Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.
The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.
Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.
Most of us still haven’t grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space – not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.
People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we’ve learned about them.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the ‘neuroplasticity’ allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
Not only have computers changed the way we think, they’ve also discovered what makes humans think – or think we’re thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.
When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.
The industrial age was not about craftspeople trading peer to peer. It was about stopping that. You weren’t supposed to be a craftsperson, you were supposed to be an employee.
Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
The new Zune may not be an iPod killer, but it does offer a clean interface, great industrial design, HD radio, and a subscription model for music, making it significantly less expensive for big users.
Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don’t look at the users on the other side as people. They aren’t – they’re just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.
I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.