Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Orville Schell:

In short, what used to be referred to as "the West" now finds itself confronted by an increasingly intractable situation in which the power balance is changing, a fact that few have yet quite cared to acknowledge, much less to factor into new formulations for approaching China. We remain nostalgic for those quaint days when Chinese leaders still followed Deng's admonition to his people to "hide our capacities and bide our time" (taoguang yanghui). What he meant in using this "idiom" (chengyu) was not that China should be eternally restrained but that the time to manifest its global ambition had not yet come. Now that it is stronger, however, its leaders appear to believe that their time has at last come ... What the Chinese seem to be saying without being too explicit (they have always been masters at indirection) is that they will now be reckoned with on their own terms, not ours. Like it or not, this is the world's new reality.

Peter Thiel:

There is an enormous difference between perfect competition and monopoly, and most businesses are much closer to one extreme than we commonly realize.

Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group:

Facebook has deep, deep data on its users. [The new Atlas platform] can track people across devices, weave together online and offline.

Steve Cheney:

It's clear the mobile era is now spawning new platforms, which deeply impact how Google and Apple are evolving. The Apple Watch is a fine tuned system, deeply tied to everything else Apple, accelerated by innovation straight from embedded mobile IP. And just like the iPhone, Apple profits when you buy it. Meanwhile, When you use Google powered devices, Google parses through troves of data about you and ultimately profits off usage. Google is ambitious to a level we have never seen, building drones, cars and robots, all of which will be controlled through permutations of Android. And this 'platformification' of mobile operating systems and frameworks is about to accelerate by what's known as 'system wide network effects'.

Dan Kaminsky:

We've migrated so much of our economy to computer networks because they are faster and more efficient, but there are side effects.

Alexis Madrigal:

If the big tech players building the wearable future, the Internet of things, self-driving cars, and anything else that links physical stuff to the network get their way, our relationship to ownership is about to undergo a wild transformation.

Peter Kafka:

What's that? You're worried about people using your Facebook data to serve you ads? Facebook says you shouldn't worry, because your identity will remain anonymous to advertisers and publishers -- they'll just know some basic facts about you. But really, if you're worried about this kind of thing you shouldn't be on Facebook. Actually, the whole Web is probably a no-go zone for you. Sorry.

Frank Chimero:

Boring Future #4: Congress hatches six new political parties in 2024. Nothing happens, because political parties are seen as branding exercises for corporations, not political agents for change. America makes history by electing our first legume: Mr. Peanut takes the oath of office in front of the Pepsi Chill Zone.

David Runciman:

Fukuyama points out the irony that the US institutions that currently poll best with the American people – the armed forces, NASA -- are the ones that experience the least democratic oversight. The institutions Americans really hate -- such as Congress -- are the ones they control themselves.

Lawrence Lessig, on Hong Kong democracy advocates:

Their ideals are ours too, as is the flaw in the system they attack. We should be demanding the reform for which they are now fighting: an unbiased election, at every important stage.

Dan Davies:

In many ways the way that people look on the "revolving door" in regulation is wrong -- the problem is every bit as much to do with the "lifers" who would never consider an outside offer as it is to do with the staff who have one eye on a job at the place they're supervising.