Quotes from Steven Johnson

SQUARE ROOT AND PLUS AND MINUS SYMBOLS (1525)

While the Germans intercepted and recorded many hours of SIGSALY transmissions, they were never able to interpret them.

CUBIC EQUATIONS AND COMPLEX NUMBERS (1530-1540)

When nature is in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.

STEAM TURBINE (1551)

But it is clear that Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes. His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology.

exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

MERCATOR MAP PROJECTION (1569)

What we are seeing now is arguably the largest mass migration in human history, and the first to be triggered by a home appliance.

SUPERNOVAS AND COMETS (1572—1577)

If mutation and error and serendipity unlock new doors in the biosphere's adjacent possible, exaptations help us explore the new possibilities that lurk behind those doors. A match you light to illuminate a darkened room turns out to have a completely different use when you open a doorway and discover a room with a pile of logs and a fireplace in it. A tool that helps you see in one context ends up helping you keep warm in another. That's the essence of exaptation.

STOCKING FRAME (1589)

phrase "often a bridesmaid, never a bride" originated with a 1925 Listerine advertisement.)

Darwin's mind had been profoundly shaped by Lyell's understanding of the deep time of geological transformation, but standing on the beach, watching the breakers crash against the coral, he knows that his mentor is wrong about the origin of the atolls. It is not a story of simple geology, he realizes. It is a story about the innovative persistence of life.

PLANETARY MAGNETISM (1600)

That cognitive overlap is what makes this mode so innovative. The current project can exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, make new connections. It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes.

TELESCOPE (1600--1610)

ELLIPTICAL ORBITS (1605--1609)

if you look at the entirety of the twentieth century, the most important developments in mass, one-to-many communications clock in at the same social innovation rate with an eerie regularity. Call it the 10/ 10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

Hurley, Chen, and Karim cobbled together a rough beta for a service that would correct these deficiencies, raised less than $ 10 million in venture capital, hired about two dozen people, and launched YouTube, a website that utterly transformed the way video information is shared online. Within sixteen months of the company's founding, the service was streaming more than 30 million videos a day. Within two years, YouTube was one of the top-ten most visited sites on the Web.

Some will say that this is merely a matter of software, which is intrinsically more adaptable than hardware like televisions or cellular phones. But before the Web became mainstream in the mid-1990s, the pace of software innovation followed the exact same 10/ 10 pattern of development that we saw in the spread of other twentieth-century technologies.

This is a book about the space of innovation. Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.

If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context.

When life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are emergent and self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents.