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Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

Stewart Brand

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Stewart Brand
Age: 85
Born: 1938
Born: December 14
Biologist
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Rockford
Illinois
Span
Pace
Environmental
Civilization
Problems
Attention
Problem
Mismatched
Shortening

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Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.
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There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.
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The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.
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There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.
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We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
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Redefine the possible.
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A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
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Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
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You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.
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A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
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All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
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On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
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For artists diving into a new technology, it is a triple short-cut to mastery: you get a free ride on the novelty of the medium there are no previous masters to surpass and after a few weeks, you are the master. Try that with the violin.
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This is pretty much the infrastructural stuff that comes along with large quantities of energy. Whichever technology we are looking at has serious hazardous issues.
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The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.
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Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence.
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Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.
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Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.
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Whenever I hear the word share I would reach for a gun if I had one. Share is frequently followed by the word feelings, and I have enough of my own thank you please do us both a favor and repress yours.
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When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.
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