Words matter. These are the best Steven Johnson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn’t have a command hierarchy. It doesn’t have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.
If you look at where innovation – defined as ideas, not as commercial product – tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.
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.
When it’s a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you’re riffing off other people’s ideas, that actually can be productive.
If we didn’t have genetic mutations, we wouldn’t have us. You need error to open the door to the adjacent possible.
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.
As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.