I can’t understand why people are afraid of new ideas, I am frightened of the old ones.
- John Cage

What is a PR lackey tasked to incent and measure massive viral reach via SPAM emails to do???

Die, hopefully.

- Sean Howard in I am not an influencer and we are not friends (try 2)

Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. “How will authors and artists get paid for their work?” they ask me. Truth be told, I don’t know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: “How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?” I’m sorry, but I don’t know that, either.
- Bruce Schneier in Protecting Copyright in the Digital World

When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.
- Gordy Thompson, manager of internet services at the New York Times in 1993 quoted by Clay Shirky in Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

The World Wide Web sits on top of a turtle, and then below that is an older turtle, and that sits on the older turtle. You don’t have to feel fretful about that situation — because it’s turtles all the way down.
- Bruce Sterling in What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09

Cloud computing becomes fog when it goes down.
- Todd Spraggins on Twitter regarding Ma.gnolia data failure

Oscar Wilde would have loved the Internets – ‘It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information’.
- Andy Coughlan via Twitter

People love models, especially when they’re big, complex and quantitative. Models make us feel safe. They take the uncertainty of the future and break it down into neat, bite-sized equations. But here’s the problem with models, which is really a problem with the human mind. We become so focused on the predictions of the model – be it the cod population, or the risk of mortgage derivatives – that we stop questioning the basic assumptions of the model. (Instead, the confirmation bias seeps in and we devote way too much mental energy to proving the model true.) It’s not just about black swans or random outliers. After all, there was no black swan event that triggered this most recent financial mess. There was simply an exquisite model, churning out extremely profitable predictions, that happened to be based on a false premise.
- Jonah Lehrer in Dangerous Models

Social media, it turns out, isn’t about aggregating audiences so you can yell at them about the junk you want to sell. Social media, in fact, is a basic human need, revealed digitally online. We want to be connected, to make a difference, to matter, to be missed.
- Seth Godin, The rapid growth (and destruction) and growth of marketing

So my advice to Chris [Messina] is, if it isn’t already obvious, don’t explain why the BigCos aren’t following your lead, shrug your shoulders and let them do the explaining. Eventually if you do your job well, they will follow, they’ll have to. They will never follow out of the goodness of their hearts, because (sorry to say) that’s not what they do.
- Dave Winer in Advice to Chris Messina

I don’t think change is difficult. Control is what’s difficult. People and organisations are changing all the time, just not in the ways that some of us want.
- Johnnie Moore in Change or control?

- Open source is the altrusitic synchronisation of self interests.
Simon Phipps replying on Twitter