Alexis C. Madrigal

"Creativity is not a process, right?"

"Mostly it's Foo Fighters-powered," Cook said. Ok. No, he didn't (Reuters).

Bloomberg Businessweek has a loooong interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook. There's a lot of meat, too. The magazine's editor, Josh Tyrangiel, did the Q&A, and it has several interesting dimensions (including why Cook is talking to reporters at all).

What makes Apple special is that they create category-defining products. Even if their competitors have some key advantages (like Google's data or Amazon's online retail game), Apple's actual creative output is superior by most standards. At the very least, you have to say their execution of media and touchscreen devices has been visionary and tech path altering. And keep in mind, this is a monster company, a huge place. How can they keep cranking out the hits? 

To that point, my favorite piece of the interview was when Cook took on how and why Apple comes up with consistently interesting, sometimes truly radical products.

Creativity is not a process, right? It's people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it. They keep thinking about something until they find the best way to do it. It's caring enough to call the person who works over in this other area, because you think the two of you can do something fantastic that hasn't been thought of before. It's providing an environment where that feeds off each other and grows.

So just to be clear, I wouldn't call that a process. Creativity and innovation are something you can't flowchart out. Some things you can, and we do, and we're very disciplined in those areas. But creativity isn't one of those.

While Cook mostly defines his vision of creativity against prevailing models and hopes (i.e. that you could simply put in the right corporate structure and... INNOVATION!), he does provide a positive vision that's quite unusual. For Cook, creativity is about relentlessness. It is about people who "keep thinking" (a phrase he repeats) until they get it exactly right.

Garbage in, garbage out

Kruglav_Orda Shutterstock

A striking photo highlights a new facet of modern warfare.

These are five government troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, three of whom, according to Reuters' caption, are recording video with their phones. They are in the town of Sake, near the town of Goma, which rebels captured last month.

I don't know what to say about this photograph aside from suggesting that an enterprising PhD student write a dissertation on "Cell Phones in War." How are fighting, killing, and controlling territory different when you can call your brother after battle, post a photo of your squadron on the march to Facebook, or play Angry Birds between skirmishes?

Philip Bump reminded me of this chilling CJ Chivers post from a few months ago in Syria. A soldier sits with a high-caliber machine gun, one hand on the trigger, the other on his phone. Chivers' description: 

Machine gun in right hand. Cell phone in left. On duty on the gun-truck's machine gun, at 80 miles an hour into Aleppo, checking messages along the way.

Even as the war in Syria rages, large areas of the countryside have cellular phone coverage, and the fighters are constantly checking their phones. When they stop, many of them immediately look for ways to recharge their phone batteries. And, often as they move and enter an area with a strong signal, they commence texting back and forth.

Update: here's one monograph that touches on some of the military strategy concerns of ubiquitous cell usage, "YOUTUBE WAR: FIGHTING IN A WORLD OF CAMERAS IN EVERY CELL PHONE AND PHOTOSHOP ON EVERY COMPUTER."

A scientific nightmare is coming true.

Reuters.

The only way to even *know* what readers might like is to allow them to read and share on the open Internet.

Reuters

Knowing what it's like inside a media company, let me state up front that there are epistemological problems in deciding from the outside why The Daily failed. I've yet to see an article about The Atlantic that understands how our site works under the hood, and why that has led to a relatively successful few years.

That said, I do have a few thoughts about The Daily that I'd like to offer alongside my colleague Derek Thompson's.

1. The Daily was built on the false premise of a "general reader." When I hear general reader, I think that a media executive is imagining himself and his friends (you know, normal guys) and  intending to produce a bundle of content for that hyperspecific DC-to-Boston-went-to-a-good-college-polo-shirts-and-grilling demographic. As a result, anything that falls outside the boundaries of the interests of this presumed Joe Six Pack will be deemed too "cool, quirky, nerdy, obsessive or snarky." That's not to say that such a publication will never run such pieces. My old pal Ben Carlson wrote quite a few. (So did Zach Baron and Sarah Weinman.) But you're fighting the institutional gravity. And you'll have to build defenses into the story that are the writerly equivalent of "I don't meant to nerd out here, but..." Because otherwise the bros running the grill will throw you in the pool.

This is not to say that media properties cannot be built with the goal of reaching the mainstream, if by mainstream we mean very large audiences. This, very clearly, can be done. (See: HuffPo, Gawker, etc.) But! And this is a big but! These sites have been built up like sedimentary rock from a bunch of smaller microaudiences. Layers of audience stack on top one another to reach high up the trafficometer. The various voices of their bloggers attract layers of readers. New York attracts a different layer of readers. Left-wingish attracts yet another. Their big investigative pieces add more. And their super niche pieces sometimes explode -- say, Matt Buchanan's tech truth bomb -- precisely because they originate inside a niche. It doesn't feel like your uncle from Evanston is telling you the latest thing about iPhones or queer dance or SEC football.

2. The Daily was built on the false premise it could control the distribution outlet. Being in media is terrifying right now. Whereas in the old days, you wrote something and then a fleet of people printed it and handed it to X hundred thousand people so they would read it, now, the fleet is gone. You are alone out there in the ocean and there's not much that anyone can do for any given story to make sure that people read it. Seriously, since the fall of '08 vintage Digg, there's not much anyone on your Internet's favorite websites can do aside from stick a story on the homepage, tweet/Facebook/tumble/Reddit/LinkedIn it and then pray. We do not control the distribution of our work. Period. It's horrible and bizarre and it is also the way that the media world works now. You can't push; the content has to pull. (Especially if we are talking numbers in the millions.)

3. Which brings us to the cardinal sin, The Daily was not tuned for sharing. Obviously: it was mostly locked up on the iPad behind a paywall. Less obviously: how would anyone build an audience growth strategy without relying on huge social hits and a distinctive voice? How many content sites or apps have you visited as a result of marketing? Then how many did you go back to? Without the actual mechanism of HUMANS DROPPING A PAPER AT YOUR DOOR, there's just no way to keep people coming back without A) a voice/POV/knowledge base that is impossible to find elsewhere B) massive traction day after day after day after day after day after day after day in the social world, light and dark forms alike. I haven't seen a digital media play succeed in the last five years without both of these factors.

It's not a technical proposition to get people to share your content. Sure, there are things you can do that marginally improve your share rates by placing the buttons in the right places, etc. But the main determinant of social sharing is the quality, tone, and form of your stories. The only way to figure out what works -- because it's constantly evolving -- is to keep sending work you love out into the ecosystem and seeing what gets amplified. Then, you take that feedback, write another thing you love and send it back into the field. If a bunch of stuff sits behind a paywall, that iterative cycle gets broken. You don't know what's working.

