The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.

Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.

We each create a story - a narritive, a picture, an allegory, a model - for what's going on in the universe. And then we fight - sometimes to the death - to make others believe in that model, or to be able to keep believing in it ourselves. In other words, we try to erase contradictory evidence to that model.

The moment you frame your own awareness within a second level of self -consciousness is the moment your mind is most up for grabs. ... You're safe because you have an ironic distance from the coercive techniques I'm employing. All of them that is, except this one. Are you on your guard yet? Does it feel good? Of course not.

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.

If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. … We’re going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if you’ve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars.

I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.