The creation story is laced with persistence, creative brilliance, and an almost patriotic presentation of work ethic.

The problem is—it isn’t exactly true. What’s more, Monopoly’s origin story teaches us that innovation can be a complicated affair and that the “lightbulb” moment of how things get made is, in fact, sometimes a myth. (The scale of Thomas Edison’s own contributions to the invention so associated with his name, fittingly, is now debated.) In the case of Monopoly, the journey of American invention was less a linear path and more a messy room shared by several people. The game was, in fact, created in 1903—long before Darrow’s mythical basement revelation—by Elizabeth Magie, the daughter of an abolitionist who was herself a staunch anti-capitalist crusader. Magie created “Landlord’s Game,” the forerunner to Monopoly, not as a celebration of wealth but as a protest against the evil monopolies of the time.

Three decades before Parker Brothers and Darrow took credit for it, her game was embraced by a constellation of notable left-wing Americans of the time, as well as on various college campuses in the Northeast. ACLU chairman Ernest Angell played it, and so did Scott Nearing, a radical professor at Wharton, champion of academic freedom, and a father of the “green” movement. It flourished in Arden, Delaware, a tiny, utopian village founded by followers of popular political economist Henry George’s “single tax” theory, a belief system Magie was passionate about. Among the residents of Arden who embraced the game was Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, who corresponded with, and possibly met, Magie.

Magie’s Landlord’s Game, the forerunner to Monopoly. Image courtesy of Tom Forsyth.

In the 1920s, homemade copies of Magie’s game found their way to what was then a flourishing Quaker community in Atlantic City. Quaker teachers in Atlantic City incorporated it into their teaching—with some modifications. Dice, associated with gambling, were discordant with their religious beliefs. The Quakers, practitioners of silence, also did away with the loud auctioning associated with the game, added fixed prices to the board, and modified it to be more child-friendly.

It was a version of this game—Magie’s Landlord’s Game with some of the Atlantic City Quaker modifications—that a friend taught Darrow to play. Darrow then sold it to Parker Brothers.

Darrow and Parker Brothers made millions for “creating” Monopoly whereas Magie’s income from the game was reported to be a mere $500. She died in 1948, having outlived her husband, with no children and few knowing of her role as the true originator of the game that became Monopoly. She had worked in Washington, D.C. in relative obscurity as a secretary and her income as a maker of games, according to the 1940 U.S. Census, was “0.”

Rendition of Darrow’s version of Monopoly. Image courtesy of Tom Forsyth.

Magie’s story would have been lost if not for Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at the University of San Francisco whose legal battle over his own Anti-Monopoly board game in the 1970s unearthed the whole scandal. Anspach, today in his nineties and retired from teaching, and still selling his game, became a tireless detective of Monopoly’s origin story and spent a decade fighting for the right to talk freely about what he’d discovered. Although Magie and Anspach never met—Anspach was a child refugee of Danzig at the time Magie was close to dying—their fates became linked together unexpectedly. Anspach’s fate partially hinged on proving Magie was the inventor; Magie’s story would not have been told without a digger and advocate like him.

Over the five years it took me to research The Monopolists and in the two years since its publication, I’ve seen many a jaw drop as I told the tale of Monopoly’s lost inventor and her unlikely exhumation. The most common question is, “How did this happen?”

In Magie’s time, it was far too easy to suppress the voices of marginalized groups, including women. At the time she patented her game, she didn’t have the right to vote. The head of the U.S. Patent Office was actively discouraging women from applying for patents. Job opportunities were extremely limited and it was common in the press to talk about how “weak,” “delicate,” and “smaller-brained” women were.

The greater astonishment maybe isn’t just that Magie lived a life of a game designer and political thinker far before her time, but that any shreds of her story survived at all. In my research, I stitched together enough of Magie’s trail—newspaper articles, Census records, her own writings, photographs—to get a sense of who Magie was and what she was trying to say to the world. But it’s hard not to think of her peers in her time who left far less behind, including female branches of my own family tree. Their contributions were large, but often silent, an untold quantity of labor that helped build this country. History is full of Lizzie Magies, Quaker teachers, friends who share ideas, the kinds of people who help shape our world and go largely unnoticed for doing so.

Cover of an earlier version of Monopoly.

