Frieda Vizel

“In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

“Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat. We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action—this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society—that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future. And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.”
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language”
― Christopher Lasch

“Members of the educated elite upheld open-mindedness as the supreme political virtue but refused to debate their own idea of the good life, perhaps because they suspected that it could not withstand exposure to more vigorous ideas.”
― Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics