It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
Esther DysonRead
Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
Interpretation
Encryption serves as a crucial safeguard for personal privacy and freedom, especially in the context of government oversight.
This quote emphasizes the importance of encryption as a means of protecting individual privacy and liberty in the modern age. Esther Dyson highlights encryption as not only a defensive tool against potential governmental overreach but also as a fundamentally empowering technology that guarantees the security of personal information, thereby enabling individuals to maintain their autonomy in an increasingly surveilled world.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of cybersecurity in the digital age.
It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.
I'm an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.
Quite a lot has been written, including by me, about the effect of social media on politics, and in particular the way in which the algorithms built into Facebook and YouTube are more likely to spread angry, extremist and deliberately provocative political language.
The internet, Facebook and Twitter have created mass communications and social spaces that regimes cannot control.
A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
China may censor YouTube. China may censor Twitter. They won't be able to censor Bitcoin. There's no central authority. There's no one you can go to and say, 'We're going to turn Bitcoin off.'
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