Charles Babbage (1791-1871, inventor)
"Long intervals frequently elapse between the discovery of new principles in science and their application... Those intellectual qualifications, which gave birth to new principles or to new methods are of quite a different order from those which are necessary for their practical application." (Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of its Causes, 1830)
Pete Cashmore (19850-now, entrepreneur)
"We're living at a time when attention is the new currency: with hundreds of TV channels, billions of websites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, out attention is more fragmented than ever before." (Privacy is dead and social media is holding the smoking gun, CNN, 2009)
Caterina Fake (1969-now, entrepreneur)
"I love participatory media, collective knowledge systems, user-generated content and the like, and spent much of my life and career participating in them and making them." (Brainyquote.com)
Jeff Jarvis (1954-now, journalist)
"I'd like to see every news organization large and small, newspaper and blog, sponsor FOIA clubs in their communities to get scores, hundreds, thousands of citizens helping to open up data." (Geeks Bearing Gifts, 2014)
Rebecca MacKinnon (1969-now, journalist)
"Human freedom increasingly depends on who controls what we know and, therefore, how we understand our world. It depends on what information we are able to create and disseminate: What we can share, how we can share it, and with whom we can share it." (Consent of the Networked, 2012)
Ben Silbermann (1982-now, entrepreneur)
"I was obsessed with this idea that these things that you collect, they just say so much about who you are." (AZQuotes.com)
Biz Stone (1974-now, entrepreneur)
"Even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things." (Things a Little Bird Told Me, 2014)
Eugene Thacker (professor)
"A new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance borne not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time." (Tentacle Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3, 2015)
Larry Wall (1954-now, computer programmer)
"Somebody out there is going to do something that's far more surprising than anything that I would do. I was surprised by the whole web thing in the first place." (Brainyquote.com)
Fred Wilson (1961-now, businessman)
"I'm really interested in the intersection between reputation, identity and knowledge." (AZQuotes.com)
