Online advertising may not be much more successful than an old double-barrel, but - like a good spray of buckshot - it makes up for its lack of accuracy with sheer volume. There are 10 unique ads listed with every Gmail message in your queue, each tied to the message content. And a paying sponsor.

When digital culture first came along, it was supposed to create more time, by allowing us to shift time around. Somehow instead we've strapped devices to ourselves that ping us all the time.

While learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free.

Removed from 'Gmail' doesn't necessarily mean removed from all Google servers. In fact, your old emails are the data set from which Google models our behaviors - the real product it is offering its advertisers.

Apple enjoys 'Harry Potter'-like adoration and queues because it sells physical objects, limited by the pace of assembly lines in China. To own is to have, to have is to hold, and to hold is to show off.

Your email inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there's some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more.

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.