Digital Disconnect Quotes

“The entire system of free market capitalism, as it is practiced in the United States and in many Western nations,” Simon Mainwaring writes,     is leading us further and further down the wrong path, toward a world dominated by narrow self-interest, greed, corporatism, and insensitivity to the greater good of humanity and to the planet itself. Short-term thinking and the single-minded pursuit of profit are increasingly subverting an economic system that otherwise has the capacity to benefit everyone.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“By three months old, 40 percent of infants watch screen media regularly; by two years, 90 percent do. By her third birthday, the average American child recognizes one hundred brand logos. The typical child is exposed to forty thousand screen ads per year. Children know the names of more branded characters than of real animals. By her tenth birthday, the average American child knows three hundred to four hundred brands. Research shows over and over that preschoolers will overwhelmingly think advertised products, branded products, are superior even when the actual contents are identical.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“because mainstream scholarship simply accepted capitalism as the same as democracy and the only possible economic system, scholarship that emphasized political economy was left to those who were by definition radicals, which increased its likelihood of being stigmatized as “ideological” and “unscientific.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“The quasi-mythical competitive “free market” provides an overpowering metaphor for a free and efficient economy, but it has little to do with real-world capitalism. As Charles E. Lindblom put it, conventional wisdom continually “stumbles” and is incapable of grasping capitalism as a system, “because the market’s dazzling benefits half blind it to the defects.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“Certainly the Internet is changing capitalism in significant ways, and it may well assist those who wish to reform or replace it in the political arena; but it is not making capitalism become, in effect, for lack of a better term, a green, democratic socialist utopia.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“Yale political scientist Robert Dahl asked. “And if citizens cannot be political equals, how is democracy to exist?”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising—all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism—are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop. Any attempt to make sense of democracy divorced from its relationship to capitalism is dubious.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“When the U.S. government turns to domestic spying and illegal harassment of citizens, it rarely if ever has been known to go after billionaires, corporate CEOs, or their advocates; it has a track record of using its spying powers domestically on, among others, law-abiding and nonviolent dissident groups that challenge entrenched wealth and privilege. When one sees how peaceful Occupy protesters have been made the target of Homeland Security covert scrutiny here in the United States—while the bankers whose dubious shenanigans helped drive the economy off a cliff waltz free—the dimensions of the problem grow stark.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“It is not just incompetence or banality that should concern us. Governments, even democratic ones, are capable of acting unconscionably and undermining the very freedoms that are necessary for self-government to be effective. When they grow secretive, the likelihood that they are representing powerful interests grows.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“The good news is the energy created by the campaigns against SOPA and CISPA and mounting concerns about privacy, monopoly, and digital censorship helped Free Press generate a broad coalition of some two thousand groups to organize popular support for protecting and expanding what it terms “Internet Freedom.” Its “Declaration of Internet Freedom” exploded into global prominence in the summer of 2012 and was translated into seventy languages in its first month.251 This is one of the central political fights of the times.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“This may be the great Achilles’ heel of the Internet under capitalism: the money comes from surreptitiously violating any known understanding of privacy.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone,” Eli Pariser wrote in 2011, “is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“will be a test of the political system to see if it can get the high-tech sector to pay what other firms do, and help address the nation’s deficit problems that are the purportedly the overriding concern of so many politicians. A problem for Apple and its fellow Internet giants is that the profits they allocate to foreign locales cannot be repatriated to the United States without paying U.S. taxes. To get around this, the digital giants are launching a lobbying campaign to establish a “repatriation holiday.” The last such corporate tax repatriation was in 2004. This would allow for a brief amnesty period during which American businesses could return these foreign profits to the United States without owing any taxes on them.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“In October 2010 a Bloomberg reporter explained how Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the previous three years through transfer pricing games known by names such as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich,” ending up with an overseas tax rate of 2.4 percent. The problem is getting worse. Microsoft’s tax bill has been falling sharply, for similar reasons. Cisco is at it. They are all at it. Transfer pricing alone costs the United States an estimated $60 billion a year—and that is just one form of the offshore tax game.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“Some sense of the rapidly growing power of the digital giants comes when one looks at international politics, where the giants play a foundational role. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was invited to the 2011 G8 meetings, where he sat at the table and discussed world politics.92 MacKinnon characterizes “Facebookistan” and “Googledom” as virtual nation-states obsessed with limiting the ability of governments anywhere to interfere with their profitability and growth, which is their driving concern. The U.S. government—the same one that is theoretically working to regulate the giants domestically—generally acts as their powerful advocate globally. “Right now our social contract with the digital sovereigns is at a primitive, Hobbesian, royalist level,” Mackinnon writes. “If we are lucky we get a good sovereign, and we pray that his son or chosen successor is not evil. There is a reason most people no longer accept that sort of sovereignty.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“Nearly everything about the way the digital giants conduct their operations smacks of antitrust violations, or at least violations of the spirit in which the relevant statutes were passed a century ago.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“for all its problems in teaching other subjects, the United States is leading the pack in commercial indoctrination. The massive wave of advertising to children is considered a contributing factor in the epidemic of juvenile obesity, the growth of attention-deficit disorders, and other psychological issues, as well as the rampant sexualization of girls at ever-younger ages.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“The democratization of the Internet is integrally related to the democratization of the political economy. They rise and fall together.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“As Ben Scott puts it, we are in a “triple paradigm shift,” wherein personal communication, mass media, and market information have been subsumed within the new order so that the distinctions are becoming passé.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“The Internet’s development is intricately connected to the political economy’s development.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

“My core argument is that most assessments of the Internet fail to ground it in political economy; they fail to understand the importance of capitalism in shaping and, for lack of a better term, domesticating the Internet. When capitalism is mentioned, it is usually as the “free market,” which is taken as a benevolent given, almost a synonym for democracy. The conventional discussion of capitalism often degenerates into a bunch of clichés and is only loosely related to the capitalism that really exists.”
― Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy