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The internet is the most effective means of giving stuff away for free that humanity has ever devised. Actually making money from it is not just hard, it may be fundamentally opposed to the character and momentum of the net. And yet this is where the newspaper business now is.

— John Lanchester

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More quotes by John Lanchester

Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin. That’s technology, not science.

We are more connected in more ways to more people than we ever have been at any point in human history. This is changing everything, and it would be deeply strange if it didn’t change money too.

The brief history of the internet is dominated by wishful thinking about turning internet traffic into revenue; companies that have managed to do it are vastly outnumbered by those who have learned the cruel new information era twist on ‘if you build it, they will come.’ The modern form of that now runs: ‘if you build it, they may well come, but only as long as it’s free.’

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Lanchester (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.