I used to have dreams in which I was overhearing conversations I had to program. Once, I had to program two people making love. In my dream they swea… - Ellen Ullman

I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.

Somehow, even if it means laws and rules and governments, we must find our way back to the technologists’ dream of the internet, the free exchanges among millions of equals; the following of links to links, unobserved, as we desire; the personal web pages we created, of our own designs, defeating the domination of Microsoft’s and Apple’s standard human interfaces. We must go back to that internet, even if it existed for only a flickering moment, or never existed except in idylls and nostalgia. We must route around the new bad corporate net; or create a superset of it; or an alternative. Or something.

There is a purpose of life in the nerd world, which is treating reality as code, and optimizing it. Life becomes a problem-solving activity, and the problem is some sort of lack of optimization.