Quotes from Stewart Brand

Allen: "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Panic

Favor moves that increase options; shy from moves that end well but require cutting off choices; work from strong positions

To have a second language is to have a second soul, said Charlemagne around 800 AD. Each language has its own cognitive toolkit, said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

I was part of that too, and I apologize.

We finesse climate, or climate finesses us.

We seem trapped in the Short Now. The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal.

To change is to lose identity; yet to change is to be alive.

George ended by looking at the larger picture. He said that computation at present is still parasitic on us, but it probably is in the process of becoming part of life itself---it's just another system of genetics. Evolution, after all, is massively parallel computation, and now the world of code is evolving, perhaps to reshape the tree of life itself.

Cuando nos enfrentemos a un problema de difícil solución quizá resulte fructífero preguntarnos: '¿Qué haría un microbio?

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. This trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking.

If you on't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.

The temptation to customize a building around a new technology is always enormous, and it is nearly always unnecessary. Technology is relatively lightweight and flexible—more so every decade. Let the technology adapt to the building rather than vice versa, and then you're not pushed around when the next technology comes along.

A frozen bureaucracy and a frozen building reinforce each other's resistance to change

Carbon tax has the advantage of basically being able to subsidize one set of activities that you want with another set of activities that you don't want. It's like a cigarette tax.

If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear [energy], the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can.

As you gain elevation [on the mountain] your IQ goes down — but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not.

When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

They don't make it as well as they did in the past!0

Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly

A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.

Information wants to be free.

If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.

We are as gods and might as well get good at it.