She had been doing this for some time when a man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can’t save all these starfish. You can’t begin to make a difference!”

The girl seemed crushed, suddenly deflated. But after a few moments, she bent down, picked up another starfish, and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied, “Well, I made a difference for that one!”

– Adapted from “The Star Thrower” by Loren C. Eiseley.

• Introduction
• Commencement Address
  • Connecting the dots
  • Love and loss
  • Death
  • Final remarks

Introduction

It now gives me great pleasure to introduce this year’s commencement speaker, Steve Jobs – the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Apple and Pixar Animation Studios. Stanford University has been characterized since its founding by willingness to be bold and to strike out new directions, and this is a characteristic very much shared by today’s speaker. A pioneer and visionary for almost three decades, his name and the companies he has founded have been synonymous with innovation and creativity.

As a young boy, growing up in Los Altos, Steve Jobs came of age at the same time as Silicon Valley. While still in school, he attended lectures informally at Stanford as well as at Hewlett Packard, where he spent his summer working.

After graduating from high school, he left California to attend Reed College. A trek through India, and a short stint as video game designer for Atari followed.

Soon after his return to the Valley in 1974 he became a regular, along with Steve Wozniak, at meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, held at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. It was not long before the two of them had built the prototype for the Apple I.

The Apple I was very fast at the time, reading and writing four kilobytes in about twenty seconds. About 20,000 times slower than we do so today.

The Apple II was faster still, but more importantly introduced color monitors into the home market. In the mid-1980’s the Macintosh became the first truly user friendly personal computer. You didn’t have to be an expert to set it up, or to load software or to transfer information between applications. And the mouse offered point-and-click convenience, and opened the door to computer literacy for everyone.

I still remember the amazed faces of onlookers, as they saw a computer that was completely different from the personal computers of that day.

Steve also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, which has revolutionized the film industry, in its short history, with a brilliant use of technology, and produced two Academy Award winning films: Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

Since his return to Apple 8 years ago, Steve has reinvented the company once again, extending its vision to music and new digital media. iPod and iTunes have changed the way we listen to, organize, store and purchase our music. And in my case, the way I often read books.

Now songs we love are just $0.99, and a completely legal click away. iPhoto and iMovie revolutionized the ability of consumers to organize, edit and display digital photography and video, putting capabilities that once cost thousands of dollars, into the hands of every Mac user.

Steve is also widely recognized for his ability to create an innovative environment inside Apple, as well as an external company image that is equally innovative.

Just think about Apple’s marketing campaigns over the past three decades — a promotional flyer in 1976 showed Isaac Newton sitting under a tree just as an apple was falling by, with the catchy exhortation to byte (B-Y-T-E) into an Apple.

There was an iconic Super Bowl commercial, telling us that the Macintosh was on the horizon, and assuring us that we would see why 1984 wouldn’t be like 1984.

And in the late 1990’s we saw banners and billboards, featuring Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Martha Graham, and Mahatma Gandhi all urging us to think different. Steve Jobs understands that creativity and innovation start by thinking differently. He has a deep rooted belief in the power of education to transform lives coupled with a desire to make the world a better place.

From the earliest days of Apple, he worked to develop partnerships with educators and get computers into schools. For almost three decades, he and his companies have provided invaluable technology and supports to schools and communities increasing accessibility to information for learners of all ages.

More than 100 years ago in describing his vision for a new university Leland Stanford wrote: “The imagination needs to be cultivated and developed to assure success in life”. Stanford clearly understood that technical knowledge was only the starting point for creation and discovery.

Steve Jobs understands that the computer is a very powerful tool in a technical sense, but that its true power lies in the ability to unleash the imagination and creativity of the user.

As explained to the New York Times in a 1997 interview, the Macintosh turned out so well, because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets, and historians, who also happened to be excellent computer scientists. And last fall a Businessweek reporter asked how he manages for innovation — his answer was deceptively simple: “We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.”

Steve Jobs personifies the spirit and creativity that have characterized this university since its founding 114 years ago and we are pleased to have him here today.

Please join me in warmly welcoming this year’s commencement speaker, Steve Jobs.

Commencement Address

Thank you. I am honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college. And this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

Connecting the dots

The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.

So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the $0.05 deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference.

Love and loss

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did.

The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. And don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

Death

My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.

My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and thankfully I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Final remarks

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. And I have always wished that for myself.

And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Based on “Lois Schaefer, at 95” by Bryan Marquard. Reprinted without permission.

Schaefer was determined to never make a mistake on her notoriously difficult instrument, which sometimes waits silently through portions of concerts, only to suddenly be highlighted for all ears to hear. “I’m either bored to death or scared to death,” she told a Concord newspaper in 1980, “although it’s not as nerve-wracking as it used to be.”

A groundbreaking musician who had been one of only four women in the BSO in the mid-1960s, Ms. Schaefer was 95 when she died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on Jan. 31, 2020 in Sequim, Wash., where she lived in retirement with her older sister, a former cellist with the orchestra.

“For her 25 years as solo piccolo, Lois Schaefer has been the highest, brightest voice in the Boston Symphony Orchestra,” Globe music critic Richard Dyer wrote in 1990, when she retired from the BSO and the Pops.

Ms. Schaefer approached playing the piccolo and flute “with great care about technique and correct positions,” said her sister, Winifred Mayes, who in the mid-1950s was the first woman hired for the BSO’s string section. “It somehow suited her personality, which was that way, too. She was meticulous in every way.”

“She played with such quality,” Leone Buyse, a former acting principal flute with the BSO and former principal flutist for the Boston Pops, said of Ms. Schaefer. “She was so consistent,” added Buyse, who is now a flute professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston. “You could count on Lois to always get the job done. Consistency is a prime requisite in the orchestral field, and she was solid as a rock.”

During her quarter-century with the Pops and the BSO, Ms. Schaefer drew consistently glowing notices. “To hear her in a Rossini overture is like watching the sunlight dance on rippling water,” Dyer wrote in 1990. “She can also break your heart with a perfectly placed high pianissimo in a Mahler or Shostakovich slow movement.” He added that Ms. Schaefer was “a great artist who has mastered an impossible instrument.”

Dyer even tipped his hat to her playing on nights when he was less impressed with the rest of the orchestra’s overall performance. Reviewing a 1980 BSO concert at Tanglewood, he likened her performance to “showering diamond dust.” In 1986, Dyer wrote that her piccolo playing was “iridescent” during a Symphony Hall offering of a Ravel selection, conducted by Seiji Ozawa. “Seiji really appreciated her artistry and her collegiality,” Buyse recalled.

Ms. Schaefer “was very, very happy in Boston,” her sister said. “She loved the orchestra and the people in it. She always felt very secure and warm towards them, and they towards her. I think it was perfect for her.”

The younger of two sisters, Lois Elizabeth Schaefer was born in Yakima, Wash., on March 10, 1924. Her father, Charles Frederick Schaefer, was a fruit industry broker. Her mother, Mary Elizabeth Wherry, had been a schoolteacher and taught her daughters piano.

“For me, it was wonderful, I enjoyed it,” Winifred recalled. “For Lois, it was the other side of the coin. Lois did not enjoy piano lessons, and in fact rebelled against them.”

In elementary school, Ms. Schaefer was offered a choice of other instruments. “I said the trumpet,” she recalled in a 1990 Globe interview. “When my mother heard that, she said, ‘You will not,’ and suggested the clarinet. But when I tried the clarinet, all I could do was squawk, so that’s when I took up the flute.”

Given the dearth of flute teachers in Yakima in that era, as a youth Ms. Schaefer was “mostly self-taught, which is unbelievable,” her sister said. Ms. Schaefer saved money from playing in a trio in the Yakima area to spend a summer at the Interlochen music camp in Michigan.

“I was first out of 27 flutists there,” she recalled in the 1980 interview with the Concord publication. “I guess that was the signal that I might make a career in music.”

Setting her sights on Boston, she studied at New England Conservatory with Georges Laurent, a former principal flutist with the BSO.

She initially played piccolo professionally with the orchestra for a musical at the Shubert Theater.

“In those days you didn’t study the piccolo; it was sort of incidental, and you picked it up while you were learning the flute,” she said in 1990. “So there were a lot of things I had to figure out in a hurry.”

Though the piccolo and flute share fingerings, everything else is “diabolically opposed,” she said, adding that she would initially practice piccolo pieces on the flute to solve fingering challenges.

“That may be why I have the sound I do, because the sound of the flute is in my ear, and that is what I bring to the piccolo,” she said. “I practice on the piccolo as the final step before the performance.”

After graduating from New England Conservatory, she performed with the Chicago Symphony and the New York City Opera, filling in at one point for a major BSO foreign tour at the outset of the 1960s.

In 1965, she was hired by the BSO, where she stayed until retiring as principal piccolo in 1990, also having been principal piccolo for the Pops. In addition, she was a board member of the National Flute Association, which honored her in 1993 with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Ms. Schafer formerly lived in Jamaica Plain for many years with her cat, Vivaldi. She gardened there and at her summer place in the Berkshires for the Tanglewood part of the season.

“She had beautiful gardens,” said her nephew Nick Winograd of Spring Mills, Pa.

In the few weeks between the summer and fall concert seasons, Ms. Schaefer and her sister met in Washington State to camp and hike, often around Mount Rainier.

“That was such a bonding thing,” said Winifred, who is 100 and Ms. Schaefer’s only immediate survivor. “We never, never got over that beautiful period of our vacations together. They were so stunning in the beauties of nature. And we became so close at that time. It was quite remarkable. It was just one beautiful thing after another.”

No service is planned for Ms. Schaefer, who in retirement lived with her sister, first in Arizona and then in Sequim.

It was “a great honor” to perform with the BSO, Ms. Schaefer told the Globe in 1990, though upon retiring she was ready to leave certain piccolo challenges behind.

“I remember thinking during the Mahler 10th that the high F-sharp at the end was my last note of my last winter season,” she said. “I’m not going to miss that note, or the last note of the first movement of the Shostakovich 10th. I loved to play Ravel’s ‘Mother Goose’ and Rossini overtures, and I will miss those.”

Based on “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss” by Paul Graham. Reprinted without permission.

I began to suspect this after spending several years working with startup founders. I’ve now worked with over 200 of them, and I’ve noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. I wouldn’t say founders seem happier, necessarily; starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put it is to say that they’re happier in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts.

Though they’re statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be working in a way that’s more natural for humans.

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I’d only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They’re like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn’t the life they were designed for.

Trees

What’s so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I’ve read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they’re getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. [1]

Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.

Companies know groups that large wouldn’t work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.

These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I’ve never heard anyone mention explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It’s really a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person’s worth of freedom between them.

In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree. [2] Anyone who’s worked for a large organization has felt this. You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.

Corn Syrup

A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers have much more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but they don’t generally tell them what to do and when the way a boss can. It’s not your boss’s fault. The real problem is that in the group above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person. Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you.

So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels like the kind of group you’re meant to work in, but something major is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you’re meant to like, but is disastrously lacking in others. Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what’s wrong with the usual sort of job.

For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do, at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food shows that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you’d probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories. “Normal” food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing weirdos in Berkeley.

If “normal” food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal. You may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first couple bites feels great. The other is economies of scale. Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn’t. Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it’s worth spending a lot to market it.

If people have to choose between something that’s cheap, heavily marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that’s expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you think most will choose?

It’s the same with work. The average MIT graduate wants to work at Google or Microsoft, because it’s a recognized brand, it’s safe, and they’ll get paid a good salary right away. It’s the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of malaise.

And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority of the population, they’re the ones living as humans are meant to. In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.

Programmers

The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. Sales people make much the same pitches every day; support people answer much the same questions; but once you’ve written a piece of code you don’t need to write it again. So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. And when you’re part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, you’re going to face resistance when you do something new.

This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It’s true even in the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder who considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to work for Google instead because he thought he’d learn more there. He didn’t learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing, and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn’t—sometimes because the company wouldn’t let him, but often because the company’s code wouldn’t let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a fraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he has learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has to do all the company’s errands as well as programming, because at least when he’s programming he can do whatever he wants.

An obstacle downstream propagates upstream. If you’re not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. And vice versa: when you can do whatever you want, you have more ideas about what to do. So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same way a low-restriction exhaust system makes an engine more powerful.

Working for yourself doesn’t have to mean starting a startup, of course. But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a big company and their own startup is probably going to learn more doing the startup.

You can adjust the amount of freedom you get by scaling the size of company you work for. If you start the company, you’ll have the most freedom. If you become one of the first 10 employees you’ll have almost as much freedom as the founders. Even a company with 100 people will feel different from one with 1000.

Working for a small company doesn’t ensure freedom. The tree structure of large organizations sets an upper bound on freedom, not a lower bound. The head of a small company may still choose to be a tyrant. The point is that a large organization is compelled by its structure to be one.

Consequences

That has real consequences for both organizations and individuals. One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger, no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo. It’s a consequence of the tree structure that every large organization is forced to adopt.

Or rather, a large organization could only avoid slowing down if they avoided tree structure. And since human nature limits the size of group that can work together, the only way I can imagine for larger groups to avoid tree structure would be to have no structure: to have each group actually be independent, and to work together the way components of a market economy do.

That might be worth exploring. I suspect there are already some highly partitionable businesses that lean this way. But I don’t know any technology companies that have done it.

There is one thing companies can do short of structuring themselves as sponges: they can stay small. If I’m right, then it really pays to keep a company as small as it can be at every stage. Particularly a technology company. Which means it’s doubly important to hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of them to solve a given problem.

For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

In an essay I wrote a couple years ago I advised graduating seniors to work for a couple years for another company before starting their own. I’d modify that now. Work for another company if you want to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own startup, go ahead.

The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately was that I felt most would fail. And they will. But ambitious programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than going to work at a big company. Certainly they’ll learn more. They might even be better off financially. A lot of people in their early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school. At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be zero rather than negative. [3]

We’ve now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company. The people who’ve worked for a few years do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only because they’re that much older.

The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of conservative. It’s hard to say how much is because big companies made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that made them work for the big companies in the first place. But certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I’ve seen it burn off.

Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they’re transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they’ve grown several inches taller. [4] Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I’d describe the way lions seem in the wild.

Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own startup they seem to come to life, because finally they’re working the way people are meant to.

◼︎

[1] When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean by evolution.

[2] It’s not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagates up as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead of just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.

[3] Do not finance your startup with credit cards. Financing a startup with debt is usually a stupid move, and credit card debt stupidest of all. Credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It is a trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish.

[4] The founders we fund used to be younger (initially we encouraged undergrads to apply), and the first couple times I saw this I used to wonder if they were actually getting physically taller.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, Aaron Iba, Abby Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

Biilitis was a fictional Greek courtesan who lived in the sixth century BC. In the Louÿs poems, she reflects on the events of her life. Claude Debussy set to music three poems that describe intimate encounters between Biilitis and the shepherd boy Lykas, her first lover.

• Performance
  • 1. La flûte de Pan
  • 2. La chevelure
  • 3. Le tombeau des Naïades
• Artists

Performance

In 2008, the Gardner Museum in Boston presented a performance of Trois Chansons de Bilitis by mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and pianist Pei-Yao Wang. A recording of this fine performance was made available in episode 57 of the podcast “The Concert”.

1. La flûte de Pan

2. La chevelure

3. Le tombeau des Naïades

Artists

Two-time Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke has been called a “luminous standout” (New York Times) and “equal parts poise, radiance and elegant directness” (Opera News). Ms. Cooke is sought after by the world’s leading orchestras, opera companies, and chamber music ensembles for her versatile repertoire and commitment to new music.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Pei-Yao Wang was the youngest pianist ever to receive the overall First Prize in the Taiwan National Piano Competition, at the age of eight. Four years later, she was invited to study at The Curtis Institute of Music, where she worked with Seymour Lipkin and Institute Director Gary Graffman. She then studied with Claude Frank at Yale University, where she received the Master of Music degree, and also pursued a concentration in architecture. She has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia, including venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and Suntory Hall. She is currently a member of Chamber Music Society Two at Lincoln Center, a program to promote emerging artists.

Sure, as individuals they probably have Facebook profiles and may even be part of the demographic that spends up to an hour a day engaging there. However, experience tell us that most are there to stay in touch with their family and friends, laugh at pictures of cats flushing the toilet, or playing Words with Friends. It’s a diversion or “down time” vs. “business time” and that’s not a conducive environment to building a professional relationship between our business and our audience.

Core Memory Music receives more customer inquiries from the engagement generated on our website and our radio ads than we would ever generate on a social networking site where the latest celebrity gossip is going viral.

We’re not suggesting that all businesses abandon Facebook and other social networks. Local businesses, where owners and staff can also have personal relationships with prospects, customers, and advocates, could do very well at generating leads and improving customer service.

The point is don’t follow the advice of every “social media rock star” and social marketing software salesperson who claims they can improve your business through Facebook engagement. Think independently.

Social media marketing success won’t come from just advertising on Facebook, which is really what Facebook for business is. It’s about developing an ongoing relationship with my audience that will start with interested music lovers who turn into customers and customers who turn into advocates.

If that relationship is centralized on a social network where you’re paying to engage a small segment of your potential audience while competing with the latest YouTube video, how successful can you be? The customer relationship promised by social media marketing must be owned and centralized on your own digital properties.

[Adapted without permission from a Sensei Marketing blog post published in March 2015]

An interview with Dr. Sherry Turkle

Why do we love our devices so much?

On a deep level, they offer us the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy or challenges to empathy.

Second, they mean that we never have to be bored. Boredom is something that is so important to our psychology and development. The signal achievement of childhood is the capacity to be bored and to transform that into solitude and creativity and looking within the self.

Boredom is also one of the most painful experiences. Devices make us not have to face it.

Solitude is something we don’t talk about enough. If you don’t have the capacity for solitude — and I think this is the most important finding in my work — you really can’t form relationships. As a great psychologist said, if you don’t teach your children to be alone, they’ll only know how to be lonely.

What that means is, if you’re always looking to somebody for validation, you’ll always need other people. You’ll always feel lonely if you always need validation. People don’t like to be around those kinds of people.

And the third thing is that our phones make us feel less vulnerable. I say to students, “Come to office hours. I’m here. Come! People pay to talk to me!” They’d rather send a text. They don’t want to feel vulnerable.

With a phone, we can massage our message and make it seem perfect, present ourselves to other people the way we want to be seen by other people.

If I really have to talk to somebody, things come out. It comes out if I’m depressed. You can hear it. And people may say, “What’s the matter?” And maybe I don’t want to tell you what’s the matter. Maybe I would feel I’d have to lie, because it’s too intimate to tell you what’s the matter.

Sometimes people fear the other person isn’t interested. And you know what? Sometimes the other person isn’t interested. You have to confront that.

The point is, you have to confront your own vulnerability. And that’s not a lot of fun.

There’s a lot about being in life that’s difficult and challenging. If you’re on the screen, you get to avoid all that. Going to a device just feels like the happier choice. But we pay a price.

Do our devices make us lonely?

There are a lot of reasons why we’re lonely. So many of our social mores and institutions that used to bring us together don’t.

When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that had social clubs. It’s never delightful to glamorize one’s youth. My neighborhood was poor. But people felt part of the neighborhood. This was in Rockaway Beach, Long Island.

No vegetable ever occurred in that neighborhood. It was not on the radar. But people felt truly part of the neighborhood. There were clubs, there were organizations, the Democratic Party held a dance, other parties held dances too. The Catholic Church had block parties and events.

There was no loneliness because you sat on your porch if you were elderly, and you talked with all the other elderly people sitting on their porches. All the porches faced the courtyard. So you dragged your chair there in the summer to get some sun, and you all sat talking to each other and watching the babies.

You didn’t need to bring pet robots to these people, the way my colleagues are trying to bring pet robots to elderly people. They played with babies all day.

They weren’t a bit lonely. They lived in a meaningful neighborhood. People organized the way they lived — and the way buildings were built — around the idea that people wanted to hang out with each other.

I now live in two high rises. Honestly, I don’t know who lives to the left and right of me. I make it a point to know who I work with at MIT, but everybody knows that you have to struggle to create any kind of community now.

To take my bony finger and say it’s all the fault of cellphones and Facebook would be very naïve. However, it is not the case that Facebook is helping.

If you’re a popular high school student and you’re outgoing and swept up in the world, Facebook is not going to do you a lot of harm. It’s not like it’s blocking you from your friends. I’m not making the case that you’re stopping your party life or your club life. But there is a community that is hurting.

There’s the 35-year-old nurse I followed for quite a time. She comes home from a shift and a half, she’s single, she’s a lovely woman, and she used to make a point to go out for a light bite, a drink with a friend. She used to get out just to stay in touch with people.

Now she comes home and gets on Facebook for three hours. Because she’s exhausted and it’s easier.

Are you seen as anti-technology at MIT?

I think there’s a split. On the faculty are people who are making robots to do psychotherapy, to read to babies. I think we have to ask, constantly, “Why do we want this?” Why do we want Alexa to pretend she cares? What human value is served? What is pretend empathy going to get me?

They say, “It will make you feel good.” What about inauthenticity makes me feel good?

What if living in an authoritarian state makes us feel like we’ve taken Valium? I don’t want to. I want to vote. My highest value is not that the trains are on time. I want to be free.

So on the one hand you have a runaway engineering mentality that I think is dominant because it’s funded. Everybody wants a robot that will do psychotherapy. But If you don’t have empathy, you don’t have psychotherapy. The robot doesn’t know about life.

I think we’ll be slogging this out for a very long time.

OLD TOM BOMBADIL. Possibly the least liked character in The Lord of the Rings. A childish figure so disliked by fans of the book that few object to his absence from all adaptations of the story. And yet, there is another way of looking at Bombadil, based only on what appears in the book itself, that paints a very different picture of this figure of fun.

What do we know about Tom Bombadil? He is fat and jolly and smiles all the time. He is friendly and gregarious and always ready to help travellers in distress.

Except that none of that can possibly be true.

Consider: By his own account (and by Elrond’s surprisingly sketchy knowledge) Bombadil has lived in the Old Forest since before the hobbits came to the Shire. Since before Elrond was born. Since the earliest days of the First Age.

And yet no hobbit has ever heard of him.

The guise in which Bombadil appears to Frodo and his companions is much like a hobbit writ large. He loves food and songs and nonsense rhymes and drink and company. Any hobbit who saw such a person would tell tales of him. Any hobbit who was rescued by Tom would sing songs about him and tell everyone else. Yet Merry – who knows all the history of Buckland and has ventured into the Old Forest many times – has never heard of Tom Bombadil. Frodo and Sam – avid readers of old Bilbo’s lore – have no idea that any such being exists, until he appears to them. All the hobbits of the Shire think of the Old Forest as a place of horror – not as the abode of a jolly fat man who is surprisingly generous with his food.

If Bombadil has indeed lived in the Old Forest all this time – in a house less than twenty miles from Buckland – then it stands to reason that he has never appeared to a single hobbit traveller before, and has certainly never rescued one from death. In the 1400 years since the Shire was settled.

