Archive

His Master’s Voice

What we’ll be cov­er­ing is just the gen­er­al issue of polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion on the net. And actu­al­ly I think prob­a­bly all three of us are in some­what agree­ment that the gov­ern­ment on the net is maybe the least best-poised to make use of this, or the most chal­lenged by polit­i­cal speech on the net, the pol­i­tics of the infor­ma­tion flow­ing around the net.

Virtual Futures Salon: Dawn of the New Everything, with Jaron Lanier

So here’s what hap­pened. If you tell peo­ple you’re going to have this super-open, absolute­ly non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to sur­vive in this envi­ron­ment that’s based on mon­ey, where it has to make mon­ey, how does any­body square that cir­cle? How does any­body do any­thing? And so com­pa­nies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a cor­ner. There was exact­ly one busi­ness plan avail­able to them, which was advertising.