A cashless society promises a world of limitation, control, and surveillance - all of which the poorest Americans already have in abundance, of course. For the most vulnerable, the cashless society offers nothing substantively new; it only extends the reach of the existing paternal bureaucratic state.
Sarah Jeong
Facebook lets me be lazy the way a man in a stereotypical 1950s office can be lazy. Facebook is the digital equivalent of my secretary, or perhaps my wife, yelling at me not to forget to wish someone a happy birthday or to inform me I have a social engagement this evening.
Are whisper networks good? That question itself is a little flat. Whisper networks arise in a vacuum of justice. They alleviate an untenable condition; they do not actually address it.
You can't copyright a urinal. But you could probably copyright a sculpture of a urinal. And like Duchamp's famous work, code is both, at the same time.
When it comes to music, movies, literature, paintings, and even Bikram yoga, it's pretty easy to have an opinion about whether something has been copied. Software, on the other hand, was an awkward late addition to the original Copyright Act of 1976, shoehorned into section 102(a) as a 'literary work.'
Oracle v. Google is a vast, sprawling piece of litigation over the Android platform, one where the billions of dollars at stake were the least-significant possible consequence of the lawsuit.
In America, surveillance has always played an outsized role in the relationship between creditors and debtors.
In the early days, I loved Facebook. I loved being able to keep tabs on hundreds of college classmates all at once, of being able to tag all my dorm mates in the photos we took on our garbage 7 megapixel cameras, of creeping on crushes, of keeping up with every person I met at a party or in a classroom without doing very much work.
The Tamagotchi, I have realized, is everything that is wrong with our smartphone era. Is this what went wrong with millennials?
Information is lightning-quick. It crosses cities, states, and national borders in the twinkle of an eye. It passes through many kinds of devices, flowing from phone to phone and computer to computer, rather than being sealed away in those silent marble temples we used to call banks.
Artificial intelligence is just a new tool, one that can be used for good and for bad purposes and one that comes with new dangers and downsides as well. We know already that although machine learning has huge potential, data sets with ingrained biases will produce biased results - garbage in, garbage out.
People don't object to spying on the grounds that the secret dossier about them might be full of errors. They object to spying because it's spying.
When Facebook launched, it dove headfirst into a brave new world. No one knew that the cost of connecting people all over the world for ad revenue was eventually going to be Cambridge Analytica.
Not everyone can afford to plunk down hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on a laptop.
When you listen to music through Spotify, you don't own the song, even though you might be able to listen to it at any time.
Surveillance has long been theorized as a way to control the surveilled - namely, by getting them to police themselves out of fear of being watched.
Because whisper networks are built on personal credibility and social capital, they often end up operating like exclusive clubs.
In 2018, streaming companies know with precision how many people are listening to what song.
When I was in college, my high school best friend and I had a terrible falling-out. It was entirely because of Facebook.
For the participants of whisper networks - often women - these networks hum below the surface. Whispers are take it or leave it. Whispers are a defense, not an offense.
Gentrification and housing shortages are complex issues.
Mechanisms that prevent Keurig machines from using off-label coffee pods are annoying but relatively harmless.
'Star Wars' is life, but 'Star Wars' is also not very good, which is why 'Rogue One' - a Frankenstein's monster assembled from a butchered first cut and an excessively large space antenna that only exists to add another 30 minutes to the film - is one of the better 'Star Wars' movies.
In the black-and-white world of a girl in her late teens, I thought of things like Internet etiquette as obvious, rule-bound institutions. Facebook was Facebook, texts were texts, emails were emails, chats were chats, webcamming was webcamming, phone calls were phone calls.
Because the American credit reporting system relies on both good and bad reports of creditworthiness, a consumer must have some kind of credit - not just the absence of bad credit.
A Tamagotchi is a beep encased in a plastic shell. It exists to haunt you with ghostly notifications that signify nothing.
Wherever information gathers and flows, two predators follow closely behind it: censorship and surveillance. The case of digital money is no exception. Where money becomes a series of signals, it can be censored; where money becomes information, it will inform on you.
The belief that the law will never 'catch up' to technology is borne in part of tech exceptionalism, a libertarian elitism that derides any kind of legal or regulatory impediment as Luddism.
I was a kid when the Tamagotchi craze hit, and I was always envious of my friends and cousins who got to hand-rear their little digital babies.
Artificial intelligence cannot solve the problem of not knowing what the hell you're doing and not really caring one way or the other. It's not a solution for shortsightedness and lack of transparency.
The effect of letting someone sue without showing harm is obvious: It makes it really easy to sue.
In the quest for perfect protection of Sony's intellectual property, the company threw the privacy and security of their customers under the bus.
In a cashless society, the cash has been converted into numbers, into signals, into electronic currents. In short: Information replaces cash.
Unfortunately, nothing is ever that simple in copyright law, and when it comes to music copyright, it's especially convoluted.
