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.

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.

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.

You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences.

You know, the only reason net neutrality is controversial is because it's complicated.

We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.

Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically, it sometimes happens that the only way to preserve freedom is through judicious controls on the exercise of private power. If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.