Rachel Toor:

I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people's ideas aren't that brilliant.

Julian Gough:

As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading.

Walter Benjamin:

I'd like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes.

1st Batallion, 5th Marines:

Have something short, but important to say. What you say here will be remembered.

Matt Raymond:

That's right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress.

John Mayer:

Why do I want to invent more reasons to have haters?

Kathleen Parker:

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

Michael Lewis:

I like the feeling of knowing that nobody is trying to reach me.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Dave Eggers:

It's just sort of like: 'Why does everything have to be on the screen?'

Jeffrey Zeldman:

This thing. If numbers are your strategy to win at this thing, you've already lost. This thing is not a game. There is no winning. There is only mattering. If you don't understand that, you aren't making a difference.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

Merlin Mann:

Once you've seen The Wire, you're spoiled for life.

Anne Frank:

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

Jason Baptiste:

If you spent the money on an original iPod in 2001 on Apple stock ($499), you would have $14,513.78 today.

1st Batallion, 5th Marines:

$500 can build things that change how people live.

Rory Stewart:

Without music, time has a very different quality.

Caterina Fake:

It's an incredible amount of data.

Bruce Schneier:

More is coming.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

Decius:

We need to balance privacy interests with the state's interest in monitoring suspected criminals.

Cory Doctorow:

I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure.

Ryan Singel:

Google unveiled a Government Requests Tool that shows the public how often individual governments around the world have asked for user information, and how often they've asked Google to remove content from their sites or search index, for reasons other than copyright violation.

The numbers reflect only criminal investigations, and do not include national security investigation powers such as National Security Lettters or FISA warrants, which companies are often not legally allowed to disclose.

Matt Higgins:

The nice thing is, it's not a free for all. We're taking care of the problem responsibly. We're targeting the troublemakers, and we're hoping the troublemakers will be gone someday.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

Maybe You And Your Innocence Shouldn't Be Doing It In The First Place

Pete Warden:

Do we actually prefer that our information is for sale, rather than free? Or are we just comfortable with a 'privacy through obscurity' regime?

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow:

Young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Hal Varian:

Data are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Caterina Fake:

It's an incredible amount of data. And now, I'd say we're in the position where we can actually use this data. We can actually make assumptions.

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Mikel Maron:

Even a name may not be a name. The use of a structure changes more rapidly than the availability of money to repaint a sign. So the sign might show a beauty parlor, but it's currently used as a tailor, and everyone knows that and calls it by its 'spoken name'. How can the map reflect both what residents already know, and what an outsider might need to know to navigate?

An exchange:

The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes.'"

"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.

"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged, Aged Man.'"

"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.

"No you oughtn't: that's another thing. The song is called 'Ways and Means' but that's only what it's called, you know!"

"Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting On a Gate': and the tune's my own invention."

John Brockman:

Those of us involved in communicating ideas need to re-think the Internet. Many of the people that desperately need to know, don't even know that they don't know.

It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code.

Cory Doctorow:

I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

An unnamed intelligence official:

Every day, every week that goes by, there's just one more week of information that we're not collecting. You sit there and say, 'This is unbelievable that we have this gap.'

Markus Dohle:

If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant.

Paul Graham:

Just fix things that seem broken.

Ken Auletta:

At the Yerba Buena Center, it took a while for Jobs to mention books, and when he did he said that "Amazon has done a great job" with its Kindle. "We're going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther." It would probably have been more accurate to say that Jobs planned to stand on Amazon's neck and press down hard, with publishers applauding.

Madeline McIntosh, on the publishing business:

It's a culture of lunches. Amazon doesn't play in that culture.

Alain de Botton, author of A Week at the Airport:

There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race, however preoccupied with the payroll, who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to say hello at arrivals. So what dignity must we possess not to show any hesitation when it becomes clear, in the course of a twelve-second scan of the line, that we are indeed alone, with nowhere to head to other than a long queue at the ticket machine for the Heathrow Express.

Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.

In a world without airplanes, everything would, of course, go very slowly. And yet there would be benefits tied up in this languor.

Virginie Tisseau:

I ride the tram because every day it takes me to a place less familiar.

David Gelernter:

Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.

Louis CK:

Maybe we need some time ... because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

Tony Judt:

The old egalitarian language has been transfigured into saying we all have the same opportunities, we are all equal, we will not talk about the fact that you are female and brown, or allow you to dress differently, because that would not be republican. This subterfuge enables very illiberal behavior in the name of a 'liberal ideal'.

The idea is that you can't have an elite, since elitism is undemocratic and unegalitarian. Therefore, you always make the point that people are in some important way the same. You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.

Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren't normally short. It isn't a useful attribute.

What we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent.

William Deresiewicz:

Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things -- the leaders -- are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering.

Ed Tom Bell:

You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore.

More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

David Gelernter:

Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

Notorious BIG:

Just stay hungry.

Homer:

You don't win friends with salad.

Yoda:

Try not. Do ... or do not. There is no try.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Garrison Keillor, quoting you:

I could have done that. I could have done that while doing all the other things that I do. Why didn't I?

The Way Things Are and How They Might Be

Seth Godin:

Should I write blog posts that increase my traffic or that help change the way (a few) people think?

