"Everyday we see evidence of biological growth in technological systems. This is one of the marks of the network economy: that biology has taken root in technology. And this is one of the reasons why networks change everything."

"A good definition of a network is organic behaviour in a technological matrix."

"It's a "hits" economy where resources flow to those that show some life. If a new novel, new product, or new service begins to succeed it is fed more; if it falters its left to wither."

"In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley's greatest "product" is the social organisation of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile e mail culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy."

"In the industrial economy success was self-limiting; it obeyed the law of decreasing returns."

"The value of a network explodes as its membership increases, and then the value explosion sucks in yet more members, compounding the result."

"Mathematics says the sum value of a network increases as the square of the number of members. In other words, as the number of nodes in a network increases arithmetically, the value of the network increases exponentially. Adding a few more members can dramatically increase the value of the network."

"The great benefits reaped by the new economy in the coming decades will be due in large part to exploring and exploiting the power of decentralised and autonomous networks."

"At present there is far more to be gained by pushing the boundaries of what can be done by the bottom than by focusing on what can be done at the top."

"Without some element of governance from the top, bottom-up control will freeze when options are many. Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralysed with choices."

"Complete surrender to the bottom is not what embracing swarm power is about."

"The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment."

"The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness."

"Dumb parts, properly constituted into a swarm, yield smart results."

"When we permit any object to transmit a small amount of data and to receive input from its neighborhood, we change an inert object into an animated node."

"We are connecting everything to everything."

"The dynamic of our society, and particularly our new economy, will increasingly obey the logic of networks. Understanding how networks work will be the key to understanding how the economy works."

"As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world."

"As tremendous as the influence of financial inventions have been, in the influence of network inventions will be as great, or greater."

"Communication – which in the end is what the digital technology and media are all about – is not just a sector of the economy. Communication IS the economy."

"The tricks of the intangible trade will become the tricks of your trade."

"The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being."

"We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of constant evolution."

"No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning."

"When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command."

"We are all steering."

"We cannot import evolution and learning without exporting control."

"Telling the future is what organisms are for."

"As life evolves it unbinds from the inorganic and interacts more with the organic."

"Inconsistency is an inevitable trait of any self-sustaining system built up out of consistent parts."

"The quickest route to describing a seed's output is to sprout it."

"Evolution is a technological, mathematical, informational, and biological process rolled into one. It could almost be said to be a law of physics, a principle that reigns over all created multitudes, whether they have genes or not."

"The genes harbor their own wisdom and their own inertia."

"Hereditary information does not exist independently of its embodiment."

"If machines knew as much about each other as we know about each other (even in our privacy), the ecology of machines would be indomitable."

"The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge."

"Urbanization is the advent of edge species."

"Life is in the business of making its environment agreeable for life."

"In turbulence is the preservation of the world."

"What little time left is in this century is rehearsal time for the chief psychological chore of the 21st century: letting go, with dignity."

"Life is a verb not a noun."

"The story of automation is the story of a one-way shift from human control to automatic control."

"Organisms are self-causing agencies. Every self is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-created."

"Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness."

"Dying creatively is the hallmark of vivisystems."

"The great secret which life has kept from us is that once born, life is immortal. Once launched, it cannot be eradicated."

"Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference."

"An ecosystem is more like a conference than a community -- indefinite, pluralistic, tolerant, and in constant flux."

"Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing."

"The capacity to evolve must be evolved itself. Evolution has been, and will keep on, exploring the space of possible evolutions. Organisms, memes, the whole ball of wax are only evolution's way to keep evolving."