We need to start seeing privacy as a commons - as some kind of a public good that can get depleted as too many people treat it carelessly or abandon it too eagerly. What is privacy for? This question needs an urgent answer.

I'm rarely invited to start-up parties, but who cares about their trinkets and apps anyway?

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.

Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly.

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools.

If you want to plan a revolution, you never do it in public - the authorities show up and arrest everyone.

Technology changes all the time; human nature hardly ever.