Week 19, 2025 - The genesis of the internet
Song of the week:
Top of mind
This week I spent time at Sessions; the conference run by Stripe. And while there were an enormous amount of inspiring conversations, thoughtful sessions (pun very much intended) and celebratory releases; the conversation that caught me most of all was when Patrick Collison met Jony Ive.
One comment in that conversation that struck me was the notion that a lot of folks in the tech industry simply do not understand the genesis of the things they're working on. People don't know the names Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee and I've somehow met young people who didn't really know who Steve Jobs was, despite his passing only being 14 years ago. That said, it also shocks me that somehow that was 14 years ago. Aside, I recall placing an apple, a photo and some flowers in the window of the Compu b Apple reseller store on Grafton Street on the day of his passing. And others then put apples on the windowsill.
In the conversation, Ive mentioned that the attitude that breaking things will inherently make things better. I dislike this concept as much as Ive does. And have never lived my life in the context of breaking something deliberately to make something better. Breaking things like that causes chaos. And when I look at a company like Apple and the products it produces versus Meta, one seems chaotic and the other seems thoughtful (most of the time).
Change is inevitable, but progress isn't necessarily. And I think when chaos is the order of the day, you'll cause change, but not progress.
And if you consider chaos as an agent of bad rather than good, one resolution to such chaos is to have a sense of the backstory. And in my case, and I assume most folks who read my drivel occasionally, that lies in the tech industry. There was no chaotic mess in developing the internet, the world wide web, the Mac, etc. They were deliberate. They were crafted. They were to be beautifully simple, obvious and meaningful in their applications.
I am optimistic and hopeful, even though I aged aggressively when someone didn't know who Steve Jobs was this past week. And a climate of innovation, entrepreneurship and ideas won't come from chaos. It comes from a climate of deliberate research and deep thought. And I wonder if that's part of the issue our current variant of society doesn't espouse in people.
Photo of the week
(via my flickr)