Jordan Lieberman:

The technological leap we've made is matching that voter file to the Internet so online ads can be as accurate as the phone calls, mail and knocks on your front door. Instead of buying ads on websites, we're buying audiences. The technology is spreading, but you won't notice the difference. While you're seeing an ad for Christine Quinn, your unlikely-voting neighbor sees a Neiman Marcus ad. At the exact same time, an outside independent expenditure group that's supporting Christine Quinn may have determined that your other neighbor, who is likely to vote but not for Ms. Quinn, might be seeing an ad for Bill de Blasio or against Bill Thompson, if the strategists and buyers have determined that a pro-Bill D or anti-Bill T vote helps Ms. Quinn's goal.

Ron Horning:

What could be better than exercising one's freedom of choice, over and over again, to get new and exciting things, to have novel experiences tailored especially for our personal delight?

To facilitate the shift in emphasis to data collection -- and obfuscate the poorly aligned incentives between dating sites and their users -- online dating ... is rebranding itself as "social discovery." Social discovery denotes a kind of commodified serendipity that emphasizes the joy of users' perpetually meeting people on the basis of a wide variety of ever-shifting interests -- that is, opportunistically consuming them for their novelty.

To capitalize on convenience and autonomy in a consumer marketplace, we must first allow our desires to be commodified and suppress the desires that don't lend themselves to commodification.

For online dating sites, the optimal customer is an oversexed solipsist addicted to novelty. But interacting with the sites doesn't have to be a matter of sitting alone at your computer (or staring into a phone) and attenuating your personal predilections as if they came entirely from within and existed independently of social relations. Instead, it can be a confrontation with how little we know about ourselves and how we might aspire to be sure of even less.

Charles Stross:

To Generation Z's eyes, the boomers and their institutions look like parasitic aliens with incomprehensible values who make irrational demands for absolute loyalty without reciprocity. Worse, the foundational mythology and ideals of the United States will look like a bitter joke, a fun house mirror's distorted reflection of the reality they live with from day to day.

Generation Z will arrive brutalized and atomized by three generations of diminished expectations and dog-eat-dog economic liberalism. Most of them will be so deracinated that they identify with their peers and the global Internet culture more than their great-grandparents' post-Westphalian nation-state. The machineries of the security state may well find them unemployable, their values too alien to assimilate into a model still rooted in the early 20th century.