Kevin Kelly (editor)

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

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

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

"Telling the future is what organisms are for."

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

"We are all steering."

"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."

"The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"We are connecting everything to everything."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Technology has become our culture, our culture technology."

"In the past, an innovationÕs momentum indicated significance. Now, in the network environment, where biological behaviour reigns, significance precedes momentum."

"In the network economy the more plentiful things become, the more valuable they become."

"Every time a closed system opens, it begins to interact more directly with other existing systems, and therefore acquires all the value of those systems."

"The value of an invention, company or technology increases exponentially as the number of systems in participates with increases linearly."

"The more interconnected a technology is, the more opportunities it spawns for both use and misuse."

"The law of plentitude is most accurately rendered thus: In a network, the more opportunities that are taken, the faster new opportunities arise."

"A network is a possibility factory."

"Because prices move inexorably towards the free, the best move in the network economy is to anticipate this cheapness."

"All items that can be copied, both tangible and intangible, adhere to the law of inverted pricing and become cheaper as they improve."

"If goods and services become more valuable as they become more plentiful, and if they become cheaper as they become valuable, then the natural extension of this logic says that the most valuable things of all should be those that are ubiquitous and free."

"Following the free also works in the other direction. If one way to increase product value is to make products free, then many things now free may contain potential value not yet perceived."

"The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abudance is human attention."

"The migration from ad hoc use to commercialisation cannot be rushed. To reach ubiquity you have to pass through sharing."

"Releasing incomplete 'buggy' products is not cost-cutting desperation; it is the shrewdest way to complete a product when your customers are smarter than you are."

"The first thing the network economy reforms is our identity."

"Individual allegiance moves away from firms and toward networks and network platforms."