Цитаты из книги Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

In the short term, we are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.

Meanwhile, kids in other countries -- from China to Iran -- aren't wasting their time learning how to use off-the-shelf commercial software packages. They are finding out how computers work.

For us, as the mystery of computers became the science of programming, many other mysteries seemed to vanish as well. For the person who understands code, the whole world reveals itself as a series of decisions made by planners and designers for how the rest of us should live. Not just computers, but everything from the…

Value is still being extracted from the work -- it's just being taken from a different place in the production cycle, and not passed down to the creators themselves. Those of us who do create for a livingare told the free labor will garner us exposure necessary to get paid for something else we do -- like talks or…

Such anecdotes are encouraging, for sure, but they may represent less a triumph over prejudice than a detour around it. We are treating the stranger as an equal because we have made the false assumption she is just like us. It's not that we see through our prejudices; we simply don't see the person.

What all this abstraction does accomplish here on earth, however, is make everyone and everything more dependent on highly centralized standards. Instead of granting power to small businesses on the periphery, the net ends up granting even more authority to the central authorities, indexers, aggregators, and currencies…

The existing bias of business toward abstraction combined with the net's new emphasis on success through scale yielded a digital economy with almost no basis in actual commerce, the laws of supply and demand, or the creation of value. It's not capitalism in the traditional sense, but an abstracted hyper-capitalism utterly…

In a digital culture that values data points over context, everyone comes to believe they have the real answer and that the other side is crazy or evil. Once they reach this point, it no longer matters that the opposing side's facts contradict one's own: True believers push through to a new level of cynicism where if the…