After my mother’s death, I had such difficulty relating to people.

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn’t correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

America’s Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven’t seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves – Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on...

Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists – and I don’t mean that in a pejorative...

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can’t be. It can only be a channel.

If market pricing is the only legitimate test of quality, why are we still bothering with proven theorems? Why don’t we just have a vote on whether a theorem is true? To make it better...

I mean, you can’t have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.

What if only humans are real, and information is not?

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.

An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy. I like the term “empathy” because it...

This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we...

Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and...

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.

Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people.

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early...

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough – they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven’t been activated before. These new experiences bring...

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There’s a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It’s almost always the case...

I’m an advocate of human nature.

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is...

I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we’ve been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as...

Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.

Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique – shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart....

We’re losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.

Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.

I’m not in any sense anti-Facebook.

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.

The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It’s pretty shocking to...

Facebook says, ‘Privacy is theft,’ because they’re selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which...

I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that’s very cold and has such an opposite effect.

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.

enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.

I’ve occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order...

I’d much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym,...

There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there’s something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don’t understand what quality...

If you’re old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends.

What does it mean to not be alone? I’ve approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.

about: Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.