William Gibson on the web

recently I read William Gibsons "Neuromancer" and I thoroughly enjoyed his hyper connected dystopian universe that was startling prescient of today's technology. I found this interview on him on his thoughts on the internet to be an interesting insight into his ideas of the web way back in 1996. here are some quotes I liked.
Gibson on the nature of HTML coding

he's got to spend however many hours in the HTML sweatshop to produce this stuff...and it turns out to be like knitting -- it's a bunch of guys manipulating little bits.

his analogy of HTML coding reminds me of my experience of learning HTML, tedious, slow, and time consuming. Oh how the web has changed these days with blogs and facebook, now anybody can become a part of this shared experience.

You can just sit there forever. Looking. Looking. And maybe not finding anything. Seeing a lot of goofy stuff.

funny how the web has changed so much since 1996 yet still remains an infinite time-suck.
Gibson noting the democratic nature of the web

this accidental global post-national post-geographical thing that we've created -- which is growing constantly and exponentially in an unplanned way -- is very scary for nation-states in the traditional sense. Because where's the border? It's a violation of what they do.
I'm also inclined to think, in the very long view, that a lot of what nation-states do, and have done traditionally, is responsible for a lot of the problems in the world. So if we're going to get to something a little better, this is maybe the only thing in the world that's pointing in that direction. This is taking us somewhere.

this quote really speaks to me the power that the web holds to democratize information and knowledge. And this democratization has not only impacted the individual with powerful technologies such as email, social networking, wikipedia, youtube, and blogging, but also as Gibson notes nations  themselves which can be most recently seen in the meteoric rise of wikileaks in national issues. Further more Gibson notes that this powerful democratization of the web has the ability (if we choose to use it) to direct us to become better, more informed citizens.