The internet is a beast, uncivil by corporal standards, rudely honest in its capacity to include any idea the mind can think of — and any voice, no matter how small, can ring loud in the internet’s ear.

The internet is not a country; it is not a belief system; it is not a government. It belongs to everyone, and no one, and by virtue of its existence, the internet has broken the bond of routine social contracts, conditioning our prejudiced perception of evolution and God. We are now on the path to a new human, our more ethereal counterpart…the Electro Sapien or e-sapien.

How the future supremacy of the Electro Sapien will play out is speculative, at best. Competing themes on how we came to be homo sapien, “modern man,” are still lost in interpretation. What we can infer, by way of all theories on the origin of the homo sapien — from the Aquatic Ape theory to unknown breakaway members of some homo antecessor-group, or a Homo Heidelbergensis / Homo Sapien tryst — is that many possibilities existed, and one survived.
Likewise, with over seven billion human beings living today, it is rational to assume that small, pre-Electro Sapien groups or types, directed by the species’ self-organisation, have begun to break away from the whole.

To establish who these new electro-types are, and why they will survive to establish the next level of species’ expansion, involves the discomfort of disputing or questioning the future validity of traditional interpretations of human purpose.

- “The Internet Messiah Has Arrived” by Thomas Easley, May 11, 2012.
Originally posted to Big Think.

Whilst the pain of finding a parking space will dissipate into the cloud, the cloud will hide other, less apparent costs. The concepts of the “smart” car, “smart” parking and payment systems, and “smart” cities are interesting enough. But all are really just a smoke screen for a much deeper set of political and even philosophical issues that will impact urban dwellers in the near future, especially as more than half’s the world’s population will soon be living in cities. That set of issues centers around the delicate dance between public and private ownership of space, both in the cloud and on the ground.

- “The Networked Urban Environment” by Jan Chipchase, May 3, 2012.

So when digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what “needs” to go away, serious nonfiction is now one of the first things I think about. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and want to read more of it and notice twentysomethings have little perceived patience for weighty tomes. Maybe it’s because I’d rather have pragmatic conversations about what categories are best suited to digital — genre fiction obviously, certain commercial strains of literary fiction, basically any book that needs to have a completed manuscript done before it’s shopped around, or can be finished very quickly post-proposal — and which ones won’t be. Maybe it’s because the very institutions that support serious nonfiction are themselves in more financial trouble than they used to be.

- “Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age” by Sarah Weinman, May 10, 2012.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

There are currently two major revolutions occurring: the enlightenment of man and the awakening of computers.

What’s incredible is that they are intertwined in their quest for information and knowledge. The more powerful computers become, the easier it is for man to access information. The better information we have, the better computers we make, and so on. [...]

1) We have no way of knowing precisely what will happen with our brains. We may lose all feelings, or we might gain extra-human senses that allow for beauty to be not only recognized, but lived within. [...]

It’s looking ahead that allows us to create effective constructs for living. In a time where many things are uncertain, we must individually live with an openness to change in order to feel secure in our lives. Learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

- “The Future Is No Place for Fear” by Zach Puchtel, May 7, 2012.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848.

In many ways, Facebook’s story is the most modern example of the American dream gone right. Some would argue that those who have gotten rich from the company should pay some dues back into the system that enabled that success. As billionaire Mark Cuban has written on his blog, the ‘most patriotic thing you can do’ is ‘bust your ass and get rich. Make a boatload of money. Pay your taxes.

“Just In Time For A Facebook IPO Tax Break, Eduardo Saverin Renounces U.S. Citizenship” by Colleen Taylor, May 11, 2012. Quoting “The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do” by Mark Cuban, September 19, 2012.

In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of silence because people are so filled up now with streaming video. Paying attention to anything will be the missing commodity in future life. You think you’ll miss nothing, but you’ll probably miss everything.

- Ed Schlossberg, as quoted in “Silence Is Golden” by Maureen Dowd, December 6, 2011.
Originally published by The New York Times.

Humans have been co-evolving with their technologies since the dawn of prehistory, when tool making and meat eating co-evolved with brain development and social complexity. What is different now is that we have moved beyond external technological interventions to transform ourselves from the inside out—even as we also remake the Earth system itself. Coping with this new reality means liberating ourselves from such categories as “human,” “technological,” and “natural” to embrace a new transhuman techno-human relationship.

- Brad Allenby in “You Want the Future? You Can’t Handle the Future!,” May 2, 2012.
Originally posted to 33rd Square.

The truth is that everything you do changes your brain. Everything. Every little thought or experience plays a role in the constant wiring and rewiring of your neural networks. So there is no escape. Yes, the internet is rewiring your brain. But so is watching television. And having a cup of tea. Or not having a cup of tea. Or thinking about the washing on Tuesdays. Your life, however you live it, leaves traces in the brain. [...]

In the absence of any substantial evidence, I would hazard a guess that the majority of internet use is either information search or communication, using email and social media. If this is so, using the internet should affect our brains so that we are better at these things. Probably this is already happening, part of a general cultural change which involves us getting better and better at dealing with abstract information.

Internet use would only be a worry if it was getting in the way of us practicing some other life skill. If Facebook stopped people seeing their friends face to face that could have a harmful effect. But the evidence suggests this is not the case. If anything, people with more active internet lives have more active “meat-space” lives. Most of us are using the internet as a compliment to other ways of communicating, not as a substitute.

So there is no magic extra risk from the internet. Like TV before it, and reading before that, it gives us a way of practicing certain things. Practice will change our brains, just like any habit. The important thing is that we are part of this process, it is not just something that happens to us.

- “Does the internet rewire your brain?” by Tom Stafford, April 24, 2012.
Originally posted to the BBC Future Blog.

Right now we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilisation but we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.

- E. O. Wilson in “E. O. Wilson: from altruism to a new Enlightenment” by Liz Else, April 21, 2012.
Originally published by New Scientist.

Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.

- The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall, April 10, 2012.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, January 12, 2012.

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future–you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

- Paper Towns by John Green, October 16, 2008.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.

- John Green