Quotes from 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.

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

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

A Tamagotchi is a beep encased in a plastic shell. It exists to haunt you with ghostly notifications that signify nothing.

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

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.

I was a kid when the Tamagotchi craze hit, and I was always envious of my friends and cousins who got to hand-rear their little digital babies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In the quest for perfect protection of Sony's intellectual property, the company threw the privacy and security of their customers under the bus.

Mechanisms that prevent Keurig machines from using off-label coffee pods are annoying but relatively harmless.

Gentrification and housing shortages are complex issues.

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.

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 a cashless society, the cash has been converted into numbers, into signals, into electronic currents. In short: Information replaces cash.

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.

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.'