After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley
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6%
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Holy crap! Marc Andreessen Liked your thoughts on the LDAP protocol’s twenty-fifth birthday?? You’d hate for his Like and comment to be forty-seventh on a long list that no one ever scrolls through but you!
7%
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if human brains devoured double the calories, grandma and grandpa wouldn’t have found twice the nuts and berries. So our ancestors’ brains grew until they hit a certain equilibrium.”
11%
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“Goals are basically cognitive actors. You could almost say they make us conscious!”
17%
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“Someone needs to start working on problems when they’re impossible. That’s what gradually makes them tractable. Flight, for instance. Or telecommunications.”
21%
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Some campuses are so devoted to tolerance and diversity that no one dares to voice thoughts that clash with the narrow ultraorthodoxy that this devotion dictates.
58%
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“The idea is that if someone signs the right documents—or the wrong ones, depending on your perspective, I guess—they can become almost as subjugated vis-à-vis their counterparty as individuals are in relation to the state.
60%
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I like it when planes don’t hit buildings. And maybe that’s the price. If so, we’re getting our skyline awfully cheap.”
62%
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I love you as much as I love anybody. But I hate your gender!” And she’s gone.
65%
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Mitchell,” as scripted in all those messages, might have been more Mitchell than Mitchell! Yet all Mitchell can think about is Mitchell. What does this say about Mitchell’s moral code? Did last night’s beautiful stranger make love to Mitchell or “Mitchell”? And if “Mitchell” is actually Mitchell’s best self, could “Mitchell” help Mitchell be more like “Mitchell” than Mitchell? Blah, blah, blah.
66%
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It’s like a medieval village fighting boredom by burning someone as a witch.”
69%
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couple years with Hezbollah, and this Shi’a notion and tactic of martyrdom through suicide bombing has entered the Sunni playbook.
69%
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Intelligence so pervades the identity and worldview of he who wields it that its Wing Man is arrogance.
69%
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“You and I are hundreds of times smarter than field mice, and share about 90 percent of our DNA with them. But do we consult them before plowing under their dens for agriculture?
70%
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She beams like some brat who just smoked Watson at Jeopardy.
74%
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The half-forgotten lesson of the anthrax attacks is that all vessels are leaky.
74%
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Terrorism is meanwhile shifting from being a means of communication by groups, to a form of self-expression by individuals.
79%
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I could make myself dictator—and turn you into an underclass that exists solely to meet my needs! I could turn you into a service organization! Into fucking Accenture, bitch!”
87%
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“Some idiot in BizDev did a deal with Nest. Now half of those things have Phluttr accounts, and they never shut up about the fucking temperature.”
90%
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“I could literally tell you millions of stories about people screwing themselves over just to pound their chests a bit. Or, to avoid making some kind of apology.
94%
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People like us don’t really buy into groups. We’ll affiliate with them. But more as a means to an end. Because they help us learn. Or, to work with other people like us. We can be really loyal to individuals.