There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.
Virginia PostrelRead
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There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.
I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.
The Internet amplifies power in all respects. It can grossly exaggerate the power of the individual.
I think that in an Internet age, content is content. As long as you can stand up on the merits of what you're doing right at that moment and aren't just relying on your success in doing something else, it's all good; people will respect you.
Facebook succeeded because it was about real people having a presence on the Internet. There were all these other social networking sites people had, but they were all about fictional people.
Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries - indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.
Technology and the Internet are not just changing politics here in the U.S. It's also happening abroad. In the Philippines, where I grew up, grassroots organizers used text messaging to help overthrow a president.
t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.
I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We're inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' you will always be in short supply.
The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights.
Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas.
I think about my own career, and when I graduated from college, the Internet didn't really exist yet. And so not having a specific plan, being able to be opportunistic at the end, is what enabled me to make some of my best decisions, which is to go to places that were growing but that I didn't plan to have happen.
I don't look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I've achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I take a shower and work on my next sentence until 1 P.M. After I've done emails and so on, I write again from 3 P.M. until 8 P.M.; then I socialise.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
Just having the internet is a weird and dangerous thing because people become accustomed to knowing things when they want to know them and not having to work for it. I definitely see the value in not knowing everything and having mystery in life and mystery in people.
Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.
Netscape brought the Internet alive with the browser. They made the Internet so that Grandma could use it, and her grandchildren could use it. The second thing that Netscape did was commercialize a set of open transmission protocols so that no company could own the Net.
Once you understand that everybody's going to get connected, a lot of things follow from that. If everybody gets the Internet, they end up with a browser, so they look at web pages - but they can also leave comments, create web pages. They can even host their own server! So not only is everybody consuming, they can also produce.
The books that I'm writing, you can write them only when you're amongst your people. You're not going to find it on the Internet. You're not going to hear it there.
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
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