Readings on digital product
The Compass and the Terrain: Readings on the Direction of Digital Products
A curated reading list on product management, product leadership, and the organizational conditions that make digital products possible — from Drucker and Ohno to Cagan, Ries, and Team Topologies.
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Technologies of distinction for indiscriminate killing: What can the Israeli war on Gaza teach us about the social meaning of AI
Schwarz's central paradox — that a technology of distinction was deployed to produce indiscriminate killing — is more analytically productive than most AI critique because it refuses to locate the problem in error or bia…
Is there an ‘I’ in AI?
Hofstadter spent fifty years arguing that selfhood is an emergent loop — that the 'I' arises from recursive self-reference rather than from any special substance. That argument, made in Gödel, Escher, Bach and refined in…
When Coordination Is Avoidable: A Monotonicity Analysis of Organizational Tasks
Ju takes a question that organization theorists have circled for decades — when does coordination actually change the outcome rather than merely consuming resources? — and gives it a formal answer borrowed from distribut…
Beyond the tool view of AI: Intelligent technologies and the emergence of new epistemic regimes
Sergeeva, Leonardi, and Faraj identify a clean analytical failure in how organisations talk about AI: adoption, automation, and augmentation frameworks all presuppose that new technology is absorbed into existing authori…
LLMorphism: When humans come to see themselves as language models
Capraro names something real and undertheorised: the reverse inference problem, where LLMs that speak like humans lead people to conclude that humans think like LLMs. This is not a restatement of anthropomorphism or comp…
The Rise of AI Search: Implications for Information Markets and Human Judgement at Scale
Aral, Li, and Zuo do something rarely achieved in AI-impact research: they run a genuine global field experiment — 24,000 queries across 243 countries — rather than theorising from platform disclosures. The empirical arc…
The Division of Understanding: Specialization and Democratic Accountability
Bonomi takes a well-established result from production economics — that specialization raises output — and traces its civic cost: when cross-domain knowledge concentrates in a small integrator class, electoral competitio…
Human Trust in AI Search: A Large-Scale Experiment
Aral and Li treat the generative search interface not as a neutral conduit but as an architecture that actively shapes the epistemic dispositions of its users — a framing that connects squarely to the library's concern w…
Teaching AI to Handle Exceptions: Supervised Fine-Tuning with Human-Aligned Judgment
The paper's most productive contribution is not technical but conceptual: it demonstrates that LLMs default to rigid policy adherence even when context demands discretionary judgment, which maps directly onto the classic…
Beyond Spot Markets: How Thick Sociality in Online Labor Markets is Reshaping Firm Boundaries
The paper's central move is to challenge a foundational assumption in the theory of the firm: that complex, co-specialized work cannot be contracted out. By introducing the concept of 'thick sociality' — the dense relati…
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Carroll introduced evolutionary developmental biology -- evo-devo -- to a general audience with remarkable clarity. The central insight: a small set of ancient "toolkit" genes controls embryonic development across vastly…
Philosophy of Biology
The standard manual for philosophy of biology — if you read only one book on the subject, this is the one. Sober covers the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory with extraordinary clarity: what natural selection…
Context Engineering
Anthropic's framing of context engineering as the discipline of designing, preparing and maintaining the information a model sees, beyond the narrow craft of prompt writing. The piece reframes the relationship between or…
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 Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World
Uglow reconstructs the Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club that met monthly on the full moon between the 1760s and 1800s and included Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, and Matthew B…
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Ariely's contribution is the word "predictably": we are not randomly irrational but systematically so, and the patterns of irrationality are stable enough to study and to design for. The book walks through experiments on…
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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 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.
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.