The Nonesuch Beast

Written from deep inside Amazon in August 2004 and addressed to co-workers, which is what makes it fun now: the exhibits are all real internal systems (iBase, Actuate, the Data Warehouse, a wiki whose page count is literally redacted to "{Amazon confidential}"), and the wish-lists are transcribed from live hallway ambushes — "some of them were actually yelling at me." The method is rigged demonstration: at one point Steve baits a co-worker into hunting the wiki for a project whose name has slipped both their minds, purely to win an argument about search. He also gives away a cheap adoption test: Twiki, the featureful wiki Amazon already had, lost him forever the instant he caught himself thinking "Gosh, I really ought to take the time to learn Twiki someday."

The piece runs long, and the back half re-argues the front half with duller exhibits; Steve knows it, pausing mid-case-study to apologize to the READERS whose faces have just hit their desks. The central claim has been stress-tested continuously since, and readers can score it against whatever their own company wiki has since become. One period accident Steve could not have planned: "irreducible complexity," the phrase he credits to his boss and hangs the whole case on, was in 2004 better known as the intelligent-design movement's signature slogan — so the essay ends up borrowing creationism's favorite argument to prove that a mythical beast cannot exist.