The Great Geek Manual

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

- “Reflections on the Atom Bomb” by Gertrude Stein, first published in the Yale Poetry Review, December 1947.

All things are possible once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake.

- Norman Cousins

Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest.

- “Why the Web Is Like a Rain Forest” Steven Berlin Johnson, October 03, 2005.

The Internet is the world’s largest library. It’s just that all the books are on the floor.

- John Allen Paulos

But knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound. We get to knowledge — especially “actionable” knowledge — by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles. Most important in this regard, where the decisions are tough and knowledge is hard to come by, knowledge is not determined by information, for it is the knowing process that first decides which information is relevant, and how it is to be used.

- “The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy” by David Weinberger, February 2, 2010.

What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.

- Introduction to the Principia Discordia, 5th edition by Kerry Thornley, 1979.

I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it.

- “Marginalia” by Edgar Allen Poe, November 1844.

The starships of the future, in other words the vehicles of the future, which will explore the high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical. The engineers of the future will be poets. This is what virtual reality holds out to us—the possibility of walking in to the constructs of the imagination. In a way culture is that. I mean our cities, bridges, highways, airliners and art galleries are condensations out of the imagination, but at tremendous cost because we must make them out of matter. Once we can make them out of light, out of electrons, then we won’t build skyscrapers a hundred and twenty stories high, we’ll build them as high as we want. Roof height will no longer be a factor ruled by cost effectiveness and gravity, it will be a parameter ruled by the imagination as will all other parameters and then we will discover what man truly is—when we are able to erect, stabilize. share and explore our dreams in a kind of virtual hyperspace that, carefully analyzed, is seen to be linguistic. That’s what its connectors are made out of, that’s what its ferro-concrete and steel is, is the edifice of language. This is what the stuff of the imagination is made of and I think this is what we’re moving toward. The psychedelic shamans have always known this. Now the psychedelic underground art community points toward this goal and leads the way.

- “Ordinary Language, Visible Language & Virtual Reality” by Terence McKenna, 1997.