Google did a great job hacking the Web to create search - and then monetizing search with advertising. And Apple did a great job humanizing hardware and software so that formerly daunting computers and applications could become consumer-friendly devices - even a lifestyle brand.

When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.

The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we've learned about them.

Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data.

Not only have computers changed the way we think, they've also discovered what makes humans think - or think we're thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.

Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.

The reason why Apple computers have worked so well over time is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't bend over backward to be compatible with every piece of hardware or software in the digital universe. To code or create for Apple, you follow Apple's rules. If you're even allowed to.

Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.

I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.

'Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel.

As a digital technology writer, I have had more than one former student and colleague tell me about digital switchers they have serviced through which calls and data are diverted to government servers or the big data algorithms they've written to be used on our e-mails by intelligence agencies.

I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think it's a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us.

I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.

Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product.

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.

While learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free.

In spite of my own reservations about Bing's ability to convert Google users, I have to admit that the search engine does offer a genuine alternative to Google-style browsing, a more coherently organized selection of links, and a more advertiser-friendly environment through which to sell space and links.

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.

The new Zune may not be an iPod killer, but it does offer a clean interface, great industrial design, HD radio, and a subscription model for music, making it significantly less expensive for big users.