I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

All of us are citizens in a republic much larger than the Republic of America. It is the Republic of Letters, a realm of the mind that extends everywhere, without police, national boundaries, or disciplinary frontiers.

My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.

Social media is really not for conversations. There are people that you can meet and talk to on it, but it was not created for that. People wanted things that were soap boxes, where they could say what they wanted, and they don't have to respond to anyone else.

Because of social media, a lot of people think they can be, like, a rapper or a singer or a musician because they can put something on YouTube and it might become a thing because there's - like - YouTube phenomenons and whatnot, you know? It's not like they dedicated years to it or anything. It's annoying.

I think the Internet was the saving grace for Public Enemy. Before that, travelling the world saved Public Enemy.

The thing I think is often misunderstood about Ripple is people say, 'Oh, Ripple is a centralized platform.' To me, this is a legacy perspective. Ripple's technology, IRP, is open source; XRP Ledger is open source.