Great, now everyone knows you’re a dog on the internet.

One of the greats when it comes to thinking about where technology meets humanity, Paul Ford writes in Businessweek that maybe we need a Digital Protection Agency, much like we have (or at least, used to have) an Environmental Protection Agency. He even lays out a few potential roles it could play:

Lots of helpful information, plenty of infographics, a way to track just how badly you’ve been screwed, and, ideally, some teeth—the DPA needs to be able to impose fines. I’m sure there’d be some fuss and opposition, but, come on. The giants have so much money it would hardly matter.

And that might barely scratch the surface of what we need, or will need in the years to come.

What regulations would help sort out the mess that’s become of the internet in the hands of the big power players?

What corporations would suffer the most if we did? What would the biggest benefits be?

What are the biggest changes, or sacrifices, we’d have to make to ensure they work?

At least constant headphone wearers can still look down on constant walk-and-texters.

I wear headphones constantly. At work, to tune out office noise. Almost 100% of public transportation or commute time. While running errands. I’m an avid podcast listener so it has to be done, only so many hours in the day.

Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker asks if our personal audio bubbles are making us more antisocial:

Certainly, headphones are an obvious method of exercising autonomy, control—choosing what you’ll hear and when, rather than gamely enduring whatever the environment might inflict upon you. In that way, they are defensive; users insist upon privacy (you can’t hear what I hear, and I can’t hear you) in otherwise lawless and unpredictable spaces. Should we think of headphones, then, as just another emblem of catastrophic social decline, a tool that edges us even deeper into narcissism, solipsism, vast unsociability?

And then goes on to ask if the way we’re listening to music — mostly through headphones — is affecting the kind of music that’s made, or the way it’s made, but that question is way harder to address with evidence, and way less interesting on a personal level. So:

Are headphones making you more antisocial? How much or how often?

Is that a net positive or negative for society? What are the benefits or drawbacks?