The golden rule is even more golden in our hyperconnected world. An important lesson to learn: If you talk about someone on the Internet, they will find out. Everybody has a Google alert on their name.

Rule number one: Don't fuck with librarians.

Stuff designed to make them sound clever and make us part with our money. Which is fine, but their shtick isn’t the whole story. Buzzwords are not the word of God. The Internet doesn’t work the way it does because some clever person in New York or Shanghai has decided she needs your money. No, it’s something far more universal and egalitarian. The Internet works best when we’re all trying to share stuff. Not just the corporations and the Internet millionaires, but you, me, everybody else on this planet.

Computers are machines. The internet is, ultimately, a huge army of machines. And machines do not allow in the element of chance. They do exactly what you tell them to do. So the internet means that, though you get what you already knew you wanted, you’ll never get anything more.

The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected

But rule number one, in my book, is: Stop listening to professionals!

To do Linking, a person must be able to hold two things in awareness, keep the positive material more prominent, and not get hijacked by the negative. Practicing mindfulness will increase your capacity to do these things. If you get pulled into the negative, drop it and focus only on the positive. Later on, you can allow the negative to come back alongside the positive in awareness. Most experiences of Linking are fairly brief, under half a minute, but you can take longer if you like.

If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls.

More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.

The Internet is for lonely people. People should live.

Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don't be an asshole.

Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind

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?