When I came here [to Silicon Valley] I encountered tremendous arrogance. A kind of “resistance is futile” mentality that of course our apps will take over the world, and when they do, when everybody is connected, that’ll be awesome! There will be one global community and everything will be great. And my response to that was: That’s insane. That’s historically completely implausible. We’ve run experiments with really large-scale social networks before. We didn’t have the Internet, but that didn’t matter. You could do it with a printing press. You could even do it just with the written word. And the result is never to produce a single homogenous cluster of happy-clappy individuals in a global community. That never happens.
Niall Ferguson, quoted by @bigthinkagain, 2018-02-17.
