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What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
Here’s some of what just Millions of ordinary, sensible people came into possession of computers. These machines had wondrous powers, yet made unexpected demands on their owners. Telephones broke free of the chains that had shackled them to bedside tables and office desks. No one was out of touch, or wanted to be out of touch. Instant communication became a birthright.
A new world, located no one knew exactly where, came into being, called “virtual” or “online,” named “cyberspace” or “the Internet” or just “the network.” Manners and markets took on new shapes and guises.
As all this was happening, James Gleick, author of the groundbreaking Chaos , columnist for The New York Times Magazine , and—very briefly—an Internet entrepreneur, emerged as one of our most astute guides to this new world. His dispatches—by turns passionate, bewildered, angry, and amazed—form an extraordinary chronicle. Gleick loves what the network makes possible, and he hates it. Software makers developed a strangely tolerant view of an ancient devil, the product defect. One company, at first a feisty upstart, seized control of the hidden gears and levers of the new economy. We wrestled with novel issues of privacy, anonymity, and disguise. We found that if the human species is evolving a sort of global brain, it’s susceptible to new forms of hysteria and multiple-personality disorder.
What Just Happened is at once a remarkable portrait of a world in the throes of transformation and a prescient guide to the transformation still to come.
A new world, located no one knew exactly where, came into being, called “virtual” or “online,” named “cyberspace” or “the Internet” or just “the network.” Manners and markets took on new shapes and guises.
As all this was happening, James Gleick, author of the groundbreaking Chaos , columnist for The New York Times Magazine , and—very briefly—an Internet entrepreneur, emerged as one of our most astute guides to this new world. His dispatches—by turns passionate, bewildered, angry, and amazed—form an extraordinary chronicle. Gleick loves what the network makes possible, and he hates it. Software makers developed a strangely tolerant view of an ancient devil, the product defect. One company, at first a feisty upstart, seized control of the hidden gears and levers of the new economy. We wrestled with novel issues of privacy, anonymity, and disguise. We found that if the human species is evolving a sort of global brain, it’s susceptible to new forms of hysteria and multiple-personality disorder.
What Just Happened is at once a remarkable portrait of a world in the throes of transformation and a prescient guide to the transformation still to come.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
7 people are currently reading
714 people want to read
About the author
James Gleick
28 books2,035 followersJames Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.
He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.
His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.
Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.
Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )
Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.
He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.
His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.
Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.
Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
April 5, 2013
If your house is anything like mine it is filled with the detritus of the last couple of decades of evolving technology. What to do with all these cables, power adapters, disks and old handhelds now? Just imagine how much of this stuff sits in landfills. If you've been along for the ride, this book will recall to you long forgotten technologies like Lotus and WordPerfect and the excitement of the transition to Word for Windows. What to do with Powerpoint? Oh well, it was part of the package. How superior we felt knowing what WYSIWYG was. I can remember the delight of the first multimedia CD-ROMs like Encarta and of buying San Diego's Zoo Animals for our baby. I can remember what a goat track the internet was back then. Information superhighway indeed. Then we got ISDN connections, blue cables started to snake around the house, and we got web browsers like AltaVista, Yahoo and Netscape - only dimly aware of the clash of the titans going on in the background between the major software companies. And all this before the rise of MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, Google, social media and WiFi! This book will make you ponder the way we've come. Why have we ended up limiting the use of one hand by always carrying around a smart phone in it? Why aren't we clipping them to our belts like the old pagers or carrying them on our wrists as a smart watch? What happened to the idea of computer jewellery? And what are we going to do now with all these cables?
July 29, 2019
Readable retrospective on the nineties in technology
It's usually a good sign when picking up a collection of essays to find that they have been previously published in some noted periodical such as The New Yorker or Harper's or in this case (with one exception) from The New York Times Magazine. Gleick's focus in these thirty highly polished essays is information and especially the Internet and how the Internet and related technology are changing our lives. There is a personal, and an "I lived it" quality to the writing that I found engaging.
Author of the challenging Chaos and the very long and adoring Genius about physicist Richard Feynman and the more recent Faster, here Gleick gives us short and easy to appreciate recollections of the communications revolution. His observations are trenchant, mildly apocalyptic and/or gee-whizzed, amusing and very well expressed. Having good editors is something Gleick says he has been blessed with, and in these pieces it shows. This attractive book is simply a pleasure to read.
The first piece is from 1992 about the bugs in software, in particular those in Microsoft's Word for Windows; and I want to tell you even though (or especially because) I use WordPerfect, I identified. I felt the aggravation. Gleick notes that software is unlike any other product in its complexity, an observation that no doubt pleases Microsoft's software engineers. However, he reports that Microsoft, unable to cope with the bugs munching on their code and unable or unwilling to excise them, came to an accommodation with the world by declaring that "It's not a bug--it's a feature," while compiling an in-company list of known bugs dubbed, "Won't Fix."
And then, I guess, had lunch.
My favorite essay in the collection is the one entitled "The End of Cash" beginning on page 143 in which Gleick notes among other things that issuers of digital cash cards expect to "profit generally from lost cards." He adds that "telephone companies and transit systems already figure gains ranging from 1 percent to a phenomenal 10 percent." (p. 152) This is an example of privatized "escheatment," an aptly named phenomenon in which governments have traditionally benefitted from lost coins and paper money, or people dying without heirs. Gleick reports that billions of pennies "simply vanish from the economy each year" which he cites as a "hidden cost of money." (pp. 157-158) But credit cards too have their hidden costs. They amount to a tax on those who do not use credit cards (basically the poor) because "the credit card companies have mostly succeeded in forbidding merchants to offer discounts for cash purchases." (So everybody buying the product shares the credit card transaction costs.)
Gleick also looks into the changes that a cashless society will bring, noting what kinds of crime will no longer be worth doing (e.g., kidnaping for ransom, armed robbery.) He reflects on the phenomenon of "float" in which digital money can be used by financial institutions to earn interest for themselves. Gleick observes that holders of the Yankee dollar at home and world wide (think of the large safe-deposit drawers of Arabian sheiks) are actually lending "their wealth to the United States, interest free, just as holders of American Express traveler's checks lend their money to American Express." (p. 153)
I also liked the essays on advertising ("Who Owns Your Attention") and on the growing lack of privacy ("Big Brother Is Us") and on the awesome power of Microsoft ("Making Microsoft Save for Capitalism"). There are lesser essays on political websites ("dirtytricks@campaign96.org") web browsing ("Here Comes the Spider") and software contracts between vendor and user ("Click OK to Agree"), etc. Finally Gleick notes that we are "Inescapably Connected" and gives on page 299 a weird but telling example of how we are being transformed. We are not yet "neurons in the new world brain," he observes, yet we have gotten so much in the habit of knowing things, or at least being able to find them out that "You get a twitchy feeling that you ought to push a button and pop up the answer."
I've felt that, and soon a connecting chip may be inside my brain that really does do something like twitch as my synapses are activated by the World Wide Web.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
It's usually a good sign when picking up a collection of essays to find that they have been previously published in some noted periodical such as The New Yorker or Harper's or in this case (with one exception) from The New York Times Magazine. Gleick's focus in these thirty highly polished essays is information and especially the Internet and how the Internet and related technology are changing our lives. There is a personal, and an "I lived it" quality to the writing that I found engaging.
Author of the challenging Chaos and the very long and adoring Genius about physicist Richard Feynman and the more recent Faster, here Gleick gives us short and easy to appreciate recollections of the communications revolution. His observations are trenchant, mildly apocalyptic and/or gee-whizzed, amusing and very well expressed. Having good editors is something Gleick says he has been blessed with, and in these pieces it shows. This attractive book is simply a pleasure to read.
The first piece is from 1992 about the bugs in software, in particular those in Microsoft's Word for Windows; and I want to tell you even though (or especially because) I use WordPerfect, I identified. I felt the aggravation. Gleick notes that software is unlike any other product in its complexity, an observation that no doubt pleases Microsoft's software engineers. However, he reports that Microsoft, unable to cope with the bugs munching on their code and unable or unwilling to excise them, came to an accommodation with the world by declaring that "It's not a bug--it's a feature," while compiling an in-company list of known bugs dubbed, "Won't Fix."
