Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

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

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.

The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.