Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.
Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict...
Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is a...
Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, Are we being good ancestors?
Build a tangled bank.
For a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid netwo...
When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news a...
In other words, a serious crisis of nonrenewable energy resources is likely to accelerate the urbanization trend, not derail it.
The technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrat...
The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice’s lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans’ lead—at least so far—and just move to...
Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.
The wetland created by the beaver, like the thriving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as they are protected...
But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated...
The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.
An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence. We’re blind to our blindness.
Chance favors the connected mind.
Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don’t even have to think about reading once we’ve learned how to do it.
Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform...
…let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind’s cage-door… —KEATS
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