If your business or cultural strategy was based on attention at scale, the first years of the century felt great, as the leading Internet platforms offered the possibility of nearly limitless, precisely targeted traffic. Then came the troubles

A database is a tool for forgetting; it decays on command, faster than nightmares and more thoroughly than graves.

Call it machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, or simply computational intelligence: countries are rushing to apply new technologies to combat crimes, but how they do so — and even what counts as crime — varies among them, and says much about their societies, priorities, and future.

Imagine you’re Rene Descartes, data scientist at Facebook in charge of saying true things. Problem is, your only input is what people say, and everybody lies.

Mainstream language about cyber-security, specially at the political and military level, is divorced from reality to the point of nonsense.

Silicon Valley pitches for smart cities and military descriptions of future battle environments are awfully similar. That’s not entirely coincidental.

(Spoiler alert: it’s not Detroit, and it’d be a relatively simple question if it weren’t for cancer.)

“The junk merchant,” wrote William S. Burroughs, “doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.” He might as well have been describing the commercial, AI-mediated, social-network-driven internet.

When it comes to ethics and AI, forget corporate responsibility statements. If you want to know what a tech company worries about, look at what it monitors when deploying new code.

Charlie had a chip in his head, but that’s not what made him special…