I don't know of any other form of life that gathers up all the food it needs in the first two-thirds of its life in order to do nothing in its last third of life. In a utopian presentist society, instead of working extra hard to put money in the bank, you'd be working to provide value for the people around you.

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.

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

Like the diminishing beauty returns for a facially paralyzed Botox addict, the more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time, the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.

The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers. That makes them the customers. And it means we are the product being delivered to those customers.

I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.

The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God's universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse.