Individuals achieve optimal stupidity when they're given substantial powers while being insulated from the results of their actions.

I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.

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.

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

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

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.

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