Let me give you a really short example from our work. There's a classic longform convention in profiles of people. The writers tend to drop in to the story sitting with their subjects. They describe what they look like and provide some color about the situation: are they eating? how'd they get there? was the publicist a stickler? does the person appear to be on drugs? Sometimes we get a very short quote from the profilee that is indicative of the person's affect and intellect. Then, the story, by which I mean the action, really begins. In particular, the stakes are explained lower down in the story, several grafs in. These description-rich ledes come first because that is how it is done (and it can be artful as hell when done perfectly).

Well, we found this sort of thing bombs for us over and over. Maybe we don't profile the right people (disagree!). Maybe we're terrible at writing these sorts of ledes (perhaps!). Or maybe, just maybe, the form doesn't work very well to capture the attention of people who are clicking through from an email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Reddit. You just don't know what's happening for several hundred words in some cases. And before the writer answers why you're reading, that person is gone.

So, we switched it up. Rather than say, "Well, long, narrative pieces of writing suck for us," we changed the ordering of our narratives. We get the stakes up very, very high. I'm talking within the first 100 or 200 words, even if the story is two or three or four thousand words. And if we want to keep that narrative lede and we know we have nuggets down low, we drop in a tl;dr box to capture the kind of reader who wants to know what the point is exactly. (If you're a regular reader, you will start to notice this pattern.)

Now, this strategy might not work for other people. Hell, it might not keep working for us. But we have a high hit rate with the pieces that we put extra time and special effort into. And that's the feedback loop you want; that's the one that makes us happy. But the only way to even *know* what readers might like is to allow them to read and share those pieces on the open Internet.

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The magnitude of public funds at stake add some urgency to improving understanding of the extent and characteristics of knowledge spillovers from learning by doing. The main results here imply that policies that enhance demand are necessary to generate sufficient knowledge from experience. Other insights from this case--especially depreciation and diminishing returns--heighten the value of policy instruments with performance-oriented mechanisms and longevity. That experience-derived knowledge appears to be so ephemeral suggests that we should also consider explicit support for codification and transfer of what is learned.

What better way to respond to a faux-personal email than with a faux-love letter?

A relic from the age when the magic of the fundamental properties of the universe was embedded in the everyday.

Harry Houdini liked a good science experiment. He was a magician, yes, and an escape artist, too, but both of those pursuits also made him an amateur scientist. Science found, Houdini applied, audiences raved. 

So, it is with special interest that we recommend you check out Houdini's copy of Scientific Amusements, a book by Henry Firth that is filled with things you might call simple magic tricks, if they did not demonstrate principles of science. The book was gifted to the Library of Congress and now available as part of a special collection online. 

But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. "Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest," Showalter said.

Joi/Flickr

The thing I love about Intel researcher Genevieve Bell is that she finds surprising things by looking at what's left out of the dominant narratives about technology. She finds data that's ignored because it didn't fit into the paradigm of, say, how people adopt technology. The dominant narrative is that young men determine the popularity of phones, computers, websites, and the like. But when Bell looked at the data, the story we told ourselves about how the world worked was not reflected in the numbers.

That's why I wanted to talk to her about what gadgets people around the world might be using over the next decade. I figured she was someone who could look past the conventional wisdom and find the missing pieces of the future. What follows is an extended remix of the conversation we had, which appears in a shorter version in the latest issue of our magazine.

How did your current role at Intel come to be?

About two years ago, Justin Ratner of Intel approached me and asked if I would consider coming back to the R&D labs. The start of my career in Intel was in the R&D labs, but I had moved into the products groups, because I was determined to work out how to make social science and anthropology have a business impact.

I said, I think what I want to do is reinvent the way we experience computing. He looked at me and said, "You're already late." And I was like, "Is that a yes?" He said, "Yes, that'd be excellent." And I was like, "Good. Well, I've got an idea for the sort of people I want to assemble to do that." I knew I needed social scientists other than myself, because you want people who have that training, that deep connection to people, and an ability to understand what they're telling you even when they're not saying anything. And I wanted a bunch of interaction designers, human-factors engineers, user-experience people, because I really wanted that ability to start bridging from the ethnographic work I know how to do into things you can start to move engineers with.

Then I decided sort of radically that it would be good to actually have some engineers this time. I said to my boss, "Could I have some engineers please?" And he was like, "What do you think you'll do with them?" Well, after he processed the initial shock, I said, "I want to have the conversation." I realized if you want to talk about the future, you also have to start building it. And what I realized about my time in the tech industry is that people were stumped for ideas. You have to put things in people's hands to start letting them imagine what's possible. I wanted to start to be able to push the boundaries of what was happening, in terms of having people who understood the latest gear build their own and hack their own. And I realized, too, that I was incredibly interested in the hacking/DIY/making movement--running the gamut from the kind of classic maker's fare to the kind of stuff I grew up with in Australia.

You know any Australian worth their salt has a shed somewhere on their property that is full of stuff that they're inevitably cobbling together, right? I was back in Australia over the weekend and talking to some of the farmers out near where my family has a farm, and they are just mesmerized by idea of 3-D printing. Here's a bunch of pretty burly boys with their harvests, tractors, and dirt under their fingernails for the past 35 years. And they're going, "This 3-D printing? That's pretty cool."

And I'm like, "What? Why is that cool?" And they were like, "Mate, you've been in my shed, you know it's full of stuff I've been collecting because one day I'm going to need to make a thing that will hold that bit and that bit, and I'm always cobbling it together and finching it and [using the Australian version of crazy glue] and a four-inch nail. But 3-D printing might just make it." And they were like, "Here is this thing that could make the thing that could make the thing out of the stuff."

Could you go through the traditional way of thinking about gadget adoption? Which new users does it leave out?

One of the things we told ourselves for a long time was that there was a particular group of early adopters. When I joined Intel, my boss sat me down and said, "We need your help on two things. [One,] women." I said, "Which women?" And she said, "All women."

We had this fascination with what the youths are doing and this notion that technology was being used by men. The data just didn't reflect that. When you look the globe over, women are 44 to 45 percent of the world's Internet users. They spend more time online than men--17 percent more a month. If you look at social-networking sites on a global scale, women are the vast majority on most sites, with the exception of Linked-In. Facebook is an extension of social communication, which has often been the realm of women.

Same with things like Skype, whose average user is 20-to-30-something, college -educated, female. If you look across the sale of e-readers, those are vastly driven by women. The same with downloading books, which is a lucrative space right now. If you look at smartphone data, again, women are about half the users on the planet, but spend more time talking, texting, and using location-based services than their male counterparts. When I put all that together, I had this moment of going, What? What is it that makes people think we're not using the technology?

What does your analysis say about how other groups will adopt new technology?

