Jacob Silverman > Quotes

“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society. —Majority opinion in Supreme Court case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Information sharing will improve your LinkedIn experience, which will, according to the site’s mission, boost your value in the world.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“You are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that. —Don DeLillo, White Noise”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“It seemed to me that the inability of the political mainstream to articulate, much less enact, a genuinely populist economic program was one reason why American democracy was approaching the precipice. If given two competing visions of America as a bleak, hobbled country waiting for its strongman savior and a sclerotic liberal party trying to scold its disaffected base into compliance, the tech industry’s leading lights understandably chose the former.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“It was just a quickly conceived art project, cheeky and deliberately nonfunctional, but the virtue of ConstantUpdate.net was that it was mostly useless. It wasn’t constant, it was easily stoppable. You could watch the video on a loop and try to read something profound into the noise, but you could just as easily get the message the first time. It’s finished, it’s done. Here it is.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“How do we reconcile this tension between consuming the world as we want to and knowing that every act of enjoyment translates to a micro-payment in the pocket of Google, Twitter, Facebook, or some faceless advertising network?”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“What would they do with their power, these unelected change agents? They wanted low taxes, no regulation, enormous investments in AI and defense tech to “deter” China. They wanted to banish wokeness in all its forms. They wanted free-speech absolutism and an end to censorious liberalism, but they also wanted to imprison leakers and take away licenses from media organizations they resented. They wanted to prosecute advertisers for engaging in a supposed criminal conspiracy by choosing not to advertise on Elon Musk’s X. They wanted an end to all regulatory and legal investigations that might harm their interests. They wanted personal liberty, so they elected a party that regulated women’s bodies and was a slave to corporate power. They wanted free markets and government bailouts and perhaps a charter city in Greenland. They wanted it all—on their terms.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“Guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how Web sites work.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“This societal shift has been long in the making. In 1981, the Roman Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich coined the term “shadow work” to define work that’s both passed down to consumers or traditional work that’s rarely acknowledged as such.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Miami was a matter for concern, but NYC was the heart of global finance. CityCoins was also knocking on politicians’ doors in Philly, Austin, and other cities. The token still had no use case—it wasn’t yet a vehicle for voting on city governance—except for speculating on the volatile price of a token that was difficult to trade. Like many crypto projects, CityCoins was mostly about hype, promises of future utility, and betting on price fluctuations. Like a classic pyramid scheme, the risk would fall mostly on those coin holders who could least afford to lose their money. It was a prime example of what the economist Tonantzin Carmona called “predatory inclusion”: “marginalized communities gaining access to goods, services, or opportunities that they were historically excluded from—but this access comes with conditions that undermine its long-term benefits and may reproduce insecurity for these same communities.”5 Crypto claimed to offer financial liberation, but it came with a price tag, including, Carmona wrote, “high risks and insufficient consumer protections.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“The result is churnalism—cheap, disposable content repurposed from press releases, news reports, viral media, social networks, and elsewhere, all of it practically out-of-date and irrelevant as soon as someone clicks Publish. With”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Photos become less about memorializing a moment than communicating the reality of that moment to others.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“It was all the same. The incredibly rich, well-connected guy talking to you, the one who might have helped create the very interface through which you were consuming his thoughts, was actually pretty powerless, culturally marginal, easily canceled. Same went for the billionaire ex-president, unfairly kicked off Twitter before having his megaphone restored by a sympathetic owner.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“Who hasn’t stopped an activity mid-stride so that a friend can send out some update about it? Who hasn’t done it himself?”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“In comparison, their American counterparts, like FTX.US and Binance.US, were derelict flea markets where no one shopped—distracting American regulators from the fraudulent behavior happening at their overseas equivalents. This was deliberate. Binance adopted something it called, in an internal presentation prepared by a consultant, the “Tai Chi strategy.” It was a classic “bait and switch,” as Forbes described it.7 The idea was that Binance.US would be served up to regulators as a compliant exchange trying to do the right thing under US law. Binance.US had to be ready “to accept nominal fines in exchange for enforcement forbearance,” according to the presentation—redirecting the energies of US law enforcement away from the mothership, Binance.com. Meanwhile, customers would be funneled to the offshore exchange, which, with its distributed global operations, could operate with greater latitude. For a time, the strategy worked quite well.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“The paradigm of social media is one that Silicon Valley would like to extend to society at large: a technocracy of benevolent, but total, surveillance. In this kind of society, profits flow to platform owners, not those writing tweets and sharing YouTube videos.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Unless we dig through archive.org, an essential repository of Web history, we rarely stumble upon these artifacts, in part because our filter bubbles emphasize the new and the heavily trafficked. Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign site, dolekemp96.org, is still up as of this writing. Encountering it today is remarkable, an immediate encounter with the past. The site is like a museum exhibit (in fact, it remains up due to the efforts of an entity called 4President.org).”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Both Google search results and Facebook’s News Feed algorithm are based on showing us what they think we want. The”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“In one notable incident, the feminism and pop culture blog Jezebel publicly called out a dozen teenagers who tweeted racist remarks after Barack Obama’s reelection. The site went beyond posting the tweets by researching the students, writing short bios for each, and contacting their schools. While the students’ conduct was abhorrent, they were minors, and the manner in which Jezebel went about publicizing their own behavior offered the impression that the act was more about allowing Jezebel to grandstand as a moral authority and to rack up page views based on the resulting controversy. Jezebel could as easily have contacted the students’ schools—the kind of institution of authority that might be able to positively influence the children’s behavior, or, perhaps, enact some punishment in concert with the children’s families—and written a story about the experience while also keeping the students anonymous. Instead, the site ensured that, for many of these students, they would spend years trying to scrub the Internet of their bad behavior, while likely nursing a (perhaps understandable) grievance toward Jezebel, rather than reforming their own racist attitudes. It’s easy to forgo self-examination when you, too, feel like a victim.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“We develop what some social scientists have termed “ambient awareness” of the lives of those in our social graphs and intuit, Jedi-like, when they’ve been absent from the network. Our vision becomes geared toward looking at how many likes or comments a post has received, and when we open the app or log onto the network’s Web site, our eyes dart toward the spot (the upper righthand corner, in Facebook’s case) where our notifications appear as a number, vermilion bright.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“The new American dream is to go viral,” to achieve celebrity by having your image explode across the digital firmament.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“This kind of dizzying, circular integration—of big-time tech and military investments, Heritage Foundation-style policy advocacy, educational activism, nonprofit payroll processing, and old-fashioned influence peddling, much of it taking place under the same roof, all of it reinforcing shared concerns and ownership interests—is not necessarily illegal or even unusual. But it’s revealing of how wealthy entrepreneurs operated in multiple related domains at once, sometimes with a great deal of self-promotion, sometimes more quietly. Their interests tended to converge, if not share office space, with the fortunes of one raising the fortunes of others. And without much notice, a company that was a payroll and accounting firm for a billionaire’s nonprofit foundation could become a lobbying firm representing his other investments.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“We do the work, by clicking, writing, posting, giving over our content, data, and attention. This work is diffused throughout our society, through our day jobs and entertainment and most basic communications. We might not even realize it’s work. The writer and game designer Ian Bogost describes this form of always-on but rarely acknowledged labor as “hyperemployment”: “We do tiny bits of work for Google, for Tumblr, for Twitter, all day and every day.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” according to one popular digital-age axiom. It’s a bit glib, but there’s truth in it.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“If wars are how Americans learn geography, then elections are how they learn about plutocracy. Within the country’s donor-driven political system, each election brings different billionaires into the public eye—chemical magnates, software executives, hedge fund tycoons, reclusive scions to old banking fortunes.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“It more accurately resembles an extreme form of capitalism in which everyone is an entrepreneur but no one is employed.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“It’s in this kind of context that we should look at the labor we put into social media. Twitter is work, Facebook is work. Words are being written, content produced and shared, ads sold against it. A welter of data, some of it structured by us, is produced, and this has value. Yes, this work is often voluntary. You put in what you want, and if you don’t like that Facebook is profiting off of your relationships and communication with friends and your very identity, then you can quit.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“We become beholden to them, laborers on the Facebook farm, where our content can be seen by hundreds or thousands, but it is owned, along with our digital identities, by the Facebook mother ship. We’re not just the product, we’re also making the product. It’s for this reason that some observers have come to think of our relationship to social media as something like feudalism. They call it “digital serfdom.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Pay is meager: a few cents per image or a dollar per hour, sometimes with opportunities to make a couple more bucks.* It’s brutal work, numbing, boring, and rife with imagery of gore, bestiality, abuse,”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Pay is meager: a few cents per image or a dollar per hour, sometimes with opportunities to make a couple more bucks.* It’s brutal work, numbing, boring, and rife with imagery of gore, bestiality, abuse, and violent pornography. As one moderator, or content reviewer as they’re also called, told the journalist Adrian Chen: “Think like that there is a sewer channel and all of the mess/dirt/waste/shit of the world flow towards you and you have to clean it.” The job of these unseen laborers is to deal with all of the horrible stuff people upload to social networks and prevent it from ever being seen. They are the ones who make sure that Facebook is a clean and well-lighted place.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection