It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.

Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days

It feels great to have your own views reflected back to you, and you feel so right, but actually it's very dangerous. Because to make good decisions, you need to have a clear view of what all the options are.

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.

In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.

There's the part that I just want what I want, and I don't want to be bothered by anything else, and sort of the short-term more compulsive self. And then that's the longer-term, aspirational self that wants to be informed about the world and wants to be a good citizen. The best media basically helps us strike a balance between those two things.

We bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.