Readings on digital product
The Shape That Repeats: Networks, Fractals, and the Geometry of Decentralisation
Why the same acentred, self-similar, scale-free structure keeps appearing across mathematics, philosophy, biology, computer science and political theory.
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AI Governance under Political Turnover: The Alignment Surface of Compliance Design
Peterson frames a problem that most AI governance literature ignores: compliance layers built to make algorithmic decisions reviewable can also be gamed by successive administrations who learn to satisfy the form of over…
The AI Layoff Trap
Falk and Tsoukalas construct a task-based competitive model to show that the real problem with AI-driven displacement is not ignorance but a classic collective action failure: each firm rationally automates while the agg…
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Hayles traced a single, consequential assumption through three waves of cybernetics, postwar science fiction, and contemporary information theory: the idea that information can be separated from the material substrate th…
Cyberculture
Lévy's project was to provide a philosophical framework for the emerging digital culture at a moment when most commentary oscillated between utopian celebration and dystopian panic. He refused both. Drawing on his earlie…
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
If The Second Self studied what people projected onto computers, Life on the Screen studied what they became inside them. Turkle spent years observing and interviewing participants in MUDs — text-based virtual environmen…
Snow Crash
If Gibson imagined cyberspace as an abstract datascape, Stephenson imagined it as an inhabited city. The "Metaverse" in Snow Crash is a virtual boulevard with real estate, architecture, social stratification, and economi…
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
Haraway's manifesto argues that the boundaries between human and machine, physical and non-physical, male and female, are not natural facts but political constructions — and that the figure of the cyborg, a hybrid of org…
Neuromancer
Gibson coined the word "cyberspace" in a short story two years earlier, but Neuromancer gave it a geography. The novel describes a "consensual hallucination" — a graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks…
Simulacra and Simulation
Baudrillard's thesis is that the distinction between reality and representation has collapsed — not because representations have improved, but because the model now precedes and generates the thing it was supposed to rep…
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Calvino wrote what may be the first novel that behaves like a hypertext system. The book is structured as a series of interrupted beginnings: the reader starts one novel, is diverted to another, begins that one, is diver…
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One
Stewart Brand — the man behind the Whole Earth Catalog, the Long Now Foundation, and How Buildings Learn — turns his attention to the vast, invisible labour of keeping things working. His argument is that maintenance, no…
The Science of YouTube
A scientific paper examining how YouTube's recommendation system shapes content consumption — the mechanics by which the platform produces the watch patterns it produces. The piece is empirical and technical, which is it…
A Rulebook for Arguments
Weston's Rulebook for Arguments is one of the shortest and sharpest books on how to construct and evaluate arguments. The rules are practical — generalise cautiously, use representative examples, address objections — and…
Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization
Simon's 1947 book is one of the foundational texts of modern management theory — the argument that real organisations make decisions through bounded rationality rather than the idealised comprehensive rationality of clas…
The Age of Agile Must End
Burnett's argument is the one many product directors have been quietly thinking but struggle to say out loud: the word "agile" has been consumed by the industry it was meant to correct, and what is sold today under its n…
The Origins of Efficiency
Potter traces the genealogy of efficiency as an organising principle — from the early factory system and interchangeable parts through Frederick Taylor's scientific management, the assembly line, statistical quality cont…
More itineraries
The Place That Was Named Before It Was Built: Literature, Philosophy, and the Invention of Digital Space
How cyberspace was imagined in fiction, designed by engineers, inhabited by communities, and questioned by philosophers — from Borges to Carr.
The Theory in the Code: A History of the Practice of Building Software
What does it mean to build software well — and who gets to decide? An itinerary through six decades of the craft, from the theoretical foundations that defined programming as an intellectual activity to the ongoing negotiation between the organisation's need for legibility and the builder's need for discretion.
From Coase to AI: Technology, Organizations, and the Frontier Between Compacting and Decentralizing
Why firms exist, why they grew, and how each technological wave redraws their boundaries — from Coase to AI.