The Great Geek Manual

I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

- Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 1815.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

- Mark Twain

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

- Edward R. Murrow, upon receiving the “Family of Man” Award, 1964.

…the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050. This scenario exists alongside another future in which young people reject many of the devices, networks, and digital services that today’s adults market to them so relentlessly. Being more technologically literate, they develop the capacities to resist the constant push of faster, cheaper, easier information and select among the new and the old on the basis of real value. If we are lucky, today’s young people will do what countless generations before them have done: defy authority. have done: defy authority.

- “The Dawn of the Postliterate Age” by Patrick Tucker, October 2009.

The first and most vital step of all, as I said at the outset, is simply to understand media and its revolutionary effects on all psychic and social values and institutions. Understanding is half the battle. The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them. And this is a vital task, because the immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around us. No civilian can escape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide. But if we diagnose what is happening to us, we can reduce the ferocity of the winds of change and bring the best elements of the old visual culture, during this transitional period, into peaceful coexistence with the new retribalized society.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift…

- Marshal McLuhan from an interview with Playboy Magazine, March 1969.

When one experiences cyberspace as this extension of one’s mind – as a transitional space between self and other – the door is thrown wide open for all sorts of fantasies and transference reactions to be projected into this space. Under ideal conditions, people use this as an opportunity to better understand themselves, as a path for exploring their identity as it engages the identity of other people. Under less than optimal conditions, people use this psychological space to simply vent or act out their fantasies and the frustrations, anxieties, and desires that fuel those fantasies. As an internet traveller once told me, “Everywhere I go on the internet, I keep running into… ME!”

- “The Psychology of Cyberspace” by John Suler, May 1996.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

- “Radio Power Will Revolutionize the World” by Nikola Tesla
First published in Modern Mechanics and Inventions, July 1934.

It’s Halloween! It’s Halloween!
The moon is full and bright
And we shall see what can’t be seen
On any other night.

Skeletons and ghosts and ghouls,
Grinning goblins fighting duels,
Werewolves rising from their tombs,
Witches on their magic brooms.

In masks and gowns
We haunt the street
And knock on doors
For trick or treat.

Tonight we are
The king and queen,
For oh tonight
It’s Halloween!

- “It’s Halloween” by Jack Prelutsky.