BE THE MEDIA is uplifting and empowering.

If you really care about content, you should pay for it.

We're going to put Hulu ahead of you, unless you pay up.

When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.

The most interesting thing about Google is its founders hated advertising.

The best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation.

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

I think, by this point, almost everything on YouTube has some ad or another.

I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems.

Take back the web because it is a situation that really isn't working for anyone.

Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.

You know, the only reason net neutrality is controversial is because it's complicated.

One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.

Socialization would be the most successful thing to bring mainstream audiences to online computers.

There's always going to be merchants who need to get their message out, but things have gone way too far.

The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.

Hitler understood the demagogues' essential principle to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.

Starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads.

We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.

Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.

What's so interesting about the internet - I keep saying this - is the web has gotten worse over the last five years as opposed to better.

I'm afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring because you're afraid to express yourself.

There's always going to be a tradeoff between trolling and anonymity, and I guess that's the way life will be. And you can manage it, but you can't cure it.

Every time you click on a like button on another site, you've told Facebook that you're doing that. And so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is.

Advertising always corrupts the goal of the search engine, which is to try to give you the most important stuff, not the stuff someone paid there to be there.

More than anyone else, Adolf Hitler completely understood the union between government propaganda and between - and advertising, that they were in some ways the same thing.

I don't think anyone at Google feels happy about it, but they've been in some sense, you know, enslaved to their business model, and so they have to satisfy their advertisers.

There is this inherent human instinct that the usual way you control trolling is you force people to use their real identities. So there's less trolling on Facebook, for example.

I'm kind of concerned the combined effect, not only Google, all these companies is kind of to make us more boring and that seems the opposite of what the Internet was supposed to be.

Now, he doesn't control the media, but Donald Trump has been incredibly successful in having his face appear everywhere. You cannot go a day without seeing that face somewhere maybe 10 times.

We already have our phones, but other wearables, and those technologies are going to want to know when you're deciding things and then offer some kind of input subtle or less so on that moment.

Wikipedia, a nonprofit, is an enormously popular website but has managed to operate without advertising. And, you know, maybe it's a little simpler than Google and YouTube, but it does show there's another way.

I think that's been really the key, the idea of trying to harness social capital for selling purposes. That we've let this happen so easily without clearly getting something in exchange is kind of amazing to me.

I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.

In fact, the big steps forward for advertising, especially after World War I were when government just began employing the tools of advertising for its own purposes to get people to join the army and other things.

One thing I'll say about Hitler that many people don't realize - and I don't mean to besmirch the industry - but he did get his start, not only as an artist, but as an advertising man writing art for advertisements.

I'm concerned with our autonomy. I don't like the idea of people collecting information on me in general, but I particularly don't like it when it's used to sort of exploit your weaknesses or make you lose control in some ways.

The Holy Grail of advertising has always been advertisement that people want to watch, which occasionally happens. You know, the Super Bowl, people sit there and watch the advertisements. Some print advertising is very beautiful.

You have to think back to the '90s. The computer was this terrible-looking thing that was trying to compete with the television. And it was this idea of email and chat rooms and this kind of stuff that first people - got people there.

All business models have something challenging about them, but the problem with the attention merchant business model they have is they need to keep increasing the amount of ads they deliver to people and therefore make their product worse.

If you have a disease and suddenly start getting ads for cures for that disease and it's an embarrassing disease - all that kind of stuff it just gets into that zone of autonomy or privacy where you feel a sense of freedom to be who you want to be.

There's a problem which is when you're trapped in your own identity and everything is really you, then you feel less freedom to sort of explore who you want to be. So I think it's kind of something we're stuck with as long as humans are the way we are.

I'm kind of calling for a - I'm not the only one - you know, a revolution of some kind where we try to take back the web or start something new because, you know, the dominant medium of our time is in a desperate state and it doesn't have to be like that.

When you decide to like something, I mean, you may feel you're sort of innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you're delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that, you know, you'd essentially like to be advertised to by this company.

You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences.

The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson's idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, “a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one.

I think Google is the most successful attention merchant - profitable attention merchant in the history of the world, most successful advertising-only based company - most profitable. They started a very idealistic, beautiful company in many ways, but they didn't have a business model.

History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel-from open to closed system.

Movies you pay for - well, sometimes they throw some ads at the beginning now - but generally you pay for ads. And that business model - actually, much more ancient, paying for stuff - is much more straightforward in terms of the incentives of the people who are then giving you the stuff.

In the media, traditional media like print, we had boundaries. You know, we had spaces that ads didn't leave. They stayed where they were on the page. They didn't float around over the text. And we're kind of lost on the internet. We don't have any barriers. We have a demand for growth that is insistent.

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