I went to Cal Arts and AFI, and I worked on 'Bonfire Of The Vanities.' I got this grant from the Academy to be Brian De Palma's apprentice director. And it was such a harrowing, disillusioning, awful experience.

The cloud is still really just a bunch of servers, owned by someone or something, whose decisions and competence must be trusted. This applies to everything from Google Docs to Gmail: Putting our data out there really means putting it 'out there.'

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.

I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.

Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data.

The competitive advantage professional journalism enjoys over the free is just that: professional journalists, whose paid positions give them the time and resources they need to commit more fully to the task. If we can't do better, so be it.

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.