The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.
If you're old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends.
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.
If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.
I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.
A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
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.
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.
Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.
I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we've been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying.
After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. What they're doing is selling access.
People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.
The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.
Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven't been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.
Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.
Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.
I'm an advocate of human nature.
What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
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.
