Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.

What is extraordinary is that in the United States the current culture desires feelings of machismo and power, but at the same time has absolutely no taste whatsoever for even the slightest loss or bloodshed or ickiness. That's a fascinating combination.

It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction.

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.