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Michel Foucault popularized this metaphor. The panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's prison design in which cells were arranged in a circle around a central guard tower so that all prisoners were put under constant surveillance with maximum efficiency by a small number of guards.

This is basically a way of saying that the better your computer skills are, the more right you have to be a genuine individual in control of your own digital life. But we technologists ought to be serving mankind, not turning ourselves into a privileged class.

If homeowners with mortgages had been owed something resembling royalties whenever a mortgage was leveraged, then there would not have been overleveraging. The cost of risk would have been built in from the start, and would have been paid for by the investor creating the risk. Benefits would have b…

It's worse than foolish to imagine that technologists will be able to fix the world if economists and politics have gone insane. We can't function alone. What we do is empower people. The world needs to be approximately sane for us to make any positive difference.