After Peter Thiel's blood thing, and quotes like this, I think the French were a little too hard on Marie Antoinette.
If you're referring to the "why can't they eat cake?" thing, she didn't actually say that.
I believe there was a completely unrelated girl around the same time who said something more like "why can't they eat brioche?", but that alluded to a custom of baking brioche loaves with a knobbly bit on top which people would tear off and give away, so the question had the meaning of "why can't the poor rely on private charity rather than state support?"
Still not the most endearing line imaginable, but nowhere near as dumb as is usually supposed.
"The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."
He talks about it because he feels guilt but knows he won't be punished.
He understood it was immoral. He still did it, because morality doesn't have the power to stop actions. Now he feels guilt for doing evil. But at least now he's ultra-rich and powerful. He understood what he was trying to achieve.
(talking about sociopaths, not Sean Parker)
I disagree that he's a sociopath (sociopath wouldn't disclose this information). I think he's a geek who got so caught up with what he was working on that he lost sight that it was very immoral until much later (and perhaps too late).
An important lesson for us all.
He sees what he and his friends are doing as potentially immoral and, by telling us, his conscience is asking us to stop him and his friends. At the same time, he's gloating about getting away with it and profiting handsomely. He believes he can't be stopped -- even if he tells us all about what they will do.
He won't stop by himself. It's in his self-interest. He enjoys the power and the technological challenge.
Not holding my breath though. Years from now, he and Thiel will probably be chilling in their dr. evil compounds in new zealand while the rest of us are fighting it out over scraps in apocalypto-shanty-town USA.
The only thing that seems to make people angrier than politispeak, is honesty!
Parker is a smart guy. If he were even half-way serious about what he was saying, he would be doing something a hell of a lot more effective than tweeting "conscientiously" and donating 10% to medical research.