#maciejsays

We haven't seen yet what a truly bad government is capable of doing with modern information technology. What the good ones get up to is terrifying enough.

I’ve thought about Pinboard as trying to create a habitat for different kinds of users and make it useful, and then letting things happen on their own.

Google in particular has come close to realizing our nightmare scenario from 1998, a vertically integrated Internet controlled by a single monopoly player. Google runs its own physical network, builds phone handsets, develops a laptop and phone operating system, makes the world’s most widely-used browser, runs a private DNS system, PKI certificate authority, has photographed nearly all the public spaces in the world, and stores much of the world’s email. But because it is run by more sympathetic founders than Bill Gates, because it builds better software than early Microsoft did, and because it built up a lot of social capital during its early “don't be evil" period, we’ve given it a pass.

Institutions can be destroyed quickly; they take a long time to build. A lot of what we call ‘disruption’ in the tech industry has just been killing flawed but established institutions, and mining them for parts. When we do this, we make a dangerous assumption about our ability to undo our own bad decisions, or the time span required to build institutions that match the needs of new realities.

It’s not enough to have benevolent Stanford grads deciding how to reinvent society; there has to be accountability and oversight over those decisions.

I don't care about bloat because it's inefficient. I care about it because it makes the web inaccessible. Keeping the Web simple keeps it awesome.