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.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

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.'

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

In America, surveillance has always played an outsized role in the relationship between creditors and debtors.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

The Tamagotchi, I have realized, is everything that is wrong with our smartphone era. Is this what went wrong with millennials?

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

Not everyone can afford to plunk down hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on a laptop.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong

Because whisper networks are built on personal credibility and social capital, they often end up operating like exclusive clubs.

Sarah Jeong

In 2018, streaming companies know with precision how many people are listening to what song.

Sarah Jeong

When I was in college, my high school best friend and I had a terrible falling-out. It was entirely because of Facebook.

Sarah Jeong

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.

Sarah Jeong