The open web is a quaint notion that will soon be bludgeoned to death, mercilessly fragmented into private channels. Walled off and controlled by ever-fewer businesses whose primary interest isn’t in facilitating communications but in making a fucking dollar. The Internet of Things and cross-device tracking mean you’ll never have to tweet “Poopin’ ” again because ubiquitous ambient awareness will know when you visit the toilet and for how long, measuring your output by grams and pH level. (An ad will appear in your bathroom mirror reminding you to buy tampons.) Pockets of resistance, like app.net, will offer open options to a privileged few. But most will live in someone else’s world; we’ll be nothing more than data-generation mechanisms creating bits to be analyzed, packaged, and sold like goldfish in bags, swimming about in our own shit while we slowly run out of oxygen.

—Mat Honan, who is as smart as he is articulate, on our dystopian very-near future.