Keep in mind that when Alan Kay says "object" he means something different from programmers-at-large. To the general population of programmers, an object is just a data structure that's been bundled with some behavior. To Kay, an object is a computational entity that can only send/receive messages (what Carl Hewitt called an actor even before Smalltalk was on the scene). In Kay's mind, objects do not expose state the way they commonly do in the mainstream.

That's a much better way of putting it than the original quote.