☞ Innovation Biopics

Movies about how products and companies came to be.

An invention unlikely to have a movie made about it.

I love films about how a product or company came to be. There are so many of these innovation biopics (or, as Kevin Kelly calls them, “product docu-dramas”). A selection I’ve enjoyed:

• BlackBerry

• Air

• The Founder

• The Social Network

• Tetris

• Flamin’ Hot

(Related bonus: the fantastic television series Halt and Catch Fire, about the early personal computer industry.)

A number of years ago, Anton Howes also explored these kinds of cultural products (he even made a list of films and television shows suggested to him on this topic) in his essay “Age of Invention: On the Silver Screen,” though he was disappointed by how well they displayed the actual process of innovation.

Another question is: are they accurate? Generally, probably not so much. But I view them as spurs to learn more: to learn more about the market share of Nike over time, or the details behind the rise and fall of the BlackBerry. These films also show the incredibly human aspect of innovation and triumph and failure. The success of these advances is steeped in the messiness of humanity.

Are there other ones you like? Please share them in the comments. ■

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I published an essay for Asimov Press entitled “Why Do Research Institutes Often Look the Same?” about the difficulty in creating truly novel research organizations:

Why Do Research Institutes Often Look the Same?

Please check it out.

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I love learning about jobs that I didn’t know existed. For example, insurance archaeology.

Here is an interview with an insurance archaeologist:

Westlaw Today: Your company locates historic insurance policies. Why would anyone need to do that?

Brian Della Torre: The short answer: because old insurance policies can be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. General liability and excess liability policies are typically written on an “occurrence” basis, which means they never expire, and provide coverage for claims emanating from the policy period in perpetuity.

Certain types of claims stem from harms that may not be recognized for decades, including environmental, asbestos, sexual abuse, silica, head trauma, forever chemicals and other toxic torts.

When decades later lawsuits are filed alleging such harms, the policyholder can submit claims for defense and indemnification from the insurer at the time of the occurrence, but only if they can identify the coverage in place.

In fact, historic policies often provide broader coverage. Older policies offer defense costs in addition to policy limits and fewer exclusions. Before 1986 there were typically no “absolute pollution exclusions,” asbestos exclusions or sexual abuse restrictions.

Insurance archaeology is the specialized research conducted to reconstruct that historic coverage. Since the early 1980s, insurance archaeologists have helped a wide range of entities to reconstruct historic coverage, including Fortune 100 manufacturers, utilities, religious institutions, municipalities, public and private schools, insurance carriers, dry cleaners, retailers, and real estate companies.

Read the rest here.

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 It’s Time to Save Silicon Valley From Itself: “Big Tech has lost its way. At WIRED’s Big Interview event, Techdirt editor Mike Masnick and Common Tools CEO Alex Komoroske announced a manifesto designed to help the industry get back on track.” This is the Resonant Computing Manifesto I helped to create.

🝤 Interview with Susan Kare (2000): “Susan Kare designed the icons for the first Macintosh. A high school friend of software wizard Andy Hertzfeld, she studied art history in college, and received a Ph.D. in fine art from New York University in 1979. She joined the Macintosh project in 1983, and was responsible for many of the details that gave the Macintosh its distinctive appearance.”

🜚 How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life

🝳 Watch men: “Quartz helped Japan’s watchmakers nearly drive Switzerland’s watch industry out of business. But the Swiss fought back.”

🝤 The Land of Giants Transmission Towers

🜹 Jiggle Cat: An optical illusion.

🝊 Size of Life

🜸 The Eschatian Hypothesis: ‘that the first confirmed detection of an extraterrestrial technological civilization is most likely to be an atypical example, one that is unusually “loud” (i.e., producing an anomalously strong technosignature), and plausibly in a transitory, unstable, or even terminal phase.’

🝖 How I Read: “I don’t believe there is any special virtue in finishing a book. I read all but the final 92 pages of Infinite Jest. My regret is not the 92 pages I didn’t read.”

🝊 We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars: “Anthropic’s Claude ran a snack operation in the WSJ newsroom. It gave away a free PlayStation, ordered a live fish—and taught us lessons about the future of AI agents.”

🝳 America’s post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines: “In post-apocalyptic fiction, imagined futures turn today’s political and cultural tensions into geography.”

🜹 We asked four AI coding agents to rebuild Minesweeper—the results were explosive: “How do four modern LLMs do at re-creating a simple Windows gaming classic?”

🝊 Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy

Until next time.