Astra Taylor > Quotes

“When I look at all the forces aligned to roll back and block democratic change--the concentration of wealth, the structures of minority rule, the market imperative of endless growth, the seemingly irrepressible appeal of racism, and the rapidity of climate change--I feel my will weaken. Given the magnitude of the task at hand, how can people like me possibly make a dent? The established order is so big and powerful, and a single individual so vulnerable and small. But when I engage my intellect, something approaching optimism is possible. The past is proof that it can be done,”
― Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Systems of supremacy and domination ultimately imperil even those who, in many crucial respects, benefit from them. Racism, while it elevates whiteness, is weaponized to erode the welfare and wages that would enable white people to lead healthier, less precarious lives. Misogyny hurts men economically and emotionally, as gendered pay gaps suppress overall wages and through the trap of destructive and often violent standards of masculinity. Transphobia impacts everyone by imposing state-sponsored gender norms and curtailing freedom and self-expression. Ableism, by devaluing and dehumanizing the disabled, dissuades people from demanding the social services and public assistance they need as they cope with illness or aging. The inequality and pursuit of endless growth that drive climate change endanger the homes, infrastructure, and supply chains on which the wealthy and working class both rely—not to mention the complex ecosystems in which we are all embedded.
Solidarity, in other words, is not selfless. Siding with others is the only way to rescue ourselves from the catastrophes that will otherwise engulf us.”
― Astra Taylor, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea

“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

“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

“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

“The problem with foreign oligarchs isn't that they're foreign, but that they're oligarchs.”
― Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone

“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

“What kind of ancestors do we want to be? With every action or inaction, we help decide how the future will unfold. What principles and commitments do we want to adopt for a democracy that doesn't yet exist? How will we cast our votes for a society we won't live to see?”
― Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone

“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

“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

“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

“To be vulnerable and dependent on others is not a burden to escape but the essence of human existence.”
― Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart

“this is the epitome of what communications scholar Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture”—the melding of old and new media that the telecom giants have long been looking forward to, for it portends a future where all activity flows through their pipes. But it also represents a broader blurring of boundaries: communal spirit and capitalist spunk, play and work, production and consumption, making and marketing, editorializing and advertising, participation and publicity, the commons and commerce.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Ostrom and Hess challenge this view. We are at risk, they argue, of a new kind of tragedy of the commons—a tragedy not of enclosure but of underinvestment. The issue is not simply control of culture but its creation.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“The enthusiasm for pirate politics keeps spreading, particularly through academic circles, with a number of scholars writing elegies to “pirate philosophy.” Pirate “practices exceed the limit of individual production and succeed in so far as there is a collective accumulation of knowledge to be shared” and “offer an alternative way to relate to the cultural artifacts,” says one media theorist.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“One way to fight a profit-driven system that treats people as disposable is to instead treat people as redeemable. Solidarity means not writing anyone off completely, not throwing anyone away. It holds out hope that systems and individuals can change.”
― Astra Taylor, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea

“Instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open Internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“Those who would protect the cultural commons must see that the challenge is not only copyright, but those who own the platforms and channels through which culture is increasingly shared.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

“already popular material, reducing the number of articles researchers cited and “narrowing” scholarship compared to paper databases. As the number of sources available online broadened, fewer journals and articles were cited, those that were cited were more recent, and citations were connected to fewer sources.”
― Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age