Kevin Kelly (editor)

"In the network economy a firm's primary focus shifts from maximizing the firm«s value to maximizing the network's value."

"In the network economy, ever-less energy is needed to complete a single transaction, but ever-more effort is needed to agree on what pattern the transaction should follow."

"As more of the economy migrates to intangibles, more of the economy will require standards."

"Eventually technical standards will become as important as laws."

"To prosper, feed the web first."

"Bit by bit the logic of the network will overtake every we atom we deal with."

"Because information trumps mass, all commerce migrates to the network economy."

"There can be no expertise in innovation unless there is also expertise in demolishing the ensconced."

"Letting go at the top is not an act against perfection, but against short-sightedness."

"Because skill guilds constrain (and defend) an organisation, it is often far easier to start a new organisation than to change a successful old one."

"To maximise innovation, maximise the fringes."

"Not every success needs to be abandoned drastically, but every success needs to be questioned drastically."

"People will inhabit places, but increasingly the economy inhabits a space."

"In the marketspace of networks, value flows in webs."

"Everywhere networks go, intermediaries follow. The more nodes, the more middlemen."

"The big will have a different kind of bigness. The network economy encourages the middle space. It supplies technology (which the industrial age could not) to nurture mid-sized wonders."

"It takes a village to make a mall. Community precedes commerce."

"The net shifts from mass media to mess media."

"The network economy has moved from change to flux."

"If the system settles into harmony and equilibrium it will eventually stagnate and die."

"In a poetic sense the prime goal of the new economy is to undo – company by company, industry by industry – the industrial economy."

"To achieve sustainable innovation you need to seek persistent disequilibrium. To seek persistent disequilibrium means that one must chase after disruption without succumbing to it, or retreating from it."

"Change comes in various wavelengths. There are changes in the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed."

"The central economic imperative of the new economy is to amplify relationships."

"When information is plentiful, peers take over."

"Outsiders act as employees, employees act as outsiders. New relationships blur the roles of employees and customers to the point of unity. They reveal the customer and the company as one."

"In the network economy, producing and consuming fuse into a single verb: prosuming. Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one's investment."

"As in other technological evolutions, relationship tech will begin its innovation in the avant garde, then work back to the familiar."

"Expertise now resides in fanatical customers. The world's best experts on your product or service, don't work for your company. They are your customers, or a hobby tribe."

"The net demands wiser customers."

"Privacy is a type of conversation. Firms should view privacy not as some inconvenient obsession of customers that must be snuck around but more as a way to cultivate a genuine relationship."

"One of the chief chores in the next economy is to restore the symmetry of knowledge."

"The network economy is founded on technology, but can only be built on relationships. It starts with chips and ends with trust."

"It is not money the Great Asymmetry accrues, nor energy, nor stuff. The origin of economic wealth begins in opportunities."

"Every opportunity seized launches at least two new opportunities."

"Don't solve problems, pursue opportunities."

"There is more to be gained by producing more opportunities than by optimizing existing ones."

"Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy."

"The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do."

"In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing twice."

"The technium is the way the universe has engineered its own self-awareness. ... The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium, with questions and problems and the thickening relations between bits that we call con scientia—shared knowledge—or consciousness. And whether we like it or not, we stand at the fulcrum of the future. We are in part responsible for the evolution of this planet proceeding onward."

"The technium expands life’s fundamental traits, and in so doing it expands life’s fundamental goodness. Life’s increasing diversity, its reach for sentience, its long-term move from the general to the different, its essential (and paradoxical) ability to generate new versions of itself, and its constant play in an infinite game are the very traits and “wants” of the technium. Or should I say, the technium’s wants are those of life. But the technium does not stop there. The technium also expands the mind’s fundamental traits, and in so doing it expands the mind’s fundamental goodness. Technology amplifies the mind’s urge toward the unity of all thought, it accelerates the connections among all people, and it will populate the world with all conceivable ways of comprehending the infinite."

"At the core of the notion of a superhuman intelligence - particularly the view that this intelligence will keep improving itself - is the essential belief that intelligence has an infinite scale. I find no evidence for this. Again, mistaking intelligence as a single dimension helps this belief, but we should understand it as a belief. There is no other physical dimension in the universe that is infinite, as far as science knows so far. Temperature is not infinite - there is finite cold and finite heat. There is finite space and time. Finite speed. Perhaps the mathematical number line is infinite, but all other physical attributes are finite.It stands to reason that reason itself is finite, and not infinite."

"Definition of reality: the fastest possible version of all the details and degrees of freedom present."