I once received an email from a college student in Tennessee who had been recruited by a political group to protest against leftist professors. Since I was scheduled to speak at the university in a month, she had studied my website for over ten minutes, trying to figure out if I was a leftist. After perusing several of my articles, she was still unable to determine exactly which side of the political spectrum I was on. Could I just make this easier for her and tell her whether or not I was a leftist, so that she knew whether to protest my upcoming speech? I pointed her to some of my writing on economics and explained that the Left/Right categorization may be a bit overdetermined in my case. She thanked me but asked me to please just give her a yes-or-no answer.

            “Yes and no”, I replied, breaking the binary conventions of digital choice making. I didn’t hear back.

—Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: when everything happens now