As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes correspondingly cheaper. Thus, it has become commonplace to expect online services (not just news, but 21st century treats like search or social networking) to be given for free, or rather, in exchange for acquiescence to being spied on.

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.

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.

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?

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

Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.

Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

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

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

I would argue that among musicians who work in technology today, the level of technological sophistication probably exceeds that of military programs, to be blunt. They are just really smart people attracted to making strange new sounds.

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.

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth.

There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.

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.

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

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

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 me.

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.

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