Franklin Foer > Quotes

“Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“Back in the seventies, Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Critics of soccer contend that the game inherently culminates in death and destruction. They argue that the game gives life to tribal identities which should be disappearing in a world where a European Union and globalization are happily shredding such ancient sentiments. Another similar widely spread thesis that holds that the root cause of violence can be found in the pace of the game itself. Because goals come so irregularly, fans spend far too much time sublimating their emotions, anticipating but never releasing. When those emotions swell and become uncontainable, the fans erupt into dark, Dionysian fits of ecstatic violence.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world in which we’re constantly watched and always distracted. Through their accumulation of data, they have constructed a portrait of our minds, which they use to invisibly guide mass behavior (and increasingly individual behavior) to further their financial interests. They have eroded the integrity of institutions—media, publishing—that supply the intellectual material that provokes thought and guides democracy. Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention, and they have abused it.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“there's a long history of resistance movements igniting in the soccer stadium. In the Red Star Revolution, Draza, Krle, and the other Belgrade soccer hooligans helped topple Slobodan Milosevic. Celebrations for Romania's 1990 WOrld Cup qualification carried over into the Bucharest squares, culminating in a firing squad that trained its rifles on the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. The movement that toppled the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner had the same sportive ground zero.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“As the Protestants celebrate a goal, they're egged on by the team captain, a long-haired Italian called Lorenzo Amoruso, who has the look of a 1980s male model. Flailing his arms, he urges them to sing their anti-Catholic songs louder. The irony is obvious: Amoruso is a Catholic. For that matter, so are most of the Rangers players. Since the late nineties, Rangers routinely field nearly as many Catholics as Celtic. Their players come from Georgia, Argentina, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Holland, because money can buy no better ones. Championships mean more than religious purity.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“The contemplative life remains freely available to us through our choices—what we read and buy, how we commit to leisure and self-improvement, the passing over of empty temptation, our preservation of the quiet spaces, an intentional striving to become the masters of our mastery.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“it's the most familial-based societies where the sense of obligation is strongest, that breed the worst nepotism and cronyism.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. That's always been a danger of the engineering mindset, as it moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and beings to design a more perfect social world. We are the screws and rivets in their grand design”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“(The paradox of Italian soccer). As everyone knows, Italian men are the most foppish representatives of their sex on the planet. They smear on substantial quantities of hair care products and expend considerable mental energies color-coordinating socks with belts. Because of their dandyism, the world has Vespa, Prada, and Renzo Piano. With such theological devotion to aesthetic pleasure, it is truly perplexing that their national style of soccer should be so devoid of this quality.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“There's a strange uniformity in the vocabulary European soccer fans use to hate black people. The same primate insults get hurled. Although they've gotten better over time, the English and Italians developed the tradition of making ape noises when black players touched the ball. The Poles toss bananas on the field. This consistency owes nothing to television, which rarely shows these finer points of fan behavior. Nor are these insults considered polite to discuss in public. This trope has simply become a continent-wide folk tradition, transmitted via the stadium, from fan to fan, from father to son.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“Of course, this is not an innocent activity—even though the tech companies disavow any responsibility for the material they publish and promote. They plead that they are mere platforms, neutral utilities for everyone’s use and everyone’s benefit. When Facebook was assailed for abetting the onslaught of false news stories during the 2016 presidential campaign—a steady stream of fabricated right-wing conspiracies that boosted Donald Trump’s candidacy—Mark Zuckerberg initially disclaimed any culpability. “Our goal is to give every person a voice,” he posted on Facebook, washing his hands of the matter. It’s galling to watch Zuckerberg walk away from the catastrophic collapse of the news business and the degradation of American civic culture, because his site has played such a seminal role in both. Though Zuckerberg denies it, the process of guiding the public to information is a source of tremendous cultural and political power. In the olden days, we described that power as gatekeeping—and it was a sacred obligation.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Just as the world took a neoliberal turn, the National Science Foundation conceived a multi-year plan for privatizing the internet….The euphoria of capitalism’s triumph set the tone for the internet’s emergence.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Politically I am absolutely honest, which is to say, as honest as possible; which is to say, honest more or less; which is to say, far more honest than the general.”
― Franklin Foer, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

“Just as Nabisco and Kraft wanted to change how we eat and what we eat, Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Intellectuals, freelance writers, investigative journalists, and midlist novelists are the analog to the family farmers, who have always struggled but simply can’t compete in this transformed economy.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“But in the end, the hackers were misunderstood figures. They wanted nothing more than to belong, to subsume their brilliant selves in an even more incandescent whole, to lose themselves in the poetry of community.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“There are only so many hours in the day for amateur pursuits—and very few writers are as gifted as Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath, able to generate something lasting from stolen moments.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“I believe that the rising of the proletariat, if it ever comes in this country, will end in a colossal victory for capitalism—that capitalism, as at present and in the past, will play off one mob against another, and pick the pockets of both.”
― Franklin Foer, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

