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.

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

Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.

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.

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...

I’m not in any sense anti-Facebook.

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...

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