Steven Johnson Quotes

The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.

No doubt some of the euphoria about the Internet's egalitarian promise was overstated, and some advocates did veer into genuine Net utopianism at times. But the people I was interested in were not evangelists for the Internet itself. For them, the Internet was not a cure-all; it was a role model. It wasn't the solution to the problem, but a way of thinking about the problem. One

One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg's printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn't really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways.

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, Are we being good ancestors?

Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.

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

Build a tangled bank.

the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.

Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.

We need to play each others instruments.

... 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 activists, and entrepreneurs alike.

I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.

Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go 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 networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

Ronald Burt, looked at the origin of good ideas inside the organizational network of the Raytheon Corporation. Burt found that innovative thinking was much more likely to emerge from individuals who bridged "structural holes" between tightly knit clusters. Employees who primarily shared information with people in their own division had a harder time coming up with useful suggestions

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

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.

Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.

The second analog-era mechanism that encourages serendipity involves the physical limitations of the print newspaper, which forces you to pass by a collection of artfully curated stories on a variety of topics before you open up the section that most closely matches your existing passions and knowledge.

As Lynn Margulis writes: All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

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 almost as interesting as the way it works.

A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer's knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.

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 night. Today, you can buy three hundred days of artificial light with an hour of wages. Something extraordinary obviously happened between the days of tallow candles or kerosene lamps and today's illuminated wonderland. That something was the electric lightbulb.

The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the "edge of chaos":

John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during

In the long run, the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science. It helped a good idea find a wide audience.

The glassmakers had brought a new source of wealth to Venice, but they had also brought the less appealing habit of burning down the neighborhood.

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

Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disease. Until then, it looked like a losing battle all the way.

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities - a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity - but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

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

As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.

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 to compete

The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like 'Lost' or 'Alias' is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars.

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 about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your custo

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

They mistook the smoke for the fire.

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.

Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip. That

Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine 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 another.

Today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.

As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing "natural" about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law.

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them ... Environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they want to connect, fuse, recombine ... They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.
The single maxim that runs through the book: Where Good Ideas Come From .

We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus.

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.

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!

In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn't have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.

But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity.

What's encouraging is that the early new platforms - Kindle and iPad - are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that.

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.

A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons - thousands of them - fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness.

Anti-"lightbulb moment," the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.

The individuals in the high-IQ group might have scored better individually on intelligence tests, but when it came to solving problems as a group, diversity matters more than individual brainpower.

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.

The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass.

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.

If you're trying to "transform reality" you need to give your ideas the time they need to mature; don't just look for sudden epiphanies. Cultivate your hunches.

Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.

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.

The time travelers are usually adapt at "intercrossing" different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole array of them littering your study or your garage.

That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.

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.

Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for prosperity. 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.

Chance favors the connected mind.

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.

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. You wouldn't think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just as you wouldn't have thought that the evolution of pollen would alter the design of a hummingbird's wing. But that is the way change happens.

What Ruef discovered was a ringing endorsement of the coffeehouse model of social networking: the most creative individuals in Ruef's survey consistently had broad social networks that extended outside their organization and involved people from diverse fields of expertise. Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks. The limited reach of the network meant that interesting concepts from the outside rarely entered the entrepreneur's consciousness. But the entrepreneurs who built bridges outside their "islands," as Ruef called them, were able to borrow or co-opt new ideas from these external environments and put them to use in a new context.

Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.

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.

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

Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.

Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.

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

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material - much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft - and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they've stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it's easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.