His answer was the memex, a high-tech desk. “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory,” he wrote. Seated at their memex, users could peruse thousands of

The trick is to encourage people to join in but also to think for themselves.

At their best, today’s digital tools help us see more, retain more, communicate more. At their worst, they leave us prey to the manipulation of the toolmakers.

While reading Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on “popular highlights” to see what passages other readers had found interesting—and wound up becoming fascinated by a section on chess strategy I’d only lightly skimmed myself.

Patent trolls employ the concept of multiples in a perverted reverse, using the common nature of new ideas to hold all inventors hostage.

“If you check e-mail while you talk to someone you lose forty IQ points,” he says. “People can’t multitask. It’s not possible. I think attention is a big, big issue. People are addicted to their Crackberries. You’ve got to make the systems so that they help people pay attention to the world in front of them.”

Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about.

(Dewey was something of an obsessive about speed; he proselytized for shorthand and phonetic spelling, and even truncated his first name to “Melvil” and last name to “Dui” to save crucial seconds while writing).

When tools and institutions emerged to track Americans’ personal data—like the Social Security number or credit bureaus—we passed laws to limit who could see our info and how long it was retained. Artificial forgetting can work if we want it to.