We've always believed that popular culture and populist politics go hand in hand. It's an honor to be working with so many respected and influential artists, and we're indebted to them for having the courage to speak out at a time when our country so desperately needs change. For our 2.5 million members and far beyond, the Vote for Change tour will have a seismic cultural impact.

Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days

To be a good citizen, it's important to be able to put yourself in other people's shoes and see the big picture. If everything you see is rooted in your own identity, that becomes difficult or impossible.

Democracy actually requires that the whole public be able to see common problems and address them and step outside of their own sort of narrow self-interest to do so.

In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.

Whether it's Facebook or Google or the other companies, that basic principle that users should be able to see and control information about them that they themselves have revealed to the companies is not baked into how the companies work. But it's bigger than privacy. Privacy is about what you're willing to reveal about yourself.

Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.