Quotes from Steven Johnson

What happened in the United States is now happening on a planetary scale, too.

The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass.

Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure.

IDEAS TRICKLE OUT OF SCIENCE, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into the less predictable eddies of art and philosophy.

Hunches that don't connect are doomed to stay hunches.

By 1860, two out of three New York homes had daily deliveries of ice. One contemporary account describes how tightly bound ice had become to the rituals of daily life:

Why have so many good ideas flourished in the fourth quadrant, despite the lack of economic incentives? One answer is that economic incentives have a much more complicated relationship to the development and adoption of good ideas than we usually imagine. The promise of an immense payday encourages people to come up with useful innovations, but at the same time it forces people to protect those innovations.

If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn't be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we've erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others.

Meanwhile, the conquest of the Great Plains had enabled ranchers to breed massive herds of cattle, without a corresponding population base of humans to feed. You could ship live cattle by train to the eastern states to be slaughtered locally, but transporting entire cows was expensive, and the animals were often malnourished or even injured en route. Almost half would be inedible by the time they arrived in New York or in Boston.

Universities have a reputation for ivory-tower isolation from the real world, but it is an undeniable fact that most of the paradigmatic ideas in science and technology that arose during the past century have roots in academic research.

Está en la naturaleza de las buenas ideas el subirse a hombros de los gigantes que las precedieron, lo que implica que, en alguna medida, toda innovación importante resulta ser fundamentalmente una red.

The art of human invention has more than one muse.

They weren't off on separate islands, teaching creative writing seminars or doing design reviews. That physical proximity made the space rich with exaptation: the literary stream of consciousness influencing the dizzying new perspectives of cubism; the futurist embrace of technological speed in poetry shaping new patterns of urban planning.

Even though we don't teach this particular skill in school, and we barely have a vocabulary to describe it, our mindreading abilities play a key role in our work and relationship successes, our sense of humor, our social ease.

we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

Go for 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.

PRINTING PRESS (1440)

If you find yourself mapping a "whether or not" question, you're almost always better off turning it into a "which one" question that gives you more available paths.

CONCAVE LENS (1451)

Once key ideas from idea-spaces that otherwise had little contact with one another were connected, they began, quasi-autonomously, to make new sense in terms of one another, leading to the emergence of a whole that was more than the sum of its parts.

TERRESTRIAL GLOBE (1492)

PORTABLE WATCHES (1500)

The individuals in the high-IQ group might have scored better individually on intelligence tests, but when it came to solving problems as a group, diversity matters more than individual brainpower.

EARTH ROTATES AROUND SUN (1514)