Quotes

This is just a page for me to store quotations.

“One man’s transparency is another’s humiliation.” — Gerry Adams

“There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” — Madeleine Albright

“Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality. Buildings were judged more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.” — Christopher Alexander

“Master plans fail because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt.” — Christopher Alexander

“There are geologists who can pick up a rock and say, ‘Yes, there’s oil under there.’ A geologist who has been studying those kinds of rocks for 10 or 20 years is able to make that pronouncement.” — Christopher Alexander

“Dogmatism is by far the best fall-back defense, the most impregnable castle, that ignorance can find. It’s also a dead give-away that the person doesn’t know why he believes what he believes.” — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians

“Journalists are the canary in the coal mine. We are the first ones to seriously feel the impact of total surveillance.” — Julia Angwin

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” — Hannah Arendt

“The trick used by Himmler was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” — Hannah Arendt

“Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.” — Hannah Arendt

“The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.” — Hannah Arendt

“The greater the power, the more need there is for transparency, because if the power is abused, the result can be so enormous. On the other hand, those people who do not have power, we mustn’t reduce their power even more by making them yet more transparent.” — Julian Assange

“Censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think.” — Julian Assange

“The method is transparency, the goal is justice.” — Julian Assange

“Wikipedia flourished because it was a shrine to altruism – a place for shy, learned people to deposit their trawls.” — Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia,” March 2008, The New York Review of Books

“The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we’ve made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.” — Iain Banks

“Half the world’s work is done by hopeless neurotics.” — Pat Barker

“The old internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens.” — John Battelle (2012)

“A woman who is clear and precise is viewed as cold, or a bitch, or both.” — Gavin de Becker

“Money isn’t always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don’t increase the probability of being invited back.” — Yochai Benkler

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” — John Berger

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” — Jeff Bezos

“I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.” — Jeff Bezos

“I like to be counted on.” — Jeff Bezos

“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” — User blue_beetle, Metafilter, August 2010

“I’ve gotten pretty good at making myself feel ashamed. I can even use shame in a theoretical sense to make myself do the right thing BEFORE I do the wrong thing.” — Allie Brosh

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” — Warren Buffet

“There’s nothing about advertising that is inherently privacy-destroying. It used to be a fairly innocuous business model.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“If you talk to people in Silicon Valley they’re all libertarian free marketeers, but these companies are not competing in a free market. They’re not offering products and services and trying to best each other in the wider world. They’re competing for a resource that is venture capitalist attention and venture capitalist money.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“The mobile devices that are taking over the web fall into one of two camps. One of them pretends to be more open than the other, but it’s mostly a matter of marketing. In practice they both have complete control of their ecosystem.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“The problem with a centralized web is that the few points of control attract some unsavory characters.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“The relationship between the intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley has historically been very cozy. The former head of Facebook security now works at NSA. Dropbox just added Condoleeza Rice, an architect of the Iraq war, to its board of directors. Obama has private fundraisers with the same people who are supposed to champion our privacy. There is not a lot of daylight between the American political Establishment and the Internet establishment. Whatever their politics, these people are on the same team.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“The only way to keep user information safe is not to store it.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“Public and private surveillance are in a curious symbiosis with each other.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“These big collections of personal data are like radioactive waste. It’s easy to generate, easy to store in the short term, incredibly toxic, and almost impossible to dispose of. Just when you think you’ve buried it forever, it comes leaching out somewhere unexpected.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“It should be illegal to collect and permanently store most kinds of behavioral data.” — Maciej Cegłowski

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” — Winston Churchill

“When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years.” — Tim Cook

“The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.” — Tom DeMarco

“The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.” — Tom DeMarco

“If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.” — Tom DeMarco

“No conflict, no interest.” — John Doerr

“The ideal encyclopedia should be radical. It should stop being safe.” — Charles Van Doren, The Idea of an Encyclopedia, American Behavioral Scientist 1962

“No anger, no social change.” — Susan J. Douglas

“A device that automatically works for 90% of the market is more useful to most people than a device that can be made to work for 100% of the market but requires arcane tinkering.” — Jeff Eaton

“Open Source, in its majestic equality, guarantees both programmers and non-programmers alike the right to alter and recompile their software.” — Jeff Eaton

“Amy made it clear that she wasn’t there to be cute. She wasn’t there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys’ scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it.” — Tina Fey

“Truth never damages a cause that is just.” — Mahatma Gandhi

“To the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.” — Erving Goffman

“Science has authority not because of white coats or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.” — Ben Goldacre

“Leafing through Forbes is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship.” — Adam Gopnik

“What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.” — Adam Gopnik

“If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.” — David Graeber

“Remember Secretary of State John Kerry calling on Edward Snowden to “man up” and submit himself to a lifetime of sadistic bullying at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system? What is an innocent child supposed to make of this?” — David Graeber

“The promise of the Internet has always been that it was gonna be this unprecedentedly potent instrument of liberation and democratization. It would let you explore things and meet people who you wouldn’t otherwise get to know, in completely free and unconstrained ways.” — Glenn Greenwald in Esquire

“The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs.” — Glenn Greenwald

“Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else.” — Glenn Greenwald

“If you have high IQ, you’re really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.” — Jonathan Haidt

“While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.” — Jonathan Haidt

“The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation – a force for construction and destruction.” — Jonathan Haidt

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” — Jeff Hammerbacher, formerly of Facebook, in This Tech Bubble is Different, BusinessWeek magazine, 14 April 2011

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” — Robert J. Hanlon.

“Fanfiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations.” — Henry Jenkins

“Inside every working anarchy, there’s an old boys network.” — Mitch Kapor

“Rules are established to create order and maintain profits for incumbents. Examples of rules are: social mores, professional licenses, government regulation, locked-up distribution channels. Cheaper technology suddenly allows for the bypassing of the rules. Incuments are fat and dumb and happy with current monopolistic profits and their general situation, so they bad-mouth any new stuff which threatens their incumbency or profits or both. Fringe players emerge to use this ever-cheaper technology to simply ignore the rules. Fringe companies attract venture capital since there are great profits to be made in underselling the incumbents. Incumbents are in denial until their profits are really threatened and/or market share begins to erode meaningfully. Chaos ensuses; fringe players are threatened with lawsuits, government regulation, public shaming, etc. Growth at the fringe accelerates, as it is the right way to do business using new technology. Incumbents co-opt the fringem or fringe players become the new incumbents and seek to establish the rules. Go to 1.” — Andy Kessler

“I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and save the world. You sent money to the Red Cross, you registered people to vote, you marched in rallies, stood in vigils, picked up litter.” — Anne Lamott

“Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude, and try not to be such babies.” — Anne Lamott

“Never compare your insides to somebody else’s outsides.” — Anne Lamott

“When government disappears, it’s not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.” — Larry Lessig

“We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us.” — Larry Lessig

“You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.” — Doris Lessing

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” — C. S. Lewis

“The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency.” — Michael Lewis

“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.” — Michael Lewis

“It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.” — Michael Lewis

“The market has found a way not only to permit the people who are most threatening to it their rebellious notions, but to capitalize on them. The Internet –or, to be, for once, terminologically precise, the World Wide Web– was one example of an increasingly common phenomenon. It was dreamed up by an academic with an anticommercial streak named Tim Berners-Lee. It was commercialized by a couple of marginal players in Silicon Valley –Jim Clark and Marc Andreesen– at least one of whom was the sworn enemy of the big corporation. Five years later it was a mainstream commercial technology.” — Michael Lewis

“The incentive for the outsider is to attack the system right up to the moment he is co-opted by it. The incentive for the insider –and this took some getting used to– is to allow yourself to be attacked, and then co-opt your most ferocious attackers, and their best ideas. The effect on the system as a whole is to make it more stable, because everyone winds up working on its behalf.” — Michael Lewis

