Adapted by:
Javier Lacort
Senior WriterI write long-form content at Xataka about the intersection between technology, business and society. I also host the daily Spanish podcast Loop infinito (Infinite Loop), where we analyze Apple news and put it into perspective.
Karen Alfaro
WriterCommunications professional with a decade of experience as a copywriter, proofreader, and editor. As a travel and science journalist, I've collaborated with several print and digital outlets around the world. I'm passionate about culture, music, food, history, and innovative technologies.
Huawei builds autonomous driving systems. Nokia mastered every cellphone protocol, but then Apple redefined what a phone should be. These are contrasting philosophies on the relationship between knowledge and power.
The concept of the “antilibrary,” coined by Lebanese essayist Nassim Taleb, refers to deliberately unacquired knowledge. It’s the secret of companies that want to build the future.
These are companies that have made curiosity a core discipline. ByteDance never had experts in recommendation algorithms. Instead, it had an infrastructure that sustained questions about patterns of human behavior that no one else considered relevant.
TikTok was born from that sustained questioning over the years. It came from an organization designed to explore hypotheses that seemed irrelevant. Today, TikTok is worth between $100 billion and $400 billion—a product of productive ignorance made systematic.
Huawei is an extreme example of this philosophy. Its 2024 report isn’t a catalog of dominated markets but an inventory of unexplored territories. Each division— Ascend chips, cloud solutions, 5G infrastructure and HarmonyOS—is designed to colonize spaces that don’t yet exist, not just defend familiar positions.
Huawei operates from a mindset that sees every market as an experimental laboratory to cultivate questions.
- What happens when connectivity becomes invisible?
- How does the experience change when hardware and software are designed as a unified ecosystem?
- What markets emerge from merging telecommunications and AI?
Amazon has monetized its internal infrastructure (AWS), transformed commerce into entertainment with Prime Video, and empowered homes with Alexa. Its anti-library of unproven hypotheses is its innovation engine.
McDonald’s has improved the customer experience by offering kiosks to avoid lines, using beacons for internal geolocation to reduce waiting time, and reimagining the restaurant as a digital interface. Burger King perfects burgers, but McDonald’s redesigns experiences.
Technology has inverted the equation. Deep knowledge was once an asset but is now a liability because specializations expire in months. Institutionalizing productive ignorance is a way to ensure a better future.
Meta may lose its grip on virtual reality, Apple may fall behind in AI, and Google may be displaced in search. However, companies designed around systematic curiosity can adapt to new territories.
The future belongs to those who ask better questions. Answers expire, questions evolve.
Image | Solen Feyissa (Unsplash)
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