What do we know about Tom Bombadil? He is not what he seems.

Elrond, the greatest lore-master of the Third Age, has never heard of Tom Bombadil. Elrond is only vaguely aware that there was once someone called Iarwain Ben-Adar (“Oldest and Fatherless”) who might be the same as Bombadil. And yet, the main road between Rivendell and the Grey Havens passes not 20 miles from Bombadil’s house, which stands beside the most ancient forest in Middle Earth. Has no elf ever wandered in the Old Forest or encountered Bombadil in all these thousands of years? Apparently not.

Gandalf seems to know more, but he keeps his knowledge to himself. At the Council of Elrond, when people suggest sending the Ring to Bombadil, Gandalf comes up with a surprisingly varied list of reasons why that should not be done. It is not clear that any of the reasons that he gives are the true one.

Now, in his conversation with Frodo, Bombadil implies (but avoids directly stating) that he had heard of their coming from Farmer Maggot and from Gildor’s elves (both of whom Frodo had recently described). But that also makes no sense. Maggot lives west of the Brandywine, remained there when Frodo left, and never even knew that Frodo would be leaving the Shire. And if Elrond knows nothing of Bombadil, how can he be a friend of Gildor’s?

What do we know about Tom Bombadil? He lies.

A question: what is the most dangerous place in Middle Earth? First place goes to the Mines of Moria, home of the Balrog, but what is the second most dangerous place? Tom Bombadil’s country.

By comparison, Mordor is a safe and well-run land, where two lightly-armed hobbits can wander for days without meeting anything more dangerous than themselves. Yet the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs, all part of Tom’s country, are filled with perils that would tax anyone in the Fellowship except perhaps Gandalf.

Now, it is canonical in Tolkein that powerful magical beings imprint their nature on their homes. Lorien under Galadriel is a place of peace and light. Moria, after the Balrog awoke, was a place of terror to which lesser evil creatures were drawn. Likewise, when Sauron lived in Mirkwood, it became blighted with evil and a home to monsters.

And then, there’s Tom Bombadil’s Country.

The hobbits can sense the hatred within all the trees in the Old Forest. Every tree in that place is a malevolent huorn, hating humankind. Every single tree. And the barrows of the ancient kings that lie nearby are defiled and inhabited by Barrow-Wights. Bombadil has the power to control or banish all these creatures, but he does not do so. Instead, he provides a refuge for them against men and other powers. Evil things – and only evil things – flourish in his domain. “Tom Bombadil is the master” Goldberry says. And his subjects are black huorns and barrow wights.

What do we know about Tom Bombadil? He is not the benevolent figure that he pretends to be.

Tom appears to the Ringbearer in a friendly, happy guise, to question and test him and to give him and his companions swords that can kill the servants of another evil power. But his motives are his own.

Consider: it is said more than once that the willows are the most powerful and evil trees in the Forest. Yet, the rhyme that Bombadil teaches the hobbits to use in conjuring up Bombadil himself includes the line, “By the reed and willow.” The willows are a part of Bombadil’s power and a means of calling on him. They draw their strength from the cursed river Withywindle, the centre of all the evil in the Forest.

And the springs of the Withywindle are right next to Tom Bombadil’s house.

And then there is Goldberry, “the river-daughter”. She is presented as Bombadil’s wife, an improbably beautiful and regal being who charms and beguiles the hobbits. It is implied that she is a water spirit, and she sits combing her long, blonde hair after the manner of a mermaid. (And it is worth remembering that mermaids were originally seen as monsters, beautiful above the water, slimy and hideous below, luring sailors to drown and be eaten.) But I suggest the name means that in her true state, Goldberry is nourished by the River – that is, by the proverbially evil Withywindle.

In folklore and legend (as Tolkien would know well) there are many tales of creatures that can take on human form but whose human shape always contains a clue to their true nature. So what might Goldberry be? She is tall and slender - specifically she is “slender as a willow wand”. She wears a green dress, sits amidst bowls of river water and is surrounded by the curtain of her golden hair. I suggest that she is a Willow tree conjured into human form, a malevolent huorn like the Old Man Willow from whom the hobbits have just escaped. If she is not indeed the same tree.

So, if this is true, then why does Bombadil save and help the ringbearer and his companions? Because they can bring about the downfall of Sauron, the current Dark Lord of Middle Earth. When Sauron falls, the other rings will fail and the wizards and elves will leave Middle Earth and the only great power that is left will be Bombadil.

There is a boundary around Bombadil’s country that he cannot or will not pass, something that confines him to a narrow space. And in return, no wizard or elf comes into his country to see who rules it, or to disturb the evil creatures that gather under his protection.

When the hobbits return to the Shire after their journey to Mordor, Gandalf leaves them close to Bree and goes towards Bombadil’s country to have words with him. We do not know what they say. But Gandalf was sent to Middle Earth to contend against Sauron and now he must depart. He has been given no mission to confront Bombadil and he must soon leave Middle Earth to powerless men and hobbits, while Bombadil remains, waiting to fulfill his purpose.

Do I think that Tolkien planned things in this way? Not at all, but I find it an interesting speculation.

To speculate further and more wildly:

The spell that binds Bombadil to his narrow and cursed country was put in place centuries ago by the Valar to protect men and elves. It may last a few decades more, perhaps a few generations of hobbit lives. But when the last elf has gone from the havens and the last spells of rings and wizards unravel, then it will be gone. And Iarwain Ben-Adar, Oldest and Fatherless, who was ruler of the darkness in Middle Earth before Sauron was, before Morgoth set foot there, before the first rising of the sun, will come into his inheritance again. And one dark night the old trees will march westward into the Shire to feed their ancient hatred. And Bombadil will dance down amongst them, clad in his true shape at last, singing his incomprehensible rhymes as the trees mutter their curses and the black and terrible Barrow-Wights dance and gibber around him. And he will be smiling.

Based on “Stop Reading the News” by Rolf Dobelli. Reprinted without permission.

We are in this sad condition because 200 years ago we invented a toxic form of knowledge called news. The time has come to recognize the detrimental effects that news has on individuals and societies, and to take the necessary steps to shield us from its dangers.

At core, we are cavemen in suits and dresses. Our brains are optimized for a hunter-gatherer environment where we lived in small bands of 25 to 100 individuals with limited food and information sources. Our brains (and our bodies) now live in a world that is the opposite of what we are designed to handle. This leads to great risk and to inappropriate, outright dangerous behavior.

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognized the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome) and have started to shift our diets.

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no satiation. Unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright colored candies for the mind.

Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information overload that we faced 20 years ago with food intake. We are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be and we are learning to take the first steps toward an information diet.

This is my attempt to clarify the dangers of the most toxic form of information – news – and to provide some recommendations about how to deal with it. I have now gone without news for a year, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first hand: less disruption, more time, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more insights. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it.

My good friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb was one of the first people to recognize news consumption as a serious problem. I owe most of the following insights to him.

News misleads us systematically

News reports do not represent the real world.

Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people-related, story-formatted, fast changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on things that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias.

The news media, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if it is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty.

The highly visible misleads us.

Take the following event. A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? On the car. On the person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). What kind of person he is (was). But – that is all completely irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lingering for a while.

The car doesn’t matter at all. It could have been any car that caused the bridge to collapse. It could have been a strong wind or a dog walking over the bridge. So, why does the media cover the car? Because it’s flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person (non-abstract), and it’s news that’s cheap to produce.

As a result of news, we walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our head.

Terrorism is overrated. Chronic stress is underrated. The collapse of Lehman is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is underrated. Astronauts are overrated. Nurses are underrated. Britney Spears is overrated. IPCC Reports are underrated. Airplane crashes are overrated. Resistance to antibiotics is underrated. We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. It is a very dangerous thing, because the probabilistic mapping we get from consuming news is entirely different from the actual risks that we are exposed to. If you watch an airplane crash on news television, it’s going to change your attitude toward that risk regardless of its real probability, no matter your intellectual sophistication. If you think you can compensate this bias with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

News is irrelevant

Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to not having swallowed that piece of news.

The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant.

Assume that, against all odds, you found one piece of news that substantially increased the quality of your life – compared to how your life would have unfolded if you hadn’t read or seen it. How much trivia did your brain have to digest to get to that one relevant nugget? And that is a hindsight analysis. Looking forward, we can’t even identify the value of a piece of news before we see it. So we are forced to digest everything on the news buffet line. Is that worth it? Probably not.

In 1914, Sarajevo was the news story that dwarfed all other news in terms of its significance that year by a factor of a billion. But, Sarajevo was just one of several thousand stories in circulation on that day. No news organization treated it anything more than just another politically inspired assassination. The first Internet browser debuted in 1995. That hugely relevant piece of software, which bore such important future impact, barely made it into the press.

It’s very difficult for us to recognize what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognize what’s new. We are not equipped with sensory organs for relevance. Relevance doesn’t come naturally. News does. That’s why the media plays on the new. (If our minds were structured the other way round, the media would certainly play on the relevant.) The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the modern man.

News creates a worldview that is not relevant to you. What does relevance mean? It means: what is important to you personally. Relevance is a personal choice. Don’t take the media’s view for it. For the media, anything that sells lots of copies is relevant – Darfour, Paris Hilton, a train crash in China, some idiotic world record (someone who ate 78 cheese burgers in one hour).

That is why the news industry has a swindle at the core of its business (this it shares with the circus performances, Freudian psychotherapy and palm-reading). It sells the relevant, but delivers the new. In short, it’s a camouflage industry.

Media organizations want us to believe that news offers some sort of a competitive advantage. Many people fall for that. We get anxious when we’re cut off from the flow of news. We fear we’ve missed something important. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume the bigger the advantage you have over others.

Afraid you will miss “something important”? Believe me, if something really important happens, you will hear about it, even if you try to live protected from the news in a cocoon. Friends and colleagues will tell you the relevant events far more reliably than any news organization. They will do this with the added benefit of meta-information, since you know how they think. If you don’t have friends, you will learn far more about really important events and societal shifts by reading about them in specialized journals, in-depth magazines or good books.

News limits understanding

News has no explanatory power. News items are little bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world.

News organizations pride themselves on correctly reporting the facts, but the facts that they prize are just epiphenomena of deeper causes. Both news organizations and news consumers mistake knowing a litany of facts for understanding the world.

It’s not “news facts” that are important, but the threads that connect them. What we really want is to understand the underlying processes, how things happen. Unfortunately, precariously few news organizations manage to do this. The problem is that the underlying processes that govern significant social, political and environmental movements mostly are invisible. They are complex, non-linear and hard for our (and the journalists’) brains to digest. Why do news organizations go for the light stuff, the anecdotes, scandals, people-stories and pictures? The answer is simple: because they are cheaper to produce.

The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below the journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect.

Most people believe that more information makes for better decisions. News organizations support this belief. Hell, it’s in their own interest. Will the accumulation of facts help you understanding the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is actually inverted. The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand.

There is no evidence that information junkies are better decision makers. They are certainly not more successful than the average Joe. If more information leads to higher economic success we would expect journalists to be on top of the pyramid. That’s not the case. Quite to the contrary. We don’t know what makes people successful, but amassing information is certainly not part of it.

Reading news to understand the world is worse than not reading anything. What’s best: cut yourself off from daily news consumption entirely. Read books and thoughtful journals instead of gulping headlines.

News is toxic to your body

News constantly triggers the limbic system. They spur the release of cascades of glucocordicoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. The effects of high glucocordicoid levels are impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. News consumers risk impairing their physical health. The other potential effects of news include fear, aggression, tunnel thinking and desensitization.

