10 / Libro

 Out of control

CHAPTER 2
HIVE MIND

Decentralized remembering as an act of perception

p.37
Each of our memories was delicately etched into its own plate, catalogued and filed faithfully by the temperate brain, and barring violence, could be retrieved like a jukebox song by pushing the right buttons.

CHAPTER 4
ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY

p.92
Researching the plants that were associated with savanna, Packard soon came up with a list of other associated species such as thistles, cream gentians, and yellow pimpernels-that he quickly realized peppered the fringes of his restoration sites. Packard had even found a blazing star flower a few years before. [...]

"What the heck is this?" he'd asked the botanist. "It's not in the books, it's not listed in the state catalogue of species. What is it?"

CHAPTER 5
COEVOLUTION

p. 121
The dethronement of learning is one of the most exciting intellectual frontiers we are now crossing. In a virtual cyclotron, learning is being smashed into its primitives. Scientists are cataloguing the elemental components for adaptation, induction, intelligence, evolution, and coevolution into a periodic table of life.

p.122
Researchers at the U.S. government-funded RAND corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, extended von Neumann's initial work and eventually catalogued four basic varieties of mutual second-guessing games. Each variety had a different structure of rewards for winning, losing, or drawing.

CHAPTER 14
IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM

p.323
ME: So, in other words, any book you could possibly write, in any language, could be found (theoretically) in the library. It contains all past and future books!

BORGES: Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of the Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

p.327
The Method tickled my curiosity and distracted me from my writing. Was it widely known among travelers and librarians? I was prepared for the probability that others must have uncovered it in the past. Returning to the university library (finite and catalogued), I searched for a book with an answer. I bounced from index to footnote, from footnote to book, landing far from where I began. What I found amazed me. The truth seemed farfetched: Scientists believe the Method has saturated our world since time immemorial. It was not invented by man; by God perhaps. The Method is a variety of what we now call evolution.

CHAPTER 23
WHOLES, HOLES AND SPACES

p.563
The final section in my book is a short course in what we, or at least I, don't know about complex adaptive systems and the nature of control. It's a list of questions, a catalogue of holes.

p.570
The problem of locating items in a network is substantial. It harks back to the days of early writing when texts in a 14th-century scriptorium were difficult to locate since they lacked cataloguing, indexes, or tables of contents.

The advantages which the hypertext model offers over the web of oral tradition is that the former can be indexed and catalogued. An index is an alternative way to read a printed text, but it is only one of many ways to read a hypertext.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
"THE NINE LAWS OF GOD": Kevon kelly's Out of Control Techno-Utopic Program for a WIRED World

p.638
Kevin Kelly is a brilliant scholar and a gifted writer; he is as friendly as he is smart. Largely self-taught, his formal education ended with high school. In 1969, he discovered the first Whole Earth Catalogue and was smitten with Stewart Brand's vision of access to tools and knowledge for individual empowerment and self-education, so he found something better to do than college.

[...]

In 1984, Kelly moved to the San Francisco area to work on the production of a new permutation of Whole Earth Catalogue. Within six months, this rookie was promoted to editor of the quarterly Whole Earth Review. The purpose statement of the Whole Earth Catalogue helps frame much of the discussion which follows, because Kelly is very much a Stewart Brand protégé.

[...]

(Whole Earth Catalogue, 1986, 2).

[...]

Except for the vague Libertarian philosophy expressed in the purpose statement of the Whole Earth Catalogue or implied in the pages of WIRED today, one would not tend to read into Kelly's work any particular social, political, or religious agenda;

Whole Earth Catalogue, Steward Brand,1968