Zuckerberg’s “Free Basics” is a scam against its supposed beneficiaries for several reasons. First, rather than offering “the Internet,” his service requires its users to route all their traffic to “free websites” through his servers, where the users’ identities are logged so that their traffic can be paid for by the spy, rather than by them. So the first actual charge is that the poor will be comprehensively surveilled by Facebook, losing any shred of personal privacy, while the rich using the real Internet do not route all their traffic through Facebook.

Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary, “Fictional Internet Policy Is Bad for India, Good Only for Facebook”

Although “Reclaiming Conversation” touches on the politics of privacy and ­labor-saving robots, Turkle shies from the more radical implications of her findings. When she notes that Steve Jobs forbade tablets and smartphones at the dinner table and encouraged his family to talk about books and history, or when she cites Mozart, Kafka and Picasso on the value of undistracted solitude, she’s describing the habits of highly effective people. And, indeed, the family that is doing well enough to buy and read her new book may learn to limit its exposure to technology and do even better. But what of the great mass of people too anxious or lonely to resist the lure of tech, too poor or overworked to escape the vicious circles? Matthew Crawford, in “The World Beyond Your Head,” contrasts the world of a “peon” airport lounge—saturated in advertising, filled with mesmerizing screens—with the quiet, ad-free world of a business lounge: “To engage in playful, inventive thinking, and possibly create wealth for oneself during those idle hours spent at an airport, requires silence. But other people’s minds, over in the peon lounge (or at the bus stop), can be ­treated as a resource—a standing reserve of purchasing power.” Our digital technologies aren’t politically neutral. The young person who cannot or will not be alone, converse with family, go out with friends, attend a lecture or perform a job without monitoring her smartphone is an emblem of our economy’s leechlike attachment to our very bodies. Digital technology is capitalism in hyperdrive, injecting its logic of consumption and promotion, of monetization and efficiency, into every waking minute.

Jonathan Franzen, “Sherry Turkle’s ‘Reclaiming Conversation”’