Seibel: You said earlier that you got into computers because you thought they would make the world a better place.
Crockford: That's my intention.

Seibel: How's that working out?

Crockford: For the most part, we've done pretty good. I think the world is a better place, although it's not always moving forward. Looking at, say, international politics over the last ten years, the consolidation of big media and the corrupting effects of that have not been compensated for by the open network. That's a big disappointment.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died as a direct consequence of that. That's really sad. I would like for the network to be doing a better job so that kind of stuff doesn't happen again. It's not clear yet what transformations to the network have to occur in order to accomplish that. And maybe it'll be fine on its own, but I'm more pessimistic. I think we need to figure out the next leap in order to overcome whatever is not working now.