"A Contrarian View of Open Source" (Jul 02)
"And then there's the Simputer. He speaks Telugu and Hindi and Urdu, and he costs only two hundred bucks! 'I love you Mom! I am the future, Mom! Demographics and birth rates are on my side, Mom! My new President is an atomic rocket scientist Mom! Someday you will die, Mom, and I take you to the Tower of Silence for a Parsi funeral where the vultures will eat your flesh, and then the future of computing will be mine as far as the human eye can see!'"

"911.net" (Jul 02)
"So, basically, with 911.net, we are describing a social re-definition of computer geeks as firemen. Native twenty-first century computer geeks as muscular, with-it, first-responder types. I think this would be pretty good for the computer industry. We all need to take the dysfunctional physical world far more seriously. This week, Italy's flooding, Texas is flooding, Colorado's on fire. This morning, the brand-new wilderness forests around the site of the former Chernobyl are on fire, spewing radioactive ash hither and yon. Chunks of Antarctica the size of Rhode Island have fallen into the sea. I could go on."

"Without Vision, The People Perish" (Jun 02)
"Let me put this to you straight: cyberspace has become a slum. It's a diseased slum, festering with Microsoft Outlook viruses. The viruses turn people into unwilling, unwitting agents of corruption and destruction. If you dare to use Microsoft's web products, which are so easily and cruelly sabotaged, then you run a gruesome, unconscionable risk of doing horrible virus damage to your best friends and your closest collaborators. You can give AIDs or herpes to the people who choose to have sex with you, but you can give Klez.E to people you don't even know. That is a pretty far cry from the antiseptic Euclidean vistas of virtual reality. Cyberspace in 2002 is a high-tech low-life slum straight out of William Gibson's NEUROMANCER. That's a great book, but the people who have to live in that book are pretty damn far from happy."

CFP 2002 Closing Speech (Apr 02)
"As a necessary consequence of globalization, Bollywood is finding a growing audience inside the USA. I'm one of them. Nothing odd about that -- it's like my wife's fondness for Hong Kong costume dramas, or my daughter's ferocious need for anime cartoons. The question is: as we globalize, is India Westernizing, or is America Indianizing? Just maybe, you live in a nation of arrogant maharajas, sinister influence peddlers, dubious elections and corrupt accountants. With big software industries, and alarming gaps between the privileged and the underclass. Where multi-generational political dynasties reign over Congress, in a center of government bedevilled by Moslem terrorists. Is that your country? Really, pick any two."

"Geeks and Spooks" (Nov 01)
"The future of cyber anarchy is cyberfeudalism. It's Politics 301. We had a lot of booming cyberanarchy in the USA for 20 years, and now we are looking at several years of stagnant feudal nothingness. I would guess about maybe one Presidential administration worth of nothing. About one Presidential Administration, and maybe a severe economic setback's worth of nothing. Then people are gonna start wondering why nothing important is happening any more in computer technology, and when they look at that technology, all they are going to see is Microsoft. Because that is all there is. If you want to guess what happens after that, you probably shouldn't even ask me. You should probably ask Lawrence Lessig."

Business UnUsual Keynote Address (May 01)
"If this were really about what I want as a consumer, the ultimate source of the revenue stream, the furniture industry would look entirely different--it would look something like this: first, all my furniture would be peripherals of a household system, it would surround me like a digital gesamtkunstwerk. Then when I wanted a chair, that chair would be manufactured for me, to my measurements, in a production run of one, which I get to watch. Kinda’ like a hungry guy watching a Bennihana chef. This would be transparent production--my chair as a kind of entertainment destination, a delightful novelty display in which I am absolutely assured that my chair does not harm my flesh or my environment in any way. On the contrary, every single aspect of the entire production stream has been designerized. I got designer lumberjacks, a designer fabric factory, a designer fabricator plant, designet shippers, designer trucks, and a designer highway system. I can point and click onto this whole shebang at any moment, and when I see something going on in the industrial system that I particularly like, I just click on it and buy stock in it."

Industrial Designers Society of America Speech (July 99)
"So I'm gonna explain to you how to recognize the Greenhouse Effect. When the weatherman comes on TV, and he has this stunned, sheeplike look on his face, and he says a new weather record has just been set, by a heatwave, or a flood, or a fantastically destructive hurricane, or an anomalous snowfall, or giant belts of rain forest on fire in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Mexico, and nothing like this has ever happened quite like this before, and it broke a record, and the previous record was also set in the 1990s, well, people, that is the Greenhouse Effect. Those are its big, greasy, smokey thumbprints. That's how you know it. That's the only way you will ever know it. It's not trying to hide from us. We're hiding from it. It's obvious. And if you're too dumb to catch on to this, I don't care all that much. I'm a futurist. The longer it takes you to catch on to this, the more farsighted I get."

