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1,825 books
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2,213 voters
“Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.”
― Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
― Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
“Could you refuse me if I asked you to point again at the horizon, to tell me something was worth waiting for?”
― The Hurting Kind: Poems
― The Hurting Kind: Poems
“Years later, back from Mexico or South America, he’d admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it, wrecking a forest for a temple, a temple that should be simply left a temple. He wanted it all to stay as it was, even if it went undiscovered. I want to honor a man who wants to hold a wild thing, only for a second, long enough to admire it fully, and then wants to watch it safely return to its life, bends to be sure the grass closes up behind it.”
― The Hurting Kind: Poems
― The Hurting Kind: Poems
“stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another.”
― Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
― Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
“What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network.”
― Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
― Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
The Little Book Group That Could
— 4 members
— last activity Oct 10, 2012 07:48AM
3 people! Reading Books! Discussing them weekly, in person or via Skype or Goodreads! How delightful.
Around the World in 80 Books
— 30787 members
— last activity 1 hour, 3 min ago
Reading takes you places. Where in the world will your next book take you? If you love world literature, translated works, travel writing, or explorin ...more
Ben’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ben’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
850 books
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127 friends
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5,001 friends
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