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Readings on digital product

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The Compass and the Terrain: Readings on the Direction of Digital Products

Annotated bibliography

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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paper · 2026

Is there an ‘I’ in AI?

D. Hofstadter

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…

paper · 2026

When Coordination Is Avoidable: A Monotonicity Analysis of Organizational Tasks

Harang Ju

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…

paper · 2026

Beyond the tool view of AI: Intelligent technologies and the emergence of new epistemic regimes

Anastasia V. Sergeeva, Paul M. Leonardi & Samer Faraj

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…

paper · 2026

LLMorphism: When humans come to see themselves as language models

Valerio Capraro

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…

paper · 2026

The Rise of AI Search: Implications for Information Markets and Human Judgement at Scale

Sinan Aral, Haiwen Li & R. Zuo

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…

paper · 2026

The Division of Understanding: Specialization and Democratic Accountability

Giampaolo Bonomi

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…

paper · 2025

Human Trust in AI Search: A Large-Scale Experiment

Haiwen Li & Sinan Aral

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…

paper · 2025

Teaching AI to Handle Exceptions: Supervised Fine-Tuning with Human-Aligned Judgment

M. DiSorbo, Harang Ju & Sinan Aral

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…

paper · 2026

Beyond Spot Markets: How Thick Sociality in Online Labor Markets is Reshaping Firm Boundaries

Christoph Riedl, Jonathan Jensen, Zachary Fulker & O. Alexy

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…

paper · 2026

The Two Boundaries: Why Behavioral AI Governance Fails Structurally

Alan L. McCann

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…

594 works in the library — showing 6 at random
book · 1958

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects

Gilbert Simondon

Simondon argued that the split between culture and technology is a modern pathology — that technical objects have their own mode of existence that deserves the same philosophical attention we give to art or language. His…

philosophycraftcomplexity
book · 2011

Programmed Visions: Software and Memory

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Chun examines the paradox at the heart of software: it promises permanence through storage yet operates through constant execution, repetition, and decay. She argues that the ideology of software — the belief that code i…

philosophymedia-theoryculture
book · 2003

Thought in a Hostile World

Kim Sterelny

How did the mind evolve under real adaptive pressure — in a world of predators, parasites, deception, and environmental unpredictability — rather than in the sanitised environment many cognitive models assume? Sterelny a…

evolutioncognitionphilosophy
paper · 2026

The AI Layoff Trap

B. Falk & Gerry Tsoukalas

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…

economicsaidecision-making
book · 1993

Usability Engineering

Jakob Nielsen

Where Card, Moran, and Newell gave HCI its theoretical foundation, Nielsen gave it a pragmatic engineering methodology. This book codified usability heuristics, discount usability testing, severity ratings for defects, a…

designcraftdata
book · 2011

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo

Banerjee and Duflo, later joint Nobel laureates, wrote the book that argued development economics had been asking the wrong question: not "what policies work" at the country level, but "what works for whom, under what co…

economicspovertyrcts

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