News is toxic for societies

First, the tendency to personalize and politicize the news has a polarizing impact on democracy. Media users fall into increasingly targeted, narrowcast streams of information and, therefore, become less likely to encounter input that challenges their partisan views.

Second, humankind is susceptible to fads, hypes and hysterias. News leads to collective neurosis. As a matter of fact, every large-scale collective neurosis has been driven by news. There is no other way to generate one.

Third, stories portraying acts of violence have an inordinately negative impact at many levels. Psychological scars – induced by chronic stress, horrifying images and traumatic memories – do not heal easily. News adds to health costs.

News massively increase cognitive errors

News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. We automatically, systematically filter out evidence that contradicts our preconceptions in favor of confirming evidence. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing, is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” That is the confirmation bias. News consumption, especially the ability to customize our news intake, exacerbates this human flaw. The result is that we walk around in a cloud of seemingly confirming data – even when our theories about ourselves and the world may be wrong. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities.

News not only feeds the confirmation bias. There is another cognitive error at play: the story bias. Our brains crave stories that “make sense” – even if they don’t correspond to reality. And news organizations are happy to deliver those fake stories. Instead of just reporting that the stock market declined (or increased) by 2%, they say “the market declined by 2% because of X”. X can be a bank profit forecast, fear about the Euro, non-farm payroll statistics, a Fed decision, a terrorist attack in Madrid, a subway strike in New York, a handshake between two presidents, anything, really.

This reminds me of high school. My text book specified seven reasons (not six, not eight) why the French Revolution broke out. Fact is, we don’t know why the French Revolution broke out. And especially not why in 1789. And we don’t know why the stock market moved as it moved. There are just too many factors that go into it. We don’t know why an airplane crashed or why the oil price jumped. We don’t know. Any journalist who writes “the market moved because of X” or “the company went bankrupt because of Y” is an idiot. Of course, X might have had a casual influence, but it’s far from established, and there are most likely influences that are much greater than X. To a large degree, news reports consist of nothing but stories and anecdotes that end up substituting for coherent analyses. I am fed up with this cheap way of “explaining” the world. It’s inappropriate. It’s irrational. It’s forgery. And I don’t let my thinking get contaminated by it.

News inhibits thinking

Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. This is not about stealing time (see reason 9). This is about the inability to think clearly when you open up yourself to the factoid stream.

News makes us into shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory.

»The passageway from working memory to long-term memory forms a bottleneck in our brain. While the long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time (try repeating a 10-digit phone number if you hear it for the first time). That short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.« Because news disrupts concentration, it actively weakens comprehension.

You don’t visit Paris or speed through the Museum of Modern Art in two minutes. Why not? Because the brain needs spool-up time. Building up concentration takes a minimum of a 10-minute read. At minimum. If it is less, your brain will processes the information superficially and barely store it. News pieces are like wind hitting your cheek. Ask yourself: What are the top twenty news pieces from a month ago (that are no longer in the news today). So, why would you want to consume something that doesn’t stick?

Even worse with online news. In a 2001 study[1] two scholars in Canada showed that the comprehension declines as hyperlinks in a document increase. Why? Because whenever a link appears, your brain has to at least make the choice not to click, which itself is distracting. News consumers are suckers for irrelevancy. Online news consumers are the biggest suckers. News is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. Besides a lack of glucose in your blood stream, news distraction is the biggest limitation on clear thinking.

News changes the structure of your brain

News works like a drug. It feeds compulsive information-seeking behavior (CISB). The uninterrupted supply makes us crave more. As stories develop, we naturally want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary story lines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore.

Why is news addictive? Once you get into the habit of checking the news, you are driven to check it even more often. Your attention is set on fast-breaking events, so you hunger for more data about them. This has to do with a process called long-term potentiation (LTP) and the reward circuits in your brain. Addicts seek more of an addictive substance to get their fix, because they need more stimulation than non-addicts to reach a satisfying reward threshold. If you set your attention on other things – like literature, science, art, history, cooking, pet grooming, whatever – you will become more focused on those things. That’s just how the brain works. It’s a simple cognitive process.

People used to think that our brain, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. The human brain is highly plastic. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the consumption of news, we end up with a different brain. Adaptation to news occurs at a biological level. News reprograms us. That means our brain works differently even when we’re not consuming news. And that’s dangerous.

The more news we consume, the more we are exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply. Most news consumers – even if they used to be avid book readers – have lost the ability to read and absorb longish articles or books. After four, five pages they get tired, their concentration vanishes, they become restless. It’s not because they got older or their time schedules got denser. It’s because the physical structure of their brains has changed. In the words of Professor Michael Merzenich (University of California, San Francisco), a pioneer in the field of neuroplasticity: “We are training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

Hear me: Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking. When you consume news, your brain structurally changes. And this means that the way you think changes. Regaining the capacity for concentration and contemplation will take nothing but a radical news diet.

[1] Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains, Wired, May 2010

News is costly

News wastes time. It exacts exorbitant costs.

News taxes productivity three ways. First, count the consumption-time that news demands. That’s the time you actually waste reading or watching the news.

Second, tally up the refocusing time – or switching cost. That’s the time you waste trying to get back to what you were doing before the news interrupted you. You have to collect your thoughts. What were you about to do? Every time you disrupt your work to check the news, reorienting yourself could easily waste minutes.

Third, news distracts us even hours after we’ve digested today’s hot items. News stories and images pop into our minds hours, sometimes days later and will constantly interrupt your train of thought. Why would you want to do that to you?

If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, you’re eating up substantial time. Then, add five minutes here and there when you’re at work, plus distraction and refocusing-time. You will lose productive hours totaling at least half a day every week. Half a day – and for what?

On a global level, the loss in potential productivity is huge. Take the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, where terrorists murdered some 200 people in an act of chilling exhibitionism. Imagine that a billion people devoted, on average, one hour of their attention to the Mumbai tragedy: following the news, watching some talking head on TV, thinking about it. The number is a wild guess, but the guess is far from a wild number. There are more than a billion people in India alone. Many there spent whole days following the drama. One billion people times one hour is one billion hours, which is more than 100,000 years. The global average life expectancy is today 66 years. So nearly 2,000 lives were swallowed by news consumption. It’s far more than the number of people murdered, by any standards. In a sense, the newscasters became unwilling bedfellows of the terrorists.

Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. Why give it away so easily? You are not that irresponsible with your money, your reputation or your health. Why then give away your mind?

News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement

Individual reputation affects how people cooperate in society. In our ancestral past, a person’s reputation was directly linked to his or her achievements. You saw that your fellow tribe member killed a tiger single handedly and you spread word of his bravery.

With the advent of mass-produced news, the strange concept of “fame” entered our society. Fame is misleading because generally people become famous for reasons that have little relevance to our lives. The media grants fame to movie stars and news anchors for scant reason. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement. The tragedy is that their notoriety crowds out the achievements of those who make more substantive contributions.

News is produced by journalists

Some journalists take time with their stories and try to think things through. But like any profession, and probably more so than in any other profession, journalism has its incompetent, unfair practitioners who don’t have the time – or the capacity – for deep analysis. Often, they are paid by the piece, the line, or the word. You might not be able to tell the difference between a polished professional and a rushed, glib, paid-by-the-piece writer with an ax to grind. It all looks like news.

Fewer than ten percent of the news stories are original. Fewer than one percent are truly investigative. And only once every fifty years journalists uncover a Watergate. The rest is cobbled together from other news reports, common knowledge and whatever the journalist can find on the internet. Many journalists, in their rushed schedule, blindly copy from each other. The copying and the copying of the copies not only multiplies the flaws in the stories but also the irrelevance.

Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always

Sometimes, reported facts are simply mistaken. With reduced editorial budgets at major publications, fact checking may be an endangered step in the news process.

The New Yorker Magazine was legendary for their fact checking. When an article mentioned the Empire State Building, the fact checking department would go out and visually verify that, in fact, the building was still standing. I don’t know if the story is true, but it highlights a point. Today, the fact checker has become an endangered species in most news companies.

Many news stories include predictions, but accurately predicting anything in our complex world is impossible. Overwhelming evidence indicates that forecasts by journalists and by experts in finance, social development, global conflicts and technology are almost always completely wrong. So, why consume that junk?

Did the newspapers predict World War I, the Great Depression, the sexual revolution, the fall of the Soviet empire, the rise of the Internet, resistance to antibiotics, the fall of Europe’s birth rate or the explosion in depression cases? Maybe, you’d find one or two correct predictions in a sea of millions of mistaken ones. Incorrect forecast are not only useless, they are harmful.

To increase the accuracy of your predictions, cut out the news and roll the dice or. If you are ready for depth, read books to understand the invisible generators that affect our world.

News is manipulative

News is the perfect Trojan horse. Few bits of news arrive without a hidden agenda, and many news stories crop up with big obvious agendas.

Our evolutionary past has equipped us with a good bullshit detector for face-to-face interactions. We automatically use many clues to detect manipulation, clues that go beyond the verbal message and include gesture, facial expression, signs of nervousness such as sweaty palms, blushing and body odor. Living in small bands of people, we almost always knew the background of the messenger. Information always came with a rich set of meta data. Today, even conscientious readers find that distinguishing even-handed news stories from ones that have a private agenda is difficult and energy consuming. Why go through that?

Reporting is biased. Stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers (advertising bias) or the owners of the media (corporate bias), and here is a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone (mainstream bias).

The PR industry is as large as the news reporting industry – the best proof that journalists and news organizations can be manipulated. Corporations, interest groups and other organizations would not expend these huge sums if PR didn’t work. If journalists with their natural skepticism towards powerful organizations can be manipulated, what makes you think you can escape it?

Take the Nurse Nayirah story. Nayirah was a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, who alleged that she had witnessed the murder of infant children by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, in verbal testimony to the U.S. Congress, in the run up to the 1991 Gulf War. Virtually every media outlet covered the story. The U.S. public was in rage, which in turn pushed the congress closer to approving the war. Her testimony, which was regarded as credible at the time by all the media outlets, has since come to be regarded as wartime propaganda.

Look back over the 20th century and ask yourself how many atrocities could have been prevented if the majority of people would have followed a simple news diet. It’s a wild thought.

There is more: Journalism shapes a common picture of the world and a common set of narratives for discussing it. It sets the public agenda. Hold on: do we really want the newsmakers to influence the public agenda? I believe that agenda setting by the media is just bad democracy.

News makes us passive

News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world.

Compare this with our ancestral past, where you could act upon practically every bit of news. Our evolutionary past prepared us to act on information, but the daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It zaps our energy. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitized, sarcastic and fatalistic.

If the human brain encounters a barrage of ambiguous information without being able to act upon that information, it can lead to passivity and a sense of victimhood. The scientific term is learned helplessness. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression. Viewed on a timeline, the spread of depression coincides almost perfectly with the growth and maturity of the mass media. It could turn out to be a coincidence, and I am skeptical about this type of conjecture, but I don’t want to leave it unmentioned.

News gives us the illusion of caring

Kathleen Norris (even if I don’t share most of her ideas) said it best: “We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring.”

News wraps us in a warm global feeling. We are all world citizens. We are all connected. The planet is just one global village. We sing the “We-are-the-World” song and wave the little flame of our lighters in perfect harmony with thousands of others. It’s a glowing and fuzzy feeling that delivers the illusion of care but doesn’t get us anywhere. I haven’t had the time to put my finger on it, but this allure for anything global smells like a gigantic chimera. Like a religion. Fact is, we are not connected because we consume news. We are connected because we trade.

News kills creativity

Things we already know severely impact creativity. This is one reason why mathematicians, novelists, composers or entrepreneurs produce their most creative works at a young age. They are oblivious to much that has been tried before. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that allows them to come up with novel ideas.

