I live on a canyon at the edge of San Mateo. We are fortunate to have lots of suburban wildlife as our neighbors, though I kind of wish the rattlesnakes would stop curling up by our back door.

As a global society we are performing a great experiment on ourselves. Half of the world population wants to race faster into the future. Go visit China and India. They're ready to go. And half of the world wants to drag us into the past. The problem is both sides have guns. I think there really is a reaction. A lot of people are saying enough is enough.

More information and more communications foster world peace and understanding. But connecting extremist nut cases together on the Web - whatever flavor extremism they are - is a really bad thing. More information may not be a good thing, either.

We do need to rethink privacy. I think we need to fall back on (former Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter's definition of privacy which is, "Privacy is the right to be left alone."

Using technology merely to lower operational costs amounts to standing on a whale fishing for minnows. It just allows you to do the old thing more efficiently, where in this moment of deep transformation, it is much more likely that you should be doing something entirely new in an entirely different way.

We invent our technologies and then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves as individuals, communities and cultures.

I worry about a society that can remember everything.