This is not my home.

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.

The "naked transparency movement" is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information.

More than half of respondents said government should be "wholly" or "very" responsible for protecting an individual's online privacy.

We have to look at today's economy and say, "What is it that's really scarce in the Internet economy?" And the answer is attention.

Authenticity is a snark -- although someone will always go hunting for it.

The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press is over.

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

If America is now circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rearview mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Free is just another price.

Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past.

I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media -- and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can't think of a single thing I lack.

We often say we are listening, but actually we are rehearsing in our head what we are going to say when our partner is finished.

Remember kids! In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant.

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

I am not screened because I look like a terrorist. I am routinely screened because I look like someone who will readily comply.

We are a cyber nation.

Deliberate practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something.

Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real.

Not many people know eggs freeze.

There's nothing crueler the gods can do to an artist than misalign his talents and passion.

We should probably tell you that the full title of this game is Zombies! Apocalypse - Massive Multiplayer Online Zombies Massacre, even though that's basically given away the point of it all.

If you are not found, the rest cannot follow.

Are we near the bottom? No.

It is very comforting in times of stress to go back to the fairy tales we heard as children, but it doesn't make them less false.

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

It's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive.

Who's going to say that word, forgiveness? It's outside of nature. Essentially, we just have to suck it all up.

If you have a choice never have a job.

Let us look for the positive deviants.

It's about effectiveness -- not effort.

Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

It's hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

It's possible to get accustomed to anything. Make bloody sure you are aware of what you've become accustomed to.

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online -- but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.

It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it.

If we don't get rid of the incentive to loot, the only question is what form the next round of looting will take. The human mind has a tremendous ability to rationalize, and the possibility of making millions of dollars invites some hard-core rationalization.

One person called me "Jesus of YouTube." I don't think that's right but it's a good feeling.

Success is a corollary of obscenity: you know it when you see it.

More and more of us are not interested in substance.

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

The archetype of the dead city is a distillation of the agonies of hundreds of real cities that have been destroyed since cities and marauding armies were invented. Our only way of escape from the insanity of the collective unconscious is a collective consciousness of sanity, based upon hope and reason. The great task that faces our contemporary civilization is to create such a collective consciousness.

Everybody should, at this point, try to understand ... that we are in a D-process. The D-process is a disease of sorts that is going to run its course. If you think that restructuring the banks is going to get lending going again and you don't have to restructure the other pieces -- the mortgage piece, the corporate piece, the real-estate piece -- you are wrong.

Let's pull out the bazooka and be done with it.

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present.

The short-term needs are the opposite of what is needed in the long term.

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

One of the big take-aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. We were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.

Let's not kid ourselves. We're not going to find some wonderful thing that's going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It's not going to happen.

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish or pathological or wrong.

First world shanty towns.

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

"Maybe we could" is ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it.

It's going to be a long, difficult struggle.

Tolerance is critical to a successful long term relationship.

Without music, time has a very different quality.

You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

Some of your greatest successes are going to be the children of failure.

Poor folk love their cellphones!

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys? To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming? Is there an app for that?

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Happiness exists just around the corner, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

Is there a formula -- some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation -- for a good life?

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

In prison, nothing is more depressing than an empty mailbox.

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.

I guess the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who understand quiet time and those who don't.

It is difficult to safely reveal limited information about a social network.

The great contemporary terror is anonymity. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone.

Superficial is the new intimate.