This marketization of personal information is a big mistake.

The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.

As befits Silicon Valley, 'big data' is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans - and credit histories - to millions of people who currently lack access to them.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

In reality, quitting Facebook is much more problematic than the company's executives suggest, if only because users cannot extract all the intangible social capital they have generated on the site and export it elsewhere.

One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense.

The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.