“We’d just given up our lives for six months. My wife was pissed at me. My daugher was crying because I never came home. We worked twenty-hour days. And then finally we deliver the product and it was like: What did we just do? We gave up so much.. for this? We were all pretty pissed.” — Stuart Liroff

“I’m the President, see. Everything’s my fault now.” — Julia Louis-Dreyfus as President Selina Meyer, on Veep

“I can’t identify myself as a woman. People can’t know that. Men hate that. And women who hate women hate that. Which I believe is most women.” — Julia Louis-Dreyfus as President Selina Meyer, on Veep

“One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.” — Michael Lopp

“I am a firm believer that you need a well-defined leadership role to deal with unexpected and non-linear side effects of people working together. You need someone to keep the threads untangled and forming a high-functioning web rather than a big snarl of a Gordian knot.” — Michael Lopp

“If you react to all Friction, that’s all you’re going to do all day because people bitch all the time. It’s one of the ways they process the world. However, Friction ignored and unmaintained escalates. It can eventually become Pain, and then consequences will become obvious.” — Michael Lopp

“I believe email-based status reports are the clearest and best signs of managerial incompetence and laziness.” — Michael Lopp

“I deeply believe in the power of the individual, but I also believe that in order to build epic shit at scale, a colorful tapestry of talent and degrees of experience is essential. And when I say colorful, I mean people who often don’t get along precisely because of this diversity.” — Michael Lopp

“If they don’t trust you, they aren’t going to say shit.” — Michael Lopp

“Pause. Like, shut up. There will be times when you’re listening and it’s clear they want to say something else. They’re dying to say it, but you cannot find the question, the segue, or the words to pull it out of them. In what is one of the more advanced listening moves, my advice is: shut up.” — Michael Lopp

“Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I’m wasting their time and when I find it, I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it.” — Michael Lopp

“If we’re 15 minutes into a lifeless, redundant, status-based 1:1 and I don’t have anything sitting in my back pocket, I’m going to turn [it] into a performance review.” — Michael Lopp

“When the Vent begins, you might confuse [it] for a conversation. It’s not. It’s a Vent. It’s a mental release valve and your job is to listen for as long as it takes. Don’t problem solve. Don’t redirect. Don’t comfort. Yet. Your employee is doing mental house cleaning and interrupting this cleaning is missing the point. They don’t want a solution, they want to be heard.” — Michael Lopp

“A toxic person kills, and by kills I mean totally destroys teamwork.” — Michael Lopp

“As a young designer explained to me bluntly: “Everyone upstairs is dumb,” referring to the floor above the engineering lair at the 156 University office where customer support, administrators and salespeople sat. My first impulse was to laugh at his ridiculous, blithe dismissiveness, until I realized that it wasn’t very funny.” — Kate Losse, The Boy Kings

“Despite all these attempts to remain small in feeling if not in reality, in meetings, almost daily, someone would say, “I am worried that we are losing our culture,” and everyone would look around helpless, as if they didn’t know what to do, or how to save the precious essence that they felt slipping from their grasp. Sitting on a meeting room couch, listening once again to this exchange, I recalled my Hopkins advisor saying, “You are what you do. If you don’t do it anymore, how can it be your culture?” I came to realize it was the identity of a nineteen-year-old boy, forever youthful and reckless, unmonitored and unstoppable, that the boys were so anxious about losing. They were worried, perhaps, about growing up.” — Kate Losse, The Boy Kings

“In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters.” — Kate Losse, The Boy Kings

“Skilled, dependable programmers, often Asian-American or foreign-born, were hired to code and keep the site running. Supervising them, the Harvard and Stanford boys, mostly white, who wrote code while they acted as the reassuringly familiar white faces of the company and ascended the ranks into leadership positions.” — Kate Losse, The Boy Kings

