Such exponential growth does not occur in the natural world, except maybe for cancer—and that growth ceases once the host has been consumed.

Chinese laborers "finish" smartphones by wiping off any fingerprints with a highly toxic solvent proven to shorten the workers lives. That's how valuable it is for consumers to believe their devices have been assembled by magic rather than by the fingers of underpaid and poisoned children.

If we don't truly know what something is programmed to do, chances are it is programming us. Once that happens, we may as well be machines ourselves.

Cynical views of humans as a mindless mob, incapable of behaving intelligently and peacefully, are used to justify keeping us apart and denying us roles as autonomous actors.

No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.

Digital technology is both arousing and distancing. We don't look at the users on the other side as people. They aren't - they're just usernames, Facebook photos and Twitter handles.

Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.

Our technologies become more complex while we become more simple. They learn about us while we come to know less and less about them. No one person can understand everything going on in an iPhone, much less pervasive systems.