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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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…
The Two Boundaries: Why Behavioral AI Governance Fails Structurally
McCann's central move is elegant and underexploited: Rice's theorem (1953) already proves that no behavioral layer added on top of a Turing-complete system can ever fully govern its effects — the gap between what a syste…
Collaborating with AI Agents: Field Experiments on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance
Aral and Ju run a genuinely ambitious experiment — 2,234 participants, 11,024 real advertising outputs, a live field test on X generating ~5M impressions — and use it to identify three distinct mechanisms by which AI age…
Single-Agent LLMs Outperform Multi-Agent Systems on Multi-Hop Reasoning Under Equal Thinking Token Budgets
The paper that forced the multi-agent debate to control for what it should have controlled from the start: computational budget. Tran and Kiela gave single and multi-agent LLM systems identical reasoning token budgets an…
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…
Man-Computer Symbiosis
Licklider's argument is not that computers will replace human thinking but that the interesting future is in the partnership — humans setting goals, computers handling the mechanical. He funded ARPANET to make this visio…
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Levinson tells the history of the standardized shipping container — the 20- and 40-foot steel box that reorganized world trade, destroyed old port cities, and created new ones. The story is not about invention but about…
An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma
Andy Field teaches statistics inside a sci-fi novel — a graphic-novel narrative frame in which statistical concepts are introduced as the protagonist needs them. The gimmick works: concepts that are dry in most textbooks…
Platforms, Portals, and Private Markets: A Structural Economics of Name, Image, and Likeness
The authors reframe what looks like a labor market reform as something fundamentally different: a platform-mediated private market for intangible assets. This distinction matters because it explains why standard wage-set…
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
Clinical neurology narrated as detective story. Ramachandran takes phantom limbs, anosognosia, Capgras syndrome, and other neurological conditions and uses them to illuminate how the normal brain constructs body image, e…
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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.