Just last month, in an essay for the New York Review, I wrote the following sentence about Google and secrecy: None of these books can tell you how many search queries Google fields, how much electricity it consumes, how much storage capacity it owns, how many streets it has photographed, how much e-mail it stores; nor can you Google the answers, because Google values its privacy. As of today...
Sitting at one’s desk in New York, one feels a tremor. Dreaming? Naturally one turns to cyberspace. The U.S. Geological Survey is reporting an earthquake just moments ago, but it’s in Virginia. That’s 300 miles from here—impossible. Or is it? The real-time seismograph from the Lamont-Doherty observatory is not responding. That in itself seems like a sign. Then there’s...
How thoroughly and how radically Google has already transformed the information economy has not been well understood. The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google...
I got a thrill in December 1999 in the Reading Room of the Morgan Library in New York when the librarian, Sylvie Merian, brought me, after I had completed an application with a letter of reference and a photo ID, the first, oldest notebook of Isaac Newton. First I was required to study a microfilm version. There followed a certain amount of pomp. The notebook was lifted from a blue cloth drop...
In a little essay in The Times (which you can read here or there) I muse about the differences between the artifacts of history—the tangible, venerable manuscripts and notebooks and other touchstones—and their new digital counterparts. I try to push back against what I see as a little bit of sentimentalizing. But nothing I say—and nothing I’m pushing back against—is as eloquent as a comment...
Hello, Pluto! But are you a planet? (What I wrote in 2011.)
I wrote this about the leap second 20 years ago. Eventually it led to Faster. I am in the Directorate of Time. Naturally I am running late ...
I’m reading some Edgar Allan Poe tales in anticipation of an outdoor discussion tomorrow in Bryant Park, and I am charmed to discover (in the helpful endnotes) his habit of making up epigraphs. Or at least no one seems to be able to find his sources. Maybe they just didn’t have Google. I’m a sucker for a good epigraph myself. Every chapter of The Information has one. But I...