And then, I guess, had lunch.
My favorite essay in the collection is the one entitled "The End of Cash" beginning on page 143 in which Gleick notes among other things that issuers of digital cash cards expect to "profit generally from lost cards." He adds that "telephone companies and transit systems already figure gains ranging from 1 percent to a phenomenal 10 percent." (p. 152) This is an example of privatized "escheatment," an aptly named phenomenon in which governments have traditionally benefitted from lost coins and paper money, or people dying without heirs. Gleick reports that billions of pennies "simply vanish from the economy each year" which he cites as a "hidden cost of money." (pp. 157-158) But credit cards too have their hidden costs. They amount to a tax on those who do not use credit cards (basically the poor) because "the credit card companies have mostly succeeded in forbidding merchants to offer discounts for cash purchases." (So everybody buying the product shares the credit card transaction costs.)
Gleick also looks into the changes that a cashless society will bring, noting what kinds of crime will no longer be worth doing (e.g., kidnaping for ransom, armed robbery.) He reflects on the phenomenon of "float" in which digital money can be used by financial institutions to earn interest for themselves. Gleick observes that holders of the Yankee dollar at home and world wide (think of the large safe-deposit drawers of Arabian sheiks) are actually lending "their wealth to the United States, interest free, just as holders of American Express traveler's checks lend their money to American Express." (p. 153)
I also liked the essays on advertising ("Who Owns Your Attention") and on the growing lack of privacy ("Big Brother Is Us") and on the awesome power of Microsoft ("Making Microsoft Save for Capitalism"). There are lesser essays on political websites ("dirtytricks@campaign96.org") web browsing ("Here Comes the Spider") and software contracts between vendor and user ("Click OK to Agree"), etc. Finally Gleick notes that we are "Inescapably Connected" and gives on page 299 a weird but telling example of how we are being transformed. We are not yet "neurons in the new world brain," he observes, yet we have gotten so much in the habit of knowing things, or at least being able to find them out that "You get a twitchy feeling that you ought to push a button and pop up the answer."
I've felt that, and soon a connecting chip may be inside my brain that really does do something like twitch as my synapses are activated by the World Wide Web.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
June 8, 2019
"When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive."
January 16, 2025
Back to the future
I've enjoyed the other books I've read by James Gleick, particularly his excellent biography of Richard Feynman , so I was pleased to find this collection of his essays in an Edinburgh Oxfam shop a year or so ago. It's a bunch of pieces that he wrote for The New York Times Magazine between 1992 and 2001. During this period, the internet went from being an academic construct to something so pervasive that it's hard to imagine life without it.
This book (published in 2002) is Gleick's attempt to set out a timeline for this revolution, as we're invited to look back with him at his dispatches from the frontline. So, there are pieces about software bugs, changes in telephone technology, spam, eBay, the transition to digital money, and attempts to fathom how the rising number of connections between more and more computers is affecting society. They're all nicely written; if many of them are a bit too short, it perhaps conveys the sense of breathless excitement associated with rapid change. Of course, they're dated as well (Gleick inserts a foreword attempting to deflect any criticism on this front, however - ironically - this itself has become dated too: change is continuous, after all) but they're entertaining to read. I think the book would have been improved by the inclusion of an index but, on a positive note, it features a wonderfully pithy title for a piece worrying about the millennium bug (remember that?): Oh-oh.
Originally reviewed 5 March 2010
I've enjoyed the other books I've read by James Gleick, particularly his excellent biography of Richard Feynman , so I was pleased to find this collection of his essays in an Edinburgh Oxfam shop a year or so ago. It's a bunch of pieces that he wrote for The New York Times Magazine between 1992 and 2001. During this period, the internet went from being an academic construct to something so pervasive that it's hard to imagine life without it.
