As economic life relies more and more on the Internet, the potential for small bands of hackers to launch devastating attacks on the world economy is growing.
I’m active on Twitter, and I love my iPad and my Kindle.
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.
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.
Faster roads are not always safer roads – and virtually all societies, democratic or authoritarian, prefer safety over speed, even if many of their citizens enjoy fast driving.
However revolutionary it may be, the Internet still hasn’t altered the basic law of human communication: Being nice to your interlocutors is a good way to start any negotiations, particularly, when being hostile is an open invitation for a cyber-fight.
For all its shortcomings, Wikipedia does have strong governance and deliberative mechanisms; anyone who has ever followed discussions on Wikipedia’s mailing lists will confirm that its moderators and administrators openly discuss controversial issues on a regular basis.
For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.
The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda.
A faithful lifehacker would use technology to avoid dead time and move on to the entertaining, more gratifying activities as soon as possible.
Cloud computing is a great euphemism for centralization of computer services under one server.
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.
Cybercriminals are usually driven by profit, while cyberterrorists are driven by ideology.
In part, slacktivism is what happens when the energy of otherwise dedicated activists is wasted on approaches that are less effective than the alternatives.
The message I’m trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology – they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.
It’s true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call ‘moral panics,’ that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.
In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks.
In business, standards establish the rules of the game, creating path dependencies as investments are made and corresponding designs are set in stone and plastic. Inferior standards can prevail due to smart marketing or industry collusion.
Dictators aren’t stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook.
For many oppositional movements, the Internet, while providing the opportunity to distribute information more quickly and cheaper, may have actually made their struggle more difficult in the long run.