This issue of Limn focuses on new social media, data mining and surveillance, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, big data, and Internet revolutions. Rather than follow the well-worn paths of argument typical today, our contributors address the problems in new ways and at odd angles: from the power and politics of statistics and algorithms to crowdsourcing’s discontents to the capriciousness of collectives in an election; from the focus group and the casino to the worlds of micro-finance and data-intensive policing. Together they raise questions about the relationship of technology and the collectives that form in and through them.