Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.

Fantasy sports went a long way toward developing the sabermetrics formulas used not only by oddsmakers but general managers in hiring players. So the amateur fantasists ended up creating some of the algorithms that Oakland GM Billy Bean's statisticians used to win games with less salary money available for star players.

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.

'Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel.

It may be decades until we know what living in a state of constant distraction will do to us.

We are moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.

Ecstacy stripped away the user's inhibitions to self-expression. On E, lies are inefficient, and the peculiarities or weaknesses they are meant to obscure no longer seem like offenses against nature.