And Now What : Disruption And History
And Now What? is a series of essays on how humans came to cooperate and innovate at scale - and what that history can teach us about where we go next.
My credentials are more silicon than parchment.
I am a tech entrepreneur—steeped in technology, business, and innovation for the better part
of three decades. I built products, led teams, and competed in markets (mostly peacefully, I assure you), learning considerably more from the failures than the wins. I spent my career navigating disruption: watching closely to see why some changes take hold and scale, while others collapse.
That was my first mountain. A few years ago, I began looking for the second—which, I am discovering, is less a single peak than a mountain range. This project is one of the things I found there.
It started with reading: voraciously and without discipline, which turns out to be a perfectly enjoyable way to do it. History, philosophy, complexity theory, evolutionary biology, the economics of innovation. The more I read, the more I noticed how much extraordinary research exists across these fields—and how rarely it gets connected. Academics, for understandable reasons of specialization and reputation, tend to stay in their lanes. Each discipline illuminates its own corner; I kept wanting someone to wire them to the same grid.
Eventually, I decided to try writing my way toward that, mostly for my own benefit. I write to learn. Putting thoughts on paper has a ruthless way of exposing what you don't actually understand—and, occasionally, of surfacing a connection you didn't know you had made. These essays are that process, conducted in public.
There is some presumption involved in an outsider attempting this kind of
synthesis, and I am aware of it. My defense is modest: I have no tenure to lose
and no scholarly reputation to protect, which turns out to be a surprisingly
useful kind of freedom for connecting dots across fields. What I bring from
my first mountain is a habit of looking for the mechanisms beneath the noise:
why some innovations spread while others stall. I have applied that lens to
technology for decades. These essays apply it to the most interesting complex
system I know of: how humans came to cooperate and innovate at scale.
Everything here draws on the work of historians, economists, and scientists far more specialized than I am. I make no claim to the last word on any of it — only to an honest attempt at connecting what they've found, and to sharing what I learn along the way.
The argument is mine. The conclusions are yours.
