If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable.

Facebook, when it began, like Google, was very resistant to advertising. They knew, like all - Mark Zuckerberg, like all good engineers, knew that advertising makes the product worse. But, you know, over time, they've been forced to increase the advertising load more and more and more. And the way they advertise is they - it's subtle but they know everything, you know, about everybody on the site.

Right now it is illegal for a service provider to censor or block a site because they don't like it or to privilege someone who pays them extra money. So it's basically a level playing field. I think it was a great victory. It doesn't solve all the problems of our time, but I think we've gotten a much better place.

When you decide to like something, I mean, you may feel you're sort of innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you're delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that, you know, you'd essentially like to be advertised to by this company.

The Internet, you know, 10 or 15 years ago sort of felt like the wild West. You could go out there and do anything and search for things, and, you know, find out about stuff. Now always in the back of my mind, you know, whether it's email or whatever else, it's like, well, is this going to show up somewhere? Is someone going to keep track of this and, you know, know I was searching for - maybe it's an embarrassing disease, maybe it's a weird hobby?

The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.

The Holy Grail of advertising has always been advertisement that people want to watch, which occasionally happens. You know, the Super Bowl, people sit there and watch the advertisements. Some print advertising is very beautiful.