The “light bulb” idea, and the Darrow myth, persist, in part because we want them to. On some level we all fantasize about a lightning bolt of brilliance hitting us. The instantaneous nature of that seems particularly American: fast food, fast cars, fast road to becoming an innovative—and wealthy—genius.

Part of the reason today’s incarnation of Monopoly is so fun to play is that it was tweaked from Magie’s original design for better play. The core of the game is Magie’s, but the Atlantic City properties, the fixed prices, and the graphics all helped make it better. In today’s era of selfies, being one’s own publicist on social media, and the egotism wrapped around one’s Twitter follower count, perhaps Monopoly’s creation story reminds us that together and connected, we are better. The “light bulb” narrative of invention, by definition, largely omits much chance for collaboration, a force that can be as vital for creation as the air we breathe.

Perhaps it’s always been more than a game, after all.

The post The Anti-Capitalist Woman Who Created Monopoly—Before Others Cashed In appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You may have heard about self-driving cars when Google was first on the road with a clunky, driverless vehicle to test the new technology. These days practically every major auto company seems to be getting in on the act, be it for driver-assisted operations or fully autonomous vehicles.

This has led to plenty of questions about the possible impacts, good and ill, of this dramatic new technology. Could they be hacked, putting passengers at risk? Will taxi, bus, and truck drivers soon be out of a job? How will these vehicles be regulated? Who is liable when crashes occur? And what will the fast-moving, self-driving car do when it must choose between colliding with an oncoming vehicle or turning and hitting pedestrians?

You probably have not been asked what you think about these or other such questions, and that is a shame. This rapidly arriving new technology has the potential to transform our world, reducing road fatalities and changing notions of what it means to be free.

And it’s not just self-driving cars. As the convergence between new technologies accelerates in what some are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s worth reflecting on how essential it is for scientists, engineers, and technologists to ask questions about the potential societal impact of their inventions. You know, before it’s too late.

The challenge is to introduce what I call “actionable empathy” into the development of new technologies.

Empathy is the ability to experience someone else’s feelings—their fears, hopes, and aspirations—from that person’s perspective. Most of us know what it’s like to identify with someone else who’s experiencing strong emotions or facing extreme circumstances—to empathize with them. It’s an essential binding force within society that enables us to identify and respond to another person’s condition, without experiencing directly what they are going through.

Empathy is not a term we often use when it comes to innovation. Yet at its core, empathy is the ability to create shared understanding where there is a lack of shared knowledge, and this is where it becomes a powerful tool in technology development. An empathetic mindset may be a critical determinant of whether this new wave of convergence yields a better world or one wrought with grave dangers spurred by a failure to consider unintended consequences.

Consider the growing sophistication of gene-editing techniques that enable us to alter human embryos, and of cloud-based artificial intelligence that can listen in on your conversations and act on what it thinks you need before you know yourself. Or think about brain implants that can help manage previously incurable neurological diseases, but can also alter moods at the flick of a switch.

These are complex, potentially world-altering new possibilities. Do the principal players involved in their development possess the right skills, incentives, and tools to ask more than what problems the technology will solve and whether it will work? Can they also identify the risks and address how the technology might add physical, emotional, cultural, even spiritual value to individuals and society?

No single person, or group of experts even, can hope to fully understand from their own perspective how technology innovations will impact diverse individuals, communities, and cultures. Nor can we expect experts working on launching a new technology to be its chief critics or reviewers. These experts need others’ empathy to reflect on potential futures from different perspectives. The problem is that there is no universal common language for understanding the societal risks and benefits of these innovations—and so non-experts are left out of the development equation, even though they may be profoundly impacted by the new technologies and may have critical insights into avoiding pitfalls.

This is where empathy that supports informed decisions—actionable empathy—becomes a powerful mechanism for ensuring all of us have a say in how emerging technologies progress.

To understand how this might play out, consider the case of human gene editing. The scientific community is rapidly reaching a point where inheritable traits can be engineered into human embryos with relative ease. This technology is so controversial that the scientific community is already discussing where the ethical boundaries lie. But, as yet, there is relatively little societal engagement around the technology.

Imagine a scenario in which researchers engage at an early stage with individuals who have strong views for and against human gene editing. Now imagine if the researchers develop a way to accurately describe the hopes and concerns of these individuals, including what they think the consequences of the technology might be. They would develop the technology with knowledge of its real-world impact, and might be able to incorporate what they learn into how they create and describe the technology.