This book (published in 2002) is Gleick's attempt to set out a timeline for this revolution, as we're invited to look back with him at his dispatches from the frontline. So, there are pieces about software bugs, changes in telephone technology, spam, eBay, the transition to digital money, and attempts to fathom how the rising number of connections between more and more computers is affecting society. They're all nicely written; if many of them are a bit too short, it perhaps conveys the sense of breathless excitement associated with rapid change. Of course, they're dated as well (Gleick inserts a foreword attempting to deflect any criticism on this front, however - ironically - this itself has become dated too: change is continuous, after all) but they're entertaining to read. I think the book would have been improved by the inclusion of an index but, on a positive note, it features a wonderfully pithy title for a piece worrying about the millennium bug (remember that?): Oh-oh.
Originally reviewed 5 March 2010
October 30, 2023
I love books that make me question my understanding of things. For example, how does one quantify or qualify the difference between information and meaning. Does more information suggest more meaning? "All colors agree in the dark".
James hammers down the bits that led to our evolution of language and data handling, but not without a cute undertone of self-reflection and healthy sarcasm. "The book Cawdry made was the first Engish dictionary. The word dictionary was not in it."
The journey about the evolution of communication suggest that with the digital age we have abruptly devalued information into oblivion. "Information is surprise", but at the same time, "when information is cheap, attention becomes expensive". James Gleick got my attention.
James hammers down the bits that led to our evolution of language and data handling, but not without a cute undertone of self-reflection and healthy sarcasm. "The book Cawdry made was the first Engish dictionary. The word dictionary was not in it."
The journey about the evolution of communication suggest that with the digital age we have abruptly devalued information into oblivion. "Information is surprise", but at the same time, "when information is cheap, attention becomes expensive". James Gleick got my attention.
June 28, 2019
Well worth revisiting. I bought this when it was just published, and the essays it contained were important guideposts to how society might adapt to information technology (and vice versa). Almost two decades later, I've had an enormous amount of enjoyment out of seeing how things have panned out.
October 27, 2019
An entertaining read in that it is about the dawn of the internet age with articles as early as 1992 and published in 2002. A bit like going back in time to a less hectic era. By the end of the book you can feel the wright of the last two decades crushing in.
December 28, 2018
Not bad but hopelessly outdated at this point.
September 7, 2014
Santa: "Check out my latest mobile phone. Samrola MI47. I bought it yesterday."
Banta: "Oh that model is obsolete, now. Samrola has launched MI48 today morning."
Pappu: "Old news again. Samrola has declared bankruptcy 5 minutes ago and stopped the sales and support of MI series phone."
Well, this might sound little exaggerated now. But wait for few more years.
The technology and business world is changing so fast, that even now a year looks a long long time.
Most of the essays that appear in this book belonged to the time when Windows 95 was a big thing and people were slowly moving from VCRs to CD-ROM Players.
It was not that I didn't know this when I picked this book from my favourite second-hand book store, my intention was just to find some awes and prophesies of the author (who , according to the cover, is the king of popular science writers) about the changing times and future. I kept on looking for those.....and on.
At one point, author says, "I have seen the future, and it is still in the future."
Sorry doc. The future you saw was already in the past.
Moreover, the writing was not exactly exciting.
So, "avoid" would the right recommendation.
Banta: "Oh that model is obsolete, now. Samrola has launched MI48 today morning."
Pappu: "Old news again. Samrola has declared bankruptcy 5 minutes ago and stopped the sales and support of MI series phone."
Well, this might sound little exaggerated now. But wait for few more years.
The technology and business world is changing so fast, that even now a year looks a long long time.
Most of the essays that appear in this book belonged to the time when Windows 95 was a big thing and people were slowly moving from VCRs to CD-ROM Players.
It was not that I didn't know this when I picked this book from my favourite second-hand book store, my intention was just to find some awes and prophesies of the author (who , according to the cover, is the king of popular science writers) about the changing times and future. I kept on looking for those.....and on.
At one point, author says, "I have seen the future, and it is still in the future."
Sorry doc. The future you saw was already in the past.
Moreover, the writing was not exactly exciting.
So, "avoid" would the right recommendation.
