I'm kind of concerned the combined effect, not only Google, all these companies is kind of to make us more boring and that seems the opposite of what the Internet was supposed to be.

There's a problem which is when you're trapped in your own identity and everything is really you, then you feel less freedom to sort of explore who you want to be. So I think it's kind of something we're stuck with as long as humans are the way we are.

Wikipedia, a nonprofit, is an enormously popular website but has managed to operate without advertising. And, you know, maybe it's a little simpler than Google and YouTube, but it does show there's another way.

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

All business models have something challenging about them, but the problem with the attention merchant business model they have is they need to keep increasing the amount of ads they deliver to people and therefore make their product worse.

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?

Advertising just keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier. It doesn't have any natural limit, and we haven't found the place for the limit. And I think it's really important, therefore, that some of the revolts that are undergoing right now, you know, whether it's ad blockers or other things, are people trying to set some lines so that we say, you know, this far but no further. And this is where it ends.