The Great Geek Manual

What forces Google to have a foreign policy is that what they’re exporting isn’t a product or a service, it’s a freedom

- Clay Shirky in “Google Searches for a Foreign Policy,” March 26, 2010.

In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things.

- “The meaning of network culture” by Kazys Varnelis in Eurozine, January 14, 2010.

Talent is not a thing, but a process; not something we have, but something we do.

- The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk, March 9, 2010.

Man, who is confronted with a library, becomes a humanist. Man, who is confronted with a computer however, becomes someone for whom we have no name yet. Here a post-literary, post-humanist type of man is developed.

- Peter Sloterdijk

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care more about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

- You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier, January 12, 2010.

The Information Age is ushering in a new urban form, the informational city… because of the nature of the new society, based on knowledge, organized around networks, and partly made up of flows, the city is not a form but a process, a process characterized by the structural domination of the space of flows.

- The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells, August 24, 2009.

Inventing the future requires giving up control. No one with a compelling purpose and a great vision knows how it will be achieved. One has to be willing to follow an unknown path, allowing the road to take you where it will. Surprise, serendipity, uncertainty and the unexpected are guaranteed on the way to the future.

- Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today by George Land and Beth Jarman, 1993.

There is no evidence that the world is becoming more virtual. The cyber-prophets were wrong here. The virtual is becoming more real. It wants to penetrate and map out our real lives and social relationships. We are no longer encouraged to act out some role, but forced to be “ourselves” (which is no less theatrical or artificial).

- “MyBrain.net: The colonization of real-time and other trends in Web 2.0” by Geert Lovink, March 19, 2010.