The Great Geek Manual

Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquest…

- Charles Lindbergh

There is too much good history and good experience with the end-to-end internet to see it largely overturned. Openness has its own virtues and those who resist it will fall behind those who enable it. Users will rise up if there are too many restrictions that get in the way of the information they want and the content they want to create.

- Part 4 of “The structure of the Internet

,” a report issued by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Now that the thrill of our hyper-connected existence is gone, virtual life has become a depressing daily grind. We toil late into the night, unleashing an endless stream of status updates and tweets in a desperate attempt to keep ourselves relevant, desirable and in. There’s an ominous irony in FarmVille, a Facebook application that enables users to build and maintain a virtual farm. It’s more than a game: It’s an allegory. Virtual existence is feudalism for the modern age. Those who hold the information are kings and those of us toiling in the virtual fields are the servile peasantry: selling our souls for the mind-numbing comfort of an online existence.

… It turns out virtual life is less about connectivity than self-branding.

… Bleak, shallow and repetitive, virtual life seems increasingly less worth living. Users are beginning to realize that it’s not leisure, it’s work that borders on servitude.

- “Bleak, Shallow and Repetitive” by Irene Angelopoulos, February 16, 2010.
Originally published by Adbusters.

People know many things, and half of them are wrong. If only we knew which half, we’d have reason to be proud of our intelligence. What is knowledge? A belief that is shared by all the respectable people in a community, whether there is any real evidence for it or not. What is faith? A belief that we expect other people to argue with. What is scientific fact? An oxymoron. Science does not deal in facts. It deals in hypotheses, which are never fully and finally correct.

- Hidden Empire by Orson Scott Card, 2009.
Chapter: Brave Boys

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

- The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams“>Douglas Adams, 2002.

The nature of the personal computer revolution is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else, for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the ‘why’ out of the equation – as in ‘why would I want this?’

- John C. Dvorak in the San Francisco Examiner, February 19, 1984.

Man is now hard-at-work naturally selecting for the traits that make software more conscious. Humanity cannot resist an overwhelming urge to create unnatural life in the image of natural life. But this effort at Unnatural Selection is still Natural Selection. The end result will still be an arithmetic reordering of pie shapes and pie slices. The overall pie of life will be much larger, for it will now include vitology as well as biology. And within that larger pie, there will be slices accorded to each of the types of vitological life and biological life that successfully self-replicate in a changing environment. Mindclone consciousness will arrive vastly faster than its biological predecessor because Unnatural Selection is Natural Selection at the speed of intentionality.

- “Why Cyberconsciousness Won’t Take Aeons to Evolve” by Martine Rothblatt.
Originally published by the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies,
January 29, 2010.

All of us are watchers — of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway — but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.

- Peter M. Leschak