“The boys in the office preferred Daft Punk and the song “Robot Rock” as an anthem, speaking excitedly and without irony about wanting to become robots one day. That made me wonder: Why? What’s the pull of being a robot?” — Kate Losse, The Boy Kings

“The dissonance that I felt daily flew in the face of what Silicon Valley says about itself: that it is a meritocracy, that it values intelligence and creativity, that everyone has a fair shot if they just work hard enough. This was true only if you were technical, and even that may not always be enough: in the age of the social network, who you know and who your friends were was becoming increasingly important.” — Kate Losse, The Boy Kings

“White people [on Facebook], I discovered by reading people’s messages and walls, tended to lurk and judge.” — Kate Losse, The Boy Kings

“Design is people.” — Jane Jacobs

“The problem is that journalists don’t know shit about business. And culturally, they don’t want to.” — Jeff Jarvis, “Profitable News,” BuzzMachine, February 2012

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” — Janet Malcolm

“The problem of how to make the Internet advertising friendly bewildered and obsessed Madison Avenue for much of the 1990s. Advertising won.” — Robert McChesney

“The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the “private good” attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content –the values, the ideas– can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective.” — Robert McChesney

“If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation.” — Robert McChesney

“We have, in effect, permanent copyright on the installment plan, and nothing produced since the 1920s has been added to the public domain.” — Robert McChesney

“Copyright protects corporate monopoly rights over culture and provides much of the profits to media conglomeratesm encouraging the wholesale privatization of our common culture.” — Robert McChesney

“The early internet was not only noncommercial, it was anti-commercial. Computers were regarded by many of the 1960s and ’70s generation as hargingers of egalitarianism and cooperation, not competition and profits. — Robert McChesney

“The economic story says that the public sector is rife with problems: it’s inefficient and ineffective, wastes money by not controlling costs, has low standards of quality, lets its employees have too much influence through trade unions and professional associations, and so makes citizens unhappy. Given all these problems, the economic story says the solution is to run government like a business.” — F.S. Michaels

“Libraries embody intellectual freedom, the idea that you should be able to think and believe what you want. Becaus of that belief in intellectual freedom, diverse views –even those that are unorthodox, unpopular or considered dangerous by the majority– are deemed to be in the public interest. … The library created information resources that the market wouldn’t, because the private sector had no reason to invest in knowledge that didn’t make money, and knowledge that is unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous often isn’t profitable. — F.S. Michaels

“The contradiction between professionalism and the rule of the market is long-standing and unavoidable. Medicine and other professions have historically distinguished themselves from business and trade by claiming to be above the market and pure commercialism. In justifyng the public’s trust, professionals have set higher standards of conduct for themselves than the minimal rules governing the marketplace.” — F.S. Michaels

“The great moral question of the 21st century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?” — Eben Moglen

“You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to- face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory–both how it works and what it remembers… In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from.” — Eben Moglen

“This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.” — Evgeny Morozov

“I want my government to do something about my privacy – I don’t want to just do it on my own.” — Evgeny Morozov

“The bigger the network, the harder it is to leave. Many users find it too daunting to start afresh on a new site, so they quietly consent to Facebook’s privacy bullying.” — Evgeny Morozov

“I spent two years in Palo Alto – what an awful, suffocating place for those of us who don’t care about yoga, yogurts and start-ups – and now I have moved to Cambridge, MA – which, in many respects, is like Palo Alto but a bit snarkier.” — Evgeny Morozov

“We need to start seeing privacy as a commons – as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.” — Evgeny Morozov

“I’m rarely invited to start-up parties, but who cares about their trinkets and apps anyway?” — Evgeny Morozov

“In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.” — Evgeny Morozov

“Technological defeatism – a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there’s nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms – is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We’ll come to pay for it very dearly.” — Evgeny Morozov