We have this incredible fetish for youth. I want to laugh. Of course young people are using technology: their parents are paying for it! That's like saying I took my children to a buffet and they ate themselves silly. As soon as they start paying by the course, they eat differently. When people move into having to pay for their technology, their patterns of use change. What's interesting is, if you look at the data, you also see a lot of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s using this technology, and they're not the people we talk about either. They're the fastest-growing groups on Facebook. They're the biggest users of online dating. Unsurprisingly, they're the biggest users of online financial services, online medical-information sites, and e-readers. All of which are kind of hot things at the moment. And you know, I'm sure there's an argument to be made that Facebook got a lot less sexy when everyone's grandparents joined.

What development are you tracking most closely right now?

The different trajectories of technology adoption the globe over. We don't do a good job of tracing the genealogies of technology, and I think when you start to trace those out, you see these interesting threads that are deeply cultural and historical. There is a kind of anxiety in the post-Enlightenment West, fueled by 60 years of science fiction, that if computation gets too smart and achieves "consciousness," it'll kill us. I think of it as the Hal/Terminator/Blade Runner-singularity kind of anxiety.

What's fascinating is, it isn't global. I was trying to have this conversation with some of my colleagues in Japan. We'd just been out in the provinces and had seen a sign that said Autonomous Robot Zone. I said, "Aren't you worried about the robots?" They said, "No, Genevieve, because the sign says they're two meters in from the curb." And I said, "Aren't you worried they won't stay two meters in from the curb?" They said, "You don't understand. The robots are our friends." And they proceeded to tell me about growing up with Astro Boy and the notion that robots were good. One of Japan's leading lights on robotics has basically written that robots embody our best selves, our better angels.

Let's talk about your work on ubiquitous computing. It seems like what's fascinating about the idea of ubiquitous computing is that all the user interfaces are now up for discussion again, and there's just this wide-open field as people figure out, When I have processing power and interactivity in a place I did not have it before, how do I actually want to interact with this thing? Why did you want to go deep into ubiquitous computing?

I was going to these conferences with people who kept saying "Oh, you know, ubiquitous computing, it's going to come, we're going to have this world with smart devices and smart environments." And I'm thinking, I've seen that, that's in Singapore. They were like, "We're building it in the lab." And I'm like, "I'm pretty certain that's in Seoul."

Yeah, Seoul is crazy.

There's this amazing disconnect. All these engineers and computer scientists said they were building this ubiquitous-computing feature, and I'd already been in it. I think for me, this narrative about the future had become so kind of, I don't know, adopted, that people had missed the fact that it already happened. I think that part of the reason they missed it was that the ubiquitous computing that has happened in Asia in the past decade took a different form--it didn't come out of industrial research labs and private enterprise, it came out of government and it was back-ended by a vision driven by city-states about notions of citizenship in the future. It had a form that was more interested in civic good than individual rights.

The tidiness of the ubiquitous-computing story masked the untidiness of making it true. Even to this day, in 2012, the Internet is hardly ubiquitous the world over and certainly is not universally experienced. The technology is a patchwork. If William Gibson said the future is already here and unevenly distributed, I'd say the present is already here and unevenly distributed. And there's something there about How do you unpack and unpickle that? that, for me, was fascinating. What is the tidying-up work with the story of ubiquitous computing, about the way we experience ubiquitous technology?

And what was that work?

I think it was about all sorts of things. I think if you're saying it's going to be ubiquitous, then you have to talk about the fact that the Internet is not a seamless, global technology. It is in fact a very seamed technology. Different places in the world have different regulations and different infrastructures, which means that how you experience the Internet in Manhattan is not the way I experience it in Oregon, is certainly not the way my mother experiences it in Australia, is not the way my mates experience it in London--partly because those all have different standards about what the relationship is to upload and download speeds.

My colleagues in Singapore experience an Internet that is fast in both directions. We pay different amounts. We have different package structures. We have different configurations of the technology, so that different information moves at different speeds. If we're working on a mobile network, that's very different from a fixed network. We know that there are different regulatory frameworks so that as the Internet turns up in different countries, it is experienced and felt differently. Not all applications run the same way. And for me, to talk about the Internet is already to tidy up this incredibly interesting mess. There isn't an Internet; there are many Internets. And they're going to feel different--experienced differently and used differently and imagined differently.

I want to change gears a tiny bit to talk about 3-D printing some more. I find it remarkably difficult to get into, because I'm from the software generation. I came up after the computer tinkerers; I'm not from a period where I would have learned soldering. By the time I got there, I could just get a box. I had to learn how to run the box and I had to put in RAM now and then, but the finished product came to me and I built things--the platform--on top of that. Now there's this reemergence of the physical culture of the craft DIY side, and this 3-D-printing side of things that I don't understand how to use. Who is going to adopt these physical technologies first?

We've been in a decade of dematerialization, all the markers of identity. You and I, when we were younger, knew how to talk about ourselves, to ourselves and others, through physical stuff--music, the books on our shelves, photos. We've gone through a period where a lot of that content is dematerialized. It became virtual. You could send people playlists, but it's not the same as having someone go through your record collection. It had a different sort of intimacy.

And it doesn't surprise me that after 10 years of early-adoptive dematerialization, all the identity work and now the seduction of physical objects has come back in full force. Now it's kind of a pendulum: we move between the virtual and the real a great deal. And we have historically--that's hardly a new thing. I suspect that part of what we're seeing with the Etsy maker and that whole spectrum is a kind of need for physical things because so much has become digital, and in fact, what's being manifested in some of these places is really a reprise of physical stuff. Physicality has kind of come back.

Now, who do we think the early adopters are going to be? It's really going to run the gamut. There's clearly an Etsy world, and Etsy's really interesting, and the Etsy world is--some of it, clearly--is about small-scale cottage industry. I think some of it is about art. It's been like that for a long time. Lovingly in Australia, we call that custom "Nana art," for, like, knitting and crochet.

You've told me that in your Intel lab, you focus on what people love. So: What do people really love about new technology?

I have so many stories of people reflecting on the ways technology gave their parents voices they didn't know they had. I remember years ago, people--mostly 20-, 30-, and even 40‑somethings--reflecting on the fact that when e-mail and text-messaging came along, they suddenly heard their father in a way he'd never been before. It gave a generation of taciturn men a way to have affective relationships across their families. I still hear that about the way people are connecting on Facebook.

There's something in it that you recognize as being a kind of truth. The early ideology of the Internet was about radical transparency, free information, and the sense that the consequences of that would be this sort of massive social upheaval. I sometimes think the more-interesting things are the really mundane, banal things that the Internet and digital technologies are now part of: everything from how we balance our checkbooks to how we arrange our romantic lives to how we insure that there's still a paper that gets delivered to our houses every two weeks. I'm fascinated by that piece. And the ways in which the Internet has become not just part of our romantic lives but also our spiritual and religious ones, and clearly it's part of our political landscape.

