Clara

“Whereas a social movement has to persuade people to act, a government or a powerful group defending the status quo only has to create enough confusion to paralyze people into inaction. The internet’s relatively chaotic nature, with too much information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available information unusable.”
― Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

“Indeed, fascist regimes tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep. For some observers, this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism. It is certainly a fundamental point on which fascist regimes differed most profoundly from authoritarian conservatism, and even more profoundly from classical liberalism.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“Most fascist parties won little or no electoral success, and consequently had no bargaining power in the parliamentary game. What they could try to do was to discredit the parliamentary system by making orderly government impossible. But that could backfire. If the fascists seemed to be more evidently making disorder than blocking communism, they lost the support of conservatives. Most fascist movements were thus reduced to propaganda and symbolic gestures. That is how most of them remained at the margins when no space opened up.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your *time*”
― Bob Black, The Abolition of Work