Howard rheingold quotes

You wash the roots very carefully before you plant.

Openness and participation are antidotes to surveillance and control.

There is sort of a continuing problem of putting a moral template on the future that is based on the morality of today.

Humans are humans because we are able to communicate with each other and to organize to do things together that we can't do individually.

In Japan, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what's missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.

If 80,000,000 polygons per second is reality, what happens to you when you live in a world 160,000,000?

American families don't work. There is an illusion that they do.

There are performances in which the people who have the best muscle skills and musical history may be on the stage, but it's not  -  like a Dead show is not like a usual sit-down performance; the audience does participate.

Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create.

The areas of the brain that have to do with speech are very connected with the same parallel processors that have to do with the kind of ballistic calculations you need to hit small game with a rock.

We've got a planet in which we don't want to have everybody having sex, and most people are lonely anyway.

Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.

When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology.

Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before.

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.

Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it."

Technology is knowledge of how the universe works that enables you to change the world.

We can design things that learn, so you can grow an intelligence by creating an environment and creating things that just do it a million time faster than we do.

Dinosaurs grew feathers for heat regulation, but the ones that started flying started becoming birds.

The manufacturing and packaging of homogeneous experience is what politics in America is about.

Technology no longer consists just of hardware or software or even services, but of communities. Increasingly, community is a part of technology, a driver of technology, and an emergent effect of technology.

Craigslist is about authenticity. Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.

If you depend on where the chestnuts are going to be, and where the deer are, you have to be attuned to the outside world.

What is it about sex? Is it the sensations, or is it the meanings and the communication game that's tied into that.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

The first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time.

Democracy is not just voting for your leaders; it's really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues.

There are these two strands, the Dionysian and the Appollonian, and in the same theater grew up from these folks who during the day were just ordinary citizens, and at night they would sneak off to the woods and party.

I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.

Technological civilization has now dominated the earth to the point where there is a big question what is going to happen next.

I usually try to check quotes with people just to make sure things work out.

The AP has only so many reporters, and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access.

Its not a global village, but we're in a highly interconnected globe.

Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time.

I think the one thing humans are is language wizards.

The entire human race faced a singularity when one small group discovered, ooh, technology. We can live a different way. Eventually, that spelled the death of the old way of life.

Human beings were human beings anatomically for several hundred thousand years, wandering around, hunting and gathering. And then suddenly, at the same time they started painting in caves they started multiplying.

One of the things we know now that we didn't know then, is that revolutions are very painful to a lot of people. And that at the stage that we have evolved to now, a revolution would be extremely painful.

The neural network is this kind of technology that is not an algorithm, it is a network that has weights on it, and you can adjust the weights so that it learns. You teach it through trials.

The Western model for a meeting is you have an agenda and you come in and everyone says things.

My mission is to try to get a lot more global view.

You can't pick up the telephone and say, 'Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.'

Everything is removed. You're actually doing something dangerous when you get in your car, when you're getting on an airplane, or having sex.

Essentially pursuit of happiness is saying, everything's allowed until we come down on it.

Communicating online goes back to the Defense Department's Arpanet which started in 1969. There was something called Usenet that started in 1980, and this gave people an opportunity to talk about things that people on these more official networks didn't talk about.

Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.

There is the global teenager hypothesis, that what happened in the '60s in America was that there was, the baby boom cohort grew up at the same time that television and popular music grew up, so that we had this carrier frequency that we all tuned into that gave us the feeling of a common culture, even though I was in Phoenix and someone was in Des Moines. That now we are getting the global cohort at the same time we have our first global communications. MTV is everywhere.

I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.

The two parts of technology that lower the threshold for activism and technology is the Internet and the mobile phone. Anyone who has a cause can now mobilize very quickly.

See technology used to be our friends. But now, nobody is quite so sure.

There actually are buildings that existed in cyberspace before they built it.

Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.

Humans are language machines, computers are language machines.

There are always a few people who are hyper-normal.

Knowing of how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is, like it or not, an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century.

In the broad sense design means thinking about what the function or purpose of things or processes are, and translating that into action.

A phone tree isn't an ancient form of political organizing, but you have to call every person.

It's quintessentially American to transform your family.

You know back when there were light shows, there was this thing for people to sync into together. And the more people got synced into it, the more sync started happening. I guess it's just the size of the venue, and traveling around and so forth that it doesn't happen anymore. I don't know why.

Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn't want these little toys on their desk.

1947 America blasted off.

The great power of the Internet is it allows people who don't know each other... to connect with people with shared interests. The shared interests might be that 'I have a kid with leukemia.' Or, 'I'm a Nazi.' It gives marginalized people more power.

Mobile phones amplify human talents for cooperation.

Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.

Inexpensive phones and pay-as-you go services are already spreading mobile phone technology to many parts of that world that never had a wired infrastructure.

We know where the television is - everything has to be a sound bite; everything has to be an image; ideas are okay as long as they don't take more than four or five seconds to explain; candidates and issues are commodities that are sold like cans of soup; entertainment is limited to what a few people believe the lowest common denominator is; and you can't talk back to it.

We are taught what reality is in all kinds of ways.

The audience is a big part of the show.

The industrial revolution took the father out of the home and put the kids in school. And then everyone had their own little scene.

A lot of people use collaborative technologies badly, then abandon them. They aren't 'plug-and-play.' The invisible part is the social skill necessary to use them.

I think that most people really do need the sort of community you find in an office. Most people are always going to go into an office. If you are a member of a working group and you are not there physically, decisions are made without you.

It's kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.

Now of course like, you know fancy go to the opera and see drama and they regard them as high culture. And these, are really people for the most part who get uptighter. The idea that people you know might take their clothes off and dance in the street.

Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on technology. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words  -  and this is the problem that they have with Americans  -  just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well.

Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time.

We don't have a revolution, and we don't have the time for evolution, where does it come from? It must come from some kind of shared experience that everybody agrees with.

If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool.

Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping.

A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future - and more - that enlists the participants as 'first-person forecasters.'

Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.

I'm somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.

Back in the really early days, the men went out hunting, the women stayed home with the kids, and would hold the kid in one arm against the heart, so that's the left, and with the right arm they would throw. And it turns out you cannot make that calculation in real time. You have to have an algorithm set up. So these brain mechanisms evolved in order to do that, and when they evolved, the thing is that where there is a useful capability it often adapts to places it wasn't evolved for.

In Japanese organizations, before you have a meeting and you've got an idea that you want to get across, you go talk to everyone and list them. And then the meeting, you don't do it American style where everyone gets up and advocates and conflicts and decides, you get up and formalize agreements.

People's social networks do not consist only of people they see face to face. In fact, social networks have been extending because of artificial media since the printing press and the telephone.

Kerouac was this kid who exemplified something happening.

One thing we didn't know in 1996 is that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a culture with online advertising.

I think there are two aspects to smart environments. One is information embedded in places and things. The other is location awareness, so that devices we carry around know where we are. When you combine those two, you get a lot of possibilities.

What the Japanese are, are the Americans of the 21st century. Essentially what is objectionable about them is what was objectionable about Americans when we had the ball. However, they are committed in a way that American technology is not.

All you have to do is mate.

You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.

The body is just the vehicle for something else.

Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

Telecommuting has its advantages and it has its limits. I think we need to find that sweet spot in between where it helps the environment, it helps people, but it doesn't alienate us and it doesn't cause our organizations to fall apart by centrifugal force.

We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.

The world is restructuring, and all of the enemies that used to exist are kind of gone, so now they are looking out for new enemies.

There are actual communication systems being built to enable eye surgeons to get inside the eye, and vascular surgeons to get inside the arteries. You could see a social reaction in which people would want to regulate this technology because they are threatened by it, and thereby cause a lot of harm. There are several scenarios that are happening at once. The other scenario is that the Japanese are going for this in a big way.

Journalists don't have audiences, they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.

Let's cut loose what you were given and find what you can seek.

Maybe there is no objective experience, but there is a certain way of interacting with all the subjective experiences.

By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.

There may be a jump on electronic LSD with virtual reality, and the problem just with saying LSD, enough time has gone by that there is no distinction between psychedelics and other drugs.

The Amish communities of Pennsylvania, despite the retro image of horse-drawn buggies and straw hats, have long been engaged in a productive debate about the consequences of technology.

Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.

You can't assume any place you go is private because the means of surveillance are becoming so affordable and so invisible.

The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.

Active people to revitalize what is really the root of democracy: citizens communicating with each other. Democracy is not just about voting, it's about citizens talking with each other about the issues which concern them. We've lost a great deal of that in the age of the mass media.

It's more important to me to get an e-mail that says, 'I saw your page and it changed my life,' than how many hits the page got.

It's too late by the way, with virtual reality. You can't put the genie back into the bottle.

When the Appollonian strain took over in Greece, they made them into theaters and the original dramas.

Everything is danger, but we pretend that it's not.

Mindfulness means being aware of how you're deploying your attention and making decisions about it, and not letting the tweet or the buzzing of your BlackBerry call your attention.

Young voters are crucial. The trend over recent years has been for them to drift away. So anything that gets young voters interested in the electoral process not only has an immediate effect, but has an effect for years and years.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

Doesn't it seem ironic that people fear that we might become alienated by communicating with each other through computers, when we are already staring at these boxes in our living rooms for seven or eight hours a day, slack-jawed and saying nothing to anyone on either side and not talking back to it.

Like most modern Americans, I assume individuality is not only a fundamental value, but a goal in life, an art form.

I guess music in general is the transportation business.

Flash mobbing may be a fad that passes away, or it may be an indicator of things to come.

We must take responsibility for educating ourselves. Being part of a 'smart mob' doesn't guarantee that you're a responsible participant or collaborator.

Make your own fun. As opposed to consume fun like a package of Spam.