I don’t know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie – not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist, musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a whole bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs.

The creativity-killing effect of news might also be owned to something simpler we’ve discussed before: distraction. I just can’t imagine producing novel ideas with the distraction that news is sure to deliver. If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t read news.

What to do instead

Go without news. Cut it out completely. Go cold turkey.

Make news as inaccessible as possible. Delete the news apps from your iPhone. Sell your TV. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions. Do not pick up newspapers and magazines that lie around in airports and train stations. Do not set the browser default to a news site. Pick a site that never changes. The more stale the better. Delete all news sites from your browser’s favorites list. Delete the news widgets from your desktOp.

If you want to keep the illusion of “not missing anything important”, I suggest you glance through the summary page of the Economist once a week. Don’t waste more than five minutes on it.

Read magazines and books which explain the world – Science, Nature, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly. Go for magazines that connect the dots and don’t shy away from presenting the complexities of life – or from purely entertaining you. The world is complicated, and there is nothing we can do about it. So, you must read longish and deep articles and books that represent its complexity. Try reading a book a week. Better two or three. History is good. Biology. Psychology. That way you’ll learn to understand the underlying mechanisms of the world. Go deep instead of broad. Enjoy material that truly interests you. Have fun reading.

The first week will be the hardest. Deciding not to check the news while you are thinking, writing or reading takes discipline. You are fighting your brain’s built-in tendency. Initially, you will feel out of touch or even socially isolated. Every day you will be tempted to check your favorite news Web site. Don’t do it. Stick to the cold-turkey plan. Go 30 days without news. After 30 days, you will have a more relaxed attitude toward the news. You will find that you have more time, more concentration and a better understanding of the world.

After a while, you will realize that despite your personal news blackout, you have not missed – and you’re not going to miss – any important facts. If some bit of information is truly important to your profession, your company, your family or your community, you will hear it in time – from your friends, your mother in law or whoever you talk to or see. When you are with your friends, ask them if anything important is happening in the world. The question is a great conversation starter. Most of the time, the answer will be: “not really.”

Are you afraid that living a news-free existence will make you an outcast at parties? Well, you might not know that Paris Hilton is in jail (I don’t know, I am making this up), but you will have more intelligent facts to share – about the cultural meaning of the food you are eating or the discovery of exosolar planets. Never be shy about your news diet. People will be fascinated.

Final thoughts

Society needs journalism – but in a different way.

Investigative journalism is relevant in any society. We need more hard-core journalists digging into meaningful stories. We need reporting that polices our society and uncovers the truth. The best example is Watergate. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Often, reporting is not time sensitive. Longish journal articles and books are fine forums for investigative journalism – and now that you’ve gone cold turkey on the news, you’ll have time to read them.

by Gerome Brush (1936)

Fernand Gillet was one of the new members to join the Boston Symphony in 1925. He is at home and at ease anywhere; but there is something about Gillet that leaves you wondering if he really likes being away. His parents were both French and both musical, his father a well-known composer and ‘cellist. Despite his French origin, he has an Anglo-Saxon air which unquestionably comes from having been brought up in an English school. In the [First] World War, he served for four and a half years as an aviator.

M. Gillet is reticent and the meaning of his words is very often oblique. When he was asked what instrument he thought the best, he replied: “A great artist.” His uncle was Georges Gillet, the teacher of oboe at the Paris Conservatory. Although young Gillet had started off as a pianist, the opportunity of learning the oboe at the Conservatory presented itself—and his destiny was settled.

Source: Boston Symphony Orchestra 1936 by Gerome Brush. The Merrymount Press, Boston MA.

Lead-in text here.

• Video
• About the Artists
  • Timothy Ridout
  • Frank Dupree
• Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT)

Video

About the Artists

Timothy Ridout

British violist Timothy Ridout has performed widely in Europe including Wigmore Hall, Munich Gasteig, Verbier Academy & Festival and Schloss Elmau, the Eggenfelden Klassisch, Valdres Sommersymfoni, Koblenz, Musikdorf Ernen and Beethoven Bonn Festivals. He attended, IMS Prussia Cove Open Chamber Music and gave performances with the Nash Ensemble.

In 2016 Timothy became the first British winner of the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. Previous awards include 1st Prize at the 2014 Cecil Aronowitz and 2nd Prize at the 2015 Windsor Festival competitions.

Engagements this season include appearances as soloist with the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, Baden-Baden Philharmonie and Sinfonia Cymru. He returns to Wigmore Hall and performs George Benjamin’s Viola, Viola at the Purcell Room. In 2017, Champs Hill released his first CD of music by Vieuxtemps.

Born in London in 1995, Timothy studied at the Royal Academy of Music graduating with the Queen’s Commendation for Excellence. He was selected by YCAT in 2016 and is currently at the Kronberg Academy with Nobuko Imai.

Timothy plays on a viola by Peregerino di Zanetto c.1565-75 generously on a temporary loan from Beares International Violin Society.

Frank Dupree

German pianist Frank Dupree has recently come to international prominence as the laureate prize winner of the 2014 Deutscher Musikwettbewerb in Bonn, having enamoured the judges with his musical maturity, refined technique, and ability to draw a wide spectrum of sound and colour from the keyboard. Renowned pianist Emanuel Ax has remarked that he is “a sincere, feeling, and enormously interesting artist, whom no doubt will be a major presence amongst the leading musicians of his generation”.

Initially trained as a percussionist, Frank celebrates the breadth and depth of the piano repertoire, ranging from baroque to classical to contemporary. He is an enthusiast for new music especially, having already worked closely with composers such as Péter Eötvös and Wolfgang Rihm, the latter of whose work ‘Con Piano? Certo!’ was given its world premiere by Frank with conductor Justin Brown and the Badische Staatskapelle Karlsruhe in June 2015.

Highlights of Frank’s past engagements include concerts with the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, Minnesota Orchestra, Bern Symphony Orchestra, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn and the Baden Baden Philharmonic. Also an active chamber musician, he was most recently invited on scholarship to the Chamber Music Academy of the Heidelberg Spring Festival and the Verbier Festival Academy.

Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT)

Founded in 1984, Young Classical Artists Trust provides career development services to some of the finest emerging artists in Europe and North America. Selected by a rigorous audition process, these young performers receive unparalleled support, including a dedicated artist management team, extensive performing opportunities both nationally and internationally, debuts at the world’s most prestigious venues, professional publicity materials and digital support.

About the Concert

Saturday, November 18, 2017
Oslo Opera House
Grigory Sokolov, piano

Program

Encores

About the Artist

Each Sokolov concert is unique in its own way. His technique is utterly peerless, but he rarely adheres to a template for piano virtuosos. He is known for his ability to draw an unusually broad spectrum of colours and sounds from the keys. Sokolov’s interpretations are usually deeply personal. If you’d like to learn more about Sokolov, a good place to start is the article Last of the Titans.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I heard Grigory Sokolov play for the first time. Everything I had ever learned, thought or felt about the piano and performance upon it went up in smoke. Sokolov, although a well-kept secret, is for many the greatest pianist alive today. Youthful celebrities with fast fingers, designer gear, and slick photos pall beside such gigantic artistry.

Adapted from an article by Jessica Duchen in the British publication International Piano, Sep–Oct 2006.

Sokolov is a pianistic Dostoyevsky, his music-making vast in scope, visionary and revelatory, squeezing out every last drop of meaning. After much effort on the part of the barbican press officer and Sokolov’s agent, I manage to pin down the great Russian pianist for his first interview with a British journalist in nine years.

It begins with his recital in the Palau de la Musica Catalana in Barcelona. This must be the world’s most colourful concert hall: A modernist masterpiece ebullient with stained glass, statuary and bright-hued architectural detail. Watching Sokolov give a recital here is like seeing a black-and-white movie superimposed on technicolor: A grey-haired man in black and white at an ebony and ivory piano, playing in a way that few pianists have ever played, certainly not since the “golden age” of the early 20th century. The individuality of his musicianship harks back to another era as much as any classic movie.

Yet the colour in his playing is so vivid that it puts the palau’s visual richness in the shadow at once. We talk backstage after the oncert, aided by a Russian cellist as interpreter. Spain being Spain, the recital had begun at 9pm. Sokolov being Sokolov, the encores were generous while the night draws on. By the time we sit down in the dressing room it is nearly midnight. Sokolov is still in the midst of a post-performance high. “Now it is still after the concert,” he remarks, “but in three or four hours it will be time to prepare for the next concert.”

Like Sviatoslav Richter, Grigory Sokolov is a musician around whom tremendous mystique has formed. He meets none of the modern expectations of a mega-star; he seems to have stepped out of a different universe, a distant and purer world. If he’s not yet as universally celebrated as he should be, that’s because he doesn’t like publicity, interviews or, indeed, anything extraneous to making music. His mind is phenomenally sharp and informed. He employs no gimmicks and takes no prisoners.

I put it to him that he makes no concessions to the extra-musical demands of the music business. “That’s not a question, it’s a compliment,” he exclaims. “Yes, I don”t like anything that is not a matter of music. Indeed, I hate it. Anything that disturbs the music is against it and has no place together with it. Naturally, if you like music you don’t like those other things. If you don’t like music, you work in other areas. If you like music, you accept that it’s enough for your whole life.”

He was born in Saint Petersburg and still lives there – theoretically. “Practically, I live in the plane and the car.” He can’t remember when his passion for music began: “I can only explain what I know from my parents. They said that if I heard music in the street, I stopped immediately and wanted to listen to it. At home we had some records, and I had a little podium and baton, and I conducted everything that was there! Then they asked a piano teacher what to do with me; she told them to wait until I was five years old. When I began to study piano, I forgot my dream to be a conductor and wanted only to play. Everything was the opposite way round from the usual. Many pianists begin by playing and later they start conducting. I had already had it with conducting by the age of four.”

In 1966, when he was only sixteen, he won the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, championed by the chairman of its jury, Emil Gilels. Despite the prestige of this prize, he remained relatively unknown in the West. He did not defect, and under the Soviet regime his travelling was limited. After Perestroika, that began to change. Now he gives around eighty concerts a year and fans snap up his rare CDs, infrequent releases recorded live in concert. He doesn’t like to make studio recordings these days. The French director Bruno Monsaingeon captured on film a magical 2002 recital in Paris.

It’s been suggested that he is the last great artist to emerge from the legendary “Russian school” of pianism, after such giants as Tatiana Nikolaeva, Richter, and Gilels. Sokolov himself discounts the tag. “It would be very strange if all the pianists from such a huge country as Russia could be put together and display a sign saying Russian school,” he says. “Musicians are individuals, and each one is very different. If we talk about a school in terms of what is taught in certain parts of the world, I think it does not make much sense. If we go to a museum, we see paintings by Rembrandt or Rubens, but also other paintings attributed to a “school of Rembrandt” or a “school of Rubens”. That means, in principle, that people belonging to a school did not have the personality for us to remember each one as an individual artist. Personality is what’s important in art.”

Indeed, Sokolov’s interpretations span a spiritual galaxy light years away from anyone else’s. It’s not only the vast range of his expressive capabilities, from the filigree ornamentations of works from the french baroque to the gargantuan power and ferocity of such works as prokofiev’s seventh and eighth sonatas, with the tone always speaking and rounded, no matter the volume. This is just the beginning.

Inevitably, Sokolov has been labelled “eccentric”. He refuses to compromise his standards and so, to others, his demands may seem extreme. For instance, he likes to spend an entire day working with the piano in the hall before a concert, and instructs the tuner in precise detail about what he needs from the instrument: “You need hours to understand the piano because each one has its own personality, and we play together,” he explains.

