Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.

I think, by this point, almost everything on YouTube has some ad or another.

There's always going to be a tradeoff between trolling and anonymity, and I guess that's the way life will be. And you can manage it, but you can't cure it.

When you think about normal advertising, it's just like, hey, here's a car and, you know, we don't know if you're looking for a car or not. So Google promised that mental state, and then were able to prove that delivering the message at the exact right moment would make someone click on something. So they pioneered the idea that advertising could be profitable on the internet, that a specific, very micromental state could be targeted. And they established the primacy of the click, which has haunted us ever since.

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

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

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.