Books – Christopher Wink

What happens to our digital remains after we die?

By 2100, the dead could outnumber the living on Facebook, and other social platforms like it.

Centuries of hiding the dead away may come to a close as our “digital remains” may keep our ancestors around us at all times. We ought to have a plan.

So argues the Oxford researcher Carl Öhman in his new book The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care.”

The book is a mix of philosophy, technology and information sciences. It’s rich, light, short and important. I recommend it. Below I share my notes for future reference.

Living and working with AI

Artificial intelligence is a marvel that generates two unnecessarily extreme reactions: This will solve all our problems, or it will actually kill us all.

“If we focus solely on the risks or benefits of building, super intelligent machines, it robs us of our abilities to consider the more likely second and third scenarios, a world where AI is ubiquitous, but very much in human control.” That’s from the 2024 book by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick titled Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. As he writes: “Rather than being worried about one giant AI Apocalypse, we need to worry about the many small catastrophes at AI can bring.”

It’s a great read gathering the moment we are in right now. I recommend it. Below are my notes for my future reference.

The New Geography of Jobs

In 1979, Seattle and Albuquerque were comparable regions, in population, in reputation and industry.

That year, young Bill Gates and team moved their fledgling computer company Microsoft back home to Seattle — and that changed everything. A generation later, Albuquerque native Jeff Bezos decided to move his own early ecommerce company Amazon to Seattle because Microsoft built an ecosystem there. Today, Seattle is a top-tier innovation economy, by my news organization’s own measure, and Albuquerque isn’t even on the map.

Where once regional economies sought physical capital, they now pursue human capital, and there’s a flywheel effect for people even more than the agglomeration effects of industry. So argues the influential 2012 book The New Geography of Jobs, written by economist Enrico Moretti.

This matters because like manufacturing in the 20th century, the knowledge sector is the driver of the economy today. All those “tradable jobs” create all the non-tradable ones that follow. Put another way, if you lcoate a tech firm or manufacturing plant in a town, then a Walmart will follow — but not the other way. All those productive workers make everyone else more productive too, for three big reasons: complementarity, better technology and externalities.

Globalization was supposed to mean “the world was flat” Instead, geography matters even more. Below find my notes for future reference.

Word Origins: how etymology interprets English

How language evolves is better understood today because of a few obsessively written forms, and the development of comparative techniques. This is etymology, a science of irrational human culture that requires the balance of simple elegance and rigorous complexity.

The obscure science of etymology is broadly known but not widely considered. Years into a curiosity with linguistics, I picked up the 2005 book from lexicographer John Ayto called Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z.

It wasn’t quite what I expected — less a detailed account of the process and more a charming walk through hundreds of word origins to demonstrate the start and stop discovery process. It still does better convey the process, and fits alongside broader popular books on linguistics

Below are my notes for future reference.

Why has war lasted for thousands of years?

The first recorded war involved the Sumerians in Mesopotamia almost 5,000 years ago. Prehistoric war is thought to be far older. Can we ever get rid of it?

Margaret Mead said war is older than the jury system but no less an invention to address conflict, and so it can be removed. As the anthropologist Douglas Fry more recently wrote: “War like slavery before it can be abolished.”

Whether peace or war is the more natural human state is disputed and complicated.

That’s from the 2024 book Why War?, which recasts an old question that previous literature has addressed, this time from British historian Richard Overy. The book is largely a review of the literature on war. All the disciplines in these chapters build on each other, starting in evolution, biologically evolved to demonstrated aggression.

“Warfare,” Overy wrote “ is not in our genes, but for our genes.” There is still a role for historians (and therefore journalists) to interpret the specific human actions of “why THIS war” but there is also a broad universal answer to the question Why War: It’s been an effective means to resolve dispute, despite considerable cost, so war emerged from our systems by hijacking our instincts.