It's interesting how different that looks in different places. I still remember my colleagues who worked in Southeast Asia talking about the early Web sites that were turning up across that part of the world. One of the very first Web sites that operated out of Sri Lanka was for the Sri Lankan diaspora living in Europe, and it offered tarot divinations. There was some [part] of the Sri Lankan population that, when you made decisions, consulted a priest--not that unusual. One of the things involved a box of goods and paper, and the priest read the piece of paper and made sense of it in your given situation--classic divination activity. Well, if you weren't living in Sri Lanka, you didn't have access to the priest or the tarot, so someone made a Web site that did that.

That is amazing.

Isn't that fabulous? Of course that would make perfectly good sense if that was the service you needed. The matrimonial classified section of The Times of India was a huge win when it went online, because, as the Indians I did fieldwork with explained to me: "Listen, Genevieve, getting a husband is a database problem." The Internet is very good for that. So how this stuff unfolds and unravels is going to look different in different places. The same technology will be beloved and frustrating for completely different reasons in different parts of the world, which for me is the wonder of it all.

When it comes to user experience, are there things that people love that you didn't expect them to love?

Some of it is about tactility. Think about the number of times you have stood in the lobby of a building and watched a little kid run up to an elevator button and then just push it a hundred times.

Or go through one of those carousel doors too many times.

Or the traffic-light button. There's a tactile response that human beings obviously really like. I had the pleasure of being in Belgium recently with Bill Thompson from the BBC, and he was on a panel with me, and he had ... an iPhone, an iPad, a MacBook Air, and a piece of paper, and something else, and he was moving between screens. I watched him attempt to make the screen on the MacBook Air work like the iPad. And I kind of realized there that, actually, the thing that's interesting is that people don't know how to change gears.

So people who are using touch things then go attempt to touch everything the same way. There's that kind of intuitive I've just banged on my laptop and am waiting for something to happen or I've just touched my Kindle or the phone or whatever it is. My favorite example is watching people stand in front of ATM machines and bang on the glass. Because it makes so much sense for people when they go for the glass.

I've heard people talk to a lot of consumers in the U.K. over the past couple of years, and anyone who has got digital-TV stuff there has an enormous anxiety about the red button on their remote control. It's this very odd thing: the red button basically pushes them into a paved-wall, garden environment where it's not clear what's going to happen. So people have this really interesting anxiety about the red button, and it came up in every interview we did: "Oh my God, I don't want to push the red button." And people had strategies about the red button, like taping over it so you couldn't push it. It's really quite splendid in terms of managing that. I heard a nice one the other day about people with their Galaxy phones: they liked the ever-so-faint vibration that came up when you touched the phone. It's like pushing the elevator button: you want to feel something. I think that faint vibration is how we reassert that [when] you do something, you want a response to it.

So what's next in gadget interface design? Will tactility return to our lives? The iPad's version of touch is so flat, and there's no feedback.

I think we will end up seeing this incredible layering of things: standard touch for some things, haptics for others, voice for yet another thing. The best analogy I can think of is cars. When you sit in a car, look at all the different ways you have to engage with the machine. The wheel, for steering. Foot pedals, for gear changes, acceleration, and braking. It turns out having a knob for windshield wipers doesn't really make sense.

We always talk about technology adoption. What about non-adoption? Can you think of telling areas in which people haven't wanted a new gadget?

We have the example of the Honeywell Kitchen Computer from the 1960s, in a Neiman Marcus catalogue. I think it cost about $10,000--and $600 to teach your wife how to program it. The tagline was "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." It's so perverse. Of course, none of them sold. Every ubiquitous-computing conference I'd been to, everyone was doing something in kitchen computing, and none of it ever seemed to pay any attention to how people actually inhabited kitchens.

Has anything changed since then?

This last year, we were looking at really early adopters of the iPad, and we found a woman in her house, and what had she done? She had stuck the iPad in a ziplock bag and stuck it on the kitchen counter and was using it to cook. And I remember thinking, Ah, it wasn't about "kitchen computing," it was about computing you could make come to the kitchen. It was about finding an object that fitted into all the things that a kitchen already is, rather than trying to re-configure the kitchen around the Honeywell Kitchen Computer.

Intel's Genevieve Bell talks about why we adopt some gadgets and spurn others—and why tech companies underestimate female users.

A trip through the HTML time machine that is Warren Buffett's company's website.

When Silicon Valley's old obsession meets one of its newer ones.

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal in conversation with industry entrepreneurs shaping our future. See full coverage

Clean Power Finance is a marketplace for all the pieces of the solar value chain to find each other. For many years, solar was a small and fragmented market. It was difficult to find the right suppliers, installers, and financial backers. Now, CPF is trying to streamline that process and take the friction out of the business.

The way they do that is to offer a business-to-business software platform. That's not exactly sexy. In fact, it may be the opposite of sexy. But it's this kind of solution that's helped other industries scale and grow. And it's the sort of thing that green tech was never big enough to warrant. Point is: the efficiency of a solar cell is not the only kind of efficiency that matters in driving down the cost of zero-carbon electricity. 

A 156-second symphony honoring the sounds of the mid-century workplace.

The modern machine aims to be silent. The MacBook Air, eschewing the noisy optical and hard drives of yore, is a perfect example: It whispers through nearly all work. The quiet indicates the quality of the computer; it doesn't *need* some big noisy fan. 

But go back to the office of the 1960s and you'd hear a symphony of mechanical noises: metal hitting metal at various rhythms and speeds. Playing with the cacophony of the age, Swiss composer Rolf Liebermann composed a short song for 156 machines in honor of his country's National Exposition in 1964. 

According to UbuWeb, which hosts the original, the machines include: "16 typewriters, 18 calculator machines, 8 accounting machines, 12 office perforators, 10 caisses enregistreuses, 8 humidificateurs-colleurs, 8 tele-scripteurs, 2 metronomes, 4 bells of signalisation, 2 entrance door gongs, 10 claxons, 16 telephones, 40 experimental signal receptors,1 fork lift, a duplicator and a monte-charge."

I'll be honest: I'm not even sure what several of those machines are, but dang, do they sound good together. This is a fantastic little piece of music made from the sonic detritus of a pre-digital workplace. 

And here, we can see what it takes to reproduce a similar sound with real live people playing the role of the machines.

Very high efficiency, rugged solar panels could find their first markets outside the green demographics.

How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection

Three members of Obama's tech team, from left to right: Harper Reed, Dylan Richard, and Mark Trammell (Photo by Daniel X. O'Neil).

The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong.

Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.

They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, PalominoDB, was fixing databases, but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn't have time.

They'd been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.

They'd been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time.

And that was the point. "Game day" was October 21. The election was still 17 days away, and this was a live action role playing (LARPing!) exercise that the campaign's chief technology officer, Harper Reed, was inflicting on his team. "We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built."

Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master, calling out devilishly complex scenarios that were designed to test each and every piece of their system as they entered the exponential traffic-growth phase of the election. Mark Trammell, an engineer who Reed hired after he left Twitter, saw a couple game days. He said they reminded him of his time in the Navy. "You ran firefighting drills over and over and over, to make sure that you not just know what you're doing," he said, "but you're calm because you know you can handle your shit."

