Power
An annotated collection of 5 books & papers on power, spanning 1929 to 2009. Featuring works by Patrick Hamilton, Humphrey Cobb, George Orwell and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Rope
Hamilton's 1929 play constructs an entire dramatic tension from a single room, a single evening, and two men who believe their intellectual superiority exempts them from moral accountability — a disposition disturbingly…
Paths of Glory
Cobb's 1935 novel reconstructs the 1915 Souain court-martial, in which French soldiers were executed not for cowardice but to satisfy a general's need to deflect blame for a failed assault. The book is a clinical anatomy…
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell's dystopian novel remains the foundational text for understanding how information architecture becomes an instrument of power. The mechanisms of Newspeak—systematic reduction of vocabulary to constrain thought—pre…
Il Gattopardo
Not a technology book, but the opening conceptual frame for how technology waves actually play out. "Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi." — if we want everything to stay as it is, everything mu…
Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder? A Study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the Last 100 Years
Owen and Davidson's article proposes hubris syndrome as an acquired personality disorder — specific patterns of behaviour that emerge in people who have held substantial power for substantial time, with a consistent set…