Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive. A vigilant, eyes-wide-open embrace works much better.

The 12 forces are Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.

Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Once we invented the scientific method, we could immediately create thousands of other amazing things we could have never discovered any other way.

because the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating (the average lifespan of a phone app is a mere 30 days!), you won’t have time to master anything before it is displaced, so you will remain in the newbie mode forever.

Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better.

every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent.

Now we are transitioning into the third age of computation. Pages and browsers are far less important. Today the prime units are flows and streams.

We tag and “like” and “favorite” moments in the streams. The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds.

A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts.

When copies are superabundant, they become worthless. Instead, stuff that can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied.

Why would anyone ever pay for something they could get for free? And when they pay for something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?

Generative qualities add value to free copies and therefore are something that can be sold.

What counts are not the number of copies but the number of ways a copy can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, and enlivened by other media.

Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work.

What those kinds of books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, bookmarked, summarized, cross-referenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked to.

More important, with my permission, my highlights can be shared with other readers, and I can read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar, or critic. We can even filter the most popular highlights of all readers, and in this manner begin to read a book in a new way

Reading becomes social. With screens we can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them.

We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia—highlights, notes, questions, musings.

Over the next three decades, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library.

Once snippets, articles, and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffleable, and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

The empty white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

The status of a new creation is determined not by the rating given to it by critics but by the degree to which it is linked to the rest of the world.

Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.

To access a service, a customer is often committing to it in a far stronger way than when he or she purchases an item.

the long-term trend in our modern lives is that most goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore most goods and services are candidates for rental and sharing.

At almost every level of a platform, sharing is the default—even if it is just the rules of competition. Your success hinges on the success of others.

Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Woven together, the bits are made much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone.

As innovation expert Larry Keeley once observed: “No one is as smart as everyone.”

Editors are the middle people—or what are called “curators” today—the professionals between a creator and the audience.

Intermediates of some type are needed to shape the cloud of creativity that boils up from the crowd. This hybrid of user-generated and editor-enhanced is quite common.

The largest, fastest growing, most profitable companies in 2050 will be companies that will have figured out how to harness aspects of sharing that are invisible and unappreciated today.

Anything that can be shared can be shared better, faster, easier, longer, and in a million more ways than we currently realize.

Way back in 1971 Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning social scientist, observed, “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

The maximum potential attention is therefore fixed. Its production is inherently limited while everything else is becoming abundant. Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow.

all new technologies derive from a combination of existing technologies. Modern technologies are combinations of earlier primitive technologies that have been rearranged and remixed.

We don’t have the equivalent of a hyperlink for film yet. With true screen fluency, I’d be able to cite specific frames of a film or specific items in a frame.

Anonymity enables the occasional whistle-blower and can protect the persecuted fringe and political outcasts. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system.

Computer scientist J. Storrs Hall writes: “If there is enough of something, it is possible, indeed not unusual, for it to have properties not exhibited at all in small, isolated examples.

A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking.