I’m not in any sense anti-Facebook.

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

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 we’ll have everyone vote on it, especially the hundreds of millions of people who don’t understand the math. Would that...

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long...

Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.

A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

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

My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity – in the sense that I’m willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing.

Google’s thing is not advertising because it’s not a romanticizing operation. It doesn’t involve expression. It’s a link. What they’re doing is selling access.

I’m an advocate of human nature.

If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience…. If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will – or...

If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.

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

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 believed, more good than harm would result.The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central...

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 way. I’m thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.Movements associated with Freud...

Technologists provide tools that can improve people’s lives. But I want to be clear that I don’t think technology by itself improves people’s lives, since often I’m criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there’s commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it’s for naught.

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.

A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.

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.

Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there’s a single numeric average. But if it’s a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that’s crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.

The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we’re saying, ‘Don’t make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.’ We’re sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

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 really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying.

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 the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn’t have been able to forget their former selves.

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 that our worst behaviour comes out when we’re switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software...

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as...

A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush – the way heat scrambles things – is what makes them bits.But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so...

Information wants to be free.’ So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn’t deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information...

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 to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.

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 by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the...

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. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far...

It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.

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

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

Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.

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, you’ll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you’ll realise that you’re a full-class citizen. You have the potential...

The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It’s us looking at ourselves – and like all human endeavors it’s imperfect.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it’s a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can’t be any rights of authorship.

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

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 has spiritual overtones. A term like “sympathy” or “allegiance” might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to...

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?

that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.