Ai Weiwei Quotes
Technology is a liberation. I think the information age probably is the best thing to happen to the human race in human evolution. Now you have the equal opportunity to equip yourself through information and knowledge and express yourself as an independent mind.
Ai, Weiwei. Weiwei-isms. Edited by Larry Warsh, Princeton University Press, 2012.
While Wikipedia has not yet reached every person in the world, it has already distributed more human knowledge than any other vehicle in human history. And all at no cost to the user. It is certainly the greatest volunteer intellectual effort in history.
The Senator was referring to the difficulty that governments have in censoring and controlling information on the Internet.
An economic bubble occurs when the investing public with little logic and facts to support it actions exhibits great enthusiasm and overvalues some kind of asset with the logic that the price is going up and someone later will pay more than I just did—sometimes called the “greater fool theory”. Historically Fama claims that there were no bubbles until there were media to whip up the irrational enthusiasm necessary for a bubble to take place. Capitalist history is full of bubbles ranging from real estate, to tulips; from silver to dot com shares. The damage is always great to the people at the end who are stuck with the object of the bubble which few people want any more. In the period before the bubble, lots of people make money contributing to the demand for the object of the bubble.
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist and activist. Ai grew up in the far north-west of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights. He investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of "tofu-dreg schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing Capital International Airport on 3 April, for "economic crimes". He was detained for 81 days without charge. Ai Weiwei emerged as a vital instigator in Chinese cultural development, an architect of Chinese modernism, and one of the nation's most vocal political commentators.