His exacting nature has spurred a decision to reduce the number of concertos he performs with orchestras. This sounds like a huge loss, but Sokolov says: “It’s very simple. For piano is written an ocean of music, and during your lifetime you are not able to play even a small part of it. When playing concertos, it’s not easy to find enough time to rehearse, or to find an orchestra which is interested in the final product and not looking at their watch. It’s also not easy with conductors, because you must find the combination of a very good musician who has this special talent to follow and to understand the music in the same way as you. It’s very seldom, I must say! And then maybe the worst: If you play a solo piece several times over several days you will develop, going to another level with it. But with a concerto you play this piece more and more, bui with each orchestra and conductor you must start again from zero at the first rehearsal. So, if you spend so much energy that you could use much more effectively for recitals, why do you do it? I very much like the fact that everything I make depends only on me. With a hundred people it’s almost impossible. You have not the responsibility.”

To Sokolov, music remains fresh at every performance. Indeed, he feels it is impossible to play a piece the same way twice: “first, because every day we are something different,” he says. “next, you have another piano, and you play together with the piano; you have another concert hall and another acoustic. Even in the same hall on the same piano it can’t be the same.” His programme in Barcelona included music by Bach and Beethoven, with the second half consisting of the Schumann F-sharp minor sonata — an unusual, problematic work, but in Sokolov’s hands full of exposed depths, ghostly voices and unimaginable tenderness. He does not wax lyrical about it in words, though. “It’s a beautiful piece,” he comments briefly. “Schumann is a very good brand!”

His Bach is replete with intricate details and moments of startling poetry, delivered with a clarity that would turn many harpsichordists green with envy. I ask what he thinks about the era, now receding, in which purists habitually decreed the piano the wrong instrument for Bach. “I can’t believe that a young musician can grow up without playing Bach,” he begins. “If you’re not allowed to play Bach, then why can you play Chopin? Is that not allowed because it was another instrument in Chopin’s time? This is completely the wrong idea, as is the idea that it’s possible to have one museum interpretation. First of all, you can’t find an old instrument with a very good equivalent quality now. If you make a replica, it means that you have made a new instrument. Next, Bach was universal from the point of view of the instrument; each of his concertos for keyboard and orchestra were originally written for violin; some we know, some are lost. There is a wider distance from violin to keyboard instrument than from cembalo to piano. Back then the same piece was played on the clavichord, which was very popular because it was very close to violin; the system of the clavichord was that when you touched the string you made a vibration. The problem was that the sound was very limited and it was impossible to play in a bigger room. Then there was the chamber organ. Three keyboard instruments which are completely different. Next, on whichever instrument you play Bach, the public and you have another problem: you can never be the public of that time. That means that a museum interpretation is impossible. Of course, if you want the sound to be exactly like the cembalo, then play cembalo. If you play the piano and you don’t understand that the sound and other things have another nature, it’s also not the way. But if you enter the world of this composer, then you can play it on almost anything.”

Although in the past Sokolov has occasionally played programmes consisting of just one composer, he currently has no plans to join the roster of pianists performing complete cycles, such as all thirty-two Beethoven sonatas. “A pianist should only play what he or she feels inside. It must feel natural. I have played many of the Beethoven sonatas, and if I play in the end all of them, then maybe to play them together is okay. But every one of the piano sonatas of Beethoven represents a different world.”

His recitals usually end in standing ovations and a jamboree of encores. In Barcelona, we heard some astonishing Rameau, three Chopin impromptus, a mazurka or two, and a touching, quiet waltz. Why so many? Sokolov laughs: “I like to play piano,” he says, “so if people want …” and people certainly do. Sokolov’s magic is at last reaching music lovers across the globe, transforming our expectations of everything a piano recital can and should be. My final impression is of this last of the Russian titans approaching his tea in the same way he approaches his piano: pressing the teabag insistently, squeezing out every last drop of flavour.

◼︎

Linux has succeeded not because the original goal was to make it widely portable and widely available, but because it was based on good design principles and a good development model. This strong foundation made portability and availability easier to achieve.

Contrast Linux for a moment with ventures that have had strong commercial backing, like Java or Windows NT. The excitement about Java has convinced many people that “write once, run anywhere” is a worthy goal. We’re moving into a time when a wider and wider range of hardware is being used for computing, so indeed this is an important value. Sun didn’t invent the idea of “write once, run anywhere,” however. Portability has long been a holy grail of the computer industry. Microsoft, for example, originally hoped that Windows NT would be a portable operating system, one that could run on Intel machines, but also on RISC machines common in the workstation environment. Linux never had such an ambitious original goal. It’s ironic, then, that Linux has become such a successful medium for cross-platform code.

Originally Linux was targeted at only one architecture: the Intel 386. Today Linux runs on everything from PalmPilots to Alpha workstations; it is the most widely ported operating system available for PCs. If you write a program to run on Linux, then, for a wide range of machines, that program can be “write once, run anywhere.” It’s interesting to look at the decisions that went into the design of Linux, and how the Linux development effort evolved, to see how Linux managed to become something that was not at all part of the original vision.

Amiga and the Motorola Port

Linux is a Unix-like operating system, but not a version of Unix. This gives Linux a different heritage than, for example, Free BSD. What I mean is this: the creators of Free BSD started with the source code to Berkeley Unix, and their kernel is directly descended from that source code. So Free BSD is a version of Unix; it’s in the Unix family tree. Linux, on the other hand, aims to provide an interface that is compatible with Unix, but the kernel was written from scratch, without reference to Unix source code. So Linux itself is not a port of Unix. It’s a new operating system.

Porting this new operating systems to other platforms was really not on my mind at the beginning. At first I just wanted something that would run on my 386.

A serious effort to make the Linux kernel code portable began with the effort to port Linux to DEC’s Alpha machine. The Alpha port was not the first port, however.

The first port came from a team who ported the Linux kernel to the Motorola 68K series, which was the chip in the early Sun, Apple, and Amiga computers. The programmers behind the Motorola port really wanted to do something low-level and in Europe you had a number of people who were in the Amiga community who were especially disenchanted with the idea of using DOS or Windows.

While the Amiga people did get a system running on the 68K, I don’t really think of this as a successful port of Linux. They took the same kind of approach I had taken when writing Linux in the first place: writing code from scratch targeted to support a certain kind of interface. So that first 68K port could be considered a Linux- like operating system, and a fork off the original codebase.

In one sense this first 68K Linux was not helpful in creating a portable Linux, but in another sense it was. When I started thinking about the Alpha port I had to think about the 68K experience. If we took the same approach with Alpha, then I would have three different code bases to support in order to maintain Linux. Even if this had been feasible in terms of coding, it wasn’t feasible in terms of management. I couldn’t manage the development of Linux if it meant keeping track of an entirely new code base every time someone wanted Linux on a new architecture. Instead, I wanted to do a system where I have an Alpha specific tree, a 68K specific tree, and an x86 specific tree, but all in a common code base.

So the kernel underwent a major rewrite at this time. But that rewrite was motivated by how to work with a growing community of developers.

Microkernels

When I began to write the Linux kernel, there was an accepted school of thought about how to write a portable system. The conventional wisdom was that you had to use a microkernel-style architecture.

With a monolithic kernel such as the Linux kernel, memory is divided into user space and kernel space. Kernel space is where the actual kernel code is loaded, and where memory is allocated for kernel-level operations. Kernel operations include scheduling, process management, signaling, device I/O, paging, and swapping: the core operations that other programs rely on to be taken care of. Because the kernel code includes low-level interaction with the hardware, monolithic kernels appear to be specific to a particular architecture.

A microkernel performs a much smaller set of operations, and in more limited form: interprocess communication, limited process management and scheduling, and some low-level I/O. Microkernels appear to be less hardware-specific because many of the system specifics are pushed into user space. A microkernel architecture is basically a way of abstracting the details of process control, memory allocation, and resource allocation so that a port to another chipset would require minimal changes.

So at the time I started work on Linux in 1991, people assumed portability would come from a microkernel approach. You see, this was sort of the research darling at the time for computer scientists. However, I am a pragmatic person, and at the time I felt that microkernels (a) were experimental, (b) were obviously more complex than monolithic Kernels, and (c) executed notably slower than monolithic kernels. Speed matters a lot in a real-world operating system, and so a lot of the research dollars at the time were spent on examining optimization for microkernels to make it so they could run as fast as a normal kernel. The funny thing is if you actually read those papers, you find that, while the researchers were applying their optimizational tricks on a microkernel, in fact those same tricks could just as easily be applied to traditional kernels to accelerate their execution.

In fact, this made me think that the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don’t necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or deluded. I mean this in a very real sense. The dishonesty comes from the intense pressure in the research community at that time to pursue the microkernel topic. In a computer science research lab, you were studying microkernels or you weren’t studying kernels at all. So everyone was pressured into this dishonesty, even the people designing Windows NT. While the NT team knew the final result wouldn’t approach a microkernel, they knew they had to pay lip service to the idea.

Fortunately I never felt much pressure to pursue microkernels. The University of Helsinki had been doing operating system research from the late 60s on, and people there didn’t see the operating system kernel as much of a research topic anymore. In a way they were right: the basics of operating systems, and by extension the Linux kernel, were well understood by the early 70s; anything after that has been to some degree an exercise in self-gratification.

If you want code to be portable, you shouldn’t necessarily create an abstraction layer to achieve portability. Instead you should just program intelligently. Essentially, trying to make microkernels portable is a waste of time. It’s like building an exceptionally fast car and putting square tires on it. The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast–the kernel–is inherently counter-productive.

Of course there’s a bit more to microkernel research than that. But a big part of the problem is a difference in goals. The aim of much of the microkernel research was to design for a theoretical ideal, to come up with a design that would be as portable as possible across any conceivable architecture. With Linux I didn’t have to aim for such a lofty goal. I was interested in portability between real world systems, not theoretical systems.

From Alpha to Portability

The Alpha port started in 1993, and took about a year to complete. The port wasn’t entirely done after a year, but the basics were there. While this first port was difficult, it established some design principles that Linux has followed since, and that have made other ports easier.

The Linux kernel isn’t written to be portable to any architecture. I decided that if a target architecture is fundamentally sane enough, and follows some basic rules then Linux would fundamentally support that kind of model. For example, memory management can be very different from one machine to another. I read up on the 68K, the Sparc, the Alpha, and the PowerPC memory management documents, and found that while there are differences in the details, there was a lot in common in the use of paging, caching, and so on. The Linux kernel memory management could be written to a common denominator among these architectures, and then it would not be so hard to modify the memory management code for the details of a specific architecture.

A few assumptions simplify the porting problem a lot. For example, if you say that a CPU must have paging, then it must by extension have some kind of translation lookup buffer (TLB), which tells the CPU how to map the virtual memory for use by the CPU. Of course, what form the TLB takes you aren’t sure. But really, the only thing you need to know is how to fill it and how to flush it when you decide it has to go away. So in this sane architecture you know you need to have a few machine-specific parts in the kernel, but most of the code is based on the general mechanisms by which something like the TLB works.

Another rule of thumb that I follow is that it is always better to use a compile time constant rather than using a variable, and often by following this rule, the compiler will do a lot better job at code optimization. This is obviously wise, because you can set up your code so as to be flexibly defined, but easily optimized.

What’s interesting about this approach–the approach of trying to define a sane common architecture–is that by doing this you can present a better architecture to the OS than is really available on the actual hardware platform. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s important. The generalizations you’re looking for when surveying systems are frequently the same as the optimizations you’d like to make to improve the kernel’s performance.