In many ways, actionable empathy is a facet of enlightened self-interest. Increasingly in today’s interconnected world, products cannot succeed long-term if they fall afoul of vocal communities. This was starkly seen with genetically modified foods, where blinkered commercial self-interest failed to take into account how the technology—and the perceived motivation behind it—would be received by different communities.

Without such actionable empathy, technology innovation becomes driven by individual or corporate aims, while societal good remains a side effect rather than a planned outcome.

For thousands of years, human history has been dominated by emerging technologies that create the problems that the next wave of innovation helps resolve. So far, we have avoided widespread catastrophe. But as our world becomes more interconnected and our technologies more integrated and powerful, we are in danger of losing the ability to handle the challenges that self-serving technology innovation creates.

This brings us back to self-driving cars. Imagine a future where the tedium and risks of driving are all but eliminated. Now imagine that, in this future, people who cannot drive, or are uneasy driving, or cannot afford to drive, have access to self-driving cars. And imagine that these cars empower their “drivers” in more ways than conventional cars ever could—just as smart phones have empowered us beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations.

This is a future that’s within our grasp. But only if researchers, designers, manufacturers, and others understand deeply what car ownership means to people. And such change presents challenges. To many of us, the cars we drive are a symbol of freedom, and an outward expression of who we are. They enable us to go where we want, when we want, with us quite literally “behind the wheel.” I suspect that, as the possibility of widespread—and eventually obligatory—automation comes closer, some will see the technology as threatening their liberty and their sense of identity. Those developing the technology will need to understand this perceived threat, and that requires engaging with all kinds of people, empathetically.

Technology innovation can produce a self-driving car that works. But only empathy will lead to one that people actually want.

The post The New Industrial Revolution Could Use a Lesson in Empathy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At a Smithsonian/Zócalo “What It Means to Be American” event, held at the National Museum of American History in Washington, Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez moderated a lively, big-picture discussion about the nature of creativity and the cultural forces that influence it. The evening featured four panelists, all recipients of this year’s Smithsonian magazine Ingenuity Awards, from a wide variety of disciplines: Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto; Zoe Crosher, co-curator of The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project; Harvard Alzheimer’s researcher Doo Yeon Kim; and Françoise Mouly, art editor at The New Yorker. In front of an enthusiastic crowd, they debated the right balance of doggedness and collaboration, and hunger and support.

Rodriguez kicked the conversation off by questioning the prevailing vision of the American loner—the individual, as opposed to the group, who tinkers alone in his garage until he or she makes a groundbreaking discovery. Is this the correct way to frame innovation? Is it just as important—or even more so—to have a society that wants innovation to take place?

Kim suggested that while society cannot force genius or ingenuity, a society supportive of innovation is still essential. Consider how easy it is for a society to stifle it, he pointed out. “I was raised in South Korea,” he said, and while there are many things about the country he loves, “I’ve seen a lot of cases where talented people just aren’t in the right place. There are genius people over there, but often they don’t find the right outlet for this genius.” They don’t have the impulse to push their fields forward as a result.

Mouly picked up on this idea by talking about her similar experience coming to the States from Paris. “I spent a few months in New York when I was 19 or 20 and still studying architecture in France,” she said, “and it was absolutely clear to me that there was an openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things.”

When she returned to Paris, she explained, she ran into trouble when she tried to land a job that required three more years of experience than she had. “I said I could do it: I have the skills, I’m interested. And the woman who was doing the hiring looked at me like, ‘Get out of my office,’” Mouly said. “I realized it was my New York spirit.”

While in France she often heard, “That’s not how we do things,” in New York, she never found barriers separating her from the experts. When she wanted to try her hand at plumbing, for instance, she found plumbers and learned from them. “To be curious was enough of a qualification,” she said.

The idea of a lack of hierarchy in America was a theme that ran throughout the conversation. Kim noted that he didn’t see the rigid divisions he’d seen in other places like Korea where “associate professors aren’t allowed” to talk to senior professors. Crosher added nuance to the idea by noting that it’s not that there are no hierarchies here—the politics of the art world, for instance, are “very bizarre, and exist in all sorts of irrational ways that all have to do with the market.” It’s that even in hierarchical fields, often there are ways to work around the established order, she said. The project she was recognized for, which commissioned artists to design works for billboards across the country, was sponsored by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), an arts nonprofit organization that she describes as a “really radical outlet.”

