Jerry Brown Quotes

We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places. [The Web] has ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.

Five or ten years ago, when it was clear the Internet was becoming a mainstream phenomenon, it was equally clear that a lot of people were being left out and could be left behind.

We're building what I call 'software apartheid.' We're in the process of creating a divided society: those who can use technology on one side, and those who can't on the other. And it happens to divide neatly along economic lines.

I'm not against the virtual world; it's fascinating, but I don't like the way they try to impose it on us. It's a thing imposed by rich countries.

As we now know, cyberspace did not liberate human society from pre-existing socioeconomic hierarchies and power structures.

In many ways, the Internet is about diversification, and yet, in the wrong hands, the digital world can use those very examples to reinforce the narrowest of perspectives.

The Internet was supposed to bring people together, but it's created big divisions.

The Internet has not become the great leveller that it was once thought it could be.

The smug complacency of technology adverts disguises a pretty mixed picture, with too many people not connected, too many passive users of technologies designed for interactive, and far too much talk about empowerment but far too little action to make it happen.

The internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. Instead what it's allowed is silos of interest.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate.

I don't even have my own computer.

The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to admit its downside.

We're seeing an enormous amount of global upward mobility that's quite rapid and quite sudden, and undiscovered individuals have a chance - using the Internet, using computers - to prove themselves very quickly. So I think the mobility story will be a quite complicated one.

It used to be that the only ones with access to cutting-edge technology were top government labs, big companies and the ultra-rich. It was simply too expensive for the rest of us to afford.

No matter how much it's growing, the Internet still is a pretty specific demographic. It doesn't necessarily represent the general populace.

As we develop and get quicker with technology in America, it's like we're downgrading if you look at the investment in education... that's the thing that worries me.

Technology produces a new division of haves and have nots.

The existing system of Internet governance is a form of neocolonialism.

We must close the digital divide.

We tend to look at computers and the Internet as items of nicety. In the 21st century, they will be items of necessity.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet's corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer.

One tech-related concern with religion is that it appears to be a positive feedback loop to the accelerating rich-poor gap, as the disenfranchised opt out of modernity.