I don't think you can ever be ahead of your time with cynicism about that subject. No, I don't think it was ahead of its time. I think it was very much a product of its time.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.
Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?
My whole life has been about confronting cynicism.
Obviously I wouldn't have said that three or four years ago in the midst of it. But I really believe that. It's been a marvelous and important experience.
You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.
That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.
I don't worry whether the period is contemporary or three hundred years ago. Human beings are all alike.
I'd say there was a fair amount of skepticism at the time about whether the Internet held any promise. And of course I felt that it did.
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
I believe I was ahead of my time.