Simply getting a country's population online is not going to trigger a revolution in critical thinking.

I think governments will increasingly be tempted to rely on Silicon Valley to solve problems like obesity or climate change because Silicon Valley runs the information infrastructure through which we consume information.

The great temptation of Big Data is that we can stop worrying about comprehension and focus on preventive action instead. Instead of wasting precious public resources on understanding the 'why' - i.e., exploring the reasons as to why terrorists become terrorists - one can focus on predicting the 'when' so that a timely intervention could be made.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate.

Once a term like "open source" entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about "innovation" and "progress," not "accountability" or "security."

In Google's world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.

Sleephackers go to bed with sensors on their wrists and foreheads and maintain detailed electronic sleep diaries, which they often share online. To shift between sleep phases, sleephackers experiment with various diets, room and body temperatures, and kinds of pre-sleep physical exercise.