The Filter Bubble

.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index2.htm.

183 sold to eBay for $1.5 billion: Troy Wolverton, “It’s official: eBay Weds PayPal,” CNET News, Oct. 3, 2002, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/Its- official-eBay-weds-PayPal/2100-1017_3-960658.html.

183 “impact and force change”: Peter Thie, “Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, Apr. 13, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter- thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian.

183 “end the inevitability of death and taxes”: Chris Baker, “Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap,” Wired, Jan. 19, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/17-02/mf_seasteading?currentPage=all.

183 “ ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron”: Thiel, “Education of a Libertarian.”

184 “makes a living being against computers”: Nicholas Carlson, “Peter Thiel Says Don’t Piss Off the Robots (or Bet on a Recovery),” Business Insider, Nov. 18, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-obama-ai-and-why-he-rents-his-mansion-2009- 11#.

184 “which technologies to foster”: Ronald Bailey, “Technology Is at the Center,” Reason.com, May 2008, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://reason.com/archives/2008/05/01/technology-is-at-the- center/singlepage.

184 “way I think about the business”: Deepak Gopinath, “PayPal’s Thiel Scores 230 Percent Gain with Soros-Style Fund,” CanadianHedgeWatch .com, Dec. 4, 2006, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, at www.canadianhedgewatch.com/content/news/general/?id=1169.

184 “that voting will make things better”: Peter Thiel, “Your Suffrage Isn’t in Danger. Your Other Rights Are,” Cato Unbound, May 1, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/01/peter-thiel/your-suffrage-isnt-in-danger-your-other-rights-are.

185 talked to Scott Heiferman: Interview with author, New York, NY, Oct. 5, 2010.

188 “good or bad, nor is it neutral”: Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3 (1986): 544–60.

Chapter Seven: What You Want, Whether You Want It or Not

189 “millions of people doing complicated things”: Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, The New Media Reader, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 8.

189 “yet to be completely correlated”: Isaac Asimov, The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science (New York: Basic Books, 1965),

190 “you’ve got a problem”: Bill Jay, phone interview with author, Oct. 10, 2010.

191 ads tailored to her: Jason Mick, “Tokyo’s ‘Minority Report’ Ad Boards Scan Viewer’s Sex and Age,” Daily Tech, July 16, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.dailytech.com/Tokyos +Minority+Report+Ad+Boards+Scan+Viewers+Sex+and+Age/article19063.htm.

191 the future of art: David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010). Credit to Michiko Kakutani, whose review led me to this book.

193 interrogated by a virtual agent: M. Ryan Calo, “People Can Be So Fake: A New Dimension to Privacy and Technology Scholarship,” Penn State Law Review 114 , no. 3 (2010): 810–55.

193 Kismet increased donations by 30 percent: Vanessa Woods, “Pay Up, You Are Being Watched,” New Scientist, Mar. 18, 2005, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.newscientist.com/article/dn7144-pay-up-you-are-being-watched.html.

193 “Computers programmed to be polite”: Calo, “People Can Be So Fake.”

194 “not evolved to twentieth-century technology”: Ibid.

195 identity and criminal record in seconds: Maureen Boyle, “Video: Catching Criminals? Brockton Cops Have an App for That,” Brockton Patriot Ledger, June 15, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.patriotledger.com/news/cops_and_courts/x1602636300/Catching- criminals-Cops-have-an-app-for-that.

195 “other images of you with ninety-five percent accuracy”: Jerome Taylor, “Google Chief: My Fears for Generation Facebook,” Independent, Aug. 18, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-chief-my- fears-for-generation-facebook-2055390.html.

197 “The future is already here”: William Gibson, interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Aug. 31, 1993, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1107153.

197 your identity already tagged: “RFID Bracelet Brings Facebook to the Real World,” Aug. 20, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.psfk.com/2010/08/rfid-bracelet-brings-facebook-to-the-real-world.html.

198 “real world that can be indexed”: Reihan Salam, “Why Amazon Will Win the Internet,” Forbes, July 30, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.forbes.com/2010/07/30/amazon-kindle-economy-environment-opinions-columnists-reihan- salam.html.

198 “some have termed ‘smart dust’”: David Wright, Serge Gutwirth, Michael Friedewald, Yves Punie, and Elena Vildjiounaite, Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence (Berlin/Dordrecht: Springer Science, 2008): abstract.

199 four-year joint effort: Google/Harvard press release. “Digitized Book Project Unveils a Quantitative ‘Cultural Genome,’” accessed Feb. 8, 2011, http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/news- archive/2010/digitized-books.

200 “censorship and propaganda”: Ibid.

200 nearly sixty languages: Google Translate Help Page, accessed Feb. 8, 2011, http://translate.google.com/support/?hl=en.

201 better and better: Nikki Tait, “Google to translate European patent claims,” Financial Times, Nov. 29, 2010, accessed Feb. 9, 2010, www.ft.com/cms/s/0/02f71b76-fbce-11df-b79a-00144feab49a.html.

202 “what to do with them”: Danny Sullivan, phone interview with author, Sept. 10, 2010.

202 “flash crash”: Graham Bowley, “Stock Swing Still Baffles, with an Ominous Tone,”