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.

A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

I have been around military technology people a lot because of my role in virtual reality I've seen weapons from conception to implementation. And there is an extraordinary gadget lust that drives the military. So it's possible that war is just the ultimate expression of creativity.

There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.

I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.

If you're old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends.

Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavour of person-hood. MySpace preserved some of that flavour, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other forms