One of the points I make in the book is that one source of our dissatisfaction with smartphones and other personal electronics is that we instinctively want to treat them like extensions of our selves, but they don't work reliably enough to be completely trustworthy. When I ride my bike, I pretty much know exactly what's going on, where I'm going, how to fix any minor problems– and I can be certain that Specialized and Shimano and Schwinn, and all the other manufacturers of the various parts on my bike, have no interest in where I go, and no ability to pull me in a different direction.

Alas, the situation is not the same with personal electronics. Not only do we have to deal with the frustrations that are caused by poor design, we also have to confront the fact that even after we buy them, connected devices continue to be governed– and changed– by their makers, and by service providers.

Now, one can argue that technologies have always reflected the interests of their creators– that artifacts have politics, to use Langdon Winner's phrase from the 1970s. But I contend that it's one thing for politics to be reflected in the design process or in the choice of what gets built and what doesn't, and quite another for those politics to be reflected in a device's continuing ability to report back to Cupertino or Mountain View about where you are, what you're doing, and whether you should be allowed to keep doing those thing.

To put it another way, the first Macintosh have reflected Apple's vision of the social and politically transformative effects of the personal computer. The iPhone 5 gives Apple a window into your everyday behavior, and a lever by which to nudge it.

I made this case in my book, but as often happens, reality is making the case even more forcefully than I ever could, as the latest news about Google Glass shows. The first people who buy Google Glass are prohibited from reselling it, and if they give it away, the recipient has to obey the same licensing terms (getting a Google Wallet account, for example). As Slate contributor John Villasenor says,

Google Glass, like many recent- and emerging-generation consumer electronics products, is made useful largely through its ability to connect to license-based service offerings. When you use a service such as Google Maps, you do so under a license to access the associated content—you’re a licensee, not an owner of that content.

The model of requiring purchasers of consumer electronics devices to first enter into restrictive contracts as a condition of sale and then to agree to restrictive licenses when using those devices raises multiple concerns. Most fundamentally, it does an end run around legal frameworks that evolved specifically to prohibit anti-competitive and consumer-unfriendly downstream control over transfers of ownership. And it’s confusing for consumers.

And, I would argue, it prevents us from being able to become as completely entangled with these devices as we would like.