“THE ALGORITHM IS A NOVEL PROBLEM for democracy. Technology companies boast, with little shyness, about how they can nudge users toward more virtuous behavior—how they can induce us to click, to read, to buy, or even to vote. These tactics are potent, because we don’t see the hand steering us. We don’t know how information has been patterned to prod us. Despite all Silicon Valley’s sloganeering about building a more transparent world, their ideals stop at the threshold of their offices.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“If we believe we’re being watched, we’re far less likely to let our minds roam toward opinions that require courage or might take us beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion. We begin to bend our opinions to please our observer.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Even though Silicon Valley’s monopolies exist for the sake of profit, they view themselves as revolutionary agents, elevating the world to the state of oneness that Brand spent his life chasing.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“It's a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Soccer's appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports. For children of the sixties, there was something abhorrent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn't just incidental but inherent. They didn't want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird's prime, still had the taint of the ghetto.

But soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock.”
― Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World

“Every dollar and every moment of care devoted to increasing the individual importance of people, all skill and training, all fine organization to humanize work, every increase of political expression, is a protection against idle use of our military power, against any attempt to convert legitimate and necessary preparation for defense into an instrument of conquest. It may be said with justice that the man is dangerous who talks loudly about military preparation and is uninterested in social reform. It is the people engaged in adding to the values of civilization who have earned the right to talk about its defense.”
― Franklin Foer, Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

“That afternoon, Manchin and Schumer published a joint statement revealing their secret agreement to the world. And the world couldn’t quite believe it. Politico deemed it a “shocker.” And when that outlet relayed the news to Tiernan Sittenfeld, the League of Conservation Voters’ top lobbyist, she could only manage to blurt, “Holy shit.” In Washington, these sorts of surprises were usually spoiled by the city’s high concentration of reporters and its cultural proclivity for leaking. After”
― Franklin Foer, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future

“In the olden days, big houses in New York impeded creativity—editing, printing, distributing a handful of volumes each year. If a writer somehow failed to catch the fancy of a New York publisher, she was consigned to irrelevance. Amazon disrupted the hell out of that arrangement. Anyone with a novel in a desk drawer could publish directly to Amazon.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Pelosi didn’t especially care for the infrastructure bill, at least not as a standalone piece of legislation. But her mission was to keep the wins coming, and she had a promise to her moderates to keep. Her best hope was to press to make it happen all at once, if she could, advancing both bills. If she needed to be the one to pressure Manchin into compliance, well, she would play that role. She’d placed a call to him, left a message to have him call, and then went to glad-hand at a sacred ritual.”
― Franklin Foer, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future

“Over the last generation, journalism has slowly been swallowed. The ascendant media companies of our era don’t think of themselves as heirs to a great ink-stained tradition. Some prefer to call themselves technology firms. This redefinition isn’t just a bit of fashionable branding. Silicon Valley has infiltrated the profession, from both within and without. Over the past decade, journalism has come to depend unhealthily on Facebook and Google. The big tech companies supply journalism with an enormous percentage of its audience—and therefore a big chunk of revenue. This gives Silicon Valley influence over the entire profession, and it has made the most of its power. Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media to ink terrible deals, which look like self-preserving necessities, but really just allow Facebook and Google to hold them even tighter. Media will grant Facebook the right to sell advertising or give Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. What makes these deals so terrible is the capriciousness of the tech companies. They like to shift quickly in a radically different direction, which is great for their bottom line, but terrible for all the media companies dependent on the platforms. Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or that its users prefer ideologically pleasing propaganda to hard news. When Facebook shifts direction like this or when Google tweaks its algorithm, they instantly crash Web traffic flowing to media, with all the rippling revenue ramifications that follow. Media know they should flee the grasp of Facebook, but dependence also breeds cowardice. The prisoner lies on the cot dreaming of escape plans that will never hatch. Dependence on the big tech companies is increasingly the plight of the worker and the entrepreneur. Drivers maintain erratic patterns of sleep because of Uber’s shifting whims. Companies that manufacture tchotchkes sold on Amazon watch their businesses collapse when Amazon’s algorithms detect the profitability of their item, leading the giant to manufacture the goods itself at a lower price. The problem isn’t just financial vulnerability. It’s the way in which the tech companies dictate the patterns of work, the way in which their influence can shift the ethos of an entire profession to suit their needs—lowering standards of quality, eroding ethical protections. I saw this up close during my time at the New Republic. I watched how dependence on the tech companies undermined the very integrity of journalism. At the very beginning of that chapter in my career, I never imagined that we would go down that path.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech