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.

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

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

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.

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,...

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

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...

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

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...

I’m astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw...

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

Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.

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...

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

If there’s any object in human experience that’s a precedent for what a computer should be like, it’s a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface...

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.

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...

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 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...

Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It’s a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.

I’ve always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.

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...