More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 4 - May 22, 2025
information itself is now where the action is.
When dirty jokes are used by the weak to poke fun at the powerful, they can bring authority figures back down to earth, give the sense that their rules can be suspended.8 That’s why dirty jokes have often been suppressed.
But when such language is used consistently by men with real power to degrade those weaker, this humor becomes menacing: it lays the linguistic path to humiliating victims in other ways as well, to a space where all norms disappear.
The first is psychological: laughter removes the aura of impenetrability around an authoritarian leader.
Conspiracy theory replaces ideology with a mix of self-pity, paranoia, self-importance, and entertainment.
people will go along with the majority opinion to fit in.11 The need to belong is one of the deepest human inclinations,
people are motivated by fear of isolation.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech, which called for freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from fear and want, as the basis for a democratic world.
“If you had the chance to interview Christ you would give the devil equal time as well,” one of Igor’s colleagues lambasted Holland. “Certainly,” Holland answered. “But I would give Christ the chance to say the final word.”
Back in 2011 Guillaume Chaslot, an engineer at Google with a PhD in artificial intelligence, discovered that the way YouTube was designed meant that it served people ever more of the same content, creating and reinforcing one point of view—and not one necessarily based on its factuality.
YouTube was primarily interested in increasing the time that people spend watching it.
“Cognitive patterns in echo chambers tend towards polarization,”
“The twentieth century began with Utopia and ended with nostalgia. The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for new-ness, but by the proliferation of nostalgias,” wrote the late Russian-American philologist Svetlana Boym, who saw nostalgia as a way of escaping the strictures of rationally ordered time. She contrasted two types. One, which is healthy, she called “reflective nostalgia.” This focuses on individual, often ironic stories, tries to narrate the difference between past, present, and future. The other, more harmful type she called “restorative nostalgia.” This
...more
“All politics is now about creating identity”—
“Populism is not an ideology, it is a strategy,”
“disinformation” (content designed to mislead) and “misinformation” (content that misleads by accident).
This fit with previous academic studies Angela had seen that found that reading was related to an ability to imagine a different social and political reality from the one around you.
