Paul Saffo Quotes

The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded.

Before the iPhone, cyberspace was something you went to your desk to visit. Now cyberspace is something you carry in your pocket.

The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.

Microsoft is a big intellectual roach motel. All the big minds go in, and they don't come out.

Each time you toss out a 'singing' greeting card, you are disposing of more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1950.

The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace.

Graphic designers are idea embalmers, loving undertakers preserving bits of data like to many butterflies pinned to felt in a jewel box.

I worry about a society that can remember everything.

We tend to use a new technology to do an old task more efficiently. We pave the cow paths.

Hipness is the only asset that matters.

We invent our technologies and then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves as individuals, communities and cultures.

Responding to climate change will become the obsession of the next decade in much the same way terrorism was this decade's obsession.

I don't think information overload is a function of the volume of information. It's a derivative of the volume of information plus the sense-making tools you have.

The Web is a compelling new medium being put to all kinds of uses, by everyone from banks to Cub Scouts to flying saucer cults. That said, it can also be a powerful folly amplifier.

Though I carry enough electronics to get nervous in a lightning storm, I love paper and I always have a Moleskine journal with me to capture notes, conversations and ideas.

It will take a decade or two, but fundamentalism is going to burn itself.

We do need to rethink privacy. I think we need to fall back on (former Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter's definition of privacy which is, "Privacy is the right to be left alone."

I'm actually an optimist about what lies ahead. Are wikis reliable? It depends on the specific business. Is Wikipedia reliable? You bet. Wikipedia is a researcher's dream.

When I lived in Japan in the 1980s, I once was mistaken for Paul Newman, and I didn't have much more hair than I do now. My first reaction was that staying in Japan might be good for my social life.

I live on a canyon at the edge of San Mateo. We are fortunate to have lots of suburban wildlife as our neighbors, though I kind of wish the rattlesnakes would stop curling up by our back door.

Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions.

I've actually tried not to call myself a futurist for the last 25 years. I prefer "forecaster," but people call me a futurist, and it doesn't really bother me.

You don't want to rely on an expert to tell you what lies ahead.

Stock prices turn people's heads. When prices are high, we treat a company like gods, and if they drop, we treat them as fools.

My driving style is alert. As a forecaster, I can't help but think about who else is on the road and how little attention they are paying to their driving.

The curse of cyberspace is that everything we want to preserve will get lost and everything we want to lose will be preserved.

Any thinking person is qualified to be a forecaster, and in fact, everybody does it every day.