The best investor is your customer.
The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.
No system in the world is so well-designed that it can’t grow stale, rigid, or corrupted by those who benefit most from it.
New landscape of personal media has given us a vaster wasteland of cyberspace. But, luckily for us, there’s some really wonderful stuff in it. And if history is any guide, as the media matures, the quality will continue to go up.
Since I became chairman, I’ve tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don’t expect the world that we’re familiar with to be perfect.
Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it’s the system – there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it’s a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.
If the past decade was the decade of searching and finding and looking for stuff, this coming decade is going to be the decade of filtering and going to your friends for recommendations.
In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don’t get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.
The definition of the problem, rather than its solution, will be the scarce resource in the future.
I believe in markets doing what they do well, which is to develop technology, and letting citizens do what they ideally do well, which is to set policy.
People still have a choice, but, if they find it all too confusing, or they just want someone else to make a choice for them, there’s a default that works pretty well. That’s this concept of libertarian paternalism. And it’s handy.
Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world.
There’s almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you’re at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.
People need to understand that the technology is for them. It’s not to them. It’s not over them. People still sometimes want to be led a little too much.
Don’t leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you’re doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don’t think about technology first.
The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
From the business point of view – not to overstate it – intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.
People have to understand that they can reject technology. They can turn off their cell phone. They can stop looking at their e-mail. It’s there if they want it. It’s not being forced on them.
And the Russians certainly don’t have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she’s a crook. And that’s me, the nice American. The assumption that you can’t make money honestly is a killer.