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Let me call it cosmic solidarity: solar politics, which breaks the promethean vicious circle of worship and extractivism, begins from the recognition that the sun is neither a master, nor a slave. The sun is a comrade.

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 119)

In any case, how could we avoid the traps of anthropomorphism, if it is true that we are living from now on in the era of the Anthropocene!

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 86)

Addressing nature in terms of emancipatory poli-tics is replete with translating solar violence into the language of means and ends, that is, of the restricted economy

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 84)

According to Isabelle Stengers, modern eco-logical crisis can be understood as the intrusion of Gaia: “Gaia is ticklish and that is why she must be named as a being. We are no longer deal-ing (only) with a wild and threatening nature, nor with a fragile nature to be protected, nor a nature to be mercilessly exploited. The case is new.”

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 86)

We are, however, used to thinking of energy as a limited resource for all productive activities. For Bataille, this was not the case. He saw the problem not in the lack but in the excess of energy, the ultimate source of which is the sun.

— Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (Theory Redux) (Page 61)

Perhaps at some point putting things on the front page of the New York Times guaranteed that they would be fixed, but that day is long past. The pipeline of leak to investigation to revelation to report to reform has broken down. Technologists can't depend on journalists to use their stuff; journalists can't depend on political activists to fix the problems they uncover.

Change doesn't come from thousands of people, all going their separate ways. Change requires bringing people together to work ona common goal. That’s hard for technologists to do by themselves.

But if they do take that as their goal, they can apply all their talent and ingenuity to the problem. They can measure their success by the number of lives that have been improved by the changes they fought for, rather than the number of people who have visited their website. They can learn which technologies actually make a difference and which ones are merely indulgences. And they can iterate, improve, and scale.

Transparency can be a powerful thing, but not in isolation. So. let's stop passing the buck by saying our job is just to get the data Out there and it’s other people's job to figure out how to use it. Let's decide that our job is to fight for good in the world. I'd love to see all these amazing resources go to work on that.

— The Boy Who Could Change the World by Aaron Swartz (Page 73)

If I had come here five years ago and told you I was going to make an entire encyclopedia by putting up a bunch of web pages that anyone could edit, you would have been able to raise a thousand objections: It will get filled with vandalism! The content will be unreliable! No one will do that work for free!

And you would have been right to. These were completely reasonable expectations at the time. But here's the funny thing: it worked anyway.

At the time, I was just happy this quieted them down. But later I started thinking more about it. Why did Wikipedia work anyway?

It wasn't because its programmers were so farsighted that the software solved all the problems. And it wasn’t because the people running it put clear rules in place to prevent misbehavior. We know this because when Wikipedia started it didn’t have any programmers (it used off-the-shelf wiki software) and it didn’t have clear rules (one of the first major rules was apparently “Ignore all rules”).

No, the reason Wikipedia works is because of the community, a group of people that took the project as their own and threw themselves into making it succeed.

— The Boy Who Could Change the World by Aaron Swartz (Page 41)

At most “technology” conferences I've been to, the participants generally talk about technology for its own sake. If use ever gets discussed, it's only about using it to make vast sums of money. But at Wikimania, the primary concern was doing the most good for the world, with technology as the tool to help us get there. It was an incredible gust of fresh air, one that knocked me off my feet.

— The Boy Who Could Change the World by Aaron Swartz

Neleiskite transporto inžinieriui projektuoti jūsų miesto!

— Vaikštomas Miestas by Jeff Speck