Latest Quotes

“The question is whether the Ideal exists in actuality or only in our clumsy, moment-by-moment emotions— continually shifting potential; in other words 'out there' or 'in here' or both: God's voice, so to speak, or the opinion, on a particular Tuesday, of some human— or both at once. Am I leaving thi…”

— John Gardner, Peter Mickelsson, Mickelsson's Ghosts

“When they had fights about Ellen's playing around— a phrase that, inexplicably, filled him with rage— it always seemed later that it was not her infidelity that brought on the fights, nor his guilt at his own unconfessed infidelity, but the gin they'd drunk. It had seemed not in the real world, as r…”

— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts

“We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob. We are messing with our source code, including the code that grows our brains and makes our minds. Gene splicing, genetic engineering, and gene therapy have given our minds direct control of our genes, ending a four-billion-year hegemo…”

— Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants

“About 2,500 years ago most of humanity's major religions were set in motion in a relatively compact period. Confucius, Lao-tzu, Buddha, Zoroaster, the authors of the Upanishads, and the Jewish patriarchs all lived within a span of 20 generations. Only a few major religions have been born since then.…”

— Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants

“He'd never in his life heard music so unearthly. Perhaps it was the shale of the mountainsides, or the breath of cold fog on the river; whatever the reason, the music, by the time it reached Mickelsson, seemed nothing that human voices could conceivably produce. If stones were to sing, taking their…”

— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts

“Over the next week, we can enjoy the benefits of increased dopamine. This chemical—responsible for the rush one gets on heroin or after performing a death-defying stunt—is responsible for reward-driven learning. 'It allows us to expand our behaviors outside of our routines, decrease our intensity, a…”

— Dr. Mark Filippi, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Finally, in the last moon phase, we are dominated by norepinephrine, an arousal chemical that regulates processes like the flight-or-flight response, anxiety, and other instinctual behaviors. 'We tend to be better off doing more structural tasks that don't involve a lot of reflection. Its binary nat…”

— Dr. Mark Filippi, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Nearer to the full moon, an uptick in serotonin increases self-awareness, generating both high focus and high energy. Serotonin, the chemical that gets boosted by drugs like Prozac, is thought to communicate the abundance or dearth of food resources to our brain. 'When under its influence we can fee…”

— Dr. Mark Filippi, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“'When we speak of tensegrity,' Filippi explains, 'we mean the capacity a system has to redistribute tension and retain the same physical shape. Our manifested reality, from the infrastructure of our cells to the street grids of the towns and cities we live in, possess a tensegrity.'”

— Dr. Mark Filippi, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“...children's playground activity has been observed to be paced by just one or two youngsters who move about seemingly randomly from one group to another, establishing fairly precise rhythms of activity. Social scientists believe this collaborative pacing allows for high levels of group coherence as…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“The same is true for businesses that rework their operations around the time frames of quarterly reports, and mutual funds that 'dress up' for end-of-year evaluations by selling unpopular assets and purchasing popular ones. They miss or work against the more naturally occurring rhythms and lose the…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“By putting email and Twitter in our smart phones and attaching them to our bodies so that something vibrates every time we are mentioned, summoned, or pinged, we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“...the bloggers, designers, lovers, and programmers all sacrifice their connection to natural and emergent rhythms and patterns in order to match those dictated by their technologies and the artificial situations they create.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Instead of demanding that our technologies conform to ourselves and our own innate rhythms, we strive to become more compatible with our technologies and the new cultural norms their timelessness implies. We compete to process more emails or attract more social networking connections than our collea…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Many of us aspire to this ability to be 'on' at any time and to treat the various portions of the day as mere artifacts of a more primitive culture—the way we look at seemingly archaic blue laws that used to require stores to remain closed at least one day a week. We want all the time, to everything…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, our machines keep us humans working at their pace, or the pace of the companies on the other end of our network connections. Thanks to the Internet, we travel more on business, not less, we work at all hours on demand, and we spend our…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“The point is that time is not neutral. Hours and minutes are not generic, but specific. We are better at doing some things in the morning and others in the evening. More incredible, those times of day change based on where we are in the twenty-eight-day moon cycle. In one week, we are more productiv…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Although the thing we call time might be a mere concept—variation on energy in Einstein's equations—all this chronobiological evidence suggests there is a kind of synchronization going on between different parts of our world. In other words, even if we are ultimately unhinged from any absolute clock…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“...we also have internal clocks, governed by less understood metabolic, hormonal, and glandular processes. We listen to those inner rhythms while simultaneously responding to external cues, from daylight and moon phases to the cycle of the seasons. Still other evidence suggests a complex set of rela…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Leaving people in rooms with no external time cues, researchers found that the average person's biological clock would actually lengthen to a twenty-five-hour cycle. This, they concluded, is why traveling east, which shortens the day, is so much more disorienting than traveling west, which lengthens…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now