“You gave your life to become the person you are right now. Was it worth it?”

In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.

Unlike baby mammals, a meme cannot expect to go from conception to birth in a standard, more or less fixed period of time. Some memes are born immediately, whereas others may linger in gestation for years on end. Because prenatal care is so poor in the meme world, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality rates are quite high. Even worse, abortion and infanticide of new memes are commonplace in some quarters.

The idea of peacefully replacing our ruler through a legal process is still a wild, alien thought for us. The powers-that-be are above the law and they're unchangeable by law. Overthrowing them is something we understand. But at the moment, we don't want to. We've had quite enough revolution.

The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

Ideas don't explode; they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall-sized television screens. After a while, someone notices that we're not thinking about things the way our parents did.

Some ideas are reeled into our mind wrapped up in facts; and some ideas burst upon us naked without the slightest evidence they could be true but with all the conviction they are.

From curious children, hackers were born.

The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences.

The idea was to erect an island of intellectual freedom where young people could probe and question and develop their own ideas before reality closed in and everybody went to work for a private equity firm.

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.
-- Louis Kahn

Ideas are abstract. They become books only when they are clothed with people and narrative.
--V.S. Naipaul

Learning history isn't mostly about "a-ha moments." It's about laboring through a lot of information and ideas that are often less than magical. Therein lies the real trouble. Learning is labor. We're selling the fantasy that technology can change that. It can't. No technology ever has. Gutenberg's press only made it easier to print books, not easier to read and understand them.
-- Peter Berger, The land of iPods and honey