“For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.” — Evgeny Morozov

“Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.” — Evgeny Morozov

“While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.” — Evgeny Morozov

“Once a term like “open source” entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about “innovation” and “progress,” not “accountability” or “security.”” — — Evgeny Morozov

“The message I’m trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology – they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.” — Evgeny Morozov

“Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.” — Evgeny Morozov

“I went to SXSW in 2011. God, that was awful. I mean, I only went because my publisher wanted me to promote the book and the organizers invited me and it seemed silly not to go, especially for a relatively unknown first-time author. This is just not my cup of tea; the fewer such events I do on an annual basis, the happier I feel.” — Evgeny Morozov

“When it is about technology, there is this tendency to just reject all criticism as being anti-technological and anti-modern. I think this is very unhealthy.” — Evgeny Morozov

“Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” — George Orwell

“We aren’t upset when Paramount makes a $200 million movie that flops, but if a charity experiments with a $5 million fundraising event that fails, we call in the attorneys. So charities are petrified of trying bold new revenue-generating endeavors and can’t develop the powerful learning curves the for-profit sector can.” — Dan Pallotta

“Delay is the deadliest form of denial.” — C. Northcote Parkinson

“Expenditures rise to meet income.” — C. Northcote Parkinson

“Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.” — C. Northcote Parkinson

“The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.” — C. Northcote Parkinson

“When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.” — C. Northcote Parkinson

“Wikipedia represents a belief in the supremacy of reason and goodness of others.” — Daniel Pink, “The Book Stops Here,” Wired magazine, March 2005

“We expect that advertising search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.” — Larry Page and Sergey Brin

“I’ve spent ten years detoxifying this party. It’s been a bit like renovating an old, old house, yeah? You can take out a sexist beam here, a callous window there, replace the odd homophobic roof tile. But after a while you realise that this renovation is doomed. Because the foundations are built on what I can only describe as a solid bed of cunts.” — Stewart Pearson

“Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.” — Venkatesh Rao

“California is full of people who are cheerfully bloody-minded about their engagement of technology.” — Venkatesh Rao

“The metaphors you use determine your money personality, and how much you will be able to do with it.” — Venkatesh Rao

“[As a leader] you need to keep your people connected enough to reality to be effective, but not so connected that they are demotivated and demoralized.” — Venkatesh Rao

“Your job is to survive a lack of incoming empathy and generate a positive atmosphere and empathy for others. You yourself become the reservoir of harsh reality information that is yours alone to handle. Reserves of empathy can get drained, resentment of the demanding children can turn into sadism and justification for abuse. In the worst cases, the stress of being alone with the filtered-out realities that you cannot share, can break you. You can regress into childlike behaviors because you decide to take your tun at being the “child.” You are tired of being the adult and you’re going to abdicate for a bit whether others like it or not. A great deal of executive coaching, such as the excellent advice from Marshall Goldsmith, is really about increasing your endurance at the “information parenthood” game.” — Venkatesh Rao

“Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances.” — Venkatesh Rao

“The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions.” — Venkatesh Rao

“Facebook is to marketers and politicians what Google Maps is to travelers.” — Venkatesh Rao

“Though the social space occupied by the subcultural web is vast, it is being domesticated so fast that we can expect complete colonization within a decade.” — Venkatesh Rao

“Petty bureaucrats are basically parasites, because they lack the creativity to go beyond roles and rules in productive ways.” — Venkatesh Rao

“The everyday social world is not a harsh and dangerous one built on widespread deceit. It is mostly a slightly timid, risk-averse and benign world.” — Venkatesh Rao

“You’re probably going to be disappointing people your whole life. Managing how you spread the disappointment around is managing your loyalty budget.” — Venkatesh Rao

“”No, no NO. That is not the way. Let’s start again. Hi! My name is ___, and you are?”” — Venkatesh Rao

“This is why I personally care about diversity: it’s the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy. When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process, that it’s not actually as meritocratic as it could be. And I believe that is exactly what is happening in Silicon Valley.” — Eric Ries

