Agent Palmer

I always take notes when I read a book. Part of it comes from wanting the ability to add quotes to the reviews I write, but the bigger picture reason is because sometimes I like to go back to those notes and see them at a later date. By actually being able to read through a small document with all the quotes I pulled, I’ll find the one I remember, and it’s easier than paging through and rereading a whole page.

I bring this up because the notes I collected from reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson are more than a lot of the other books I have recently read, even some on the same subject.

“From the emergence of the first browser through the boom of social media, this fascinating history reveals how the internet changed everything we thought we knew about technologies–and ourselves.”

That first sentence from the inside cover flap explains in broad strokes what How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone is. But it is more than that.

“The history of technology that you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers. But from the first computer programmer in the nineteenth century through the cyberpunk era of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of tech and innovation. They’ve just been erased from the story—until now.”

In Claire L. Evans brilliant words “This book is about women,” but it also raises more questions about the marginalized and forgotten heroes of every revolution, not just the digital one that brought about the Internet.

I recently had the privilege of being honored by my friends with a special episode of Our Liner Notes for having infiltrated 100 different podcast episodes. The very definition of “Proxycasting,” a term coined by Bill Sweeney of The Wicked Theory Podcast, which means “Palmer doesn’t need his own podcast, he has yours!”

And while that episode was, in fact, my idea, I have no doubts about its origin as a fairly egotistical start, but what happened at the end is worth noting on a very serious level