Quotes from Steven Johnson

Build a tangled bank.

It's true enough that the Victorians were grappling with heady issues like utilitarianism and class consciousness. 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?

However profound the threats are that confront us today, they are solvable, if we acknowledge the underlying problem, if we listen to science and not superstition

a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces.

Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.

The glassmakers had brought a new source of wealth to Venice, but they had also brought the less appealing habit of burning down the neighborhood.

To a certain extent, Ruef's and Burt's research is a validation of the celebrated "strength of weak ties" argument first proposed by Mark Granovetter

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

They were not hacks, working surreptitiously for Victorian special-interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambition. They were blinded, instead, by an idea.

A sustained scenario practice can make leaders comfortable with the ambiguity of an open future," Wack writes. "It can counter hubris, expose assumptions that would otherwise remain implicit, contribute to shared and systemic sense-making, and foster quick adaptation in times of crisis.

As he reads through his observations, a new thought begins to take shape in his mind, which provokes a whole new set of notes that will only make complete sense to Darwin two years later, after the Malthus episode.

But the idea itself sprang out of a certain kind of lived experience--on the ground, as the activists still like to say. It came, in part, from seeing human beings buried in conditions that defiled both the dead and the living.

The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association.

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.

A single piece of information designed to flow through the entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass box.

One gets the sense that Darwin would have been an avid Fitbit user.)

Formal city parks have a longevity to them that can exceed that of castles or cemeteries or forts.

We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals. This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.

hundred and fifty years after they were first contemplated, and there is every reason to suspect that the parks will survive, more or less intact, for centuries to come.

Facts, however numerous, do not constitute a science. Like innumerable grains of sand on the sea shore, single facts appear isolated, useless, shapeless; it is only when compared, when arranged in their natural relations, when crystallized by the intellect, that they constitute the eternal truths of science.

In his diary, Tudor noted that he had lost nearly four thousand dollars with his tropical misadventure.

Before tube amplifiers, the limits of our vocal chords made it difficult to speak to more than a thousand people at a time. (The elaborate vocal stylings of opera singing were in many ways designed to coax maximum projection out of the biological limitations of the voice.)