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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“(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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“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

“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

“Schumer’s new enemy was the calendar. Senators were about to leave town for the Fourth of July, and Labor Day was looming in the near distance. This was an election year, and he couldn’t plausibly pass the bill once Congress headed to the hustings. Working backward, Schumer‘s staff figured that they really needed to vote a bill into law before Congress fled Washington for the August recess. That left roughly a month to rush things to completion. If they were passing a normal piece of legislation, he wouldn’t have worried. But this was a massive bill, which needed to comply with the exacting constraints of the reconciliation process, enforced by a persnickety parliamentarian.”
― Franklin Foer, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future

“The parliamentarian represented a bottleneck in the process. She would need to scrutinize each provision, judging whether it fell within the acceptable bounds of the rule governing reconciliation, an audit known as a Byrd Bath—in honor of the West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who created the arcane rules back in the seventies. Every provision in a reconciliation bill needed to have a “fiscal implication.” Otherwise, the parliamentarian would rule it out of bounds and excise it from the bill. If she rejected a provision, Schumer would be sent scrambling for a last-minute fix. The fragile structure that Schumer and Manchin had concocted might collapse. Before the Senate dispersed, Schumer summoned Manchin to his office. He felt as if he needed to light a fire under Manchin, to convince him that it was time to rush. —”
― Franklin Foer, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future