Howard could imagine someone doing what he did, but better. He couldn’t imagine someone making what he did obsolete.

We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change.

Digital means of distributing words and images have robbed newspapers of the coherence they formerly had, revealing the physical object of the newspaper as a merely provisional solution; now every article is its own section.

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.

The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.

Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession.

It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence.

When sociologists talk about social capital, they often make a distinction between bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding capital is an increase in the depth of connections and trust within a relatively homogenous group; bridging capital is an increase in connections among relatively heterogeneous groups.

One of the few uncontentious tenets of economics is that people respond to incentives. If you give them more of a reason to do something, they will do more of it, and if you make it easier to do more of something they are already inclined to do, they will also do more of it.