via Marginal Utility: “The advance of digital technology further and further into the nooks and crannies of our lives is based on an elementary trade-off. It supplies us with a great deal of convenience: It lets us communicate with one another wherever and whenever we want to. It provides us with instantaneous access to and limitless storage of media, everything from personal photos to films to most of the history of recorded music on a terabyte hard drive. It’s capable of building in a level of redundancy in our lives, preserving what we might otherwise forget and protecting us from oversights—if you lose tickets to an event, chances are the barcode on them can be canceled and new tickets issued to you. And if your credit card number is stolen, the bank may very well recognize suspicious purchases and notify you.

But in exchange for all this convenience, we sacrifice privacy and spontaneity. We permit all our public actions to be cataloged and processed, and we make ourselves completely and instantly accessible not just to our friends and family, but to marketers who seek to guide our behavior in contexts that they can detect and analyze perhaps even before we have a chance to, and also to the state, which may seek to stifle dissent before it has the opportunity to assemble and gather force. By allowing ourselves to be tracked and recorded and analyzed, we become willing parties to our own reification, to our assimilation into the giant digital data machine.

[…] Technology threatens to render our wishes irrelevant even as it pretends to cater to them—that is, it serves our needs as long as they are boiled down to the need for convenience, to consume faster and with maximum indiscriminateness.  I feel this acutely when I find myself spending more time tagging and arranging my music files than I spend listening to my music. Part of that is a cognitive illusion, but a telling one—I’m listening to music the entire time I’m doing the iTunes bookkeeping work, but I’m concentrating on the data, not on the intricacies, harmonies, melodies, and hooks of the music. It barely breaks through, usually only when what’s playing is so irritating, I have to skip it.”