I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.

Cloud computing is a great euphemism for centralization of computer services under one server.

I want to prevent us reifying 'the Internet' as something to be preserved like some people want to preserve the American Constitution as it was written.

Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.

For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.

I used to work for an NGO called Transitions Online, and I was their Director of New Media. I was a very idealistic fellow who thought that he could use blogs, social networks and new media to help promote democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.

Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions.

We can now with Google Glasses record everything around us, and we can make sure that nothing is ever forgotten because everything is stored somewhere in Google servers or somewhere else.

If my idea was just to maintain a certain lifestyle, there would be no need to get a Ph.D. But I do care very deeply about the idea side as well.

If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public -- the authorities show up and arrest everyone.

The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value.

To me, the success of the cyberactivists in Tunisia is actually very interesting, because many of them explicitly rejected any support from Washington.

If Amazon's dream of a world without gatekeepers becomes reality, then the company itself will become a powerful gatekeeper.

If we don't like rent control, we ought to oppose it on political and social grounds -- and not just by arguing that, thanks to smartphones and social networks, we can create new, more efficient markets for matching short-term renters with tenants.

Dictators aren't stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook.

Social media's greatest assets -- anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness -- are also its main weaknesses.

Most other documents leaked to WikiLeaks do not carry the same explosive potential as candid cables written by American diplomats.

There is something almost sacred about the Internet. I'm trying to secularize it.

If you trace the history of mankind, our evolution has been mediated by technology, and without technology it's not really obvious where we would be. So I think we have always been cyborgs in this sense.

Once Google is selected to run the infrastructure on which we are changing the world, Google will be there for ever. Democratic accountability will not be prevalent. You cannot file a public information request about Google.