Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.”

— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Counter-culture comes about when…

“A member of an archaic culture who acknowledges the limits of his own model and compares it to the one that is being formed as an alternative, from inside or outside his model, is creating…. in a positive sense, ‘counter-culture.’ Counter-culture is thus the active…

The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity

“As people and firms specialize in different activities, economic efficiency increases, suggesting that development is associated with an increase in the number of individual activities and with the complexity that emerges from the interactions between…

A Great Variety of Morbid Symptoms

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

— Antonio Gramsci, English translation Selections from the Prison Notebooks, “Wave of…

“The maintenance of organization in nature is not — and cannot be — achieved by central management; order can only be maintained by self-organization. Self-organizing systems allow adaptation to the prevailing environment, i.e., they react to changes in the environment with a thermodynamic response which makes the system extraordinarily flexible and…

“When you bow deeply to the Universe, it bows back.”

— Morihei Ueshiba (founder of Aikido), The Art of Peace

“It is well known among cryptography and computer security experts that closed-source software and algorithms are less secure than their Free and Open Source counterpart…. The very existence of non-free software and hardware puts humanity at a greater risk, it can foster or accelerate the process of the creation of an artificial entity that can…

We Thrash About…

“Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash…

Every Decrease in Power Is an Open Invitation to Violence

“Again, we do not know where these developments will lead us, but we know, or should know, that every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence — if only because those who hold power and feel it slipping from their…

The Nature of Technology

“The whole of a technology and all of its parts develop simultaneously in parallel…. All this activity is going on at many points in the network at the same time. Like the buildout of species in the biosphere, it is a parallel process, and there is nothing orderly about it…. A novel…