One consequence of this is that people are expected to make it on their own by chasing clicks or building a brand. What a diminished vision that is.

One thing that struck me about going to those tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people's greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives.

One of the big myths about people growing up is that they are "digital natives;" that just because they've been raised with the Internet - that you're very adept at using the app on your phone - it doesn't mean you have any idea about how the Internet actually works.

Look back on the utopian dreams of the previous century, or even the century before that, where people thought machines would ultimately give us a quality of life where our needs would be taken care of so we could all basically be artists together in the evening, after we had fished, hunted, raised cattle - or whatever it was Marx imagined for us.

There's something odd about telling people, artists, that they need to work for free to be pure while you're sitting there getting a salary that ultimately is paid by a generation of young people going deeply into debt for their education.

Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy.

think there's a culture of Silicon Valley that seems to have the attitude that you can have it both ways, that you can be an insurgent but also, ultimately, it's paid for by advertising, when in fact advertising is totally retrograde. Now that's an industry we should be disrupting, and maybe you disrupt it by funding public media. None of this is technological destiny; there are only social choices.