Fifty years ago, the way that we consumed food was revolutionized. We began eating processed foods, and it seemed amazing. And then we woke up many decades later, and we realized that food was engineered to make us fat. And I think that such companies as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple are doing the same thing with the stuff that we ingest through our brains. They're attempting to addict us, and they're addicting us on the basis of data.

Most of the time the concept of globalization ends up sounding unnecessarily abstruse - even the name itself sounds clunky and highfalutin.

I think that globalization is partly responsible for the spread of the hostile, radical forms of Islam.

I don't see tribalism ever really disappearing entirely. I just think that people are almost hardwired to identify as groups. And that sort of group identity always runs the risk of being chauvinistic.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple are among the most powerful monopolies in the history of humanity. So, the problem is, is that they have tremendous ability to shape the way that we think, the way that we filter the world, the way that we absorb culture. And if they were just companies, maybe we shouldn't be so concerned about them, but they play an incredibly vital role in the health of our democracy.

Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.

Is Islam a tribe or is it a force of globalization? Islam has certainly been studied as a local, tribalistic phenomenon. But Islam is also theoretically a universalist idea, its spread has been facilitated by modern technologies, and it's an identity that people can slip into and out of fairly easily. I don't think Islam has really been understood as a product of globalization. It might be one of these instances where globalism and tribalism ultimately go hand in hand.