When there's no commitment of money or time in the interaction, can change or commerce really happen?

An exchange:

Lisa: Look at all those beautiful shoes! I know they're made from animals but WOW!
Marge: Mmmm, if only I didn't already have a pair of shoes.

PJ O'Rourke:

I wonder, when was the last time a talk show changed a mind?

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell:

You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore.

More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

Driveby culture and the endless search for wow

David Shields / William Gibson:

Who owns the words?

Who owns the music and the rest of our culture?

We do -- all of us -- though not all of us know it yet.

Steven Johnson:

That's the thing about games without frontiers. You never really know when you're playing.

Jean-Luc Godard:

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

Marisa Meltzer:

With blogs, everyone became a critic. With Tumblr, everyone's a curator.

With Tumblr, there is no "stealing" words or images, only reblogging. It encourages a delightful collectivity. The reblog button may currently only be available on tumblelogs, but it's only a matter of time until this quick-and-easy curation function is adapted for the rest of the Internet. Perhaps Tumblr's greatest innovation is that it has settled the question of who owns content on the Internet by eliminating the idea of ownership all together.

Matt Higgins:

One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it.

The nice thing is, it's not a free for all. We're taking care of the problem responsibly. We're targeting the troublemakers, and we're hoping the troublemakers will be gone someday.

Gordon Crovitz:

Getting our heads around information abundance will mean becoming more discerning about what information is worth our time and what kinds of tasks require real focus.

Lapham's Quarterly:

Demosthenes composed his orations after shaving half his head so that he would be too embarrassed to show himself in public.

Caterina Fake:

It's an incredible amount of data. And now, I'd say we're in the position where we can actually use this data. We can actually make assumptions.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

David Foster Wallace:

If anybody feels like perspiring, I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to.

Fear not:

If you are a sufferer of Hyperhidrosis, then there is no reason for you to worry and feel embarrassed any more.

Texts Without Context

David Foster Wallace:

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

John Brockman:

Those of us involved in communicating ideas need to re-think the Internet. Many of the people that desperately need to know, don't even know that they don't know.

It's a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people's code.

David Gelernter:

If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?

Instead of letting the Internet solve the easy problems, it's time we got it to solve the important ones.

William Deresiewicz:

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it's almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it's even there.

Liz Danzico:

I need idle time in equal proportion to planned time; leaving time for the unplanned, and making sure there's enough time for a bit of nothing. It's this space that makes the planned more worthwhile.

Jonathan Harris:

"Natural ideas", which account for the big leaps forward and often appear to come from nowhere, actually come from nature, solitude, and meditation. They're less concerned with how the world is, and more with how the world could and should be.

Gelernter:

Internet culture is a culture of nowness. As we learn more about now, we know less about then.

Louis Kahn:

I like English history. I have volumes of it, but I never read anything but the first volume. Even at that, I only read the first three or four chapters. My purpose is to read Volume Zero, which has not been written.

Maggie Jackson:

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing -- attention.

Alain de Botton:

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulse, is something we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people and ideas. We require periods of fast in the life of our minds no less than in that of our bodies.

Louis CK:

Maybe we need some time ... because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

It's Time To Start Taking the Internet Seriously

A Decius sampler:

Man, what a great time to be alive!

The best and brightest should be running at full speed at this point. The question is into what?

Eventually, the king always takes liberties ...

I continue to feel like I'm standing between poles that I cannot align myself with.

Ever wanted to know what life was like in the 30s? You will.

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

The ship has already sailed ... This is just another brick in the wall. Hold on to your hats.

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

There are certain basic pleasures of the ancient world that one has to work very hard to come by today. We've cut ourselves off from things that even our grandfathers took for granted.

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

More hacking less talking.

Buy my shit!

I don't have a solution for the problem of bad taste.

I'm going to file "Giddy Anticipation of an Apocalypse" next to actually having an AK-47 on your flag as God's way of telling you that you're bat shit crazy.

It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene.

Wow, life is boring.

Happy Birthday Decius!

Christopher Ketcham:

The human form can only grow so big.

The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism.

Bigness worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Ketcham:

Look at IBM, where a senior vice-president once described the managerial hierarchy as "a giant pool of peanut butter we have to swim through."

John Bird:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

J.B.S. Haldane:

For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.

Umberto Eco:

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees.

Ketcham:

Today we find ourselves in an unprecedented age of corporate gigantism. This situation is characterized not by the outright monopolies that worried Brandeis, but by the rise of oligopolies.

Decius, 2010:

The thing that sucks about freedom of speech is that rich people can afford more speech than you can.

Simon Johnson:

Recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure.

You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore.

More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

An exchange:

Gas Station Proprietor: Look, I need to know what I stand to win.
Anton Chigurh: Everything.
Gas Station Proprietor: How's that?
Anton Chigurh: You stand to win everything.

Ketcham:

Creativity, in any case -- the radical's creativity, which is the only kind -- is not what the corporation looks for. Rather, it pursues what William Whyte called "the fight against genius." It looks for Whyte's "Organization Man," who seeks protection, safety, succor in bigness, who can be relied on to conform and submit. What it lacks in creativity, of course, the big corporation makes up for in coercion.

Richard Sennett:

From an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

The Curse of Bigness