You see, when you do a large enough survey of things like page table implementation and you make a decision based on your observations–say, that the page tree should be only three deep–you find later that you could only have done it that way if you were truly interested in having high performance. In other words, if you had not been thinking about portability as a design goal, but had just been thinking about optimization of the kernel on a particular architecture, you would frequently reach the same conclusion–say, that the optimal depth for the kernel to represent the page tree is three deep.

This isn’t just luck. Often when an architecture deviates from a sane general design in some of its details that’s because it’s a bad design. So the same principles that make you write around the design specifics to achieve portability also make you write around the bad design features and stick to a more optimized general design. Basically I have tried to reach middle ground by mixing the best of theory into the realistic facts of life on today’s computer architectures.

Kernel Space and User Space

With a monolithic kernel such as the Linux kernel, it’s important to be very cautious about allowing new code and new features into the kernel. These decisions can affect a number of things later on in the development cycle beyond the core kernel work.

The first very basic rule is to avoid interfaces. If someone wants to add something that involves a new system interface you need to be exceptionally careful. Once you give an interface to users they will start coding to it and once somebody starts coding to it you are stuck with it. Do you want to support the exact same interface for the rest of your system’s life?

Other code is not so problematic. If it doesn’t have an interface, say a disk driver, there isn’t much to think about; you can just add a new disk driver with little risk. If Linux didn’t have that driver before, adding it doesn’t hurt anyone already using Linux, and opens Linux to some new users.

When it comes to other things, you have to balance. Is this a good implementation? Is this really adding a feature that is good? Sometimes even when the feature is good, it turns out that either the interface is bad or the implementation of that feature kind of implies that you can never do something else, now or in the future.

For example–though this is sort of an interface issue–suppose somebody has some stupid implementation of a filesystem where names can be no longer than 14 characters. The thing you really want to avoid having these limitations in an interface that is set in stone. Otherwise when you look to extend the filesystem, you are screwed because you have to find a way to fit within this lesser interface that was locked in before. Worse than that, every program that requests a filename may only have space in a variable for, say, 13 characters, so if you were to pass them a longer filename it would crash them.

Right now the only vendor that does such a stupid thing is Microsoft. Essentially, in order to read DOS/Windows files you have this ridiculous interface where all files had eleven characters, eight plus three. With NT, which allowed long filenames, they had to add a complete set of new routines to do the same things the other routines did, except that this set can also handle larger filenames. So this is an example of a bad interface polluting future works.

Another example of this happened in the Plan 9 operating system. They had this really cool system call to do a better process fork–a simple way for a program to split itself into two and continue processing along both forks. This new fork, which Plan 9 called R-Fork (and SGI later called S-Proc) essentially creates two separate process spaces that share an address space. This is helpful for threading especially.

Linux does this too with its clone system call, but it was implemented properly. However, with the SGI and Plan9 routines they decided that programs with two branches can share the same address space but use separate stacks. Normally when you use the same address in both threads, you get the same memory location. But you have a stack segment that is specific, so if you use a stack-based memory address you actually get two different memory locations that can share a stack pointer without overriding the other stack.

While this is a clever feat, the downside is that the overhead in maintaining the stacks makes this in practice really stupid to do. They found out too late that the performance went to hell. Since they had programs which used the interface they could not fix it. Instead they had to introduce an additional properly-written interface so that they could do what was wise with the stack space.

While a proprietary vendor can sometimes try to push the design flaw onto the architecture, in the case of Linux we do not have the latitude to do this.

This is another case where managing the development of Linux and making design decisions about Linux dictate the same approach. From a practical point of view, I couldn’t manage lots of developers contributing interfaces to the kernel. I would not have been able to keep control over the kernel. But from a design point of view this is also the right thing to do: keep the kernel relatively small, and keep the number of interfaces and other constraints on future development to a minimum.

Of course Linux is not completely clean in this respect. Linux has inherited a number of terrible interfaces from previous implementations of Unix. So in some cases I would have been happier if I did not have to maintain the same interface as Unix. But Linux is about as clean as a system can be without starting completely from scratch. And if you want the benefit of being able to run Unix applications, then you get some of the Unix baggage as a consequence. Being able to run those applications has been vital to Linux’s popularity, so the tradeoff is worth it.

GCC

Unix itself is a great success story in terms of portability. The Unix kernel, like many kernels, counts on the existence of C to give it the majority of the portability it needs. Likewise for Linux. For Unix the wide availability of C compilers on many architectures made it possible to port Unix to those architectures.

So Unix underscores how important compilers are. The importance of compilers was one reason I chose to license Linux under the GNU Public License (GPL). The GPL was the license for the GCC compiler. I think that all the other projects from the GNU group are for Linux insignificant in comparison. GCC is the only one that I really care about. A number of them I hate with a passion; the Emacs editor is horrible, for example. While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it needs to be.

But basically compilers are really a fundamental need.

Now that the Linux kernel follows a generally portable design, at least for reasonably sane architectures, portability should be possible as long as a reasonably good compiler is available. For the upcoming chips I don’t worry much about architectural portability when it comes to the kernel anymore; I worry about the compilers. Intel’s 64-bit chip, the Merced, is an obvious example, because Merced is very different for a compiler.

So the portability of Linux is very much tied to the fact that GCC is ported to major chip architectures.

Kernel Modules

With the Linux kernel it became clear very quickly that we want to have a system which is as modular as possible. The open-source development model really requires this, because otherwise you can’t easily have people working in parallel. It’s too painful when you have people working on the same part of the kernel and they clash.

Without modularity I would have to check every file that changed, which would be a lot, to make sure nothing was changed that would effect anything else. With modularity, when someone sends me patches to do a new filesystem and I don’t necessarily trust the patches per se, I can still trust the fact that if nobody’s using this filesystem, it’s not going to impact anything else.

For example, Hans Reiser is working on a new filesystem, and he just got it working. I don’t think it’s worth trying to get into the 2.2 kernel at this point. But because of the modularity of the kernel I could if I really wanted to, and it wouldn’t be too difficult. The key is to keep people from stepping on each other’s toes.

With the 2.0 kernel Linux really grew up a lot. This was the point that we added loadable kernel modules. This obviously improved modularity by making an explicit structure for writing modules. Programmers could work on different modules without risk of interference. I could keep control over what was written into the kernel proper. So once again managing people and managing code led to the same design decision. To keep the number of people working on Linux coordinated, we needed something like kernel modules. But from a design point of view, it was also the right thing to do.

The other part of modularity is less obvious, and more problematic. This is the run-time loading part, which everyone agrees is a good thing, but leads to new problems. The first problem is technical, but technical problems are (almost) always the easiest to solve. The more important problem is the non-technical issues. For example, at which point is a module a derived work of Linux, and therefore under the GPL?

When the first module interface was done, there were people that had written drivers for SCO, and they weren’t willing to release the source, as required by the GPL, but they were willing to recompile to provide binaries for Linux. At that point, for moral reasons, I decided I couldn’t apply the GPL in this kind of situation.

The GPL requires that works “derived from” a work licensed under the GPL also be licensed under the GPL. Unfortunately what counts as a derived work can be a bit vague. As soon as you try to draw the line at derived works, the problem immediately becomes one of where do you draw the line?

We ended up deciding (or maybe I ended up decreeing) that system calls would not be considered to be linking against the kernel. That is, any program running on top of Linux would not be considered covered by the GPL. This decision was made very early on and I even added a special read-me file (see Appendix B) to make sure everyone knew about it. Because of this commercial vendors can write programs for Linux without having to worry about the GPL.

The result for module makers was that you could write a proprietary module if you only used the normal interface for loading. This is still a gray area of the kernel though. These gray areas leave holes for people to take advantage of things, perhaps, and it’s partly because the GPL really isn’t clear about things like module interface. If anyone were to abuse the guidelines by using the exported symbols in such a way that they are doing it just to circumvent the GPL, then I feel there would be a case for suing that person. But I don’t think anyone wants to misuse the kernel; those who have shown commercial interest in the kernel have done so because they are interested in the benefits of the development model.

The power of Linux is as much about the community of cooperation behind it as the code itself. If Linux were hijacked–if someone attempted to make and distribute a proprietary version–the appeal of Linux, which is essentially the open-source development model, would be lost for that proprietary version.

Portability Today

Linux today has achieved many of the design goals that people originally assumed only a microkernel architecture could achieve.

By constructing a general kernel model drawn from elements common across typical architecture, the Linux kernel gets many of the portability benefits that otherwise require an abstraction layer, without paying the performance penalty paid by microkernels.

By allowing for kernel modules, hardware-specific code can often be confined to a module, keeping the core kernel highly portable. Device drivers are a good example of effective use of kernel modules to keep hardware specifics in the modules. This is a good middle ground between putting all the hardware specifics in the core kernel, which makes for a fast but unportable kernel, and putting all the hardware specifics in user space, which results in a system that is either slow, unstable, or both.

But Linux’s approach to portability has been good for the development community surrounding Linux as well. The decisions that motivate portability also enable a large group to work simultaneously on parts of Linux without the kernel getting beyond my control. The architecture generalizations on which Linux is based give me a frame of reference to check kernel changes against, and provide enough abstraction that I don’t have to keep completely separate forks of the code for separate architectures. So even though a large number of people work on Linux, the core kernel remains something I can keep track of. And the kernel modules provide an obvious way for programmers to work independently on parts of the system that really should be independent.

The Future of Linux

I’m sure we made the right decision with Linux to do as little as possible in the kernel space. At this point the honest truth is I don’t envision major updates to the kernel. A successful software project should mature at some point, and then the pace of changes slows down. There aren’t a lot of major new innovations in store for the kernel. It’s more a question of supporting a wider range of systems than anything else: taking advantage of Linux’s portability to bring it to new systems.

There will be new interfaces, but I think those will come partly from supporting the wider range of systems. For example, when you start doing clustering, suddenly you want to tell the scheduler to schedule certain groups of processes as gang scheduling and things like that. But at the same time, I don’t want everybody just focusing on clustering and super-computing, because a lot of the future may be with laptops, or cards that you plug in wherever you go, or something similar, so I’d like Linux to go in that direction too.

And then there are the embedded systems were there is no user interface at all, really. You only access the system to upgrade the kernel perhaps, but otherwise they just sit there. So that’s another direction for Linux. I don’t think Java or Inferno (Lucent’s embedded operating system) are going to succeed for embedded devices. They have missed the significance of Moore’s Law. At first it sounds good to design an optimized system specific for a particular embedded device, but by the time you have a workable design, Moore’s Law will have brought the price of more powerful hardware within range, undermining the value of designing for a specific device. Everything is getting so cheap that you might as well have the same system on your desktop as in your embedded device. It will make everyone’s life easier.

Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) is one area that will be developed. The 2.2 Linux kernel will handle four processors pretty well, and we’ll develop it up to eight or sixteen processors. The support for more than four processors is already there, but not really. If you have more than four processors now, it’s like throwing money at a dead horse. So that will certainly be improved.

But, if people want sixty-four processors they’ll have to use a special version of the kernel, because to put that support in the regular kernel would cause performance decreases for the normal users.

Some particular application areas will continue to drive kernel development. Web serving has always been an interesting problem, because it’s the one real application that is really kernel-intensive. In a way, web serving has been dangerous for me, because I get so much feedback from the community using Linux as a web-serving platform that I could easily end up optimizing only for web serving. I have to keep in mind that web serving is an important application but not everything.

Of course Linux isn’t being used to its full potential even by today’s web servers. Apache itself doesn’t do the right thing with threads, for example.

