The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.
A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn’t correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.
You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.
Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?
enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.
It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.
that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.
about: Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique – shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.
We’re losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.
Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.
Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.
It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
I’ve always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.
I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it’s too expensive to change the interface.
Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.
What does it mean to not be alone? I’ve approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.