The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That's the problem.

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.

People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, "Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living." We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

It's as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.