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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The effect of letting someone sue without showing harm is obvious: It makes it really easy to sue.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”