"One of the most surprising things about the Internet is how people think there’s a single monolithic culture. There used to be, back when access was difficult and determined by circumstance. But it’s not like that now. The Internet is for everything and everyone, which means it’s like everything else, prone to mediocrity and abuses of power. But unlike the physical world there’s no scarcity of space or time. While we should be aware of the machinations of the evil machine we don’t have to be slaves to it. Let those who can’t be bothered have their Facebooks and the Google Plus. But for those for whom that isn’t enough, don’t complain or give up in the face of these mountains of shit. Turn away and keep searching, building, exploring and blogging. There’s plenty to do and plenty of room to do it in."

"I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill. Because it turns out that the most important things in this life — why the universe is here instead of not, what happens to us when we die, how the people we love really feel about us — are things we’re never going to know."

"Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago."

"(...) if you took an open poll of his friends, or any large enough group of people, “Satantango” would almost always lose out to something more mainstream, like “War Horse.” It might not be everyone’s top choice, but it won’t offend, either — that’s the tyranny of the social for you."

"It's this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. (...) Sadly, frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable."