Intellectuals of the categories happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It's easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world.

Like most technology, the internet has mixed effects. It's a neutral instrument.

There could be an independent labor-based party, which might over time become an important force the way the Labor Party did in England. To all of these things there are plenty of barriers, in the culture and in the social and political institutions, the concentration of economic power. But these are not insuperable barriers, I think. They can be overcome. And it is urgent that this be done, because there are really incredible problems that are simply not being addressed.

It hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison.

Silicon Valley, after all, feeds off the existence of computers, the internet, the IT systems, satellites, the whole of micro electronics and so on, but a lot of that comes straight out of the state sector of the economy. Silicon Valley developed, but they expanded and turned it into commercial products and so on, but the innovation is on the basis of fundamental technological development that took places in places like this [MIT] on government funding, and that continues.

South America has virtually broken away in the last decade. That's an event of historic significance. South America just doesn't follow US orders. In fact there isn't a single US military base left there.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.