Ezra Klein Quotes

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

So we should preserve it. I don't think that digital storage is necessarily a good thing, but I definitely think that digital manipulation is interesting.

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.

Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.

At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.

The idea that you can somehow erase the Internet is silly.

One of the things that is counterintuitive about BuzzFeed is that there's not a natural corollary to what we're doing because it isn't possible to distribute content through word-of-mouth in print.

Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it's the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it's only a year, but not like a tweet, where it's only relevant for a day or a week.

With the Internet, if you erase something it just means you have to spend another half-minute to find it.

Now, not every blog post or 'Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet' piece deserves to live forever. But there's gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes.

Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.

But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.

Print is definitely more nutritious. When I leave a website, I'm hungry again an hour later - especially the Chinese websites.

As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.

For me personally, I get to be a cartoonist, because my comic would never survive in print. Maybe one in 100 people would like it, but online, I can gather that one percent all in one place.

When you close a tab or when you finish an article on the web, it's gone unless you go back into your history or search for it or explicitly try to find it. Apps on your phone have this special property: they hang around. In some ways, they're more like a book on a bookshelf than they are like web pages.

I'm not mad at digital media at all; I just see the importance and beauty of physical media.

I love documenting. Having these videos forever is priceless to me, so I think I will be doing it forever, but who knows if YouTube is gonna be around forever.

Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.

The Internet will make every enterprise a publisher.

In digital, you can maintain the quality.

I can get a script and go, "Well, I'd rather do stand-up." I don't hold movies in higher regard. I love making videos and posting. I love TV.

The book is here to stay. What we're doing is symbolic of the peaceful coexistence of the book and the computer.

Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

Amazon has included me in an opportunity to provide top-shelf television-style programming live on the world's computer screens. To hold forth with the industry's very best actors, directors, musicians, authors - I'm thrilled to be on the cutting edge of this.