| #265 The Web is a democracy of opportunity, but not necessarily of beautiful, fertile ground where all sorts of organizations could theoretically survive. But the selection process has been incredibly fast. |
#4 Because network technology behaves more like an organism than like a machine, biological metaphors are far more useful than mechanical ones in understanding how the network economy runs. |
#22 No central authority has cultivated the web as a beautiful garden. It grows on its own like an ecosystem. |
| #327 The biological example of writing information on a small scale has inspired me to think of something that should be possible. Biology is not simply writing information; it is doing something about it. A biological system can be exceedingly small. Many of the cells are very tiny, but they are very active; they manufacture various substances; they walk around; they wiggle; and they do all kinds of marvelous things—all on a very small scale. Also, they store information. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want—that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at that level! |
Information
travels through a sea of anonymous,
interchangeable computers like a
breeze through tall grass. A desktop computer
is a scooped-out hole in the beach where
information from the
Cybersphere wells up like seawater. |
|
| #132 The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. But a swarm is not merely a big crowd. The individuals in the swarm lose their identities. The computers that make up this global swarm will blend together into the seamless substance of the Cybersphere. Within the swarm, individual computers will be as anonymous as molecules of air. |
…if
the web
feels like a frontier, it's because for the
first time in history, we are witnessing biological
growth in technological systems. |
All
this talk of viruses
makes me wonder just why we call some pieces
of computer
code
a virus and others a computer program. Intrinsically, they are both
just lines of code, bits of information or instructions. The word is,
of course, taken directly by analogy from biological viruses
and probably based on the same
intuitions about
the way these bits of code spread. The answer is not so much to do with
the harm they do — indeed some really do very little — but to do with
their function. They have none apart from their own replication.
|
| #275 Why did we ban it? Let me put it this way: If I want to tell my forty thousand employees to attack, the word 'attack' in ASCII is forty-eight bits. As a Microsoft Word document, it's 90,112 bits. Put that same word in a PowerPoint slide and it is 458,048 bits. That's a pig through the python when you try to send it over the Net. |
The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. | We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. |