On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next.

Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.

The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.

Files on iTunes - and thus iPods - are incompatible with everything else. Applications on iPhones may only be sold and uploaded through the iPhone store - giving Apple control over everything people put on to the devices they thought they owned.

Web sites are designed to keep young people from using the keyboard, except to enter in their parents' credit card information.

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.

Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest.