The People's Platform Quotes

“MPAA. The idea that piracy is an effective form of resistance, a direct attack on the corporate empire, is confirmed by the reaction it has provoked:”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“At present, the United States occupies the worst of both media worlds, lacking either a competitive market or meaningful government investment or oversight.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“There is no such thing as a public Internet: everything flows through private pipes. However, using the Internet for the consumption of culture or to search for information is nearly as essential to participating in modern life as having electricity or plumbing in your home”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Alice Marwick, an anthropologist who did her fieldwork studying the tech scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, argues that new communication technologies reflect the individualist and status-conscious values of the competitive, commercial milieu in which they were developed.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Networks do not eradicate power: they distribute it in different ways, shuffling hierarchies and producing new mechanisms of exclusion.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“They speak about openness, transparency, and participation, and these terms now define our highest ideals, our conception of what is good and desirable, for the future of media in a networked age. But these ideals are not sufficient if we want to build a more democratic and durable digital culture. Openness, in particular, is not necessarily progressive. While the Internet creates space for many voices, the openness of the Web reflects and even amplifies real-world inequities as often as it ameliorates them.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“In fact, wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume, and connect.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Giving people what they want reduces us to consumers instead of treating us like citizens, consumers who are on the prowl for the predictable and comfortable. What we want winds up being suspiciously like what we’ve already got, more of the same—the cultural equivalent of a warm bath.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Jeff Hammerbacher, a software coder and one of Facebook’s early hires, succinctly said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“New media companies look remarkably like the old ones they aspire to replace: male, pale, and privileged.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“The rub is that over the intervening years we have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that this state of insecurity and inequity is a form of liberation.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“How valiant to deny the importance of money when it is had in abundance.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume, and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world—monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Instead, the commons were as much a thing and an activity, both a noun and a verb—a set of social relationships, a bundle of rights and restrictions, a mode of being for mutual aid.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“For all its flaws, copyright provides some incentive for people to take on the risk of creating new work by allowing for the possibility of some economic benefit.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“while piracy signifies “a repudiation of information capitalism at one extreme,” it marks information capitalism’s “consummation” on the other.”
― Astra Taylor, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“A more open, egalitarian, participatory, and sustainable culture is profoundly worth championing, but technology alone cannot bring it into being. Left to race along its current course, the new order will come increasingly to resemble the old, and may end up worse in many ways. But the future has not been decided.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“given not just a chance to speak but to be heard. A more democratic culture is one where previously excluded populations are given the material means to fully engage. To create a culture that is more diverse and inclusive, we have to pioneer ways of addressing discrimination and bias head-on, despite the difficulties of applying traditional methods of mitigating prejudice to digital networks.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“A more democratic culture means supporting creative work not because it is viral but because it is important, focusing on serving needs as well as desires, and making sure marginalized people are”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“While some have suggested that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter can replace government agencies to do much of this work, such a view is shortsighted. Crowdfunding allows individual creators to raise money from their contacts, which gives well-known and often well-resourced individuals a significant advantage. In contrast, a government agency must concern itself with the larger public good,”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“More robust public support for the fourth estate would produce even greater freedom and diversity. In direct contradiction of stereotypes about the chilling effects of “state-controlled media,” countries enjoying such support are home to an unimpeded and vibrant press.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, government intervention is sometimes the only way to ensure competition. When left to their own devices, wired and wireless Internet service providers stifle innovation.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Reform might begin with the phone, cable, and Internet providers who hook up our homes and mobile devices and have carved the United States into noncompetitive fiefdoms, enabling them to extract enormous rewards from what are essentially natural monopolies.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“While there might be many exciting, small experiments online, there are no large spaces dedicated to the public good. And while the Internet could have offered an alternative to the sphere of commodity exchange, private and often monopolistic markets now dominate; contrary to expectations, digital concentration set in more rapidly than with previous mediums. The revolutionary nature of technology was simply no match for the underlying economic imperatives,”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Flickr is no such thing, just as Google is not operating a library. They are commercial enterprises designed to maximize revenue, not defend political expression, preserve our collective heritage, or facilitate creativity, and the people who work there are private employees, not public servants.7”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“This warning applies well beyond books to the majority of online platforms where we spend our time. They are “public” in a limited sense of the word: they are open spaces, but they are also private ones, where the rights Americans claim to hold dear—namely, protections for free speech and privacy—do not apply. When the CEO of Twitter tells users to “think of Twitter as a global town square,” he elides the fact that we don’t have to click “agree” on a Terms of Service, a binding contract, before entering an urban plaza.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“A laissez-faire system will inevitably underinvest in less profitable cultural works, no matter how worthy, enriching, or utterly vital they are. No matter how technically “disruptive” or “revolutionary,” a communications system left to the free market will not produce the independent, democratic culture we need.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“The shift to sustainable culture is possible, but implementing the necessary changes cannot fall to individuals and the marketplace alone. The solutions we need require collective, political action.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Established fair trade principles, known to anyone who has purchased coffee with the telltale label, include transparency and accountability, payment of just prices, nondiscrimination and gender and racial equity, and respect for the environment. These principles speak to many of the”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age