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.

Google's AdWords, they allow you to bid on words that people will type into the search engine, and they cost more or less. For example, I think mortgage refinancing can cost - now, it's probably hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars. So, in other words, they are allowing you to bid on what people are going to type, and that is the AdWords program. So you own certain terms, and then your ads show up as opposed to someone else's.

Every time you click on a like button on another site, you've told Facebook that you're doing that. And so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is.

There's always people - it doesn't take many - who have a different psychological makeup than most of us who really get joy out of provoking. They don't always believe the things they say, they just like to watch people go crazy. You know, I knew people like that in elementary school - bullies of one kind or another.

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.

Starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads.

I'm afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring because you're afraid to express yourself.