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What Hacker News says
- Inspired me as an undergrad Industrial Design student in 1989ish that and The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T by Stewart Brand were the two most influential technology books for me at that time.
Coincidentally enough it turns out my cousin was in the thick of it while the pre-media lab was still part of the architecture school. She would tell me stories of what she was up to in college... when I read that back I had to loop back and ask her about it.
- The Art of the Long View - Peter Schwartz
Any book by Tom Kyte.
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware - Andy Hunt
The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. - Stewart Brand
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Charles Mackay
Only the Paranoid Survive - Andy Grove
- That's very easy for me to answer -- but I'm a bit older than most of you folks. As funny as it may seem the book that changed my life and opened my eyes was "The Media Lab" (1988). and the author of the book was Stewart Brand. What's interesting is that many of the things being talked about in the book are now very much a part of the real world. It's also interesting to note that Brand was also the author of the Whole Earth Catalog. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand
The closest thing today to the "Whole Earth Catalog" today is really the net — especially sites that explore underground culture...
- By Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, author of The Media Lab, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, assistant to Douglas Engelbart on The Mother of All Demos, and subject of the recent film We Are as Gods. Glad to see he's still busy!
- > The phrase is "information wants to be free", not "information wants to be $10/month"
Actually it is kind of both. The full phrase was "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away", from Stewart Brand's "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT".
That was a more succinct expression of something he said earlier to Steve Wozniak at a conference:
> On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.
- From Stewart Brand's The MIT Media Lab: Inventing the Future:
After a dinner of take-out dim sum, Minsky, who had been reading the Koran with some dismay at its violent inquiry-blunting formulae, sermonized, “Religion is a teaching machine— a little deadly loop for putting itself in your mind and keeping it there. The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt. It’s interested in solving deep problems, not in understanding them. And it’s correct in a sense, because the problems it deals with don’t have solutions, because they’re loops. ‘Who made the world?’ ‘God.’ You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who made God?’”
“Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. I’d watch that. Then you’ll find that black is white. Look for differences! You’re looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot.” That lively loop has been cycling in my mind ever since!
