A privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.

Robert Browning
Paracelsus, Part V, 1835

Modern man's feeling of isolation and powerlessness is increased still further by the character which all his human relationships have assumed. The concrete relationship of one individual to another has lost its direct and human character and has assumed a spirit of manipulation and instrumentality.

Erich Fromm
Escape from Freedom, 1941

Nature is never modular.

I believe most people would embrace a social contract in which bits have value instead of being free. Everyone would have easy access to everyone else's creative bits at reasonable prices – and everyone would get paid for their bits. This arrangement would celebrate personhood in full, because personal expression would be valued.

Making money in the cloud doesn't necessarily bring rain to the ground.

If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.

What computerized analysis of all the country's school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.

Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals.

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for some magical formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.

Enlightened designers leave open the possibility of either metaphysical specialness in humans or in the potential for unforeseen creative processes that aren't explained by ideas like evolution that we already believe we can capture in software systems. That kind of modesty is the signature quality of being human-centered.

The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.

I worry that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.

The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

Information is alienated experience.

We have to think about the digital layers we are laying down now in order to benefit future generations. We should be optimistic that civilization will survive the challenging century, and put some effort into creating the best possible world for those who will inherit our efforts.

The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits.

The new designs on the verge of being locked in, the web 2.0 designs, actively demand that people define themselves downward. It's one thing to launch a limited conception of music or time into the contest for what philosophical idea will be locked in. It is another to do that with the very idea of what it is to be a person.

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.

The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.