Sometimes I think we're on this world for three reasons: to be useful, to tell each other stories and to collect stuff. It's the only explanation for eBay. We love to collect stuff, and at least if we're collecting stuff in cyberspace we're not deforesting the Sierra Nevada.

The Web is a compelling new medium being put to all kinds of uses, by everyone from banks to Cub Scouts to flying saucer cults. That said, it can also be a powerful folly amplifier.

Graphic designers are idea embalmers, loving undertakers preserving bits of data like to many butterflies pinned to felt in a jewel box.

Each time you toss out a 'singing' greeting card, you are disposing of more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1950.

People were touchingly naive at the dawn of the Internet revolution when they said the Internet will route around censorship the way it routes around damage. With any revolution, the establishment catches up and figures out how to screw it up. The answer is to keep technology advancing fast enough so that those who would try to control it can't. It's up to people to defend what they care about. We shouldn't be complacent that this stuff is going to be a force for good.

The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded.

I worry about a society that can remember everything.