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.

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.

The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic,” the New York Times tech columnist once wrote. “Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.

If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.

The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.