At its best, writing (and reading) can reveal the ugly, uncomfortable, or unrealistic parts of your ideas. It can pluck out parasitic ideas burrowed so deeply that they imperceptibly steer your feelings and beliefs. Sometimes this uprooting will reveal that the lustrous potential of a new idea is a mirage, or that your understanding of someone’s motives was incomplete, maybe projected.

As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside the rule of law. The public and many corporations will be reluctant to embrace a technology fraught with such problems. The Internet economy will continue to grow, but it will do so at a much slower pace than forecast by industry analysts.

I've come to view today's Internet as much like the bad neighborhood I used to inhabit. It wasn't always that way—in fact, as recently as a few years ago, the Internet seemed like a frontier town—a little rough on the edges, with its share of black hats, but also with the sense of open-ended possibility that attracted pioneers of all sorts, exploring and expanding the cutting edge in all directions: technological, economic, social, political, and artistic. But today's Internet isn't a frontier any more—it's a slum.

It will cause me an immediate head-to-desk motion.

The goal of modern large tech organizations is to buy knowledge and then delete it so nobody can ever learn it.