“In the 25th century, it’s difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is “digitized” and from which -unless the stack is hopelessly damaged- their consciousness can be downloaded (“resleeved”) with its memory intact, into a new body.”
— Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
“When we look at utility poles, we see networks as wires. And we see those wires as parts of systems: The phone system, the electric power system, the cable TV system. When we listen to radio or watch TV, we’re told during every break that networks are sources of programming being beamed through the air or through cables. But the Internet is different. It isn’t wiring. It isn’t a system. And it isn’t a source of programming.”
1. The Internet isn’t complicated
2. The Internet isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet’s value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internets three virtues:
– a. No one owns it
– b. Everyone can use it
– c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already
“And everything I ever learned about writing didn’t matter anymore. Everything I ever thought about writing went out the window as the breeze blew through my hair and the words poured out of me. I didn’t have to take writing seriously. I didn’t have to take words seriously. I didn’t have to sound like anyone else. I didn’t have to sound like The New Yorker — which weirdly, I sometimes sound like a little by NOT TRYING TO SOUND LIKE IT. So it showed me that I had a lot of hang-ups about writing and it showed me how to get over them fast. It showed me how to sound like myself. It gave me back my voice, which surprised people and surprised no one as much as it surprised me. Blogging was a place I could go and be me, completely, totally, unapologetically me. And if people didn’t like it, screw ’em. And I could write the hell out of the screen and if it blew up and disappeared, it didn’t matter anyway, because I could always come back and try something else again later. So despite all my inclinations towards bottles of ink and pads of paper, I started to blog and blog and blog and blog and there was no stopping me.”
Finished William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and enjoyed it as much as expected. With the characters and settings still in my head, it was strange to read (on Gibson’s blog) how real they are for the creator:
“One odd moment, sitting in the lower lobby of the SoHo Grand, Cayce’s entrance suddenly unspooled and I looked up, almost expecting her to walk in. And simultaneously reminded I don’t know what she looks like; she’s written “from inside”.
This means zip to anyone that has not read the book. Other nuggets that got some highlighter:
“Like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet.” (pg4)
“The future is there, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now. (pg57)
“Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.” (pg67)
“Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out onthe web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it every was.Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.” (pg68)
“History erased via the substitution of an identical object.” (pg194)
And my favorite…
“She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there.” (pg92)
Woman at party describing parenthood: “I survived it and it was more fun than I thought.” Uh, I’ll pass.
I really liked Po Bronson’s first two novels, “The Nudist on the Late Shift” and “The First $20 Millions Is Always the Hardest.” And he’s written countless articles about technology, Silicon Valley, Dot-Com boom and bust. The title of his latest book, “What Should I Do with My Life?” almost turned me off. I’m not all that keen on non-fiction to begin with. But I really enjoyed this book. I found so many “take-aways”…but I’ll only give you a few:
When you’re passionate about what you do, time disappears.
People who don’t have passions don’t struggle.
Failure is hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever. It is so much harder to leave a good thing.
Don’t pretend what you do doesn’t shape you.
People who love what they do are much more productive than those that are doing it for the paycheck. If we can find work we care about, our productivity will explode. Our value will increase radically. We will be the source of good ideas. And we will be rewarded.
This is a dangerous book.
William Gibson has a blog. I’d like to know if having a website (and blog) was something his publisher pushed or if he was enthusiastic about the idea. One interesting (and discouraging) item from his bio:
“I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”
“If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.” Or “if you don’t like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question (What do you do?), maybe it’s partly because you don’t like your answer.”
— What Should I Do With My Life, by Po Bronosn.
“Today’s sorry newsrooms–silent, smokeless, boozeless, cursor-cursed funeral parlors–bear no resemblance to the divine hell-holes that persisted at newspapers and wire services until the mid-1970s. They were seas of grunge and debris…a universe of controlled chaos, suspended in a perpetual stinking fog of cigarette smoke and worse.”
— Diana McLellan, journalist, former gossip columnist, and longtime Washington editor of Washingtonian magazine
“Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database.”
From a William Safire Op/Ed piece in the NY Times.