The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent -- by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s -- from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened."

In fact, the day after the October 21 game day, Amazon services -- on which the whole campaign's tech presence was built -- went down. "We didn't have any downtime because we had done that scenario already," Reed said. Hurricane Sandy hit on another game day, October 29, threatening the campaign's whole East Coast infrastructure. "We created a hot backup of all our applications to US-west in preparation for US-east to go down hard," Reed said.

"We knew what to do," Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. "We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca."

THE NEW CHICAGO MACHINE vs. THE GRAND OLD PARTY

Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama's perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats' vaunted ground game. Orca was going to allow volunteers at polling places to update the Romney camp's database of voters in real time as people cast their ballots. That would supposedly allow them to deploy resources more efficiently and wring every last vote out of Florida, Ohio, and the other battleground states. The product got its name, a Romney spokesperson told NPR PBS , because orcas are the only known predator of the one-tusked narwhal.

Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like the Republicans were touting the iPad as a Facebook killer.

The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn't an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company's sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine. And besides, in the scheme of a campaign, a digitized strike list is cool, but it's not, like, a gamechanger. It's just a nice thing to have.

So, it was with more than a hint of schadenfreude that Reed's team hear that Orca crashed early on election day. Later reports posted by rank-and-file volunteers describe chaos descending on the polling locations as only a fraction of the tens of thousands of volunteers organized for the effort were able to use it properly to turn out the vote.

Of course, they couldn't snicker too loudly. Obama's campaign had created a similar app in 2008 called Houdini. As detailed in Sasha Issenberg's groundbreaking book, The Victory Lab, Houdini's rollout went great until about 9:30am Eastern on the day of the election. Then it crashed in much the same way Orca did.

In 2012, Democrats had a new version, built by the vendor, NGP VAN. It was called Gordon, after the man who killed Houdini. But the 2008 failure, among other needs, drove the 2012 Obama team to bring technologists in-house.

With election day bearing down on them, they knew they could not go down. And yet they had to accommodate much more strain on the systems as interest in the election picked up toward the end, as it always does. Mark Trammell, who worked for Twitter during its period of exponential growth, thought it would have been easy for the Obama team to fall into many of the pitfalls that the social network did back then. But while the problems of scaling both technology and culture quickly might have been similar, the stakes were much higher. A fail whale (cough) in the days leading up to or on November 6 would have been neither charming nor funny. In a race that at least some people thought might be very close, it could have cost the President the election.

And of course, the team's only real goal was to elect the President. "We have to elect the President. We don't need to sell our software to Oracle," Reed told his team. But the secondary impact of their success or failure would be to prove that campaigns could effectively hire and deploy top-level programming talent. If they failed, it would be evidence that this stuff might be best left to outside political technology consultants, by whom the arena had long been handled. If Reed's team succeeded, engineers might become as enshrined in the mechanics of campaigns as social-media teams already are.

We now know what happened. The grand technology experiment worked. So little went wrong that Trammell and Reed even had time to cook up a little pin to celebrate. It said, "YOLO," short for "You Only Live Once," with the Obama Os. 

When Obama campaign chief Jim Messina signed off on hiring Reed, he told him, "Welcome to the team. Don't fuck it up." As Election Day ended and the dust settled, it was clear: Reed had not fucked it up.

The campaign had turned out more volunteers and gotten more donors than in 2008. Sure, the field organization was more entrenched and experienced, but the difference stemmed in large part from better technology. The tech team's key products -- Dashboard, the Call Tool, the Facebook Blaster, the PeopleMatcher, and Narwhal -- made it simpler and easier for anyone to engage with the President's reelection effort.

The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the meaning of life.

But it wasn't easy. Reed's team came in as outsiders to the campaign and by most accounts, remained that way. The divisions among the tech, digital, and analytics team never quite got resolved, even if the end product has salved the sore spots that developed over the stressful months. At their worst, in early 2012, the cultural differences between tech and everybody else threatened to derail the whole grand experiment.

By the end, the campaign produced exactly what it should have: a hybrid of the desires of everyone on Obama's team. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars online, made unprecedented progress in voter targeting, and built everything atop the most stable technical infrastructure of any presidential campaign. To go a step further, I'd even say that this clash of cultures was a good thing: The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the significance of elections.

YOLO: MEET THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN'S CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

The President hugging Harper Reed as shown on his Instagram feed.

If you're a nerd, Harper Reed is an easy guy to like. He's brash and funny and smart. He gets you and where you came from. He, too, played with computers when they weren't cool, and learned to code because he just could not help himself. You could call out nouns, phenomena, and he'd be right there with you: BBS, warez, self-organizing systems, Rails, the quantified self, Singularity. He wrote his first programs at age seven, games that his mom typed into their Apple IIC. He, too, has a memory that all nerds share: Late at night, light from a chunky monitor illuminating his face, fingers flying across a keyboard, he figured something out. 

TV news segments about cybersecurity might look lifted straight from his memories, but the b-roll they shot of darkened rooms and typing hands could not convey the sense of exhilaration he felt when he built something that works. Harper Reed got the city of Chicago to create an open and real-time feed of its transit data by reverse engineering how they served bus location information. Why? Because it made his wife Hiromi's commute a little easier. Because it was fun to extract the data from the bureaucracy and make it available to anyone who wanted it. Because he is a nerd.

Yet Reed has friends like the manager of the hip-hop club Empire who, when we walk into the place early on the Friday after the election, says, "Let me grab you a shot." Surprisingly, Harper Reed is a chilled vodka kind of guy. Unsurprisingly, Harper Reed read Steven Levy's Hackers as a kid. Surprisingly, the manager, who is tall and handsome with rock-and-roll hair flowing from beneath a red beanie, returns to show Harper photographs of his kids. They've known each other for a long while. They are really growing up.

As the night rolls on, and the club starts to fill up, another friend approached us: DJ Hiroki, who was spinning that night. Harper Reed knows the DJ. Of course. And Hiroki grabs us another shot. (At this point I'm thinking, "By the end of the night, either I pass out or Reed tells me something good.") Hiroki's been DJing at Empire for years, since Harper Reed was the crazy guy you can see on his public Facebook photos. In one shot from 2006, a skinny Reed sits in a bathtub with a beer in his hand, two thick band tattoos running across his chest and shoulders. He is not wearing any clothes. The caption reads, "Stop staring, it's not there i swear!" What makes Harper Reed different isn't just that the photo exists, but that he kept it public during the election.

He may be like you, but he also juggles better than you, and is wilder than you, more fun than you, cooler than you.

