Pascal Bruckner:

A revolution comes when what was taboo becomes mainstream.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

danah boyd:

Never forget that Big Data is soylent green. Big Data is made of people.

Roger Highfield:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

Phil Agre:

Data is made of bits. But data isn't just numbers -- it's also a way of thinking about the relationship between the abstract territory inside computers and the concrete territory outside them. Data has meaning -- it represents the world.

boyd:

Privacy is completely intermingled with Big Data. But in our obsession with Big Data, we've forgotten to ask some of the hard critical questions about what all this data means and how we should be engaging with it.

Cordelia Dean:

This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. There are those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

boyd:

The Uncertainty Principle doesn't just apply to physics. The more you try to formalize and model social interactions, the more you disturb the balance of them.

Felix Salmon:

His method ... became so deeply entrenched -- and was making people so much money -- that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart.

boyd:

Just because technology can record things doesn't mean that it brings attention to them. So people rely on being obscure, even when technology makes that really uncertain. You may think that they shouldn't rely on being obscure, but asking everyone to be paranoid about everyone else in the world is a very very very unhealthy thing.

Rattle:

Paranoia about the conspiracy is always justified. It's just usually misplaced.

Marc Lacey:

In other words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.