I'm Not In Any Sense Anti-facebook.

A Fashionable Idea In Technical Circles Is That Quantity Not Only Turns Into Quality At Some Extreme Of Scale, But Also Does So According To Principles We Already Understand. Some Of My Colleagues Think A Million, Or Perhaps A Billion, Fragmentary Insults Will Eventually Yield Wisdom That Surpasses That Of Any Well-thought-out Essay, So Long As Sophisticated Secret Statistical Algorithms Recombine The Fragments. I Disagree. A Trope From The Early Days Of Computer Science Comes To Mind: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

The Most Important Thing About A Technology Is How It Changes People.

If War Stems From Unmet Needs Related To Male Adolescent Ritual, That's Something That We Need To Examine. I'm Interested In The Possibility Of Simply Getting Rid Of War. I'd Be No More Willing To Let Go Of That Than To Let Go Of The Possibility Of Eradicating Cancer. That's Not To Say I'm Certain We Can, But I Am Willing To Use Any Energy At All In The Quest.

Back In The 1980s, When The Internet Was Only Available To A Small Number Of Pioneers, I Was Often Confronted By People Who Feared That The Strange Technologies I Was Working On, Like Virtual Reality, Might Unleash The Demons Of Human Nature. For Instance, Would People Become Addicted To Virtual Reality As If It Were A Drug? Would They Become Trapped In It, Unable To Escape Back To The Physical World Where The Rest Of Us Live? Some Of The Questions Were Silly, And Others Were Prescient.

Why Do People Deserve A Penny When They Update Their Facebook Status? Because They'll Spend Some Of It On You.