Tim Wu Quotes

Socialization would be the most successful thing to bring mainstream audiences to online computers.

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.

Take back the web because it is a situation that really isn't working for anyone.

There's always going to be merchants who need to get their message out, but things have gone way too far.

We already have our phones, but other wearables, and those technologies are going to want to know when you're deciding things and then offer some kind of input subtle or less so on that moment.

I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems.

Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.

I don't think anyone at Google feels happy about it, but they've been in some sense, you know, enslaved to their business model, and so they have to satisfy their advertisers.

There is this inherent human instinct that the usual way you control trolling is you force people to use their real identities. So there's less trolling on Facebook, for example.

You know, the only reason net neutrality is controversial is because it's complicated.

More than anyone else, Adolf Hitler completely understood the union between government propaganda and between - and advertising, that they were in some ways the same thing.

What's so interesting about the internet - I keep saying this - is the web has gotten worse over the last five years as opposed to better.

I'm kind of concerned the combined effect, not only Google, all these companies is kind of to make us more boring and that seems the opposite of what the Internet was supposed to be.

Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.

Now, he doesn't control the media, but Donald Trump has been incredibly successful in having his face appear everywhere. You cannot go a day without seeing that face somewhere maybe 10 times.

Hitler understood the demagogues' essential principle to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.

I think, by this point, almost everything on YouTube has some ad or another.

Every time you click on a like button on another site, you've told Facebook that you're doing that. And so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is.

One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.

BE THE MEDIA is uplifting and empowering.

We're going to put Hulu ahead of you, unless you pay up.

If you really care about content, you should pay for it.

I'm afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring because you're afraid to express yourself.

There's always going to be a tradeoff between trolling and anonymity, and I guess that's the way life will be. And you can manage it, but you can't cure it.

Starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads.

When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.

The best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation.

Advertising always corrupts the goal of the search engine, which is to try to give you the most important stuff, not the stuff someone paid there to be there.

The most interesting thing about Google is its founders hated advertising.

We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.

It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life's immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels.

Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.