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

Steven Johnson

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Steven Johnson
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: June 6
Author
Journalist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Steven Berlin Johnson
Water
May
Reason
Dissolve
Life
Silicon
Readily
Bonds
Based
Impossible

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Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.
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Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'
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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.
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The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
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That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.
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It may not be possible to 'win the future,' in President Obama's words, but if we're going to encourage more innovation, it's not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other's instruments.
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We need to play each others instruments.
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Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete
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Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.
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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.
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We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.
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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.
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As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.
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When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.
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Chance favors the connected mind.
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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.
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