Evgeny Morozov

If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.

In business, standards establish the rules of the game, creating path dependencies as investments are made and corresponding designs are set in stone and plastic. Inferior standards can prevail due to smart marketing or industry collusion.

If WikiLeaks were a for-profit company, determining its real value would be a nearly impossible task.

If you use your smart toothbrush, the data can be immediately sent to your dentist and your insurance company, but it also allows someone from the NSA to know what was in your mouth three weeks ago.

You actually see liberals checking 'Fox News,' if only to know what the conservatives are thinking. And you're seeing conservatives who venture into liberal sources, just to know what 'The New York Times' is thinking.

Surveillance cameras might reduce crime - even though the evidence here is mixed - but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved.

If my idea was just to maintain a certain lifestyle, there would be no need to get a Ph.D. But I do care very deeply about the idea side as well.

We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.

If we don't like rent control, we ought to oppose it on political and social grounds - and not just by arguing that, thanks to smartphones and social networks, we can create new, more efficient markets for matching short-term renters with tenants.

Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable.

In reality, quitting Facebook is much more problematic than the company's executives suggest, if only because users cannot extract all the intangible social capital they have generated on the site and export it elsewhere.

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.