“The State now has greater capability to conduct invasive, targeted and broad-scale surveillance than ever before.” — Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression

“Be able to resign. It will improve your value to the President and do wonders for your performance.” — Donald Rumsfeld

“Don’t do or say things you would not like to see on the front page of The Washington Post.” — Donald Rumsfeld

“Don’t speak ill of your predecessors or successors. You didn’t walk in their shoes.” — Donald Rumsfeld

“If the staff lacks policy guidance against which to test decisions, their decisions will be random.” — Donald Rumsfeld

“Preserve the President’s options. He may need them.” — Donald Rumsfeld

“Work continuously to trim the White House staff from your first day to your last. All the pressures are to the contrary.” — Donald Rumsfeld

“To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one’s class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.” — Joanna Russ

“Not all bits have equal value.” — Carl Sagan

“Data becomes its own justification.” — Bruce Schneier

“Corporate and government surveillance aren’t separate; they’re an alliance of interests.” — Bruce Schneier

“Choosing providers is not a choice between surveillance/not; it’s just choosing which feudal lord gets to spy on you.” — Bruce Schneier

“We’re tenant farmers for these companies, working on their land producing data they sell for profit.” — Bruce Schneier

“We used to believe the internet would eliminate middlemen, but it has just created different ones.” — Bruce Schneier

“If the FBI parks a van bristling with cameras outside your house, you are justified in closing your blinds.” — Bruce Schneier

“Surveillance is the business model of the Internet. We build systems that spy on people in exchange for services.” — Bruce Schneier

“We are living in the golden age of surveillance.” — Bruce Schneier

“We’re now living in a world where both corporations and governments have us all under pretty much constant surveillance.” — Bruce Schneier

“The nimble and relatively powerless make use of new technology faster. They’re not hindered by bureaucracy or laws or ethics. There was an enormous change when they discovered the Net. Now a decade later when the government figures out how to use the Net, it had more raw power to magnify. That’s how you get weird situations where Syrian dissidents use Facebook to organize, and the government uses Facebook to arrest its citizens.” — Bruce Schneier

“The NSA woke up and said ‘corporations are spying on the Internet, let’s get ourselves a copy.” — Bruce Schneier

“The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly.” — James C. Scott

“I think the currency of leadership is transparency. You’ve got to be truthful. I don’t think you should be vulnerable every day, but there are moments where you’ve got to share your soul and conscience with people and show them who you are, and not be afraid of it.” — Howard Schultz

“The team leader of a project is supposed to work on the team, not the project.” — Sunir Shah

“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments. — Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” March 2009

“What you need for a participatory system to work: “a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain.” – Clay Shirky

“If what you’re doing is valuable for people, they will find a way to pay you to keep doing it.” — Clay Shirky

“Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” — Susan Sontag

“Courage is morally neutral.” — Susan Sontag

“To understand everything is to forgive everything.” — Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein

“Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy.” — Richard Stallman

“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.” — Gloria Steinem

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be –or to be indistinguishable from– self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.” — Neal Stephenson

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.” ― Neal Stephenson

“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.” — Neal Stephenson

“One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.” — Charles Stross

“Wikipedia works because those who know the truth are usually more numerous and committed than those who believe in a falsehood.” — Cass Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, Oxford University Press 2006

“Severe initiations increase a member’s liking for the group.” — Carol Tavris

“Doubt is not the enemy of justice; overconfidence is.” — Carol Tavris

“Everybody in this room has bent the rules to get in here. You don’t get in this room without bending the rules.” — Malcolm Tucker

