Here is what I pulled out of the Castells interview. Needless to say, the list includes a lot more than I was able to cover in class, sz

On Social Science: If I had been in a normal country, law would have attracted me very much, and economics also; but I was driven to the necessity for social change, first in Spain and then later in France. Sociology was a discipline that was more intellectually open, less dominated by a narrow view of the world, that things are as they are and you cannot move them. So the notion of integrating my intellectual activity, my professional activity, and the possibility of contributing to some form of social change and betterment of society was appealing to me, as I would say, to most sociologists.

On 1968: First, it showed me, concretely, that things could change, that the institutions that seemed immobile could be shaken, not just by protest, but by protest articulated with the interests and values of society at large.

And second, it showed me that the old bureaucratic environment of the industrial society was already, to a large extent, undermined. That the issue was not, in fact, the division that at that point dominated the world, capitalism versus socialism, but something much more important. The issue was the expression of people's values and personal projects against the bureaucratic institutions, both socialist and capitalist. These institutions were trying to suppress cultural activity and the redefinition of life according to one's values.

On Freedom vs Technology: Societies, as usual, are not simply determined by one-dimensional development - let's say, techno-economic development - but by the interaction between techno-economic development and what people want to do with this techno-economic development, and in terms of who they are and what they believe and what they would like to happen in the world. This has been quite fundamentally built in terms of identity, of different kinds of identities, in the last ten years. Our world seems to be shaped by the interaction between these two trends. When the two trends get together, then you have an extraordinary socially rooted technological development expressing identity. When they split and are opposed to each other, like, for instance, in the case of exclusion of many people in the world from the networks of power and information and wealth, then it's identity versus the networks. And in that sense, we witness the potentiality of social crisis of a great dimension, because the way we work and the way we feel don't go together.

On California: When I started my work on the information technology revolution in 1983, 1984, at that time it became obvious to me two things: that something very important was going on, and that in Europe, from where I was coming, we didn't have a real feeling for it.

On Networks: My trilogy is on the interaction between the network society and the power of identity and social movements. It's that interaction which, I think, defines our world. So in that sense, my trilogy is one, two, three: The Network Society is the new techno-economic system; The Power of Identity is the key - the salient trend, in terms of social movements and politics, adapting, resisting, counteracting the network society; and then the result of these two elements expresses itself in the macro transformations of the world, which I described in the third volume, End of Millennium. The network society itself is, in fact, the social structure which is characteristic of what people had been calling for years the information society or post-industrial society. Both "post-industrial society" and "information society" are descriptive terms that do not provide the substance, that are not analytical enough. So it's not a matter of changing words; it's providing substance. And the definition, if you wish, in concrete terms of a network society is a society where the key social structures and activities are organized around electronically processed information networks. So it's not just about networks or social networks, because social networks have been very old forms of social organization. It's about social networks which process and manage information and are using micro-electronic based technologies.

On the Rise of the Network Society: These changes - economic policy, economic autonomy of governments, and, ultimately, the relationship between the governments and the economy - are only possible because of deregulation and liberalization that took place in the 1980s in most countries, and because of the existence of an infrastructure of telecommunications, information systems, and fast transportation systems that provide the technological capacity for the system to work as a unit on a global scale.

On the Network State: Europe is a complex system of institutional relations, which I call the network state, because, in fact, it's a network of interactions of shared sovereignty. Under different forms, you have a similar situation in most of the world. ... So the notion here is not the disappearance of the nation state; it's the transformation of a world based on sovereign nation states into a world of interdependence, of nation states sharing sovereignty.

On Network Warfare: Through technology, the rich countries are able to do instant wars, while the poor countries go through machete wars for years and years.

On the Rand Corporation: The development of what is called "swarming" as the key military tactic, ... which is based on the idea of splitting the traditional large units and creating a number of self-sufficient, highly powered autonomous units which form the networks that are assembled and disassembled according to specific needs and operations. These units can become networks only on the basis of strong communication technology capabilities and direct access to information sources, which are organized in a computer network and then accessed through computer networking.

On Hierarchy vs the Network Logic: This is simple to understand, but difficult to actually implement, because people who are currently in power in bureaucracies, in political organizations, in large corporations, in universities, are there because they have gone through the hierarchy, they have their clientele, they have their systems of support. All this has been pushed out by the out-competing logic of networks.

On Building Networks: The issue here is that first you start with a network which is equipped with information technology. That's the key. Then what the network does depends on the programming of the network, and this is of course a social and cultural process.

On Disconnetions: If we break the world, as we are doing, into instrumental networks with no meaning for most people, and pure meaning but no instrumentality - survival communes - it becomes a very dangerous world, a world of aliens, aliens to each other.

On the Global as Arena of Intervention: So it's not as activists used to say, "think globally, act locally." No, no: think locally - link to your interest environment - and act globally - because if you don't act globally in a system in which the powers are global, you make no difference in the power system. ... It's informational guerrilla tactics, if you wish, with different components being part or not part of the movement, and, of course, no possibility of control.

On Cultural Codes: The ability to influence, to change the categories through which we think our world (here, what I call the code of our culture) - this becomes the essential battle. (open source movement as attempt to challenge property-based cultural codes, sz)

On Corporate Power: Corporations run what they can run. ... There are a multiplicity of factors and influences. There's not an executive committee of the capitalist class planning and running the world. But on the other hand, companies and governments don't run the world because more and more there are alternative actors, social movements of all kinds, identity, communal movements, as well as proactive movements such as environmentalists, women, etc., that ultimately shape the agenda of both corporations and government institutions.

On Individualism and Communalism: If we would need one word to characterize, in social terms, in terms of values and organization, our world, it is the growing juxtaposition of individualism and communalism. (hyper-individuation – blogs – and new collectivities, sz)

On Education: But education is not simply the traditional form of education. It is to develop what I call "self-programming capabilities." That is, the ability to adapt. To learn to learn, and to learn how to use the knowledge in the implementation of their projects and tasks throughout their lives. So, building, on the one hand, the knowledge capability not to have lots of information, but to know how to find information and how to recombine this information, which would, ultimately, mean to be very good and very strong in a broad educational training.