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[...] we can’t hope to reform the information economy without fundamentally changing the incentives at its core. Wu’s postmaterialism would have been a good fit for the roaring nineties, when a rising tide of Internet firm profits seemed to be lifting many parts of the economy. But the economic cri…

[...] Google continues to maintain that it doesn’t want human judgment blurring the autonomy of its algorithms. But even spelling suggestions depend on human judgment, and in fact Google developed that feature not only by means of algorithms, but also through a painstaking, iterative interplay betw…

We pay no money for Google’s services. But someone pays for its thousands of engineers, and that someone is advertisers. Nearly all the company’s revenue comes from marketers eager to reach the targeted audiences that Google delivers so abundantly. We pay with our attention and with our data, the…

[...] search services, social and not, are “must-have” properties for advertisers as well as users. As such, they have made very deep inroads indeed into the sphere of cultural, economic, and political influence that was once dominated by broadcast networks, radio stations, and newspapers. But thei…

[...] Laws prevent the government from collecting certain kinds of information on citizens, but data brokers are not so constrained. And once someone else has collected that information, little stops the government from buying it, demanding it, or even hacking into it.

Our off- and online acti…