The Great Geek Manual

Coherent complexity, when seen for the first time, may appear to be driven by an unseen intelligence, but elegant material explanations always reside in the periphery – awaiting detection. This applies equally to the twinkling of the stars, the diversity of life on Earth, and the wonders of human consciousness. There are no ghosts in the machine. Indeed, metaphysical explanations of the world are but mud puddles to the azure waters of empirical truth.

- “Ghost In The Machine?” by Sean Gibbons, August 7, 2011.

Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses. When enlisted by charismatic leaders and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they’ve been the foundations for religions and political systems. When a storyteller has held an audience captive around a campfire, a cinema screen or on the page of a bestseller, they’ve reinforced local and universal norms about where we’ve been and where we’re going. And when they’ve been shared in the corner shop, at the pub or over dinner they’ve helped us define who we are and how we fit in.

- “Storytelling: digital technology allows us to tell tales in innovative new ways” by Aleks Krotoski, August 7, 2011.

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

- The Elusive Big Idea by Neal Gabler, August 13, 2011.

We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.

And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.

- The Elusive Big Idea by Neal Gabler, August 13, 2011.

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.

- The Elusive Big Idea by Neal Gabler, August 13, 2011.

In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural?

- Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig, October 16, 2008.

Eventually, you won’t need to have any technical knowledge in a world increasingly defined by technology. Rather, the only thing you will need to have is an idea, and having good ones will be the only meaningful thing setting you apart from others.

- “Why Today’s Developers Might Be Programming Themselves Out of Tomorrow’s Jobs” by Christopher Kahler, May 13, 2011.

Beauty is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity. It’s a learning signal urging us to keep on paying attention, an emotional reminder that there’s something here worth figuring out […].
According to Loewenstein, curiosity is rather simple: It comes when we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”. This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch. We seek out new knowledge because we that’s how we scratch the itch.

I see beauty as a form of curiosity that exists in response to sensation, and not just information. It’s what happens when we see something and, even though we can’t explain why, want to see more. But here’s the interesting bit: the hook of beauty, like the hook of curiosity, is a response to an incompleteness. It’s what happens when we sense something missing, when there’s a unresolved gap, when a pattern is almost there, but not quite. I’m thinking here of that wise Leonard Cohen line: “There’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.” Well, a beautiful thing has been cracked in just the right way.

Like curiosity, beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction not to the perfect or the complete, but to the imperfect and incomplete. We know just enough to know that we want to know more; there is something here, we just don’t what. That’s why we call it beautiful.

- “Why Does Beauty Exist?” by Jonah Lehrer, July 18, 2011.
Originally posted to Wired.