Or as the author himself concludes: “The co-evolution of culture and biology for most of the long human past created conditions within which nature and nurture together, not either one or the other, reinforced the resort to violence when regarded as necessary or advantageous.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

What are luxury beliefs?

Rich people say one thing, but they do another.

Tech executives don’t let their kids get addicted to screens. Activists who called to defund the police lived in places that didn’t rely on cops. Well-paid professionals say marriage isn’t necessary for a kid to thrive, and publicly self-efface by saying their success was luck, but they’re much more likely to get and stay married than working class families — and they make sure their kids work hard.

These are all examples of “luxury beliefs” a catchy concept from foster kid and Air Force veteran turned new young conservative thinker and writer Rob Henderson. He expounded on the topic in his February 2024 memoir entitled “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”

As he wrote: “The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs.”

I enjoyed his bestseller, and found it thoughtful and critical. Because of our partisan era, it’s easily pushed by one side and dismissed by another. But I think his perspective has merit for all, even those who don’t like everything he has to say. I certainly appreciated it.

Below I share my notes from the book for future reference.

Burn Book by Kara Swisher

Thirty years of tech journalism faces similar challenges to other beat reporters, like getting too close to sources and missing broader trends. Other characteristics are unique to tech-savvy journos: having an entrepreneurial bent, relying on live events, both for news and for revenue, and being especially entrenched in a community you help grow but also report critically on.

Among tech reporting’s founding disciples is Kara Swisher, who published earlier this year a memoir called Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, and knows these challenges well.

The influential, if controversial, veteran went from Washington Post to Wall Street Journal, before launching with her mentor Walt Mossberg a conference series and then an independent news site All Things Digital. She went on to a series of ventures and editorial posts. She’s among the longest-running Silicon Valley insider-journalists — and in that way, the godmother of the journalism I’ve brought to second-wave geographies with Technical.ly.

She’s navigated extended disclosures and been called both overly boosterish and too critical. In my far smaller way, it’s all familiar to me. I enjoyed the book for that reason, though it grated on me in other ways. Even for someone as accomplished as she, the book reads as self-aggrandizing — very few mentions of her staff, and even fewer expressions of where she had fallen short. Nearly everyone she introduces appears to have failed to take her sound counsel.

Yet I do respect what she did for our craft, and I appreciate her in contrast to the longer-running Silicon Valley insider publication TechCrunch, founded in 2005 by investor Mike Arrington. She defines herself as a teller-of-truths to power, calling Silicon Valley “assisted living for millennials.”

I, too, have navigated cheering on good, dynamic parts of our economy with its frequent misuse. Big tech wants to be regulated lightly like media companies but they want to be blameless for how their platforms are used, like a telephone company. The age of the internet and software has meant near infinite scaling, resulting in untested boy kings like Mark Zuckerberg, whom Kara has long criticized.

As she writes: “The innovators and executives ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives.”

That much has influenced how I balance my work. Below I share my notes for future reference.

The Creative Spark of humanity

Hominins are a bush of species millions of years old, not one line leading to homo sapiens. Even if we’re the last standing. Our defining characteristic is coordination and creativity.

That’s from the 2017 book “The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional” written by anthropologist Agustín Fuentes.

I enjoyed his curation of academic research into an approachable narrative. Below I share my notes for future reference.

All the News That’s Fit to Sell: notes on mass media business models from the 2003 book by James T. Hamilton

The fractured media landscape we have today was already breaking apart two decades ago, and the economic models that underpin them predicted what we have today.

That’s the benefit of reading All the News That’s Fit to Sell, a 2003 book from James T. Hamilton, a well-respected journalism professor. I’ve read Hamilton’s work before, and this book was one I’ve long had on my list. I enjoyed the work, which is just as relevant 20 years later.

His research is helpful for my understanding of journalism models that I’ve spent my entire career working on. The book is also helpful for those interested in a dispassionate outline of the beginnings of the digital transformation of media – which we’re now fully immersed in.

Below I share notes for my future reflection.