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I am the most concerned that we end up in a situation where your - everything is known about you and so therefore, not only Google, but Google, Facebook, Twitter - the whole set of companies - essentially knows all your weaknesses and therefore how to manipulate you in subtle ways in order to have you do things you might not otherwise do.

Tim Wu

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Tim Wu
Age: 54
Academic
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Timothy Wu
Timothy Shiou-Ming Wu
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More quotes by Tim Wu

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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.
Tim Wu
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There's a problem which is when you're trapped in your own identity and everything is really you, then you feel less freedom to sort of explore who you want to be. So I think it's kind of something we're stuck with as long as humans are the way we are.
Tim Wu
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One thing I'll say about Hitler that many people don't realize - and I don't mean to besmirch the industry - but he did get his start, not only as an artist, but as an advertising man writing art for advertisements.
Tim Wu
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If you really care about content, you should pay for it.
Tim Wu
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Wikipedia, a nonprofit, is an enormously popular website but has managed to operate without advertising. And, you know, maybe it's a little simpler than Google and YouTube, but it does show there's another way.
Tim Wu
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I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.
Tim Wu
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In fact, the big steps forward for advertising, especially after World War I were when government just began employing the tools of advertising for its own purposes to get people to join the army and other things.
Tim Wu
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You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems.
Tim Wu
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The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson's idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, “a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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Hitler understood the demagogues' essential principle to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.
Tim Wu
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The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.
Tim Wu
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When you decide to like something, I mean, you may feel you're sort of innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you're delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that, you know, you'd essentially like to be advertised to by this company.
Tim Wu
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In the media, traditional media like print, we had boundaries. You know, we had spaces that ads didn't leave. They stayed where they were on the page. They didn't float around over the text. And we're kind of lost on the internet. We don't have any barriers. We have a demand for growth that is insistent.
Tim Wu