Because whisper networks are built on personal credibility and social capital, they often end up operating like exclusive clubs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A Tamagotchi is a beep encased in a plastic shell. It exists to haunt you with ghostly notifications that signify nothing.
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.
'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.
When I was in college, my high school best friend and I had a terrible falling-out. It was entirely because of Facebook.
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.
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.
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.
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.'