Notes
My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.
This is Mat’s secret weapon, his passport, his get-out-of-jail-free card: Mat makes things that are beautiful.
The truth, of course, is that I am desperately curious. I’m annoyed at Mat, but also grateful that he’s playing the part of the devil on my shoulder.
I’m grateful to have a job, to sit in this chair, to quietly accrue dollars (not that many) that I can use to pay my rent, to buy pizza slices and iPhone apps.
When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?
I’m trying to formulate my next steps. I’ll recommend Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
“I love data like this,” she says, nodding her chin toward my laptop. “Real-world data. Old data.”
This girl has the spark of life. This is my primary filter for new friends (girl- and otherwise) and the highest compliment I can pay.
maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.
I hadn’t noticed the pattern because it’s so spread out in space and time, like a piece of music with three hours between each note, all played in different octaves. But here, condensed and accelerated on my screen, it’s obvious. They’re all playing the same song, or dancing the same dance, or—yes—solving the same puzzle.
Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”
It’s not like we have the same brains as people a thousand years ago.” Wait: “Yes we do.” “We have the same hardware, but not the same software. Did you know that the concept of privacy is, like, totally recent? And so is the idea of romance, of course.”
learning things on the fly,” he says. “It’s what we do at work. Not like the computer guys, you know? They just do the same thing every time. It’s always just pixels. For us, every project is different. New tools, new materials. Everything’s always new.”
Typographers are designers; designers are my people; I am committed to supporting them. But now FontShop.com tells me that Gerritszoon Display, distributed by FLC Type Foundry of New York City, costs $3,989. So of course I will try to pirate this font.
The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. People in New York are softly starting to tweet.
“I’m a pretty good queue strategist. But it’s not easy here—” “Because everyone at Google is a queue strategist,” I suggest. “Exactly.
Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader.
When I was a kid reading fantasy novels, I daydreamed about hot girl wizards. I never thought I’d actually meet one, but that’s only because I didn’t realize wizards were going to walk among us and we’d just call them Googlers.
Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.
“The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.”
I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.
The Northbridge lobby is the hub of the New York startup scene: anywhere two or more people are sitting together, Neel says, it’s probably a new company proofreading its articles of incorporation.
The Ace
Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.
I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.
These days, the phone only carries bad news. It’s all “your student loan is past due” and “your uncle Chris is in the hospital.” If it’s anything fun or exciting, like an invitation to a party or a secret project in the works, it will come through the internet.
There’s music in the distance; the Google brass band is practicing an algorithmically generated waltz.
Kat glances down at a printed-out checklist. “Second, don’t blog, tweet, or live-stream anything you see here.” Imbert is adjusting an astrolabe. Seriously: not a problem.
This isn’t a book anymore; it’s a data dump.
Nobody in the fellowship’s five-hundred-year history thought to look this closely. Neither did any of Google’s code-breakers. We were looking at digitized text in a different typeface entirely. We were looking at the sequence, not the shape.
To crack this code, you need to think typographically.
There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight. It takes forty-one seconds to climb a ladder three stories tall. It’s not easy to imagine the year 3012, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We have new capabilities now—strange powers we’re still getting used to. The mountains are a message from Aldrag the Wyrm-Father. Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.
A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.