Digital Society Quotes

“I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And, and, they're there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.
The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room.
And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food. And the thing, what the book is supposed to be about is, What has happened to us, that I'm now willing--and I do this too--that I'm willing to derive enormous amounts of my sense of community and awareness of other people, from television? But I'm not willing to undergo the stress and awkwardness and potential shit of dealing with real people.
And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like--I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.”
― David Foster Wallace

“In certain young people today…I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well mexecuted in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship. I find it obscene.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence.

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth--from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery--and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral consciousness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal, of wisdom these days? Who represents it? Who even invokes it? Our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of completing isms; we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms, of an absolute relativism. It would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of technology, but more wrong to ignore the great transformative impact of new technological systems--to act as if it's all just business as usual.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“If literature is to survive, to gain back some of the power it has ceded to terrorists and newsmakers of all descriptions, it must become dangerous.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“As people find the balance with online and in-person socialization, the social net will enhance their lives and bring greater understanding to the world. People will maintain an ‘inner circle’ of relationships that will primarily be in person, while staying connected with people around the world through various forms of the social net. This will allow the average person to gain a greater understanding of the world from the eyes of other average people from different countries and cultures. Governments will need to adjust to this new world society.” —Tom Golway 2010”
― Tom Golway

“When writers become less motivated by the desire to reach people directly, but instead must appeal to a not necessarily reliable number-dispensing system, then writers are losing their connection to their context. The more successful a writer is in this system, the less she knows what she's writing.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Online privacy is not a luxury reserved for the tech-savvy; it's a universal right that shapes the contours of a free and democratic digital society. It's about establishing spaces in the virtual realm where our thoughts, expressions, and interactions are shielded from unwanted scrutiny. As we navigate the interconnected web, the preservation of online privacy becomes a non-negotiable reality, defining the core values of our evolving digital landscape.”
― James William Steven Parker

“Infantilising yourself can often seem like a plea for diminished responsibility. Most of us will have encountered someone who, when criticised for behaving badly, appeals to their own vulnerability as a way of letting themselves off the hook. No matter what they do or the harm they cause, it’s never fair to criticise them, because there’s always some reason – often framed through therapy jargon or the language of social justice – why it isn’t their fault. Childishness grants them a perpetual innocence; they are constitutionally incapable of being in the wrong.

But we will never make the world better if we act like this. Thinking of yourself as a smol bean baby is a way of tapping out and expecting other people to fight on your behalf. It also makes you a more pliant consumer. Social media is awash with the idea that ‘it’s valid not to be productive’, as though productivity were the only manifestation of capitalism and streaming Disney+ all day is a form of resistance. It’s much rarer to encounter the idea that we have a responsibility about what we consume, or that satisfying our own desires whenever we want is not always a good thing: “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” has morphed into “there is no unethical consumption under capitalism”.”
― James Greig

“Although it’s mostly just annoying, self-infantilisation’s pervasive existence in the culture could also be the harbinger of something more sinister. Last year, the comic book author Alan Moore suggested that the popularity of superhero films represents an “infantilisation that can very often be a precursor to fascism”. This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s true that a certain kind of kitsch infantilism was always a feature of Nazi art, which was hostile to moral ambiguity and formal complexity. Hitler himself was a Disney adult. If the desire to relinquish responsibility for your own life can be considered an infantile trait, it’s easy to see why this would make you more susceptible to authoritarianism. Today’s white nationalists – with their cartoon Pepes and their ‘frens’ – are as smooth-brain and babyish as any online community, while right-wing reactionaries have recently taken to eulogising 90s video games, Blockbuster and Toys R Us – a glorious past that has been robbed from us by wokeness.”
― James Greig

“I know, I know, I know: it’s a defense mechanism, it’s a coping mechanism, capitalism killed all my hopes so I’m entitled to this, I hate my dad, yeah yeah yeah. You certainly are entitled to live this way. The question, my friend, is whether you actually want to live this way. How’s that coping mechanism going for you, hmmm? You coping pretty good? Posting Simpsons memes really defending you against the drudgery and injustice of a broken world? I’m guessing not! How many times a day do you have to evince derision without directly stating it to be impregnable? It seems exhausting. And how fucking old are people going to get, exactly, before they decide it’s beneath their dignity to live their entire lives in sneer quotes?”
― Freddie deBoer