Kevin Kelly

Without some element of governance from the top, bottom-up control will freeze when options are many. Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralysed with choices.

In the network economy, ever-less energy is needed to complete a single transaction, but ever-more effort is needed to agree on what pattern the transaction should follow.

In the industrial economy success was self-limiting; it obeyed the law of decreasing returns.

The net shifts from mass media to mess media.

Complete surrender to the bottom is not what embracing swarm power is about.

When information is plentiful, peers take over.

In a poetic sense the prime goal of the new economy is to undo – company by company, industry by industry – the industrial economy.

Everyday we see evidence of biological growth in technological systems. This is one of the marks of the network economy: that biology has taken root in technology. And this is one of the reasons why networks change everything.

It takes a village to make a mall. Community precedes commerce.

Privacy is a type of conversation. Firms should view privacy not as some inconvenient obsession of customers that must be snuck around but more as a way to cultivate a genuine relationship.

The more interconnected a technology is, the more opportunities it spawns for both use and misuse.

Releasing incomplete 'buggy' products is not cost-cutting desperation; it is the shrewdest way to complete a product when your customers are smarter than you are.