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.

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.

Global warming, you don't win it. It's this weird steady-state issue that's going to be with us for a few thousand years.

Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.

It's easy to make fun of AOL's pending purchase of HuffPo. Just like AOL's purchase of TimeWarner, here we have a new media company - Huffington Post - fooling an old media company, AOL, into overpaying for something that has already peaked.

The iPad - contrary to the way most people thought about it - is not a tablet computer running the Apple operating system. It's more like a very big iPhone, running the iPhone operating system.

Since the dawn of the Internet, I have always operated under the assumption that if the government or corporations have technological capability to do something, they are doing it - whatever the laws we happen to know about might say.