It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

• 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.
• My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.
• 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.
• My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing.
• After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
• The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.
• The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.
• Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.