Communicating online goes back to the Defense Department's Arpanet which started in 1969. There was something called Usenet that started in 1980, and this gave people an opportunity to talk about things that people on these more official networks didn't talk about.

What the Japanese are, are the Americans of the 21st century. Essentially what is objectionable about them is what was objectionable about Americans when we had the ball. However, they are committed in a way that American technology is not.

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.

All you have to do is mate.

The areas of the brain that have to do with speech are very connected with the same parallel processors that have to do with the kind of ballistic calculations you need to hit small game with a rock.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.