11) "Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint theEmerald City red involves light liquor, heavy munchies, and marathon sessions of video games of the ‘giant robots shooting each other and everything else in sight’ variety. We debate competing lines of
or gaming consoles with passion, and dissect every movie, television show, and novel in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.With as many of us as there are in this town, people inevitably find ways to cater to us when we get in the mood to spend our hard-earned dollars. Downtown Seattle boasts grandiose geek magnets, like the Experience Music Project and the Experience Science Fiction museum, but it has much humbler and far more obscure attractions too, like the place we all went to for our ship party that evening: a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Electric Penguin on Capitol Hill. ","Angela Korra'ti, Faerie Blood"
12) "The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as ""the literal word of God."" If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of
software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the
software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.","Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget"
13) "The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings,
software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day.","Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products"
14) "In plain English, you need to wrestle the doubts and accusations that it’s all just bullshit. And, needless to say, the majority of the work of the triple-H population is undeniably so. The reason that it’s so valuable to society is just that some of it isn’t bullshit and even a small percentage of genuine innovations of
software, culture or lifestyle can have a huge impact. Still, you never quite know if you are the bullshitter or the hero, or if you are being sold utter bullshit.","Hanzi Freinacht, The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One"
15) "Democracy is a continuous, open process of civility.A democracy can never be “done”; updating democracy can never be over.Democracy can be nothing else but a continuous process, because we use it to organize our life, and life is nothing but a continuous process.Democracy can be compared to an operating system or an anti-virus
software; if it does not get perpetually updated, it becomes obsolete very fast.Trusting the updates or the “improvements” of democracy to the elected and the owned mass media is like trusting the updates of an anti-virus program to virus creators; it defeats the purpose of updates or improvements.","Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity"
16) Much of what happens in life is a chance.,"Ted Todd, The '
software' of Your Personality: The Meaning and Purpose of Life"
17) "Mindset is the “
software,” and
software is eating the world. Deal with changes at the mindset level.","Pearl Zhu, Change Insight: Change as an Ongoing Capability to Fuel Digital Transformation"
18) "Why hoard away so many back-issues of People Magazine? Fashion magazines are just empty promises. You can go bankrupt blowing all your cash on expensive beauty products, but the only way you’ll ever look just like the people on those glossy front covers is if you know how to use computer editing
software for photographs. Besides, people who think they are ugly, are never really all that ugly anyway. People who think they are pretty, are rarely ever all that pretty.","Rebecca McNutt, Listen is Silent, or The Usurer"
19) "Whether you love Bach or would rather listen to a composition produced by Kulitta
software, Bach has and will continue to demand the we approach and answer the question, 'what is the art, science and language of music?","Anastasia Lily, Master of the Universe: Classical Favorites- Ana's Piano- BACH"
20) "The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know.","Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On
software and Sovereignty"
21) "Wit and puns aren't just decor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.",Adam Gopnik