I'm not a communist, just a media theorist.

In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.

It feels as if ever since the iPhone was released, the Macintosh computer has become just another leverage point in this other operating system's marketing plan.

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others.

The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.

Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what's happening on the free Internet is more akin to the 'crowdsourcing' of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them - only the search engines that parse their articles.