Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.

When it's a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you're riffing off other people's ideas, that actually can be productive.

We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.

Being right keeps you in place, being wrong forces you to explore.

If you look at where innovation - defined as ideas, not as commercial product - tends to live, the university system is remarkably innovative.

I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.

That strange new zone between medium and message. That zone we call the interface.