“Let me tell you this. The whole planet’s leaking. Everybody’s leaking! You know, everyone spewing up their guts onto the internet, putting up their relationship status, putting up photos of their vajazzles. We’ve come to the point where there are people, millions of people, who are quite happy to trade a kidney in order to get on television! And to show people their knickers, to show people their skidmarks, and then complain to OK magazine about a breach of privacy! The exchange of private information – that is what drives our economy. But, you come after me because you can’t arrest a landmass, can you? You can’t cuff a country. You can’t lynch that guy there, can you? But you decide that you can sit there, that you can judge and can ogle me like a Page 3 girl. You don’t like it? Well, you don’t like yourself! You don’t like your species, and you know what? Neither do I, but how dare you come and lay this at my door?! How dare you blame me for this?! Which is the result of a political class, which has given up on morality and simply pursues popularity at all costs. I am you and you are me.” — Malcolm Tucker

“I take this job home, it fucking ties me to the bed, and it fucking fucks me from arsehole to breakfast! Then it wakes me up in the morning with a cup full of piss slung in my face, slaps me about the chops, to make sure I’m awake enough so it can kick me in the fucking bollocks! This job has taken me in every hole in my fucking body! Malcolm is gone! You can’t know Malcolm, because Malcolm is not here! Malcolm fucking left the building fucking years ago! This is a fucking husk, I am a fucking host for this fucking job. Do you want this job? Yes, you do fucking want this job. Then, you’re going to have to fucking swallow this whole fucking life and let it grow inside you like a parasite. Getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it fucking eats your insides alive and it stares out of your eyes and tells you what to do.” — Malcolm Tucker

“Political exit. What you’re going to see is a masterclass in fucking dignity, son. The audience will be on their feet. “There he goes,” they’ll say. “No friends, no real friends, no children, no glory no memoirs.” Well, fuck them.” — Malcolm Tucker

“For the protection of the community, of individual life and health, there are some necessities that should be provided for all at the expense of all, such as roads, pure water, and sanitary systems for concentrated population, and reasonably comprehensive mail service. The determination between services that should be operated by the government and those which should be left to private enterprise under proper control should be governed by the degree of necessity to the community as a whole.” — Theodore Vail

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” — David Foster Wallace

“It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.” — David Foster Wallace

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” — David Foster Wallace

“Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.” ― David Foster Wallace

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” — David Foster Wallace

“Personalization is the automatic tailoring of sites and messages to the individuals viewing them, so that we can feel that somewhere there’s a piece of software that loves us for who we are.” — David Weinberger

“Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.” — Jack Welch

“A company has only so much money and managerial time. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest. They cut their losses everywhere else.” — Jack Welch

“I don’t give a shit about blame, but I think we need to talk about responsibility.” — Jessamyn West

“If you are a woman in Open Source, you will eventually give a talk about being a woman in Open Source.” — Emma Jane Westby

“This particular strand of feminism is characterized by two tenets: 1. men are jerks, and 2. women should strive by all means to become like them.” — Douglas Wilson

“Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas? It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.” — Paul Woolley, London School of Economics and former investment banker

“At the heart of common carriage is the idea that certain businesses are either so intimately connected, even essential, to the public good, or so inherently powerful –imagine the water or electrical utilities– that they must be compelled to conduct their affairs in a nondiscriminatory way. As a simple example, if a man operates the only ferry over to town, that simple boatman is in a position of great power over other sectors of the economy, even the sovereign authorities. If, for example, he decided to charge one butcher more than another to carry his goods, this operator could bankrupt the one who didn’t enjoy his favor. The boatman is thus deemed to bear responsibilities beyond those of most ordinary businesses.

The big question –now often the multi-billion-dollar question– is how to decide, as a matter of policy, what businesses should be considered common carriers with special duties to the public (as Bell positioned itself), which companies should be run by the government (as the Post Office has been since Franklin founded it), and which should be ‘ordinary services’ left mostly to forces of the free market.” — Tim Wu

“The best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation.” — Tim Wu

“The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that buried the answering machine remained intact.” — Tim Wu

“The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson’s idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, “a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one.” — Tim Wu

“The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.” — Tim Wu

“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. — Tim Wu

“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.” — Tim Wu

“I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is to tell the truth.” — American historian Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho, 1999