Spider Robinson : Stop Listening to the Future People
"The technoweenies honestly believe what you want, and will pay a fortune to acquire, is a home in which every single thing you own behaves as reliably as your Web browser does."
Patricia Leigh Brown on truck stops :
"In a design trend as yet unheralded by Architectural Digest, a new building type has been born, one that seeks to revive "the wow factor," as Westlake calls it, that dazzled motorists of the '50s before television advertising and computer reservations took over."
Eli M. Noam : Will the Internet Be Bad For Democracy
"My skepticism about the Internet as a pro-democracy force is not based on
its uneven distribution. ... The problem is that most analysts commit a so-called
error of composition. That is, they confuse micro behavior with macro
results. They think that if something is helpful to an individual, it is
also helpful to society at large, when everybody uses it."