“Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.”
— Nagarjuna
“The answer to the mystery of why people would make 3 billion web pages in 2,000 days is simple: sharing.”
— Kevin Kelly, The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed
“A person who creates a new discipline does not have the task of enumerating all the problems connected with it. His task is to specify the subject of the discipline and its various branches and the discussions connected with it. His successors, then, may gradually add more problems, until the discipline is completely (presented).”
“Internet engineers were vexed by spontaneous pulsations in the traffic between computers called routers, until they realized that the machines were behaving like fireflies, exchanging periodic messages that were inadvertently synchronizing them….”
— Steven Strogatz, Sync, p. 33.
“There is only the risk of contradiction. But sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you have the ‘scientific’ certainty that you are saying it in an unassailable way.”
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays, 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. xii.
“The concept of multitude, then, is meant in one respect to demonstrate that a theory of the economic class need not choose between unity and plurality. A multitude is an irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into sameness, unity, identity, or…