Technology isn't simply addictive - it's addictive because it's a servant to business incentives. There are huge departments in these companies that are devoted to this and staffed by incredibly talented people who have skills that could be put to socially beneficial projects but who are now trying to find out how to make you click and how to maximize your time on a certain site, or encourage teenagers to "friend" more products and constantly engage with them.

I'd go to conference after conference and it would essentially be the talking points. Either pro or con. It's amazing how polarized the tech conversation is. There's also this neurological fixation, the incessant wondering what the Internet's doing to our brain: "Does it make us stupid, does it make us distracted?" And then the other guys say, "No, it's making us smarter than ever, and better than ever, and more connected." And it's like, where is the economic and social context? Why is that rarely considered?

Not to be to be a vulgar materialist or be too reductive, but all of that was completely absent from the conversation. Instead we were told it was a "revolutionary" moment, where these new tools would inevitably displace the old media dinosaur and that things would be democratized and wasn't it great we could all collaborate on these platforms.

On the one hand, I'm a kind of crazy anarchist-sympathizer with a hippie background, so this sounds pretty good to me. Make something for the love of it! But the reality is so much more complicated.

We've been criticizing these superficial aspects, like whether we are all more distracted. We really need to articulate a defense, a critique, that merges awareness of the technology with a more traditional, progressive, left-wing critique of the market.

There's also the issue of tech titans throwing their weight around in Washington and lobbying. There was just a Reuters poll that reported that more than half of Americans are concerned that tech companies are "encroaching too much on their lives." That's pretty major, considering these companies were universally loved not that long ago.

I work for free all the time, as a writer but also as an activist. The decisions we have to make as individuals are really fraught but also can be really wonderful and we're all navigating this reality to the best of our abilities. But, again, I wanted to take a step back and look at the broader context.