Steven Johnson

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking _ and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions-are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. 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 prosperity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late- because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.

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.

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities__ certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity__ut they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It__ not that the network itself is smart; it__ that the individuals get smarter because they__e connected to the network.

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.

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.

It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material__uch of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft__nd then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they__e stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it__ easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.

Build a tangled bank.

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water.

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

...if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale__ head for an afternoon.

When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.