As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.

I do remember the moment when, as a child, I realized that the things we call 'TV shows' are really just the stuff that gets put between commercials. Later, I came to see that the kinds of things that get on 'free' TV are shows that help sell products.

The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

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.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us, a vast majority of the time, we surrender our true autonomy to this illusion of agency. I'm as guilty as anybody, and I write about it in a book. I'm not condemning anybody.

It feels as if ever since the iPhone was released, the Macintosh computer has become just another leverage point in this other operating system's marketing plan.

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working ... Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff-it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.