You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be the geek they will never forget. Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them, they put you here. You should realize what society has made of you and take full revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly thoroughly weird and don’t do it half way, put every ounce of your horse power into it. Have the artistic courage to realize your significance in culture.

You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.

In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

Every passing year brings us more past futures. Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin. It's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be.

I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of privacy threat...One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies...that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire.