Sublime

Puffy was taking obvious sampling to its extreme. The Neptunes were stripping down songcraft to its skeleton and also riding the crest of a cult-of-personality wave. And where were we? Where was I? I was perched on the precipice of what would eventually be called neo soul.

was the guardian of the Facebook Ads team, sussing out obscene

He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI,

Netflix pioneered the filtering of culture through recommendation engines.

The new hires took advantage of Xerox’s abundant resources and loose oversight to creatively interpret Goldman’s definition of “data processing technology,” pursuing projects inspired by Doug Engelbart’s ideas about augmented intelligence and by hacker culture more generally. Engelbart’s SRI operation had drifted after the great demo—investors