This kind of optimization has been slowed down by the limits in network bandwidth. At present, you saturate ten-megabit networks so easily that there’s no reason to optimize more. The only way to not saturate ten- megabit networks is to have lots and lots of heavy duty CGIs. But that’s not what the kernel can help with. What the kernel could potentially do is directly answer requests for static pages, and pass the more complicate requests to Apache. Once faster networking is more commonplace, this will be more intriguing. But right now we don’t have the critical mass of hardware to test and develop it.

The lesson from all these possible future directions is that I want Linux to be on the cutting edge, and even a bit past the edge, because what’s past the edge today is what’s on your desktop tomorrow.

But the most exciting developments for Linux will happen in user space, not kernel space. The changes in the kernel will seem small compared to what’s happening further out in the system. From this perspective, where the Linux kernel will be isn’t as interesting a question as what features will be in Red Hat 17.5 or where Wine (the Windows emulator) is going to be in a few years.

In fifteen years, I expect somebody else to come along and say, hey, I can do everything that Linux can do but I can be lean and mean about it because my system won’t have twenty years of baggage holding it back. They’ll say Linux was designed for the 386 and the new CPUs are doing the really interesting things differently. Let’s drop this old Linux stuff. This is essentially what I did when creating Linux. And in the future, they’ll be able to look at our code, and use our interfaces, and provide binary compatibility, and if all that happens I’ll be happy.

[This article was originally published in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, O’Reilly & Associates, January 1999.]

Beauty

[content coming soon]

To explore this topic in more depth, click here.

Coherence

A sense of place depends on its coherence. Every element in that place needs to work together. A 2017 article in Current Affairs magazine asserted that most contemporary architecture is poorly designed, unattractive, and offends our sense of aesthetics because it lacks coherence with its surroundings.

The streets of the Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston are beautiful because the many different elements are aesthetically unified.

On the other hand, Frank Lloyd Wright’s impressive Guggenheim Museum in New York doesn’t bear any actual relationship to its surroundings; it could have been placed anywhere.

But it can get much worse. The Tour Montparnasse in Paris is horrifying because it doesn’t flow with the surrounding buildings and draws attention to itself.

When a building like Kunsthaus Graz in Austria is placed in the middle of an old village, the entire fabric of the village is disrupted.

In terms of coherence with its surroundings, most contemporary architecture is ugly. Some of it is very ugly. The worst examples attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of special effort.

(Adapted from a blog post by Yann Girard)

Friends

Most of your friends want you to fail. I know what you might be saying now. Stuff like, “No this is not true. You don’t have real friends. You need to find new friends.”

But here’s the truth…

When you break free, when you do something that no one else is doing, when you get off the beaten path you’ll automatically question what everybody else is doing.

You’ll question what your friends are doing. You’ll question their lifestyles. You’ll basically question their entire lives. Their 9 to 5 jobs. Their mortgages. Their down payments. EVERYTHING…

And when you succeed in breaking free, when you succeed in doing what most people never dare to do, when you do what everybody else out there secretly wants to do, you’re basically showing them that it’s all possible.

That they’ve been lazy.

That everybody can do it.

That they’ve bought into the lie that you have to get a stable job, spend forty to fifty years in a cubicle to be able to retire when you’re almost dead, to buy a house, start a family and be chained to one place for the rest of your life.

Friends want you to stay the same. So they can stay the same.

So they can feel comfortable with their own choices.

With their own lives.

So they can feel good about themselves.

So they don’t have to challenge themselves…

Parents

Your parents want you to succeed. But only the way they succeeded. On their terms. And not your terms. Not on the terms of the 21st century.

But times have changed. What worked a few decades ago doesn’t work anymore today.

Getting a college degree, scoring a safe job, building a house and staying at the same job for the rest of your life just doesn’t work anymore.

The world has changed. And it’s still changing every single day.

In most of the cases following your parents’s advice and doing the things they’ll tell you to do is like operating on a 20-30 year old manual.

It’s like going online with a 56k modem while everybody else is online with a 100mbit connection.

Now don’t get me wrong here…

Parents want the best for their kids.

But the problem is that the best from a few decades ago might not necessarily be the best anymore today…

Gatekeepers

There are millions of gatekeepers out there.

Especially at your job.

Everybody at your job wants you to stay small.

After all, you’re paid for doing something you’ve been trained to do. At the highest degree of efficiency possible. With as little slack as possible.

Learning anything new will decrease your efficiency.

And will cost the company hard cash.

On the other hand, any new skill might qualify you to get a better job.

Any new skill might enable you to ask for a raise.

But you’ve been hired for doing the same things over and over again.

So no one wants you to diversify your skills.

Because if you do so, you might become attractive for other companies.

They want you to be as efficient as possible.

At that one thing they need you for.

That’s what you’re paid for.

That’s why everybody tells you that you have to become an expert.

And master your field.

So they can squeeze as much out of you as possible.

Until there’s no efficiency left anymore and they drop you for an algorithm, an A.I. or someone else who does your job for a tenth of your salary.

Your current employer is basically an entire gatekeeper in itself…

Teachers

Teachers, in most of the cases are the premium example of following the rules.

It’s just really, really hard to become a teacher or professor by not going through the standard procedure.

And what the standard procedure does is that it creates standard people.

I’m not saying that this is the case for everybody out there. But for many.

After all, a teacher’s job is to create employees. And employees need to be able to follow orders. They need to do the things they’re told to do. Otherwise it just doesn’t work.

It’s not the teacher’s fault. It’s the system’s fault. And whenever you rely on someone who relies on the system, when you rely on someone who is the best product of that system, then it’s just really, really hard to break free. Not impossible. Just hard.

Teachers, just like your parents operate under a guidebook that was created a few decades ago. A guidebook that doesn’t work as well anymore today as it did just a few decades ago. Sure, it still works. Sometimes. For the top 0.1% or so. Maybe…

Society

Society is holding you back. Whether you realize it or not doesn’t really matter.

No matter where you live there are certain expectations. Certain lifestyles. Certain ways of doing things. Certain unwritten rules.

And no matter how strong your willpower is, it will always influence you in one way or another.

And it makes sense.

Society only works if everybody does what everybody else does.

Otherwise the entire system wouldn’t work anymore.

The whole system would crash and burn.

Everything has its good and bad sides.

The bad side being that you’ve gotta fit in.

And if you don’t fit in you’ll get punished by the system…

Experts & Gurus

This is something not a lot of people talk about.

Still, I believe that so called gurus or experts are holding you back. Simply because they want you to use their techniques and what has worked for them. But the truth is that what has worked for them isn’t necessarily going to work for you.

Reading all of these blogs, all of these books (including my stuff) won’t really help you to build the life you want to live. As a matter of fact it’ll only hold you back. It’ll hold you back from actually doing things. And doing is the only way you’ll ever achieve what you want to achieve in life…

You

You are your biggest threat.

You’ll ultimately be the only one holding yourself back.

You’ll be the one who will ultimately be responsible for creating the life you want to live.

And no one else.

Blaming anybody else is just an excuse.

It’s an excuse for not trying hard enough.

It’s an excuse for not putting in the work.

For being lazy.

For not even trying.

At the end of the day, all of these people don’t really matter if you don’t master yourself.

Final thoughts

The critics…

Don’t show up.

Don’t put in the work.

Don’t inspire.

Don’t motivate.

And don’t put themselves out there.

You do.

So keep doing…

The new Congress will pass retrograde legislation. Trump will eviscerate federal agencies and issue absurd executive orders. But we must not let this game of legal cat and mouse discourage and distract us from our primary objective. We need to persuade a majority of Americans that we must remove Trump from office as quickly as possible. I am advocating for removal because I believe that Trump is dangerously unfit to govern. Electing him to this powerful position has placed our Republic in grave danger.

The United States Constitution provides a number of checks on Presidential power, including at least two ways to remove a President from office. The first, impeachment, is highly political in the sense that only Congress has the power to invoke it. The second is based on Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment. It allows for the removal of a President who can no longer discharge his duties but is unable or unwilling to step down. The Vice-President, along with “a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide,” can declare the President unfit and install the Vice-President as Acting President.

Our responsibility as citizens is to persuade as many Americans as possible that Trump must be declared unfit and removed from office. If pressure grows strong enough, our political leaders will have to respond. (There is no Constitutional guarantee that a duly-elected President will be allowed to serve a full 4-year term. Richard Nixon learned this the hard way.) Further, I argue that time is of the essence. Remember, the Third Reich consolidated its power relatively quickly after the Germans elected Hitler in 1932. My understanding is that within five months the dictatorship was essentially in place.

How did I arrive at this conclusion? I recommend reading The Mafia State, a short essay by Chris Hedges in which he describes metaphorically how parasites have been allowed to take over our economy and body politic. The essay is chilling and, to me, very convincing.

Former CIA Director John O. Brennan reacted to Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe with this statement:

“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America … America will triumph over you.”

My advice to Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 or support him now: wake up and repent your foolish ways, before it’s too late.

[Last updated on 9-Aug-2018]

A person who suffers serious brain trauma can have a lucid interval with no apparent symptoms. During this period, injured blood vessels in the brain can cause internal bleeding, leading to catastrophic pressure and eventually death. After her fall, Richardson was lucid and refused medical attention for several hours. The delay turned out to be fatal. After this highly publicized accident, skiers and snowboarders started wearing helmets in greater numbers.

As I read about Ms. Richardson and her accident, I learned a little about the CT scan, an advanced type of X-ray that can provide cross-section images of anatomical structures. A CT scan of the head can detect bleeding, bruising, or the beginning of swelling in the brain. The challenge for anyone who may be injured is to get the scan done immediately. According to Dr. Edward Aulisi, neurosurgery chief at Washington Hospital Center, “If there’s any question in your mind whatsoever, you get a head CT scan. It’s the best 20 seconds you ever spent in your life.”

Natasha Richardson was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and was married to the Irish actor Liam Neeson. Her obituary published in The New York Times gives a good account of her public life and legacy.

Postscript

In July 2010, I went to a party and passed out after vaping some strong marijuana. I fell onto a hardwood floor, bumped my head, and started bleeding from a cut over my left eye; I still have a scar there. My friends called 911 and I was taken to a local hospital. The emergency room doctor ordered a head scan and stitched up my wound. I remember thinking that I felt fine and that the head scan was a waste of time and money.

As it turned out, I was lucky — the scan detected no signs of brain injury. I’m glad I didn’t complain to the ER team, who were following an important medical protocol.

Nelson T. “Nick” Shields IV, the eldest son of Pete Shields, was one of fourteen victims in a serial killing spree known as the Zebra murders. In response to his son’s tragic death, Pete Shields decided to leave his job at DuPont and devote all his time to promoting national gun-control legislation. He co-founded Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI), a Washington-based advocacy group. During the next fifteen years, Pete served as the HCI executive director and chairman.

The following story appeared in a 1981 New York Times article on gun control. In late 1980, Pete Shields and Dr. Michael Halberstam, a Washington physician, were discussing the handgun issue at dinner. As a result of their conversation, Dr. Halberstam wrote and broadcast some commentaries for Cable TV News Network.

In one, he said: “Let’s start to put some of the same energy and urgency into controlling handguns as we put into muscular dystrophy. Start now. Don’t wait until someone you love or someone you respect has been murdered by a psychopath with a grudge against society and a .32 special in his pocket.”

Two weeks later, Dr. Halberstam was murdered with a .38-caliber handgun. Later that same day, John Lennon was murdered in New York City with a similar weapon.

Pete Shields was an unsung hero who fought long and hard for a sane gun control policy and a more civilized nation. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to see the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act signed into law in November 1993.

Hand guns and military assault weapons are still readily available in the United States and random mass shootings are now commonplace. Pete, we need more leaders like you to convince Americans that stricter gun control is the right course of action.