Some Remarks Quotes

“Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield that they have passed through the apocalypse while the rest of us are watching it on TV.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes. The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“It’s when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain—sometimes illusory gain—that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“My colleague Bruce Sterling has defined a thriller as a science fiction novel that includes the President of the United States.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it’s tea. In Africa it’s milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Leibniz’s most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware’s nothing more than a really complicated space heater.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“To this point it probably looks like I am setting this up as a slam-dunk case for ambulating while working, and getting ready to lambaste treadmill-resistant managers as insensitive and tragically shortsighted knuckle draggers. Well, they are.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“BIZ DEV GUY: WE COULD MAKE A PREPOSTEROUS AMOUNT OF MONEY FROM communications satellites.

Engineer: It will be expensive to build those, but even so, nothing compared to the cost of building the machines needed to launch them into orbit.

Biz dev guy: Funny you should mention that. It so happens that our government has already put $4 trillion into building the rockets and supporting technology we need. There’s only one catch.

Engineer: Okay, I’ll bite. What is the catch?

Biz dev guy: Your communications satellite has to be the size, shape, and weight of a hydrogen bomb.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“If you don’t run with this crowd, you might assume that SF is an abbreviation of Science Fiction. But here it means Speculative Fiction. This coinage is a way to cope with the problem that Science Fiction is mysteriously, inextricably conjoined with the seemingly unrelated literature of Fantasy. Many who are fond of one are fond of the other, to the point where they perceive them as The Same Thing in spite of the fact that they seem quite different to non-fans.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“The second library was called the Library of Cleopatra and was built around a couple of hundred thousand manuscripts that were given to her by Marc Antony in what was either a magnificent gesture of romantic love or a shrewd political maneuver. Marc Antony suffered from what we would today call “poor impulse control,” so the former explanation is more likely. This library was wiped out by Christians in AD 391. Depending on which version of events you read, its life span may have overlapped with that of the first library for a few years, a few decades, or not at all.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“During the 1980s, when Americans started to get freaked out about Japan again, we heard a great deal about Japanese corporations’ patient, long-term approach to R&D and how vastly superior it was to American companies’ stupid, short-term approach. Since American news media are at least as stupid and short-term as the big corporations they like to bitch about, we have heard very little follow-up to such stories in recent years, which is kind of disappointing because I was sort of wondering how it was all going to turn out. But now the formerly long-term is about to come due.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high-tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects (I recommend Arthur C. Clarke’s book How the World Was One). The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“The same problems of distribution arise in computer networks. As networks get bigger and as the machines that make them up become more equal, the whole approach to moving information around changes from centralized to distributed. The packet-switching system that makes things like the Internet work would be immediately familiar to the Chinese. Instead of requisitioning a hunk of optical fiber between Point A and Point B and slamming the data down it in one big shipment, the packet data network breaks the data down into tiny pieces and sends them out separately, just as a Chinese enterprise might break a large shipment down into small pieces and send each one out on a separate bicycle, knowing that each one might take a different route but that they’d all get there eventually.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“THE FIRST THING THAT HAPPENED DURING JARUZELSKI’S MILITARY COUP IN Poland was that the narcs invaded the telephone exchanges and severed the trunk lines with axes, ensuring that they would take months to repair. This and similar stories have gotten us into the habit of thinking that modern information technology is to totalitarianism what crosses are to vampires. Skeptics might say it’s just a coincidence that glasnost and perestroika came just after the photocopier, the fax, and the personal computer invaded Russia, but I think there’s a connection, and if you read WIRED, you probably do too. After all, how could any country whose power structure was based on controlling the flow of information survive in an era of direct-dial phones and ubiquitous fax machines?”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Finally, in graphic novels and video games, SF is, of course, dominant.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“My colleague Bruce Sterling has defined a thriller as a science fiction novel that includes the President of the United States. If you agree with Bruce’s definition, the size of the SF market suddenly becomes very much larger.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“In movies, SF dominates utterly: by my count, 57 of the top 100 movies of all time, and nine of the top ten. The only top ten film that isn’t SF is Titanic, made by a director who cut his teeth making SF films.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars

“Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: “geeking out” and “vegging out.” To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal—and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means.”
― Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing – A Brilliant Collection on Science and Technology from Newton to Star Wars