> 'Uber built an internal tool called “Starcraft,” named after the real-time strategy game, that let general managers click on a group of cars on a map and text them “Go to the train station, lots of riders!” They were literally directing the network in real time.'
There's an archive of 7,049 letters from the late Roman world that traces the collapse through the correspondence that stops. Certain regions just go quiet. The roads and couriers break down, the nodes drop off one by one, and at some point there's no network left to be part of. You can actually watch the empire lose its connections before it loses anything else.
I see a parallel - on a much smaller scale - to times when, e.g., regular email communication wanes within an organization because something within the org got gridlocked/"stuck." I'm imagining something like when a new employee gets "burned" the first couple times he tried mailing the colleague who's supposed to help him with certain specific tech questions. Or where someone of a neurotic disposition (a lot of Americans!) is aware of tensions between two groups, and starts to struggle to word emails that go to members of both factions... if someone has a busy queue, finishing that might get "dropped."
Small thing in the back of my head - if you know - what "clustered" those 7,049 letters together? Was it like one historian's extensive research assembled them as being from that time period? Or were they all at one site, or some other grouping?
> 'Uber built an internal tool called “Starcraft,” named after the real-time strategy game, that let general managers click on a group of cars on a map and text them “Go to the train station, lots of riders!” They were literally directing the network in real time.'
LOL, this is a gem!!
It was a really good book! Many such gems.
There's an archive of 7,049 letters from the late Roman world that traces the collapse through the correspondence that stops. Certain regions just go quiet. The roads and couriers break down, the nodes drop off one by one, and at some point there's no network left to be part of. You can actually watch the empire lose its connections before it loses anything else.
That is FASCINATING thank you for sharing! I had no idea we had that kind of timeline data!
Oooh. That is intriguing: +1 to "thank you."
I see a parallel - on a much smaller scale - to times when, e.g., regular email communication wanes within an organization because something within the org got gridlocked/"stuck." I'm imagining something like when a new employee gets "burned" the first couple times he tried mailing the colleague who's supposed to help him with certain specific tech questions. Or where someone of a neurotic disposition (a lot of Americans!) is aware of tensions between two groups, and starts to struggle to word emails that go to members of both factions... if someone has a busy queue, finishing that might get "dropped."
Small thing in the back of my head - if you know - what "clustered" those 7,049 letters together? Was it like one historian's extensive research assembled them as being from that time period? Or were they all at one site, or some other grouping?
Thanks for the awesome and insightful review! I ended up purchasing the book to read for myself. :)
It's a wonderful book that covers a lot more than I could get into here, so I hope you get a ton out of it! 💚