September 1, 2012
apparently i went to college a full year before wi-fi existed? and smartphones were still just a fantasy? wild.
anticipates: big data, internet of things, pervasive mobile computing, mobile payments/digital money
misses: social/facebook/twitter. robotics/mass customization. the cloud/network storage.
somewhere in between: reading essays on the state of technology in '99 made me acutely aware of differential uptake across different parts of the economy. we're way ahead of where he thought we would be in commerce and mobile. but not all screens are created equal, and our ability to network devices has outstripped our ability to connect all that data together.
i think 1996 gleick would be appalled by the state of identity/passwords, and by all the walled gardens (iPhone app store, facebook, twitter, etc) that increasingly dominate the web.
anticipates: big data, internet of things, pervasive mobile computing, mobile payments/digital money
misses: social/facebook/twitter. robotics/mass customization. the cloud/network storage.
somewhere in between: reading essays on the state of technology in '99 made me acutely aware of differential uptake across different parts of the economy. we're way ahead of where he thought we would be in commerce and mobile. but not all screens are created equal, and our ability to network devices has outstripped our ability to connect all that data together.
i think 1996 gleick would be appalled by the state of identity/passwords, and by all the walled gardens (iPhone app store, facebook, twitter, etc) that increasingly dominate the web.
February 2, 2016
One of my favorite authors, Gleick likes the 10,000 ft. view of technology, and describes it from a historical perspective, focusing on the people involved, how they uniquely grokked some aspect, and won over the geekhood. This book details information qua information, demarcated from its semantic component, and not shying away from that demarcation. Another romp through Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, Shannon's Information Theory, the failure of every one of Hilbert's challenges, and the usual suspects of the 20th century's pantheon, entertainingly told. I can't get enough.
April 19, 2011
this made me feel a little old, as i still remember the "old days" of the internet, when i needed a little cheat notebook of commands to navigate - it's amazing to realize how long ago that was, and to take a little trip down memory lane. I got this one from the library as i was ordering The Information, which is next on my list :)
January 7, 2012
In addition to being very informative, this book, ten years after its publication, is also an unintentionally humorous look at the era when the following were new: Microsoft Word, Windows 95, DSL, amazon one-click, web crawlers, gps navigation, "pocket computers," wifi, and Bluetooth. It is also fun to reminisce back to those "simpler" times.
July 24, 2013
A really interesting an amusingly nostalgic look at how information and communication technology developed so rapidly in the 90s. It's a collection of Gleick's articles written from 1994 to 2001, at each step examining what was going on in that moment and looking forward to what may or may not be right around the corner.
March 1, 2025
My first impression was that Gleick, to capitalise on his fame for having written "Chaos", put together a number of observations, or were they magazine columns?, on the Internet into a book. It was a gift so I read it, but I wouldn't have bought it. It was OK in 2003 but would be a waste of time after 2004.
August 5, 2007
Gleick wrote his own IT-related experiences and overgeneralized them as shared societal behaviors (30 essays of them). His arguments are weak, and his humors aren't ticklish. His last essay, Inescapably Connected is nevertheless quite entertaining --and true.
February 4, 2012
Pretty interesting even though it's about ten years out of date. I was too young to pay attention to or understand most of the technologies that were groundbreaking then but that we take for granted now.
March 31, 2008
Granted I read this book a few years late, but I thought it was horribly dated and irrelevant.
August 24, 2009
hasil hunting Minggu 29 Maret 2009
December 30, 2010
A time capsule now, of the dot com bubble. But a fun read.
July 30, 2011
Great collection of essays from Gleick. He writes well (Chaos is worth a read) and this collection makes one realise just how rapidly the digital age is passing by.
June 23, 2012
Enjoyable trip down (recent!) memory lane. Some is remarkably dated for only ten years old...
Read
September 30, 2012Another box of books being sorted, and this one goes back on the shelf!
Needs to be re-read before a rating or review.
Needs to be re-read before a rating or review.
November 29, 2012
Intereing to look back on these tech journalism pieces from James Gleick. Internet companies are soon gone and things soon change.
March 11, 2013
Gleick's a giant among science writers. Not his best work, but interesting.
November 19, 2013
Good stuff; in the 90s. Lots of interesting stuff from back then, but sadly dated today.
October 26, 2015
Most of these essays were written in the mid to late 90's, so reading it in 2015 is fun because you can see where he guesses right and where he gets things wrong. Mostly, he guesses correctly.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews