Steven Johnson Quotes

The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.

The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.

If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at nig...

That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior.

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...

But despite the Secret Service–like behavior, and the regal nomenclature, there’s nothing hierarchical about the way an ant colony does its thinking. Although queen is a term that reminds us of human...

In other words, a serious crisis of nonrenewable energy resources is likely to accelerate the urbanization trend, not derail it.

Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.

If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one ano...

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,

An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence. We’re blind to our blindness.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want...

And so this is why the whole world has suddenly taken an interest in whether Thai poultry workers get their flu shots: because the world wants to ensure that H5N1 stays as far away as possible from or...

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.

Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.

If your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale’s head for an afternoon.

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...