The Great Geek Manual

If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn’t to live without any regrets, the point is to not hate ourselves for having them… We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn’t remind us that we did badly — it reminds us that we know we can do better.

- Kathryn Schulz on “The Psychology of Regret,” a TED talk.

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

- “Infinite Stupidity” by Mark Pagel, November 22, 2011.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

- “Tear It Down” by Jack Gilbert

It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting.

- “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World” by Kevin Kelly, 1994.

We’ve conducted two years of research on the attitudes of Millennials toward transportation, and we’ve found that access is more important that ownership… There are three factors at play here: the economy, technology, and social networks… The economic downturn has been particularly hard on Millennials… They just can’t afford to own a car… This is an “always on” connected generation that has grown up buying music by the song, so paying for a car by the hour is not a crazy idea.. they place more emphasis on the type of mobile device they carry, over the type of car they would drive.. this generation [can] be “present” without being in the same place, thanks to Facebook, foursquare, Twitter, text… [they are] substituting trips on the asphalt highway for trips on the information superhighway.

- Scott Griffith in “A conversation with Zipcar’s CEO Scott Griffith” by April Kilcrease, December 5, 2011.

Birds were what became of dinosaurs. Those mountains of flesh whose petrified bones were on display at the Museum of Natural History had done some brilliant retooling over the ages and could now be found living in the form of orioles in the sycamores across the street. As solutions to the problem of earthly existence, the dinosaurs had been pretty great, but blue-headed vireos and yellow warblers and white-throated sparrows – feather-light, hollow-boned, full of song were even greater. Birds were like dinosaurs’ better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.

- The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen, 2006.

Too Big to Know is about what happens to knowledge when it becomes a network. The basic idea is that the properties of knowledge that we’ve taken for granted at least in the West for, oh, 2,500 years are not actually properties of knowledge. They’re properties of knowledge when its medium is paper. And when you remove the paper and put things online, it takes on the properties of its new medium—of the Internet. Importantly, knowledge in a network includes differences and disagreements in a way that traditional knowledge is uncomfortable with. Everything is unsettled, everything is argued about, and very few things are ever totally resolved on the Net.

Knowledge in the Internet Age—networked knowledge—is becoming more like what knowledge has been in the past few hundreds years for scientists: it’s provisional, it’s a hypothesis that is waiting to be disproved. Knowledge is now accepted as the best we humans can do at the moment, but with the hope that we will turn out to be wrong—and thus to advance our knowledge. What’s happening to networked knowledge seems to make it much closer to the scientific idea of what knowledge is.

- “What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age?” by Michael Moyer, November 29, 2011.
First posted by Scientific American online.

Here’s a thought: online, there’s no one to watch over us. We are responsible for watching one another. And we’re doing it constantly. And we have a much more fertile ground to observe because no one needs to dig: we are giving more and more information away – willingly. In the virtual world, ideas about privacy are changing at the ground level and what we do online will have a greater impact upon future privacy laws than any legislation that results from the current offline inquiry.

- “Untangling the web: privacy” by Aleks Krotoski, November 26, 2011.
Published by The Guardian.