Viridian Design Speech (Oct 98)
"Although it's a convulsively funny thing to do, I am totally in earnest about doing this. You see, the way I figure it, I might as well. I am going to throw away the scabbard of my sword, raise the black flag and burn my bridges. That year, 2000,will be the biggest hole in the status quo since 1977 and 1989. Furthermore, the year 2000 is going to be my personal last hurrah as a brain- burning futurist prophet. I'm in my forties now. The years after 2000 -- the decade of the zeros, whatever the hell we're going to call that -- will be the last time that I will to be able to say things, things that I know are true, and that are obvious to me, that sound weird and inexplicable to the general public."

CFP 1998 Closing Speech (Feb 98)
"The 'massive right-wing conspiracy' is what our friends at the infowar contingent at RAND corporation like to call a 'segmented, polycephalous influence network.' It's a loosely linked, leaderless enterprise which is constructed rather like an art movement, or a literary movement. It doesn't have elections, laws, bylaws, a code of ethics, a code of morals, or any kind of brakes. It can't be defeated militarily any more than Russians could defeat Afghan guerrillas or Americans defeat the Viet Cong. And this isn't merely a theoretical exercise. The thing is as real as dirt. It has real power."

"Unstable Networks" (Jun 96)
"The Information Society has basically forfeited any democratic control over its own destiny. No one's opinion is ever asked, nobody is ever polled. If we'd been asked to vote in a digital revolution, it almost certainly would never have happened. Weird homemade machinery that was full of bugs and never worked very well burst out of garages in California and destroyed the modern capitalist order. That's the story, basically. Like it or lump it."

High Technology Crime Investigation Association (Nov 94)
"Why aren't computer cops in much, much better rapport with the computer community through computer networks? You don't have to grant live interviews with every journalist in sight if you don't want to, I can understand that that can create a big mess sometimes. But just put some data up in public, for heaven's sake. Crime statistics. Wanted posters. Security advice. Antivirus programs, whatever."

"Science Or Fiction?" (Oct 94)
"I suspect the ultimate Internet link is going to look and act a lot like a make-up case. You won't see any command-line prompts when you use it. It will be a social device, a social-relations technology just like a make-up case is. When you pull it out of your purse and open it and talk face to face to your friends on the other side of the planet, you will feel just about the same kind of glamorous intimate pleasure you feel when you are pulling out and using your compact mirror. The engineers will no longer be in control."

"The Virtual City" (Mar 94)
"We then are faced with the spectacle of the true Virtual City: 10.6 billion people trading incredibly rich and detailed phantoms, as they eat their humble rice crackers and tofu on their cheap foam futons. Inside skyscrapers of a new kind: not a single rigid monolith, but something like a termite mound, a massive concretion that has built itself from the ground up pebble by pebble, and morsel by morsel, until it's a honeycomb of individual cells the size of a mountain."

CFP 1994 Remarks (Mar 94)
"Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire."

"We're All In This Together, Aren't We?" (Nov 93)
"So if that's not the way to do networks, what is the way to do them? Well, my suspicion, growing year by year kind of like the Internet has been growing, is to treat networks like language. Give everybody the power to speak and listen. Distributed nodes, like the Internet, like Fidonet. Networks that grow organically like language-use, not ruled top-down by an army of occupation."

National Academy of Sciences, with William Gibson (May 93)
"In the future, computers will mutate beyond recognition. Computers won't be intimidating, wire-festooned, high-rise bit-factories swallowing your entire desk. They will tuck under your arm, into your valise, into your kid's backpack. After that, they'll fit onto your face, plug into your ear. And after that -- they'll simply melt. They'll become fabric."

US House Subcommittee on Telecom and Finance (Apr 93)
"Since writing my nonfiction book Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier, I have returned to writing science fiction. And I've returned to that with some relief, frankly, since the world of science fiction is in most ways rather less strange and less bizarre than the contemporary world of telecommunications policy."

"Free As Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge" (Jun 92)
"Welcome to the Library of Congress. Jolt Cola is the official drink of the Library of Congress. You'll notice the banner of bright-red ads that runs by your eyeballs while you're trying to access the electronic full-text of William Wordsworth. Try to pay no attention to that. Incidentally there's a Hypertext link here where you can order our Wordsworth T-shirt and have it billed to your credit card. Did I mention that the Library of Congress is now also a bank?"

"The Wonderful Power of Storytelling" (Mar 91)
"We're not into science fiction because it's good literature, we're into it because it's weird. Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, 'woo the muse of the odd.'"