One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.

I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

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

The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.

I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.