Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN Neo-biological civilization The triumph of the bio-logic Learning to surrender our creations Chapter 2: HIVE MIND Bees do it: distributed governance The collective intelligence of a mob Asymmetrical invisible hands Decentralized remembering as an act of perception More is more than more, it's different Advantages and disadvantages of swarms The network is the icon of the 21st century Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE Entertaining machines with bodies Fast, cheap and out of control Getting smart from dumb things The virtues of nested hierarchies Using the real world to communicate No intelligence without bodies Mind/body black patch psychosis Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY Biology: the future of machines Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds Random paths to a stable ecosystem How to do everything at once The Humpty Dumpty challenge Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION What color is a chameleon on a mirror? The unreasonable point of life Poised in the persistent state of almost falling Rocks are slow life Cooperation without friendship or foresight Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX Equilibrium is death What came first, stability or diversity? Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop The origins of variation Life immortal, ineradicable Negentropy The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL In ancient Greece the first artificial self Maturing of mechanical selfhood The toilet: archetype of tautology Self-causing agencies Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS Bottled life, sealed with clasp Mail-order Gaia Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man The very big ecotechnic terrarium An experiment in sustained chaos Another synthetic ecosystem, like California Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark Migrating to urban weed The deployment of intentional seasons A cyclotron for the life sciences The ultimate technology Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY Pervasive round-the-clock plug in Invisible intelligence Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms Programming a commonwealth Closed-loop manufacturing Technologies of adaptation Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS Having your everything amputated Instead of crunching, connecting Factories of information Your job: managing error Connecting everything to everything Chapter 12: E-MONEY Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins The fax effect and the law of increasing returns Superdistribution Anything holding an electric charge w ill hold a fiscal charge Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks Fear of underwire economies Chapter 13: GOD GAMES Electronic godhood Theories with an interface A god descends into his polygonal creation The transmission of simulacra Memorex warfare Seamless distributed armies A 10,000 piece hyperreality The consensual ascii superorganism Letting go to win Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM An outing to the universal library The space of all possible pictures Travels in biomorph land Harnessing the mutator Sex in the library Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps Tunnelling through randomness Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine What you can't engineer, evolution can Mindless acts performed in parallel Computational arms race Taming wild evolution Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules Death is the best teacher The algorithmic genius of ants The end of engineering's hegemony Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL Cartoon physics in toy worlds Birthing a synthespian Robots without hard bodies The agents of ethnological architecture Imposing destiny upon free will Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald Searching for co-control Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE To enlarge the space of being Primitives of visual possibilities How to program happy accidents All survive by hacking the rules The handy-dandy tool of evolution Hang-gliding into the game of life Life verbs Homesteading hyperlife territory Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE The revolution of daily evolution Bypassing the central dogma The difference, if any, between learning and evololution The evolution of evolution The explanation of everything Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM The incompleteness of Darwinian theory Natural selection is not enough Intersecting lines on the tree of life The premise of non-random mutations Even monsters follow rules When the abstract is embodied The essential clustering of life DNA can't code for everything An uncertain density of biological search space Mathematics of natural selection Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS Order for free Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets A question worth asking Self-tuning vivisystems Chapter 21: RISING FLOW A 4 billion year ponzi scheme What evolution wants Seven trends of hyper-evolution Coyote trickster self-evolver Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY Brains that catch baseballs The flip side of chaos Positive myopia Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability Operation Internal Look, Ahead Varieties of prediction Change in the service of non-change Telling the future is what the systems are for The many problems with global models We are all steering Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES What ever happened to cybernetics? The holes in the web of scientific knowledge To be astonished by the trivial Hypertext: the end of authority A new thinking space Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD How to make something from nothing Hijacking the universe ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY A to L M to Z