Great Throughts Treasury

"One would think that by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the intellectual poverty of technocracy and the primacy of politics over it would be a well-established truth in need of no further defense."

"People somehow assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets, while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography."

"Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable."

"Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses."

"Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, funded in part by the Chinese government, have managed to build surveillance software that can automatically annotate and comment on what it sees, generating text files that can later be searched by humans, obviating the need to watch hours of video footage in search of one particular frame. (To make that possible, the researchers had to recruit twenty graduates of local art colleges in China to annotate and classify a library of more than two million images.) Such automation systems help surveillance to achieve the much needed scale, for as long as the content produced by surveillance cameras can be indexed and searched, one can continue installing new surveillance cameras."

"Sleephackers go to bed with sensors on their wrists and foreheads and maintain detailed electronic sleep diaries, which they often share online. To shift between sleep phases, sleephackers experiment with various diets, room and body temperatures, and kinds of pre-sleep physical exercise."

"Russian young people spend countless hours online downloading videos and having a very nice digital entertainment lifestyle, which does not necessarily turn them into the next Che Guevara."

"Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it's probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don't see any big political consequences out of that."

"Revolution may not be pro-Western or democratic."

"'Solutionism' for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection - by means of technology - without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy."

"Our Internet debates... tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby openness is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering of harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation - the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in - openness in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite...is always bad."

"Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing."

"Technological defeatism - a belief that, since a given technology is here to stay, there's nothing we can do about it other than get on with it and simply adjust our norms - is a persistent feature of social thought about technology. We'll come to pay for it very dearly."

"Surveillance cameras might reduce crime - even though the evidence here is mixed - but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved."

"Steve Jobs was notoriously blunt about products he found wanting, but his attack on Flash - Adobe's popular technology for playing multimedia content inside a browser - was particularly vicious. Claiming it was buggy and insecure. Jobs banned it from the iPad."

"The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites."

"The bigger the network, the harder it is to leave. Many users find it too daunting to start afresh on a new site, so they quietly consent to Facebook's privacy bullying."

"Technology changes all the time; human nature, hardly ever."

"The Chinese government keeps installing video cameras in its most troubling cities. Not only do such cameras remind passersby about the panopticon they inhabit, they also supply the secret police with useful clues? Such revolution in video surveillance did not happen without some involvement from Western partners."

"The director of the FBI has been visiting Silicon Valley companies asking them to build back doors so that it can spy on what is being said online. The Department of Commerce is going after piracy. At home, the American government wants anything but Internet freedom."

"The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes."

"The face-recognition industry is so lucrative that even giants like Google can?t resist getting into the game, feeling the growing pressure from smaller players like Face.com, a popular tool that allows users to find and automatically annotate unique faces that appear throughout their photo collections. In 2009 Face.com launched a Facebook application that first asks users to identify a Facebook friend of theirs in a photo and then proceeds to search the social networking site for other pictures in which that friend appears. By eary 2010, the company boasted of scanning 9 billion pictures and identifying 52 million individuals. This is the kind of productivity that would make the KGB envious."

"The great temptation of Big Data is that we can stop worrying about comprehension and focus on preventive action instead. Instead of wasting precious public resources on understanding the 'why' - i.e., exploring the reasons as to why terrorists become terrorists - one can focus on predicting the 'when' so that a timely intervention could be made."

"The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize."

"The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington."

"The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to admit its downside."

"The Internet can empower groups whose aims are in fact antithetical to democracy."

"The Internet has made it much more effective and cheaper to spread propaganda."

"The message I'm trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology - they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics."

"The Pirates' most advanced and widely discussed technological innovation is an online system called LiquidFeedback, which allows the party to better understand what its members think about issues of the day. Here is how it works: Any member of the party can register (with the optino of using a pseudonym) with LiquidFeedback and propose that the Pirates should do x. If more than 10 percent of other members find this proposal intriguing, it passes to the next stage, in which party members can vote for or against it."

"The newspaper offers something very different from Google's aggregators. It offers a value system, an idea of what matters in the world. Newspapers need to start articulating that value."

"The most effective system of Internet control is not the one that has the most sophisticated and draconian system of censorship, but the one that has no need for censorship whatsoever."

"The point here, as with most open-government schemes, is not that information shouldn't be collected or distributed; rather, it needs to be collected and distributed in full awareness of the social and cultural complexity of the institutional environment in which it is gathered.?"

"The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters."

"The spirit of the Internet. This spirit is a powerful myth concocted by overzealous legal activists, and the sooner we bury it, the better."

"There are good reasons why we don't want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly."

"The shift of communications into the digital realm solves many of the problems that plagued surveillance in the analog age. Digital surveillance is much cheaper: Storage space is infinite, equipment retails for next to nothing, and digital technology allows doing more with less. Moreover, there is no need to read every single word in an email to identify its most interesting parts; one can simply search for certain keywords ? ?democracy?, ?opposition?, ?human rights?, or simply the names of the country?s opposition leaders ? and focus only on particular segments of the conversation. Digital bugs are also easier to conceal. While seasoned dissidents knew they constantly had to search their own apartments looking for the bug or, failing that, at least tighten their lips, knowing that the secret police was listening, this is rarely an option with digital surveillance. How do you know that someone else is reading your email?"

"There are many problems I have with TED. It has created this infrastructure where it very easy to be interesting without being very deep. If TED exercised their curatorial powers responsibly they would be able to separate the good interesting from the bad interesting, but my fear is they don't care as long as it drives eyeballs to the website. They don't align themselves with the thinkers, they align themselves with marketing, advertising, futurist crowd who are interested in ideas for the sake of ideas. They don't care how these ideas relate to each other and they don't much care for what those ideas actually mean. TED has come to exercise lots of power but they don't exercise it wisely."

"There is something almost sacred about the Internet. I'm trying to secularize it."

"There is this absurd assumption that the revitalization of the public sphere is always a good thing. I think people tend to confuse 'civic' and 'civil,' and they believe that everything that is done by citizens is necessarily a good thing because you build a network, an association."

"There is no doubt that the Internet brims with spamming, scamming and identity fraud. Having someone wipe out your hard drive or bank account has never been easier, and the tools for committing electronic mischief on your enemies are cheap and widely accessible."

"There is this huge Roma problem in Europe. There are a lot of Romas who are discriminated against in countries like the Czech Republic or Hungary. They are an ethnic minority that in Europe everyone loves to hate."

"There is this group of people who love innovation. Those people want to innovate, and they think the Internet is a wonderful tool for innovation, which is true. But you also have to remember that much of that innovation is constrained within the realities of the foreign policy."

"This all sounds great in theory...but the reality is much grimmer. In one German region, reports Der Spiegel, the Pirates used LiquidFeedback to gather general opinions on only two issues, while only twenty votes were cast in the controversial law on circumcision.?"

"This marketization of personal information is a big mistake."

"Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, in his typical fashion, trivialized?and did much to popularize?the dictator?s dilemma fallacy by coining a new buzzword: Microchip Immune Deficiency Syndrome (MIDS)."

"This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning."

"Truly smart technologies will remind us that we are not mere automatons who assist big data in asking and answering questions."

"To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image."

"To understand the limits and opportunities of algorithms in the context of artistic creation, we need to understand that the latter usually consists of three elements: discovery, production, and recommendation."