Yet if you've spent a lot of time around tech people, around Burning Man devotees, around startups, around San Francisco, around BBSs, around Reddit, Harper Reed probably makes sense to you. He's a cool hacker. He gets profiled by Mother Jones even though he couldn't talk with Tim Murphy, their reporter. He supports open source. He likes Japan. He says fuck a lot.  He goes to hipster bars that serve vegan Mexican food, and where a quarter of the staff and clientele have mustaches.

He may be like you, but he also juggles better than you, and is wilder than you, more fun than you, cooler than you. He's what a king of the nerds really looks like. Sure, he might grow a beard and put on a little potbelly, but he wouldn't tuck in his t-shirt. He is not that kind of nerd. Instead, he's got plugs in his ears and a shock of gloriously product-mussed hair and hipster glasses and he doesn't own a long-sleeve dress shirt, in case you were wondering.

"Harper is an easy guy to underestimate because he looks funny. That might be part of his brand," said Chris Sacca, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist and major Obama bundler who brought a team of more than a dozen technologists out for an Obama campaign hack day.

Reed, for his part, has the kind of self-awareness that faces outward. His self-announced flaws bristle like quills. "I always look like a fucking idiot," Reed told me. "And if you look like an asshole, you have to be really good."

It was a lesson he learned early out in Greeley, Colorado, where he grew up. "I had this experience where my dad hired someone to help him out because his network was messed up and he wanted me to watch. And this was at a very unfortunate time in my life where I was wearing very baggy pants and I had a Marilyn Manson shirt on and I looked like an asshole. And my father took me aside and was like, 'Why do you look like an asshole?' And I was like, 'I don't know. I don't have an answer.' But I realized I was just as good as the guys fixing it," Reed recalled. "And they didn't look like me and I didn't look like them. And if I'm going to do this, and look like an idiot, I have to step up. Like if we're all at zero, I have to be at 10 because I have this stupid mustache."

And in fact, he may actually be at 10. Sacca said that with technical people, it's one thing to look at their resumes and another to see how they are viewed among their peers. "And it was amazing how many incredibly well regarded hackers that I follow on Twitter rejoiced and celebrated [when Reed was hired]," Sacca said. "Lots of guys who know how to spit out code, they really bought that."

By the time Sacca brought his Silicon Valley contingent out to Chicago, he called the technical team "top notch." After all, we're talking about a group of people who had Eric Schmidt sitting in with them on Election Day. You had to be good. The tech world was watching.

Terry Howerton, the head of the Illinois Technology Association and a frank observer of Chicago's tech scene, had only glowing things to say about Reed. "Harper Reed? I think he's wicked smart," Howerton said. "He knows how to pull people together. I think that was probably what attracted the rest of the people there. Harper is responsible for a huge percentage of the people who went over there."

Reed's own team found their co-workers particularly impressive. One testament to that is several startups might spin out of the connections people made at the OFA headquarters, such as Optimizely, a tool for website A/B testing, which spun out of Obama's 2008 bid. (Sacca's actually an investor in that one, too.)

"A CTO role is a weird thing," said Carol Davidsen, who left Microsoft to become the product manager for Narwhal. "The primary responsibility is getting good engineers. And there really was no one else like him that could have assembled these people that quickly and get them to take a pay cut and move to Chicago."

And yet, the very things that make Reed an interesting and beloved person are the same things that make him an unlikely pick to become the chief technology officer of the reelection campaign of the President of the United States. Political people wear khakis. They only own long-sleeve dress shirts. Their old photos on Facebook show them canvassing for local politicians and winning cross-country meets.

I asked Michael Slaby, Obama's 2008 chief technology officer, and the guy who hired Harper Reed this time around, if it wasn't risky to hire this wild guy into a presidential campaign. "It's funny to hear you call it risky, it seems obvious to me," Slaby said. "It seems crazy to hire someone like me as CTO when you could have someone like Harper as CTO."

THE NERDS ARE INSIDE THE BUILDING

The strange truth is that campaigns have long been low-technologist, if not low-technology, affairs. Think of them as a weird kind of niche startup and you can see why. You have very little time, maybe a year, really. You can't afford to pay very much. The job security, by design, is nonexistent. And even though you need to build a massive "customer" base and develop the infrastructure to get money and votes from them, no one gets to exit and make a bunch of money. So, campaign tech has been dominated by people who care about the politics of the thing, not the technology of the thing. The websites might have looked like solid consumer web applications, but they were not under the hood.

For all the hoopla surrounding the digital savvy of President Obama's 2008 campaign, and as much as everyone I spoke with loved it, it was not as heavily digital or technological as it is now remembered. "Facebook was about one-tenth of the size that it is now. Twitter was a nothing burger for the campaign. It wasn't a core or even peripheral part of our strategy," said Teddy Goff, Digital Director of Obama for America and a veteran of both campaigns. Think about the killer tool of that campaign, my.barackobama.com; It borrowed the my from MySpace. 

Sure, the '08 campaign had Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, but Hughes was the spokesperson for the company, not its technical guy. The '08 campaigners, Slaby told me, had been "opportunistic users of technology" who "brute forced and baling wired" different pieces of software together. Things worked (most of the time), but everyone, Slaby especially, knew that they needed a more stable platform for 2012.

In 2008, Facebook was about one-tenth of the size that it is now. Twitter was a nothing burger for the campaign. It wasn't a core or even peripheral part of the strategy.

Campaigns, however, even Howard Dean's famous 2004 Internet-enabled run at the Democratic nomination, did not hire a bunch of technologists. Though they hired a couple, like Clay Johnson, they bought technology from outside consultants. For 2012, Slaby wanted to change all that. He wanted dozens of engineers in-house, and he got them.

"The real innovation in 2012 is that we had world-class technologists inside a campaign," Slaby told me. "The traditional technology stuff inside campaigns had not been at the same level." And yet the technologists, no matter how good they were, brought a different worldview, set of personalities, and expectations.

Campaigns are not just another Fortune 500 company or top-50 website. They have their own culture and demands, strange rigors and schedules. The deadlines are hard and the pressure would be enough to press the t-shirt of even the most battle-tested startup veteran.

To really understand what happened behind the scenes at the Obama campaign, you need to know a little bit about its organizational structure. Tech was Harper Reed's domain. "Digital" was Joe Rospars' kingdom; his team was composed of the people who sent you all those emails, designed some of the consumer-facing pieces of BarackObama.com, and ran the campaigns' most-excellent accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, video, and the like. Analytics was run by Dan Wagner, and those guys were responsible for coming up with ways of finding and targeting voters they could persuade or turn out. Jeremy Bird ran Field, the on-the-ground operations of organizing voters at the community level that many consider Obama's secret sauce . The tech for the campaign was supposed to help the Field, Analytics, and Digital teams do their jobs better. Tech, in a campaign or at least this campaign or perhaps any successful campaign, has to play a supporting role. The goal was not to build a product. The goal was to reelect the President. As Reed put it, if the campaign were Moneyball, he wouldn't be Billy Beane, he'd be "Google Boy."

