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

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...

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...

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...

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

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

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it’s too expensive to change the interface.

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.

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

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...

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...

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...

I do real paintings, you know. I’m a little messy in the studio, so I’m a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.

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...

Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.

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.

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.

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.

One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we’re all going to starve, and it’s the machines that’ll get good.

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...

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

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...

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?

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...

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

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.

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.

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...

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...

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

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

I’m an advocate of human nature.

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....

Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.