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The sudden jump in the price of gold after the demise of the Bretton Woods accords was a result of the significant prior debasement of the US dollar due to excessive inflation of the monetary supply via central bank (Federal Reserve) coordinated fractional reserve banking under the Bretton Woods partial gold standard.

in an underground network that will build its forces outside of mainstream politics, and attack in moments of crisis

The problem is not inherent in the Internet or the Web.  Deterioration only began around the turn of the century with the rise of so-called “Web 2.0” designs.  These designs valued the information content of the web over individuals.  It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data.  There are so many things wrong with this that it takes a whole book to summarize them.  Here’s just one problem:  It screws the middle class.  Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor.  This is why newspapers are dying.  It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone.  When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians?  Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.

"You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning.

sterile style of wiki writing is undesirable because: it removes the touch with the real author of original information, it filters the subtlety of his opinions, essential information (eg. incl. graphical context of original sources) is lost, it creates the false sense of authority behind the information,

Lanier's position is that humans may not be considered as the biological computers

The uprising was universal: it was immediately possible for all of us around the world to identify with it, to recognise what it was about, without any need for cultural analysis of the features of Egyptian society. In contrast to Iran's Khomeini revolution (where leftists had to smuggle their message into the predominantly Islamist frame), here the frame is clearly that of a universal secular call for freedom and justice, so that the Muslim Brotherhood had to adopt the language of secular demands.

From the start, the violence of the protesters has been purely symbolic, an act of radical and collective civil disobedience.