Clive Thompson
Clive Thompson
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There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.
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Truly huge artistic collaboration on the Internet seems to work only if the gang has a well-defined objective.
people
The amount of writing that people do online is astonishing, and historically unprecedented.
improves
No consumer product improves more drastically, year after year, than the computer.
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Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public. But any serious industrialist who's facing 'climate exposure' - as it's now called by money managers - cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion.
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The genius idea of industrialism was the concept of the Model T: In exchange for something cheap and well-made, we'd forgo unique, lovely design.
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If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.
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The computer industry began with home-brew boxes that everyone had to program for themselves, but that was a huge hassle. The computer revolution didn't explode until the first Macintosh arrived, with its point-and-click simplicity.
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A textbook requires a consistent sense of style and a linear structure, hallmarks of a single authorial presence. An encyclopedia doesn't.
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Transactive memory works best when you have a sense of how your partners' minds work - where they're strong, where they're weak, where their biases lie. I can judge that for people close to me. But it's harder with digital tools, particularly search engines.
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I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for the people who flock there - because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social.
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The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.
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Plays are frequently infected with ideas that came from actors or even sound engineers. Some Shakespeare scholars wonder whether some of the Bard's lines came from onstage improvisations by actors.
america
America has always had tinkerers, including just about any teenager who ever hot-rodded a Camaro.