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“Creating our own realities is nothing new, but now it’s easier than ever to become trapped in echo chambers of our own making.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“The dark net is a world of power and freedom: of expression, of creativity, of information, of ideas. Power and freedom endow our creative and our destructive faculties. The dark net magnifies both, making it easier to explore every desire, to act on every dark impulse, to indulge every neurosis.”
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“Part of living in a free society is accepting that no idea is beyond being challenged or ridiculed, and that nothing is more stifling to free expression than being afraid to upset or offend.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“The problem with a boundary-pushing philosophy is that it can be used to justify bullying and threatening people with no regard for the consequences.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“I’ve found that just being able to talk about life with others who understand and aren’t judgmental has made it much easier to not jump on the suicide train every time things go south.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“Like many techno-pessimists, Zerzan thinks technology tends to work most effectively for those who already have power, because it maintains and strengthens their grip on society’s levers: more ways to watch us, control us, make us replaceable automatons just like in a nineteenth-century British factory. “The idea that technology is neutral, just a tool, is plain wrong,” insists Zerzan.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“remember the golden rule of the internet: no one is ever as annoying in real life as they seem online.”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“we are often ‘alone, together’, especially when online,”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“Anders is one of 2,000 or so people around the world currently paying between £25 and £35 per month to ensure his body is preserved when he dies.* It’s surprisingly little to pay for a shot at immortality. “On current trends, I estimate a 20 percent probability that I’ll be woken when the science catches up,” says Anders.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“Bitcoin is nothing more than a unique string of numbers. It has no independent value, and is not tied to any real-world currency. Its strength and value come from”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“We don’t know if early Homo sapiens argued whether fire burns or warms, but you can hazard a guess that they did.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“Tech firms are already transferring their economic power into political power through lobbying,”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“An increasing desire for digital affirmation is leading more of us to share our most intimate and personal lives online, often with complete strangers. What we like, what we think, where we’re going. The more we invest of ourselves online and the more ready we are to be offended, the more there is for trolls to feed on. And despite the increasing policing of social media sites, trolling is not going anywhere.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“What you’re selling, Zig explained, is not the product. It’s a lifestyle. A philosophy. A dream. The product is irrelevant. Zig’s stock phrase (‘You can get everything you wish for out of life when you first help other people with what they wish for’) became Igor’s stock phrase too.”
― The Missing Cryptoqueen
― The Missing Cryptoqueen
“how opponents become enemies – is one of the most important questions facing modern democracies”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“Once you’ve got a file, you needn’t fear death—you can always be re-uploaded into a synthetic human body, or, he says, “some kind of robot.” It doesn’t matter what the vessel is, according to Anders, because it would experience consciousness in exactly the same way as we do.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“Rule 36: There is always more fucked-up shit than what you just saw.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“Electoral Commission must insist that all social media spending be recorded and shared transparently – and be prepared to investigate any misuse of personal data or spending irregularities.”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“By exploring and comparing these worlds, I also hoped to answer a difficult question: do the features of anonymity and connectivity free the darker sides of our nature? And if so, how?”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“Intel has invested over $1 billion in AI companies over the past couple of years.”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“Worse still, thinks Zerzan, we have become too dependent on technology for our everyday needs—communication, banking, shopping, etc.—and our sense of autonomy, self-reliance, and, ultimately, our freedom has been eroded as a result: “If you rely on a machine for everything, you slowly stop being a free person in any meaningful sense.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“Google spent more than any other company on lobbying in Washington, DC in 2017 – around $18m”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“It is well-documented that a healthy democracy depends on a vibrant, sizeable middle class.”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“In 2004 Facebook was fun,’ writes Alter. ‘In 2016 it’s addictive.’6 This is no accident. Welcome to the attention economy.”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“Ultimately, the dark net is nothing more than a mirror of society. Distorted, magnified, and mutated by the strange and unnatural conditions of life online—but still recognizably us.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“At the most extreme end of this economic bifurcation, the world’s richest eight men own more than the bottom half of the world’s population – and four of them are the founders of technology companies.8”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“But if everyone starts using Bitcoin, government’s ability to tax and spend will diminish: healthcare, education, and social security will suffer. The things that hold democracies together, and provide support for the most in need. Societies cannot be broken and fixed like computer code, nor do they follow predictable mathematical rules.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
“One of the most important – and sudden – changes in politics for several decades has been the move from a world of information scarcity to one of overload. Available information is now far beyond the ability of even the most ordered brain to categorise into any organising principle, sense or hierarchy. We live in an era of fragmentation, with overwhelming information options.
The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016.
At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.*
What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors.
Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options. The result is a fragmentation of singular, stable identities – like membership of a political party – and its replacement by ever-smaller units of like-minded people.
Online, anyone can find any type of community they wish (or invent their own), and with it, thousands of like-minded people with whom they can mobilise. Anyone who is upset can now automatically, sometimes algorithmically, find other people that are similarly upset. Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal.”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016.
At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.*
What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors.
Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options. The result is a fragmentation of singular, stable identities – like membership of a political party – and its replacement by ever-smaller units of like-minded people.
Online, anyone can find any type of community they wish (or invent their own), and with it, thousands of like-minded people with whom they can mobilise. Anyone who is upset can now automatically, sometimes algorithmically, find other people that are similarly upset. Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal.”
― The People Vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy
“According to other academic studies, between 65 and 93 percent of human communication is nonverbal: facial expression, tone, body movement. Put very simply, our brain has evolved over millions of years to subconsciously spot these cues so we can better read and empathize with each other. Communicating via computers removes these cues, making communication abstract and anchorless. Or, as the web comic Penny Arcade has it: “The Greater Internet Fuck-wad Theory”: “normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad.”
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
― The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
