, at least don’t chase away food that appears there, such as food trucks, vendor carts, etc. Food tends to attract people, which attracts more food, etc.

• Entertainers. Even bad entertainers are good, because the act of watching entertainment is itself social and encourages social interaction, which tends to draw more people, which encourages more social interaction, etc.

• Other things being equal, it’s more of a challenge for smaller cities to “compress” their downtowns because they have fewer people overall, so they need to compress relatively more. The large and showy plazas that often result from “revitalizing” small cities’ downtowns can look sad and deserted as a result, which (surprise) doesn’t attract people to come there.

What makes indoor spaces work?

** Self-congestion for doors. **

Some of my favorite quotes

• Regarding the repurposing of an existing historic building or oddly-shaped parcel of land: “Architects and planners like a blank slate. They usually do their best work, however, when they don’t have one. When they have to work with impossible lot lines and bits and pieces of space, beloved old eyesores, irrational street layouts, and other such constraints, they frequently produce the best of their new designs– and the most neighborly.” (p.93)

It’s a fascinating collection of essays-with-commentary on the nature of consciousness and intelligence (which, by the way, are distinct), of which one of the best known is John R. Searle’s broadside against (what was then symbolic) AI, “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, the so-called “Chinese Room paper”.

(If you just want to read this paper and the above link doesn’t work, you can find it online easily since it’s part of the reading list for so many courses, but be sure you get the original article: the correct citation is John Searle, “Minds, brains, and programs”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3):417-57 (1980). However, I recommend reading the paper in the context of this book, because Dennett and Hofstadter include a set of responses to Searle’s argument from around the academic community. One of them, the so-called “systems reply” (representing the points of view of computer scientists at Berkeley and MIT), seems particularly relevant in the age of foundation models and LLMs.)

(And if you do read that version of the paper along with the various responses, don’t miss this fascinating exchange in the New York Times Review of Books in which Dennett and Hofstadter effectively double down on the “systems reply,” which to be candid was the one with which my own views were most aligned when I first read the paper, and remain so.)

As an intellectual journey in philosophy of mind, consciousness, and intelligence, this book is hard to beat. Find it in a library near you or in a local bookstore.

Here’s how you got here:

abate convivial jentacular

I was a Kindle early adopter, and wrote about buying it and my early experiences, and later about the underused potential of the Kindle DX (such as for making textbooks usable) and my disappointment with the Kindle Fire which I didn’t realize at the time was primarily going to end up as a low-cost game tablet for the gounger set.

The book correctly observes that especially the early models seemed an awkward compromise between a “book reading experience” (easy to hold in one hand, turn pages, flip, etc.) and a “computing experience” (enter notes using a keyboard, create bookmarks, notion of “Location in book” rather than page or chapter numbers, etc.) and discusses a bit of the evolution of the UX.

From the beginning, the Kindle benefited from Amazon’s unusual collection of diverse expertise: cloud computing/networking, retail, huge scale, and data mining. Amazon’s size and publisher clout meant it could encourage publishers to digitize books, and often dictate terms; Kindle was the only e-reader to launch with a sizable library of desirable titles (c. 88,000). Similar to what happens with bookstores, Amazon’s huge catalog (>65M book titles) props up “loss leader” discounting practices, and customers in that long tail can be targeted by data mining.

The author notes the success of AWS as an example of how, rather than keeping a particular innovation for internal use only, Amazon has succeeded by virtualizing its innovations and infrastructure and reselling them: AWS resells its well engineered cloud services, “fulfillment by Amazon” lets third parties sell directly to consumers (rather than locking consumers to Amazon’s retail channel) while enabling those third parties to take advantage of Amazon’s remarkable fulfillment infrastructure. Similarly, although Amazon was by far the largest print book retailer by 2007, when the Kindle launched without any serious competitors, it had the chance to become the infrastructure for digital book distribution—offsetting any potential losses from selling fewer print books.

The combination of features, and lack of oversight since everything is automated, has led to some strange problems. For example, third-party retailers may sell an item that Amazon also sells directly, charging more for the item [suggesting the retailer doesn’t stock it but will obtain it at time of purchase] or getting metadata wrong. And CreateSpace (Amazon’s print-on-demand service) had lots of fake books by real authors whose SS# or other identifying info had been obtained by fraudsters, at least enough to link to that author “officially” on Amazon.

Kindle changed the way books are marketed and sold. Rather than hierarchies of categories, Amazon relies on data-mining the relationships among titles and among purchasers’ buying patterns (“Frequently bought together”, “You might also like”, etc.), though it “bootstrapped” its catalog from the Bowker Books In Print catalog in

1. In contrast, libraries and other channels have relied on such traditionally authoritative sources regarding metadata and discoverability. And because the data mining done in the Kindle Store (including reviews, downloads, etc.) is generally not made available to publishers, it establishes a positive feedback loop in which editions designed for Kindle Store distribution are more successful than those produced primarily for print distribution.

To keep control over the ecosystem, Amazon deliberately obfuscates and rapidly evolves the file format (which started as a Mobi/Epub derivative but has lots of Amazon-specific things now), and often disables “advanced” features supported by the format in order to avoid bugs or other undesirable behavior that would need oversight, such as SVG graphics that allow overlays. In short, the formats are designed to meet the needs of publishers and distributors, not readers.

Technical problems such as Unicode characters have been solved by having each ebook carry its own dictionary containing the information and glyphs to render only those UTF-8 characters actually used in that book. Still, the “social” challenges of getting publishers to embrace and adopt ebooks were far harder than the technical problems. The speed of technology development and the publishing tools pipeline for ebooks exists in a different universe than the process of traditional publishers (as my co-author Dave Patterson and I found out when we chose to self-publish our textbook).

But my friend’s surprising and rather deflating reaction was that that “advance” had put a bunch of people out of work, and was that really something to be happy about?

I was surprised by this reaction to say the least, not just because that hadn’t at all been the point of bringing it up, but because in general I’m a proponent of less paper mail overall in order to reduce the consumption of paper and fossil fuels that that entails, and this advance seemed compatible with that goal. That is, yeah, people did lose their jobs because of this, but I have no problem defending the conclusion that the overall effects of the change represented a net benefit to society.

And it’s not as if those displaced workers represented a major lost investment in training and experience: while the technology they use does require some training, this isn’t a craft apprenticeship where displacing a worker means tossing out years of experience (oppose, for example, a weaver, woodworker, etc.).

And then today during a lunch break, because I enjoy watching videos about how things work, I watched a great video about how automatic pin-setting machines in bowling alleys work…Guess what—they displaced workers who were hired to hang around behind the bowling lanes and manually reset pins after each frame!

Anyway, I got sufficiently irked about the whole thing that I thought to compile a list of machines that nominally took away jobs but that I’d challenge anyone to argue we aren’t better off as a society for it. Perhaps if a Luddite argued against these, that makes me a Dullite.

To limit the scope of my rant, I’m only including inventions that completely eliminated a job category, rather than ones that just diminished the number of people. So by my own definition, the automatic address recognition technology doesn’t make the list, since there are still people doing that job, just fewer of them. Similarly travel agents: many (most?) people now book travel directly online, but there are still travel agents, just fewer of them and serving more specialized markets.

Here are, in no particular order, some of the ones I thought of.

• Automatic pinsetters. c. 1952. Displaced: about one “pinboy” (yes, that was a job title) per bowling lane in the country.

• Refrigerators (1834, although they wouldn’t become popular commercially until the 1920s and residentially until the 1960s in the US). Displaced: people who worked in the supply chain of ice blocks, such as ice haulers. Presumably they were then free to do other things, such as not get permanent back injuries.

• Movies with sound (c. 1920). Displaced: hundreds of live musicians who would otherwise have provided the live musical accompaniment to silent films.

• Record players and the associated recording equipment. Displaced: Yes, we still have live performances, but I’m thinking here of Tin Pan Alley “song pluggers,” who would play sheet music in music stores so prospective customers could see if they liked the song. George Gershwin got his start that way, but when they let him go, he found his way to a new career, namely changing the face of American popular music.

• Cable cars. (I live in San Francisco, where these are a thing.) Displaced: horses and their drivers and keepers, though I imagine they probably hired about the same number of cable car operators and mechanics. And of course the horses themselves were displaced, but that beats their existing career path, which was to be worked to death on some of the steepest urban streets in the country.

• Direct dial telephone service (c. 1951 for US domestic, somewhat later for direct-dial international long distance). Displaced: telephone operators (“hello girls”), which was actually a skilled position in which experience mattered. But manually connecting every call by physically patching together a continuous circuit would probably not have scaled with the demand for phone service.

• Electronic databases for keeping client records, business records, etc. Displaced: people who did filing work. But have you ever done filing work? It’s spirit-crushing. A special subcategory is library card catalogs and circulation systems moving from manual card-based implementations to electronic ones.

• Food processors. Displaced: If you’ve ever chopped, grated, diced, blended, liquefied, pureed, and you loved it, you’re someone who might have been unhappy about these jobs being lost.

In the 1980s, when a “consumer-facing Internet” was still over a decade away, France’s Minitel system introduced French citizens to much of what they’d be doing on the Internet years later. Despite being centrally planned, its architectural combination of central control and some distributed/market-incentive features resulted in a lot of innovation and serve to test the hypothesis that only a fully-decentralized free-market Internet could have succeeded.

A central theme of the work is that unlike other implementations of videotex (e.g. the British) where content production and distribution were integrated in a proprietary system, Minitel controlled the client and network architecture but content distribution (e.g. apps) was separate, enabling a combination of free market and centralized control, not unlike the iPhone’s App Store thirty years later.

France Telecom distributed free Minitel terminals to anyone who wanted them; they were essentially smart terminals with 80x24 grayscale monitors that could also display over 300 Latin-1 glyphs as well as low-res graphics by using “semi-graphic” character glyphs (in practice, these were realized on a 2-column by 3-row grid per glyph), PSTN direct-connect modems (by default, 1200 baud down and 75 baud up, but this could be changes in software), and a chiclet keyboard. An optional smartcard reader could let the terminal function as a POS system (at a time when US retailers still used paper credit-card imprint slips) or run software from a smartcard. Clever hackers figured out how to use the terminal’s modem with PCs to create one-off BBS networks, but the mass market more or less used the device as shipped.

While clients were universal, servers were not. France’s X.25 “Transpac” packet network required providers to purchase X.25 modems and use computers that could run the protocol stack. Regional exchanges connected PSTN modem banks to Transpac and also hosted several “baseline” apps such as a user-facing directory service, a database of known Teletel services, and the routing of “short codes” (4-digit codes that Minitel users typed in to connect to a specific service; these were often on billboard and magazine ads) to the correct app in some faraway ops center.

Depending on the app, the server computers could run videotex servers or text-menu-based apps that just used the terminal’s text mode. (Indeed, Minitel is pretty much the only widely-used deployment of videotex.) Any charges for using apps appeared on the user’s phone bill, with France Telecom getting a piece of the revenue.

Sociology and technology