A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History Quotes

“Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints.”
― Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

“The very idea of massified advertising meant that large cirulation newpapers were not in the business of selling information to people but rather of selling the attention of their readers to commercial concerns... to tap into the resorvoir of resources constitutred by the growing urban populations”
― Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

“But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.”
― Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

“Markets and bureaucracies, as well as unplanned and planned cities, are concrete instances of a more general distinction: self-organized meshworks of diverse elements, versus hierarchies of uniform elements. But again, meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another.”
― Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

“McNeill’s hypothesis is that explosive, self-stimulating (“autocatalytic”) urban dynamics cannot emerge when hierarchical components overwhelm meshwork components. Fernand Braudel seems to agree with this hypothesis when he asserts the existence of a “dynamic pattern of turbulent urban evolution in the West, while the pattern of life in cities in the rest of the world runs in a long, straight and unbroken line across time”
― Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History