There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.