Quotes from Steven Johnson

where small niches can flourish.

Johannes Gutenberg's printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells.

New ideas need old buildings.

that in any profession the highest order of work is achieved, not by fussy empirical demands for 'something to be done,' but by patient study of the eternal laws.

Reading through the newspapers and medical journals of the day, what stands out is not just the breadth of remedies proposed, but the breadth of people involved in the discussion: surgeons, nurses, patent medicine quacks, public-health authorities, armchair chemists, all writing the Times and the Globe (or buying classified advertising there) with news of the dependable cure they had concocted.

We tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming about through deliberate human planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure, brick by brick. But the shape an institution ultimately takes is not so much designed in advance by a master engineer as it is carved away by challenges to its outer boundaries, the way a coastline is partly formed by an endless battering of much smaller waves.

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn't the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace. So

When the next great epidemic does come, maps will be as crucial as vaccines in our fight against the disease. But again, the scale of the observation will have broadened considerably: from a neighborhood to an entire planet.

at the helm of the General Board of Health, Chadwick helped solidify, if not outright invent, an ensemble of categories that we now take for granted: that the state should directly engage in protecting the health and well-being of its citizens, particularly the poorest among them; that a centralized bureaucracy of experts can solve societal problems that free markets either exacerbate or ignore; that public-health issues often require massive state investment in infrastructure or prevention.

An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.

Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.

Thanks to the printing press, the Continent was suddenly populated by people who were experts at manipulating light through slightly convex pieces of glass. These were the hackers of the first optical revolution.

The greatest risk of a deliberately planned urban epidemic is not that we won't have a vaccine, it's that we won't recognize the outbreak until it's too late for the vaccine to stop the spread of disease.

It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.

In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

fallacy of extrapolation":

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict. This is a pattern of change that appears constantly in evolutionary history.

But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all of this shit?

plague years of the 1600s

If we're going to survive as a planet with more than 6 billion people without destroying the complex balance of our natural ecosystems, the best way to do it is to crowd as many of those humans into metropolitan spaces and return the rest of the planet to Mother Nature.

regulatory impact analysis

in 1326, an ill-fated laborer by the name of Richard the Raker fell into a cesspool and literally drowned in human shit.

bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen.