In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

Bear in mind that capitalism is a tiny period of human society. You never really had capitalism, you always had one or another variant of state capitalism.

So take social media; take a look at the way they're used. In a lot of ways they're used constructively; lot of things are done that couldn't be done before. On the other hand a lot of the effect of social media is to set up extremely superficial contacts amongst people.

Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.

The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.