Once I found out that people were really making careers for themselves off the Internet, independently, I was really inspired.
I'm nervous about our civic culture. I'm not sure the Internet is largely the cause of it. It's certainly the cause of careless writing. People who get used to blurbing things on the Internet are never going to be good writers.
Even the most brilliant accomplishments on the Internet are essentially cold. Google has changed the world, but you don't snuggle up to it. YouTube is a giant carnival, filled with freaks and mountebanks, a place to gawk and laugh and get bored. Certainly not a place to feel anything.
The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.
On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not.
I always liked to draw, and when I was a kid, the Internet wasn't big at all, so I would go to Internet cafes and search Google images for cartoon characters and save it to my USB drive.
I've said this before, but I think one of the reason so many of the cartoonists I know have become friends is because the Internet is a much more cooperative space.
Back then, before the Internet, you had these paper catalogs that you ordered all the food from. So, we flipped through the catalogs, looked up the food we wanted, called them up, and they would show up in trucks.
I would never shop from the Internet or a catalogue; otherwise, how am I going to educate my eye? I just love going out and searching for new things.
I went to Catholic schools my entire life and never had anything close to a cis heterosexual sexual education let alone a queer one. Everything I learned was trial and error or the Internet or 'Talk Sex with Sue Johanson.'
Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the 'adjacent possible.' We didn't stay in the caves. We didn't stay on the planet, and soon we won't stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet.
The threat is real, and it comes from the Internet. This is a new generation of terrorist. This is not Bin Laden in caves with couriers anymore. This is what the new threat of terrorism looks like.
The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz.
I think about the Internet and cell phones and jets and spaceships, and I wonder, 'What's going to make that look ancient?'
Obama won the presidency by running the first integrated three-screen campaign - reaching people directly via Internet, cell phones, and TV - with an authentic, complex style that resonated for voters sick of dark, deceitful, and divisive politics.
Both the American people and nations that censor the internet should understand that our government is committed to helping promote internet freedom.
I was forced to say, 'I will not censor the Internet.' But I was never convinced.
I don't care how sacred is freedom, but I think the time has come for governments, at least the Malaysian government, to censor the Internet.
Anyone anywhere - as long as you live in a country that does not censor the Internet - can now read this newspaper. But like diners passing up a healthy salad for an artery-clogging cheeseburger, many information consumers are instead digesting junk news.
The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.
