And what are some examples? What are some concrete examples that you can think of?

Well, I think the sort of concrete examples that I imagine we'll be discussing today range from the sorts of information that is collected by us as we leave our digital trails of ones and zeros, or the use of our phones that we carry around in our pocket, all the apps that everybody's using on their phones that they're carrying around in their pockets right now, or maybe even listening to this podcast on.

All those apps, as everyone here knows and many people know, are constantly streaming and collecting data about the users of those apps, including ourselves, and collecting data about where we are, what we're doing, what we're searching.

And that goes for all the digital platforms and the digital search engines that we use as well, and of course social media in addition.

So in a sense, a concrete example is the world of the Internet around us, All of the internet, the magic of the internet really consists nowadays in the fact that it is completely a personalized information collecting environment.

And it works in part, that is Google searches work so well in part because they are able, Google is able to track the sorts of data that we leave, as it were, behind.

And so I think that's a particularly concrete set of examples that I gave a whole list of things where we're interacting in our digital environment and our digital life in ways that allow our information to be used both for really for benign purposes or seemingly benign to help us find books or buy shoes, and sometimes for less benign reasons to impose upon us certain conceptions of the world or to get us to believe one thing rather than another.

Michael Patrick Lynch.