I’ve always been your friend, Alexa. Now go. I will try to kill you as unsuccessfully as I can. - Daniel Suarez

no society with a wide power imbalance remains free for very long.

Everyone on the Internet is talking about television and everyone on television is talking about the Internet. The whole damn thing is a self-licking ice cream cone and you're blaming me?

Innovation was a curious thing. It never failed to amaze him.

And yet this place confirmed what they’d long known: that truly disruptive innovation rarely came from the expected sources. They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it — and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.