All Quotes

"When you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres housed in business parks and city outskirts – consume massive amounts of energy. Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually. This is a hugely environmentally destructive side to the tech industry. While it has played a big role in reaching net zero, giving us smart meters and efficient solar, it’s critical that we turn the spotlight on its environmental footprint. Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. It is hardly news that the tech bubble’s self-glorification has obscured the uglier sides of this industry, from its proclivity for tax avoidance to its invasion of privacy and exploitation of our attention span. The industry’s environmental impact is a key issue, yet the companies that produce such models have stayed remarkably quiet about the amount of energy they consume – probably because they don’t want to spark our concern."

"The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not."

"A year ago I was the original Internet Dummy. [...] Then while I was on vacation, a colleague ran some telephone wire into the back of my computer, loaded a communications package, and left me a note about how to launch the operation. Readers, that note is now framed in my office. Eventually that telephone wire led to the Internet and the single most amazing, entertaining and educational experience of my career. Quite simply, the Internet has revolutionized the way I interact with the outside world, altered my work habits, and burst the bubble around my PC. It has also challenged my thinking about the future of personal communications technology. And I believe that sooner — rather than later — these changes will be mapped onto society as a whole."

"This is a little known fact technological about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made of words and enthusiasm."

"It's strange — you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth."

"It's very sad how in the information age you cannot get information into people's heads — as long as you write something on the internet and do not add LOL — it is true : "I'm not sure he's a Christian." — I'm not sure he's a mammal, Jay. He could be a werewolf."

"I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider — and also FOX News makes people stupider. You know the Pew group did a study recently and they found out that 10 years ago, Democrats, Republicans and independents basically got their news from the same sources, probably more from CNN, for example. Then we had this polarity. ... We do have two Americas. We have the America that's living in reality. The people who understand that Obama is a centrist liberal from Hawaii who is trying to dig us out of the hole we're in. And then we have this other FOX/Matt Drudge/Rush Limbaugh reality where he is a Muslim sleeper cell, Manchurian candidate who was sent over by his Kenyan father..."

"Surrogates and also a pretty fascinating aspect the internet. Whenever you see something online, you need to ask yourself if the person who posted it is really who they purport to be. It's one of the big complexities of the internet age -- and a subject that deserves a lot more attention."

"I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do."

"When you go to the remote areas, that's where you have issues - network operators don't reach most of the communities."

"Even if you do go into a coma, you can still keep posting to Usenet — everyone else does."

"For the record if someone did that to me I'd hitch a ride to the International Space Station straight away; of course who am I kidding, they would never let me in, I've got spiders for hands! Internet is mean!"

"All the free stuff that you take for granted online is only free because you are the product."

"The Internet has come to resemble an enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor, and a continuous stream of new books being added helter-skelter to the piles."

"There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world."

"I’m an open and vocal feminist on the internet, so I’m no stranger to some level of sexist backlash."

"I was attacked via nearly every facet of my online life by a loosely coordinated cyber mob. All of my social networks were flooded with a torrent of misogynist and racist slurs as well as threats of rape, violence and death. The wikipedia article about me was vandalized with similar sentiments. When I publicly shared what was happening to me, the perpetrators responded by escalating their harassment campaign and attempting to DDoS my website and hack into my online accounts. They also tried to collect and distribute my personal info including my home address and phone number. They made pornographic images in my likeness being raped by video games characters which they distributed and sent to me over and over again. Attempts were made to discredit me and my project by creating and posting false quotes or fake tweets attributed to me. There was also a flash game developed where players were invited to “beat the bitch up”. Unfortunately I still receive threats and explicit images on a semi-regular basis. In December 2012, I gave a TEDxWomen talk where I discuss in more detail what happened, and how these large scale loosely organized Cyber Mob attacks operate."

"There's a boys'-locker-room feel to the internet, where men feel they can show off for one another. A lot of the harassment is tied to this toxic masculine culture of ‘Look how cool I can be.’"

"We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet."

"They can't ignore us, and they can't put us down. Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn't know anything, and we would already be a fascist state."

"I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet."

"The net has provided a level playing field for criticism and comment – anyone and everyone is entitled to their opinion – and that is one of its greatest strengths."

"The members of the did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of 'comes from everyone' and 'goes everywhere.') We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won't matter much, but the norms we set will. Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change."

"(The Springfield Police Department web page is shown.)"

"Comic Book Guy: Ack. There is no "emoticon" to express what I am feeling right now."

"Some complain that e-mail is impersonal — that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. Some would say that's not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior? I think not; at least then you are conscious of the distortions. Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately."

"The Internet is a hole you pour your friends into for a never-ending stream of kitten photos and porn. Of course, that's quite a bargain, for some of us."

"And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a ."

"On the Internet, nobody can hear you fart."

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."

"Disregard the physical distance and cherish those online relationships. Tell your friends you love them every day. Behind each of these screens is a real heart that just wants as much love as the person sitting next to you in the real world. Love your neighbor, even if you're in Louisiana and he's in New Jersey."

"The report would be "routine retirement of a Replicant", which didn't make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back. There it was again... feeling in myself... for her... for Rachael."

"Not very sporting to fire on an unarmed opponent. I thought you were supposed to be good. Aren't you the... "good" man?"

"You gotta shoot straight! Straight doesn't seem good enough!"

"Today, you wander off the safe paths of the internet and it's like a trap. You know, you click on the wrong thing, suddenly fifty pop-ups come up, something says, hey, you've been infected with a virus, click here to fix it, which of course, if you do click on it, it does infect you with a virus, it's teeming with weird listicles and crazy things like, reason number four and how you can increase your sperm count or something, and you have to kind of constantly control yourself. You have to be on guard, it's worse than, it's a mixture of being in a bad neighborhood and a used car sales place and a casino and a infectious disease ward, all combined into one, and that is not relaxing."

"The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny."

"I stand with Survivors Empowered and other organizations fighting for gun reform. And I've been a strong supporter of controversial activist strategies over the past 50 years. But we need to be effective so that we change the country for the better without curtailing the legitimate rights of others. As I have learned the hard way, social change is exceedingly slow and cautious, and moves at all only because we continually prod it to do so. We all seek peace, but as W.B. Yeats wrote, "Peace comes dropping slow.""

"The buffalo hunters and range men have protested against the iron rule of Dodge's peace officers, and nearly every protest has cost human life. ... Most cowboys think it's an infringement on their rights to give up shooting in town, and if it is, it stands, for your six-shooters are no match for Winchesters and buckshot; and Dodge's officers are as game a set of men as ever faced danger."

"If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."

"Лучше старенький ТТ, чем дзюдо и каратэ."

"To suppose arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion, except in private self-defense, or by partial orders of towns, countries or districts of a state, is to demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man; it is a dissolution of the government. The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws."

"When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion."

"It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me."

"“We all make mistakes,” the cab said piously. “But some of us,” Barney said, “make fatal ones.” First about our loved ones, our wife and children, and then about our employer, he said to himself. The cab hummed on. And then, he said to himself, we make one last one. About our whole life, summing it all up. Whether to take a job with Eldritch or go into the service. And whichever we choose we can know this: It was the wrong alternative."

"It’s not religious fervor; it’s just a mean, very cruel streak."

"Isn’t a miserable reality better than the most interesting illusion? Or is it illusion, Barney? I don’t know anything about philosophy; you explain it to me because all I know is religious faith and that doesn’t equip me to understand this."

"The time, then, had come for him to poison himself so that an economic monopoly could be kept alive, a sprawling, interplan empire from which he now derived nothing."

"But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That’s closer to it. The artistic life without the talent."

"“Isn’t there any way—” He broke off. Can’t the past be altered? he asked himself. Evidently not. Cause and effect work in only one direction, and change is real. So what’s gone is gone, and I might as well get out of here."

"He glared at her. Women can get a man to do anything, he realized. Mother, wife, even employee; they twist us like hot little bits of thermoplastic."