Bob Hughes > Quotes

“the New Yorker’s George Packer found that companies like Google and Facebook are full of people who fervently believe they are changing the world more effectively than any government can, and that it is entirely appropriate to become extremely rich by doing so. Packer found the phrase ‘change the world’ used constantly in these companies and among their backers, yet they were surrounded by (and oblivious to) levels of homelessness and poverty that had been unknown in San”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“In class societies, the lower one’s status, the less one can expect to be believed. The least powerful must work the hardest to prove that they are not lying. Credibility is an attribute of high status,”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“So it’s important to state what we want: equality, not just less inequality by some vague amount. Henceforth any inequality will need to be justified. This is not such an enormous conceptual leap from where we are now. Significantly, some of the most straightforward objections to excessive wealth have come from successful entrepreneurs. For example, the late Klaus Zapf, an energetic and successful entrepreneur who built up Germany’s biggest removals firm yet lived in a small flat on a modest, worker’s salary, is quoted as saying: ‘I don’t need money; it just makes us unequal’.92 There”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Preserving one’s options, fear of commitment to some particular option, account for all manner of otherwise inexplicable behavior, and even get in the way of survival. CLOSING”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Beer detested the practice, already entrenched in the 1970s, of accumulating ‘giant data-banks of dead information’, which he called ‘the biggest waste of a magnificent invention that mankind has ever perpetrated’.16 He likened that approach to steering a car using only the rear-view mirror. His”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Under ‘business as usual’, however, managements are less concerned with discharging an organization’s avowed purpose (providing nutritious food, easy transport between A and B, warmth, comfort, and so on) than with discharging their responsibilities to shareholders (to provide healthy dividends and an ever-rising share price) or to themselves (to maintain their careers on a constantly rising trajectory and their children at private schools).”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Verbal undermining is fundamental to the maintenance of inequality and injustice. Not challenging it or even drawing attention to it hands power to those who wish to preserve privilege and oppression. Pretending that one’s attackers are fellow seekers after truth who share one’s own values when it’s clear that they regard them with contempt, betrays the entire constituency of the oppressed. It also hands oppressors and their helpers carte blanche to waste everyone’s time with spurious or mendacious objections, which they can produce in endless quantities”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“For the majority, any hope of controlling the politics that shapes their lives boils down to voting in the occasional election or, if sufficiently provoked, going out on the street and making a noise, and possibly getting arrested or injured. For wealthy people, on the other hand, the main control device is their own social milieu, a capacious affair with an enormous repertoire of tools at its disposal: invitations to weddings, directorships, memberships of advisory boards of charities and the like, mutual favors. Very little effort or risk is entailed: this apparatus even responds to small acts of kindness, frowns and discreet throat clearances, quiet words, firm handshakes and compliments. The”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“One thing that stands out is how important truth-telling is in the lives of hunter-gathering and foraging peoples – and how important the converse, avoidance and denial of the truth, is to a modern society.”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“If we are to save the planet, it will mean developing a vivid sense of the kind of world we want – and that may involve taking the whole notion of Utopia more seriously. The conventional assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish and destructive is not supported by evidence – and is actively disproved by the sense of community and caring displayed in the wake of disasters. In a more equal world, jobs would serve community needs rather than profit, caring roles would be a priority and automation would encourage skilled work rather than eliminate it. But to arrive there we will need to undermine the ‘apparatus of justification’ on which inequality depends. The”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“As wealth gaps widen, the poor rely more on credit, which further enriches the already wealthy. Investment becomes increasingly focused on financial opportunities. The principle of inequality, unchallenged, becomes further entrenched. The”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Fred Hirsch observed that education had already become a resource-hungry activity aimed more at providing individuals with saleable credentials, than at improving society’s overall levels of wisdom and skill. Hirsch”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“In the event, action has to be guided by beliefs. Facts are never gathered for their own sake, no matter how coolly objective one may claim to be, but always and inevitably to confirm or preferably to challenge pre-existing hypotheses and beliefs. One can never know everything. The best anyone can hope for is that one’s beliefs are reasonably well founded.32”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Once the powerful ecological threat of extinction is removed,’ he wrote, ‘civilization collapses into its sub-systemic attitudes’.38”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Rightwingers are fond of warning about the utter mayhem that will ensue if social justice has its way, but the ‘new heaven and new earth’ can unfold with little apparent change to the physical situation (think of the transformation that can happen in a workplace, when the boss is away). It”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“In the US, income inequality is on course to set a new world record by 2030, with 60 per cent of all earnings going to the wealthiest 10 per cent.88 No society, says Piketty, has ever survived that kind of inequality without some kind of breakdown or revolution.”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“the key issue is the justification of inequalities rather than their magnitude as such.89”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“for a social norm to become established, it is not enough for society to disapprove of those who deviate from it; society must also and especially disapprove of those who fail to show their disapproval of the offending behavior.”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Inequality turns credibility into a sort of an invisible, official currency that touches the parts of our lives ordinary currency cannot reach. Instead of being something one simply has and can rely on, one finds that it lies in the hands of others. In”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Those who have a lot, have a lot to lose; those who have little can easily lose everything.”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“The 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s contention that humans are fundamentally selfish and destructive, and therefore need strong rulers, retains a powerful hold. Objective evidence increasingly discredits the Hobbesian version, but that doesn’t stop rightwing ideologues from using every scrap of evidence they can lay their hands on to ‘prove’ that we aren’t as nice as we think we are – and it doesn’t even prevent many apparently democratic and liberal types from going along with it. A”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Whereas the US and UK had only 2.4 and 2.7 doctors per 1,000 patients in 2010, France had 3.4, Denmark 3.5, Sweden 3.8, and Norway 4.2. Cuba, with one of the world’s most egalitarian societies, provided 6.7 doctors per thousand of its population.43 Doctors”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“Speculation, the process of expressing and exploring tentative ideas in public, made people, especially in the work setting, intensely vulnerable, and that… people came to experience their workplace meetings as unsafe. People’s willingness to engage in delicate explorations on the edge of their thinking could be easily suppressed by an atmosphere of even minimal competition and judgement. ‘Seemingly acceptable actions such as close questioning of the offerer of an idea, or ignoring the idea … tend to reduce not only his speculation but that of others in the group.’37 Even”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“The likelihood of rightwing terror can never be dismissed, but solidarity is the best defense against it. That’s why elites have always sought to stigmatize and destroy sources of solidarity.”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“The poor and sick must submit their most intimate sufferings to tribunals, which decide whether those sufferings are real or not.”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World

“The frequent claim that inequality promotes accumulation and growth does not get much support from history. On the contrary, great economic inequality has always been correlated with extreme concentration of political power, and that power has always been used to widen the income gaps through rent-seeking and rent-keeping, forces that demonstrably retard economic growth.3 This”
― Bob Hughes, The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World