There's one other interesting component to the campaign's structure. And that's the presence of two big tech vendors interfacing with the various teams -- Blue State Digital and NGP Van. The most obvious is the firm that Rospars, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, and Clay Johnson co-founded, Blue State Digital. They're the preeminent progressive digital agency, and a decent chunk -- maybe 30 percent -- of their business comes from providing technology to campaigns. Of course, BSD's biggest client was the Obama campaign and has been for some time. BSD and Obama for America were and are so deeply enmeshed, it would be difficult to say where one ended and the other began. After all, both Goff and Rospars, the company's principals, were paid staffers of the Obama campaign. And yet between 2008 and 2012, BSD was purchased by WPP, one of the largest ad agencies in the world. What had been an obviously progressive organization was now owned by a huge conglomerate and had clients that weren't other Democratic politicians. 

One other thing to know about Rospars, specifically: "He's the Karl Rove of the Internet."

One other thing to know about Rospars, specifically: "He's the Karl Rove of the Internet," someone who knows him very well told me. What Rove was to direct mail -- the undisputed king of the medium -- Rospars is to email. He and Goff are the brains behind Obama's unprecedented online fundraising efforts. They know what they were doing and had proven that time and again.

The complex relationship between BSD and the Obama campaign adds another dimension to the introduction of an inside team of technologists. If all campaigns started bringing their technology in house, perhaps BSD's tech business would begin to seem less attractive, particularly if many of the tools that such an inside team created were developed as open source products.

So, perhaps the tech team was bound to butt heads with Rospars' digital squad. Slaby would note, too, that the organizational styles of the two operations were very different. "Campaigns aren't traditionally that collaborative," he said. "Departments tend to be freestanding. They are organized kind of like disaster response -- siloed and super hierarchical so that things can move very quickly."

Looking at it all from the outside, both the digital and tech teams had really good, mission-oriented reasons for wanting their way to carry the day. The tech team could say, "Hey, we've done this kind of tech before at larger scale and with more stability than you've ever had. Let us do this." And the digital team could say, "Yeah, well, we elected the president and we know how to win, regardless of the technology stack. Just make what we ask for."

The way that the conflict played out was over things like the user experience on the website. Jason Kunesh was the director of UX for the tech team. He had many years of consulting under his belt for big and small companies like Microsoft and LeapFrog. He, too, from an industry perspective knew what he was doing. So, he ran some user interrupt tests on the website to determine how people were experiencing www.barackobama.com. What he found was that the website wasn't even trying to make a go at persuading voters. Rather, everyone got funneled into the fundraising "trap." When he raised that issue with Goff and Rospars, he got a response that I imagine was something like, "Duh. Now STFU," but perhaps in more words. And from the Goff/Rospars perspective, think about it: the system they'd developed could raise $3 million *from a single email.* The sorts of moves they had learned how to make had made a difference of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Why was this Kunesh guy coming around trying to tell them how to run a campaign?

From Kunesh's perspective, though, there was no reason to think that you had to run this campaign the same as you did the last one. The outsider status that the team both adopted and had applied to them gave them the right to question previous practices.

Tech sometimes had difficulty building what the Field team, a hallowed group within the campaign's world, wanted. Most of that related to the way that they launched Dashboard, the online outreach tool. If you look at Dashboard at the end of the campaign, you see a beautifully polished product that let you volunteer any way you wanted. It's secure and intuitive and had tremendously good uptime as the campaign drew to a close.

But that wasn't how the first version of Dashboard looked.

The tech team's plan was to roll out version 1 with a limited feature set, iterate, roll out version 2, iterate, and so on and so forth until the software was complete and bulletproof. Per Kunesh's telling, the Field people were used to software that looked complete but that was unreliable under the hood. It looked as if you could do the things you needed to do, but the software would keep falling down and getting patched, falling down and getting patched, all the way through a campaign. The tech team did not want that. They might be slower, but they were going to build solid products.

In the movie version of the campaign, there's probably a meeting where I'm about to get fired and I throw myself on the table

Reed's team began to trickle into Chicago beginning in May of 2011. They promised, over-optimistically, that they'd release a version of Dashboard just a few months after the team arrived. The first version was not impressive. "August 29, 2011, my birthday, we were supposed to have a prototype out of Dashboard, that was going to be the public launch," Kunesh told me. "It was freaking horrible, you couldn't show it to anyone. But I'd only been there 13 weeks and most of the team had been there half that time."

As the tech team struggled to translate what people wanted into usable software, trust in the tech team -- already shaky -- kept eroding. By Februrary of 2012, Kunesh started to get word that people on both the digital and field teams had agitated to pull the plug on Dashboard and replace the tech team with somebody, anybody, else.

"A lot of the software is kind of late. It's looking ugly and I go out on this Field call," Kunesh remembered. "And people are like, 'Man, we should fire your bosses man... We gotta get the guys from the DNC. They don't know what the hell you're doing.' I'm sitting there going, 'I'm gonna get another margarita.'"

While the responsibility for their early struggles certainly falls to the tech team, there were mitigating factors. For one, no one had ever done what they were attempting to do. Narwhal had to connect to a bunch of different vendors' software, some of which turned out to be surprisingly arcane and difficult. Not only that, but there were differences in the way field offices in some states did things and how campaign HQ thought they did things. Tech wasted time building things that it turned out people didn't need or want.

"In the movie version of the campaign, there's probably a meeting where I'm about to get fired and I throw myself on the table," Slaby told me. But in reality, what actually happened was Obama's campaign chief Jim Messina would come by Slaby's desk and tell him, "Dude, this has to work." And Slaby would respond, "I know. It will," and then go back to work.

In fact, some shakeups were necessary. Reed and Slaby sent some product managers packing and brought in more traditional ones like former Microsoft PM Carol Davidsen. "You very much have to understand the campaign's hiring strategy: 'We'll hire these product managers who have campaign experience, then hire engineers who have technical experience -- and these two worlds will magically come together.' That failed," Davidsen said. "Those two groups of people couldn't talk to each other."

Then, in the late spring, all the products that the tech team had been promising started to show up. Dashboard got solid. You didn't have to log in a bunch of times if you wanted to do different things on the website. Other smaller products rolled out. "The stuff we told you about for a year is actually happening," Kunesh recalled telling the Field team. "You're going to have one login and have all these tools and it's all just gonna work."

Perhaps most importantly, Narwhal really got on track, thanks no doubt to Davidsen's efforts as well as Josh Thayer's, the lead engineer who arrived in April. What Narwhal fixed was a problem that's long plagued campaigns. You have all this data coming in from all these places -- the voter file, various field offices, the analytics people, the website, mobile stuff. In 2008, and all previous races, the numbers changed once a day. It wasn't real-time. And the people looking to hit their numbers in various ways out in the field offices -- number of volunteers and dollars raised and voters persuaded -- were used to seeing that update happen like that.

But from an infrastructure level, how much better would it be if you could sync that data in real time across the entire campaign? That's what Narwhal was supposed to do. Davidsen, in true product-manager form, broke down precisely how it all worked. First, she said, Narwhal wasn't really one thing, but several. Narwhal was just an initially helpful brand for the bundle of software.

In reality, it had three components. "One is vendor integration: BSD, NGP, VAN [the latter two companies merged in 2010]. Just getting all of that data into the system and getting it in real time as soon as it goes in one system to another," she said. "The second part is an API portion. You don't want a million consumers getting data via SQL." The API allowed people to access parts of the data without letting them get at the SQL database on the backend. It provided a safe way for Dashboard, the Call Tool (which helped people make calls), and the Twitter Blaster to pull data. And the last part was the presentation of the data that was in the system. While the dream had been for all applications to run through Narwhal in real time, it turned out that couldn't work. So, they split things into real-time applications like the Call Tool or things on the web. And then they provided a separate way for the Analytics people, who had very specific needs, to get the data in a different form. Then, whatever they came up with was fed back into Narwhal.

It's just change management. It's not complicated; it's just hard.

By the end, Davidsen thought all the teams' relationships had improved, even before Obama's big win. She credited a weekly Wednesday drinking and hanging out session that brought together all the various people working on the campaign's technology. By the very end, some front-end designers who were technically on the digital team had embedded with the tech squad to get work done faster. Tech might not have been fully integrated, but it was fully operational. High fives were in the air.

Slaby, with typical pragmatism, put it like this. "Our supporters don't give a shit about our org chart. They just want to have a meaningful experience. We promise them they can play a meaningful role in politics and they don't care about the departments in the campaign. So we have to do the work on our side to look integrated and have our shit together," he said. "That took some time. You have to develop new trust with people. It's just change management. It's not complicated; it's just hard."

WHAT THEY ACTUALLY BUILT

Of course, the tech didn't exist for its own sake. It was meant to be used by the organizers in the field and the analysts in the lab. Let's just run through some of the things that actually got accomplished by the tech, digital, and analytics teams beyond of Narwhal and Dashboard.

They created the most sophisticated email fundraising program ever. The digital team, under Rospars leadership, took their data-driven strategy to a new level. Any time you received an email from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing emails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers.

Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear on Reddit, the massive popular social networking site. And yes, he really did type in his own answers with Goff at his side. One fascinating outcome of the AMA is that 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President dropped in a link to the Obama voter registration page. Oh, and the campaign also officially has the most tweeted tweet and the most popular Facebook post. Not bad. I would also note that Laura Olin, a former strategist at Blue State Digital who moved to the Obama campaign, ran the best campaign Tumblr the world will probably ever see.

With Davidsen's help, the Analytics team built a tool they called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to buy eyeballs on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen's old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign's own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. Having that data allowed the campaign to buy ads that they knew would get in front of the most of their people at the least cost. They didn't have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours. 

According to CMAG/Kantar, the Obama's campaign's cost per ad was lower ($594) than the Romney campaign ($666) or any other major buyer in the campaign cycle. That difference may not sound impressive, but the Obama campaign itself aired more than 550 thousand ads. And it wasn't just about cost, either. They could see that some households were only watching a couple hours of TV a day and might be willing to spend more to get in front of those harder-to-reach people.

Goff described the Facebook tool as "the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that's come around in years, since the phone call."

The digital, tech, and analytics teams worked to build Twitter and Facebook Blasters. They ran on a service that generated microtargeting data that was built by Will St. Clair. It was code named Täärgus Taargüs for some reason. With Twitter, one of the company's former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically send individual users direct messages. "We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff." Meanwhile, the teams also built an opt-in Facebook outreach program that sent people messages saying, essentially, "Your friend, Dave in Ohio, hasn't voted yet. Go tell him to vote." Goff described the Facebook tool as "the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that's come around in years, since the phone call."

Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team's Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon's one-click purchases to political donations. "It's the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online," Goff said. "In terms of fundraising, that's as innovative as we needed to be." Storing people's payment information also let the campaign receive donations via text messages long before the Federal Elections Commission approved an official way of doing so. They could simply text people who'd opted in a simple message like, "Text back with how much money you'd like to donate." Sometimes people texted much larger dollar amounts back than the $10 increments that mobile carriers allow.

It's an impressive array of accomplishments. What you can do with data and code just keeps advancing. "After the last campaign, I got introduced as the CTO of the most technically advanced campaign ever," Slaby said. "But that's true of every CTO of every campaign every time." Or, rather, it's true of one campaign CTO every time.

EXIT MUSIC

Harper Reed after the election (Photo by Daniel X. O'Neil).

That next most technically advanced CTO, in 2016, will not be Harper Reed. A few days after the election, sitting with his wife at Wicker Park's Handlebar, eating fish tacos, and drinking a Daisy Cutter pale ale, Reed looks happy. He'd told me earlier in the day that he'd never experienced stress until the Obama campaign, and I believe him.

He regaled us with stories about his old performance troupe, Jugglers Against Homophobia, wild clubbing and DJs. "It was this whole world of having fun and living in the moment," Reed said. "And there was a lot of doing that on the Internet."

"I spent a lot of time hacking doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, " Reed said, "and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which."

We left Handlebar and made a quick pitstop at the coffee shop, Wormhole, where he first met Slaby. Reed cracks that it's like Reddit come to life. Both of them remember the meeting the same way: Slaby playing the role of square, Reed playing the role of hipster. And two minutes later, they were ready to work together. What began 18 months ago in that very spot was finally coming to an end. Reed could stop being Obama for America's CTO and return to being "Harper Reed, probably one of the coolest guys ever," as his personal webpage is titled.

But of course, he and his whole team of nerds were changed by the experience. They learned what it was like to have -- and work with people who had --  a higher purpose than building cool stuff. "Teddy [Goff] would tear up talking about the President. I would be like, 'Yeah, that guy's cool,'" Reed said. "It was only towards the end, the middle of 2012, when we realized the gravity of what we were doing."

Part of that process was Reed, a technologist's technologist, learning the limits of his own power. "I remember at one point basically breaking down during the campaign because I was losing control. The success of it was out of my hands," he told me. "I felt like the people I hired were right, the resources we argued for were right. And because of a stupid mistake, or people were scared and they didn't adopt the technology or whatever, something could go awry. We could lose."

And losing, they felt more and more deeply as the campaign went on, would mean horrible things for the country. They started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices while they coded.

"There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine and I know what is going to come out of it," Reed said. "In this, the control we all enjoyed about technology was gone."

We finished our drinks, ready for what was almost certainly going to be a long night, and headed to our first club. The last thing my recorder picked up over the bass was me saying to Harper, "I just saw someone buy Hennessy. I've never seen someone buy Hennessy." Then, all I can hear is that music.