According to Boyd, the key to a successful fighting force wasn’t just a brilliant plan of attack. It was a facility for learning and changing strategy quickly, when the enemy inevitably adapted to counter the initial strategy. “The speed of adaptation was the key factor in whether you could win or lose in a dogfight,” Haile said. OODA has since

Facebook has stressed that it is a neutral platform to facilitate the transmission of any communication. But this seems insufficient, since the very idea of a neutral platform governed by a human-designed algorithm is fundamentally flawed and possibly paradoxical. The Facebook algorithm is not a divine expression of audience preferences. It is,

The subscriptions of the flabby-bellied are subsidizing the sweat of the gym rats. But there’s another way to conceptualize this scheme: Gyms are monetizing the gap between aspiration and behavior.

The News Feed must appeal to the behavioral self, by displaying stories that readers reliably click, like, and share. But it should also appeal to the aspirational self, by showing stories that readers want to see even if they don’t interact with them.

The journalist Steven Levy has called this the “dozen doughnuts” problem. People know they shouldn’t eat doughnuts all day, but if a coworker puts a dozen doughnuts by your desk each afternoon, you might eat until your mouth is caked in sugar. The News Feed, too, can be a daily tabloid—a hyperminiaturized serving of celebrities, quizzes, and other

What do people want to read? is the question that kicks off this chapter. It’s the question that motivated newspaper publishers to hire spies and made George Gallup a star. But the success of television suggests that the query is too narrow. The correct question would be: “How do people want to experience news, entertainment, and storytelling,

Gallup was a pioneer in what some now call “applied anthropology,”53 the use of anthropology to solve a practical human problem.

Gallup was no sentimentalist when it came to the Fourth Estate. He saw newspapers principally as gladiators in the arena of attention. “The problem of the modern newspaper is to fit itself as nearly as it can to the needs of the reading public,” he wrote. “Specifically, its problem is to get itself read.”

The 1920s gave us F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The European imports included James Joyce’s Ulysses, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It was a time for drearily faithless poetry, with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and for