Top 100 Steven Johnson Quotes
#1. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps.
Steven Johnson
#2. I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.
Steven Johnson
#3. Right now we're in an arms race with the microbes, because, effectively, we're operating on the same scale that they are. The viruses are both our enemy and our arms manufacturer.
Steven Johnson
#4. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
Steven Johnson
#5. John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during
Steven Johnson
#6. What's encouraging is that the early new platforms - Kindle and iPad - are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that.
Steven Johnson
#7. One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.
Steven Johnson
#8. I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.
Steven Johnson
#9. For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
Steven Johnson
#10. We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
Steven Johnson
#11. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
Steven Johnson
#12. The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice's lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans' lead - at least so far - and just move to other nearby cities. Either way the poplation stays urban.
Steven Johnson
#13. cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties," she wrote. They get their order from below; they are learning machines, pattern recognizers - even when the patterns they respond to are unhealthy ones.
Steven Johnson
#14. Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.
Steven Johnson
#15. The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.
Steven Johnson
#16. The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, Are we being good ancestors?
Steven Johnson
#17. Anti-"lightbulb moment," the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.
Steven Johnson
#18. The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.
Steven Johnson
#19. Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.
Steven Johnson
#20. 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.
Steven Johnson
#21. Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.
Steven Johnson
#22. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.
Steven Johnson
#23. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity.
Steven Johnson
#24. the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.
Steven Johnson
#25. Today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.
Steven Johnson
#26. In other words, a serious crisis of nonrenewable energy resources is likely to accelerate the urbanization trend, not derail it.
Steven Johnson
#28. That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior.
Steven Johnson
#29. When one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments.
Steven Johnson
#30. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network.
Steven Johnson
#31. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
Steven Johnson
#32. 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.
Steven Johnson
#33. 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.
Steven Johnson
#34. The wetland created by the beaver, like the thriving platform created by the Twitter founders, invites variation because it is an open platform where resources are shared as much as they are protected.
Steven Johnson
#35. An absence of information is not the same as information about an absence. We're blind to our blindness.
Steven Johnson
#36. Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef's analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.
Steven Johnson
#37. If your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale's head for an afternoon.
Steven Johnson
#38. In the long run, the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science. It helped a good idea find a wide audience.
Steven Johnson
#39. Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don't even have to think about reading once we've learned how to do it.
Steven Johnson
#40. When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
Steven Johnson
#41. 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.
Steven Johnson
#42. This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology.
Steven Johnson
#43. Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.
Steven Johnson
#44. As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing "natural" about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law.
Steven Johnson
#45. What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart.
Steven Johnson
#46. 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.
Steven Johnson
#47. Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete
Steven Johnson
#48. Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.
Steven Johnson
#49. Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.
Steven Johnson
#50. If there is a single maxim that runs through this book's arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
Steven Johnson
#51. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus.
Steven Johnson
#52. His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.
Steven Johnson
#53. 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
Steven Johnson
#54. When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.
Steven Johnson
#55. 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.
Steven Johnson
#56. If you're trying to "transform reality" you need to give your ideas the time they need to mature; don't just look for sudden epiphanies. Cultivate your hunches.
Steven Johnson
#57. As the historian Tom Standage observes, they were among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos ... . Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little to make, it made sense to spend money on marketing.
Steven Johnson
#58. Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.
Steven Johnson
#59. If we didn't have genetic mutations, we wouldn't have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.
Steven Johnson
#60. So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.
Steven Johnson
#61. Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.
Steven Johnson
#62. 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.
Steven Johnson
#63. I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.
Steven Johnson
#64. Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.
Steven Johnson
#65. But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren't storming the gates.
Steven Johnson
#66. Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.
Steven Johnson
#67. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.
Steven Johnson
#68. 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,
Steven Johnson
#69. Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.
Steven Johnson
#70. One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!
Steven Johnson
#71. The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
Steven Johnson
#72. That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.
Steven Johnson
#73. The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.
Steven Johnson
#74. If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
Steven Johnson
#75. A city is a kind of pattern-amplifying machine: its neighborhoods are a way of measuring and expressing the repeated behavior of larger collectivities - capturing information about group behavior, and sharing that information with the group.
Steven Johnson
#76. The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the "edge of chaos":
Steven Johnson
#77. The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.
Steven Johnson
#78. The time travelers are usually adapt at "intercrossing" different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole array of them littering your study or your garage.
Steven Johnson
#79. As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.
Steven Johnson
#80. This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk.
Steven Johnson
#81. The fusion of art and technology that we call interface design.
Steven Johnson
#82. That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.
Steven Johnson
#84. Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.
Steven Johnson
#85. Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disease. Until then, it looked like a losing battle all the way.
Steven Johnson
#86. Today. By the end of 1882, Edison's company is powering electric light for the entire Pearl Street district in Lower Manhattan.
Steven Johnson
#87. Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.
Steven Johnson
#88. Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,
Steven Johnson
#89. Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.
Steven Johnson
#90. Innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an "idea-space": a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study.
Steven Johnson
#91. 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.
Steven Johnson
#92. Like every big idea, Birdseye's breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye's idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.
Steven Johnson
#93. The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass.
Steven Johnson
#94. Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.
Steven Johnson
#95. The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.
Steven Johnson
#96. IDEAS TRICKLE OUT OF SCIENCE, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into the less predictable eddies of art and philosophy.
Steven Johnson
#97. Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip. That
Steven Johnson
#98. Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society.
Steven Johnson
#99. Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities - a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity - but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.
Steven Johnson
#100. phrase "often a bridesmaid, never a bride" originated with a 1925 Listerine advertisement.)
Steven Johnson
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