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796bb60
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Build a tangled bank.
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reminder
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Steven Johnson |
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bfcdd94
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And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late--because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.
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Steven Johnson |
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7e29c4f
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This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk.
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Steven Johnson |
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b569d5d
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Like every big idea, Birdseye's breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye's idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.
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Steven Johnson |
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9eb50fc
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One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, "Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!"
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Steven Johnson |
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133dea0
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innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an "idea-space": a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study."
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Steven Johnson |
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0c6cf9e
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let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind's cage-door... --KEATS
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Steven Johnson |
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9b975ae
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The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.
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Steven Johnson |
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cc861b9
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That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.
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conventional-wisdom
simplicity
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Steven Johnson |
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86a4af2
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Johannes Gutenberg's printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells.
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Steven Johnson |
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5110a24
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Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.
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interests
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Steven Johnson |
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47cc53e
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Thanks to the printing press, the Continent was suddenly populated by people who were experts at manipulating light through slightly convex pieces of glass. These were the hackers of the first optical revolution.
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Steven Johnson |
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be8d75b
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Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.
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Steven Johnson |
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13433b6
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The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.
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Steven Johnson |
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819927a
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The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.
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Steven Johnson |
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8e9fdbd
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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 networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
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Steven Johnson |
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3bce034
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From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces.
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Steven Johnson |
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6ff0f0e
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Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.
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Steven Johnson |
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f8d289f
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It should probably be said that the virtues of the society of the self are entirely debatable. Orienting laws around individuals led directly to an entire tradition of human rights and the prominence of individual liberty in legal codes. That has to count as progress. But reasonable people disagree about whether we have now tipped the scales too far in the direction of individualism, away from those collective organizations: the union, the ..
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Steven Johnson |
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0651b7b
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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 celebrate.
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Steven Johnson |
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dbfcc4b
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it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and a..
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innovation
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Steven Johnson |
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05542b4
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In the popular folklore of American history, there is a sense in which the founders' various achievements in natural philosophy--Franklin's electrical experiments, Jefferson's botany--serve as a kind of sanctified extracurricular activity. They were statesmen and political visionaries who just happened to be hobbyists in science, albeit amazingly successful ones. Their great passions were liberty and freedom and democracy; the experiments w..
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Steven Johnson |
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6996dd4
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The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. It also greatly increased the lethality of the bacteria. This is an evolutionary principle that has long been observed in populations of disease-spreading microbes. Bacteria and viruses evolve at much faster rates than humans do, for several reasons. For one, bacterial life cycle..
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Steven Johnson |
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f64a760
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It is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be so closely dependent on each other.
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Steven Johnson |
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f6e4b4c
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It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.
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Steven Johnson |
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51ffd48
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In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.
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Steven Johnson |
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f3202f1
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as the historian Tom Standage observes, they were "among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos.... Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little to make, it made sense to spend money on marketing."
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Steven Johnson |
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1aa8701
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As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing "natural" about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law."
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Steven Johnson |
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4ad849f
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how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original "eureka" moment--Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes--occurred in a bathtub.) The shower ..
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Steven Johnson |
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6e70b16
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A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial ventures: tantalizing rewards lure innovators into private enterprise, and the codification of English patent laws in the early 1700s gives some reassurance that good ideas will not be stolen with impunity. Despite this new protection, most comm..
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Steven Johnson |
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de23557
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The observers of the time were detecting a phenomenon that we now largely take for granted: that "mass" behavior can often diverge strikingly from the desires of the individuals that make up the mass."
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Steven Johnson |
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f854472
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They mistook the smoke for the fire.
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Steven Johnson |
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455d179
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Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won't be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there's an entire button-store district.
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Steven Johnson |
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49cffcf
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Look to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways and be wise: Which having no chief, overseer, or ruler, Provides her meat in the summer, And gathers her food in the harvest. --PROVERBS 6:6-8
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Steven Johnson |
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0fa0f67
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2Do not mistake these multiple trends--the energy flows of metropolitan growth, the new taste for tea, the nascent, half-formed awareness of mass behavior--for mere historical background. The clash of microbe and man that played out on Broad Street for ten days in 1854 was itself partly a consequence of each of these trends, though the chains of cause and effect played out on different scales of experience, both temporal and spatial. You ca..
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Steven Johnson |
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13e17e5
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Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning "disks for the eyes." Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans--lentes in Latin--the disks themselves came to be called "lenses."
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Steven Johnson |
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0b32a4f
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La cuestion es inventarse formas de explorar los limites posibles de lo que te rodea. Esto puede ser tan sencillo como cambiar el entorno fisico en el trabajo, o cultivar un tipo especifico de red social, o mantener ciertos habitos en la forma de buscar y archivar la informacion.
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Steven Johnson |
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19c6c58
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Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.
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Steven Johnson |
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fe5d8e6
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Amplification created an entirely new kind of political event: mass rallies oriented around individual speakers.
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Steven Johnson |
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a9a7614
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No one recognized - and exploited - this new power more quickly than Adolf Hitler,
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Steven Johnson |
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592c98f
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Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water's edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull thems..
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Steven Johnson |