“My idea was insane. No one in a normal museum system would have been able to take this project on,” she said. “So I was able to find someone who could go around it. I constantly find myself bumping up against hierarchies, and I’m constantly finding ways to ways to get around them—or above them, or under them.”

Given the panelists’ rebellious streak, Rodriguez teased, “does ingenuity just mean a bunch of anarchists? Do you have to be a pain in the ass to be inventive?”

“A lot of people think I’m a difficult person,” Stern said. “But didn’t people also think Edison was a difficult person?”

Yet Stern, who has developed numerous scientific instruments for planetary and near-space research missions, also noted that “it sells innovation short to characterize it only in terms of the anarchy aspect. Sometimes it’s just a smart person solving a problem in an inventive way. It’s important that we recognize innovation comes in many forms.”

Collaboration, Stern said, can both help and hinder individual innovation; it’s just “an issue of degree.” On the one hand, sometimes the open-office trend goes too far: People can get distracted when companies try to force collaboration and end up getting in each other’s way, he said. But on the other hand, when he worked in the University of Colorado’s Center for Space and Geosciences Policy, he had different research groups sit together, so that people from different specialties would bump into each other. The result was a cross-pollination of ideas, because people naturally shared thoughts as they passed by.

“Encouraging innovation has been very much to our advantage for the past 220-plus years,” he said. “We’ve been an inventive nation from the get-go, with democracy to the technological powerhouse that this nation has become. It’s cultural, and it feeds on itself. It takes many forms and pathways.”

In a lively question-and-answer session, many audience members pressed the panelists to consider the more challenging sides of innovation. Is war good for creativity? And who’s left out of America’s innovative ethos—who can’t afford to be creative?

On the topic of wars, Stern acknowledged that, for better or worse, they have in fact inspired a lot of technological invention. “It’s unfortunate, but empirically wars spur invention,” he said.

The panelists agreed that not all classes, races, and genders have equal opportunities to innovate—and more education and awareness are important to overcome these obstacles.

Still, said Mouly, “I do believe that here there are opportunities for somebody who is hardworking and passionate, regardless of class and academic achievement. I’m not saying there aren’t problems, but you can make your own way.”

The post Openness Is the Mother of Invention appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When she meets the small Hardee’s team that tests out hundreds of combinations, it becomes clear that while these absurd products are clogging American’s arteries, they’re also, on a certain level, brilliant. As healthier chains like Chipotle and Panera have begun to crowd the fast-food market, older companies have been forced to innovate. And innovate they have: When the Doritos taco was released in 2012, for instance, it lifted Taco Bell out of a yearlong sales slump.

From the light bulb to the iPhone—with the car, the pacemaker, and the Snuggie in between—Americans pride themselves on their inventions. We put a high premium on ingenuity, whether it’s used to cure diseases or market a sandwich. Yet, what is it about our nation that makes us love and encourage new ideas? Is it something in our approach to education, our economy, our cowboy mythos? How do we pick it up, and how do we pass it on?

In advance of the Smithsonian/Zócalo “What It Means to Be American” event What Does American Ingenuity Look Like?, we asked a group of American-ingenuity experts: What are the aspects of U.S. culture that encourage us to prize innovation?

The post Why Does America Prize Creativity and Invention? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But Doug, while wise, was no genius. There were three things that made him special.

First, he cared about people. He treated everyone with kindness, respect, and humility, regardless of job titles, age, or social status.

Second, he saw the world in simple, commonsensical ways. Simple did not mean small. His vision was almost overwhelmingly big, which made it challenging for him and the people who worked with him to get anything done.

Third, he was maddeningly, stubbornly consistent. He lived in the same house for six decades. He ran several miles a day until he was diagnosed with cancer in the 1990s. He used his Augment hypertext system—the same software his lab created in the 1960s running on a hardware emulator—every day.

And he preached the same damn thing every day for seven decades to anyone who would listen. Not many did, and most who tried had difficulty understanding what it was he was trying to say. Even when they did understand, he couldn’t be sure. He himself had trouble understanding others, and he had been burned way too many times to trust that they understood him.

For the first five decades of his professional life, Doug was something of a pariah. People in the computing field hated what he had to say. They were interested in automation—replicating things that people could do, only faster and better. Doug didn’t believe in that. He cared about augmentation—using tools to make people better.

For the last two decades of Doug’s life, the world celebrated him, mostly for inventing many of the fundamental technologies that we all use today. And while he was moved by the attention, he was also depressed by it. He felt that most of the praise missed the point of what he was trying so desperately to help the world understand.

So what was it?

The world’s problems are getting complex faster than our ability to solve them. If we don’t do something to change this, we’re in trouble.

What can we do?

We must figure out how to get collectively smarter. That goes way beyond raising everyone’s individual intelligence, which would be nice, but would only get us so far so fast. The whole needs to be much greater than the sum of its parts.

How can we do that?

Not by inventing some magical tool. This is perhaps the biggest misconception about Doug’s work, especially in light of his many creations. Tools could help us get collectively smarter, but they would not magically do the work for us.

Doug believed we needed tools that would require mastery to yield results, tools like the bicycle, which he loved. A bike is not novice-friendly. It takes time to learn, and the learning process can be frustrating. But once you learn how to ride a bike, you are capable of doing new and powerful things that weren’t possible before. There’s a reason we don’t settle for riding tricycles.

Without mastery, tools themselves are pointless. We need to focus our collective energies on constantly learning and improving.

Doug knew that preaching this wasn’t enough. He had to do his part. He decided to start by building tools that helped us do knowledge work—thinking, learning, communicating, collaborating—more effectively. He set out to build the equivalent of bicycles for knowledge work and, over the course of a decade, he was remarkably successful. Up until his famed Mother of All Demos in 1968, the computing world had dismissed his ideas. Then came the demo, where he unveiled videoconferencing, graphical user interfaces, outliners, hypertext, the mouse, and several other amazing technologies to an unsuspecting world.

People literally gave him a standing ovation that day. Then they went back to dismissing him. Sure, the demo left an impression, and over the course of several decades, some of those tools started to see the light of day. But almost everyone missed the point of why he was creating those tools in the first place, and they missed the second half of what needed to happen when those tools existed. That continues to be true today.

Maybe you can understand why Doug was depressed.

Improving at improvement takes work. There are no shortcuts. We need to start now, and we need to work at it constantly, or it’s not going to happen. Tools can help us reach new heights, but we still need to do the work to get there.

This is simple to understand, but not easy to do. Doug understood this, and as always, he had a story—again involving bicycles—that explained the essential challenge.

As a kid, he and his brother used to challenge neighborhood kids to see who could perform the most difficult tricks. Doug had a trick that always worked. He would challenge the other kids to ride their bikes with their arms crossed.

What was so hard about this? Riding straight with your arms crossed was easy. The only tough part was turning. If you wanted to turn right, you’d have to move your left arm. If you wanted to turn left, you’d have to move your right arm. In other words, you simply had to do the opposite of what you normally had to do.

Two rules easily grasped, yet none of the kids could ever do it without falling off their bikes. Why? Because learning, in order to be applied, needs to be embodied. We need to build that habit and, sometimes, that means changing old habits.

This is hard, but it’s not impossible. That was the other key lesson of this story. Doug could do the trick, not because he was smarter or more physically gifted than the other kids, but because he had trained his body to do it through lots and lots of practice.

Doug had a way of explaining things so simply, you would either embrace them or disregard them, sometimes both at the same time. He was also incredibly kind, and in that kindness lay danger. Doug was everybody’s hero, and he treated you in ways that made you hunger for his approval. But he viewed his own body of work as a failure, so it was unlikely that he would consider anyone else’s attempt at fulfilling his enormous vision to be successful.

Furthermore, as Doug himself explained, he was handicapped. There were lots of things about the world around him that he did not understand. If you looked to him for answers, you were going to be confused or disappointed. He didn’t have any answers. No individual did. That was the point.

What Doug had was compassion, clarity, and commitment. He cared deeply about people, he was clear about why he was doing his work, and he was committed to pursuing his goals. These things may sound simple, even trite. But I’ve learned as I get older how rare these qualities are.

Doug made it his mission to make the world a better place. His accomplishments played a role in that, but the way he treated people was even more important. I want people to embrace his cause, but more importantly, I want everyone to care for each other the way that Doug cared for every human being he ever came across. He was a wonderful person and friend, and I miss him terribly.

The post Inventing the Mouse Was the Least of It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.