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Digital connection is now a means to others' commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx's old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human's experience.

The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide. We celebrate the networked world for the many ways in which it enriches our capabilities and prospects, but it has birthed whole new territories of anxiety, danger, and violence as the sense of a predictable future slips away.

The man who pursues the truth by applying his pure and unadulterated thought to the pure and unadulterated object, cutting himself off as much as possible from his eyes and ears and virtually all the rest of his as body, as an impediment which, if present, prevents the soul trom attaining to the truth and clear thinking? Is not this the person, Simmias, who will reach the goal of reality, if anybody can?

But my dear Crito, why should we pay so much attention to what 'most people' think? The most sensible people, who have more claim to be considered, will believe that things have been done exactly as they have.

For let me tell you, gentlemen, that to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil.

You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action; that is, whether he is acting justly or unjustly, like a good man or a bad one.

And since every human being is raised in a particular political community, he or she is fundamentally shaped by that communtys' view of the good and of good action; our opinions about good and bad, noble and base, just and unjust will, to begin with, reflect that overarching communal view.

Oh! be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes, and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts might be; it is mutable, can not withstand you, if you say that it shall not.

Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranguillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.

For nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

If you're reading this now - this sentence - on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around...no matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.

An interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone's address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go though the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions...whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything.

Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don't care about freedom of the press because you dont like to read. Or that you don't care about freedom of religion because you don't believe in God.

The data we generate just by living or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living—would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance vas turning the consumer into a product which corporations sold.

by changing the meanings of basic English words, such as "acquire and "obtain. According to the report, it was the government's position that the NSA could collect whatever communications records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency "searched for and retrieved" them from its database.

There was simply no way for America to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself, and I had the sneaking sense while I was looking through all this China material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America. What China was doing publicly to its own citizens, America might be—could be—doing secretly to the world.

As the millennium approached, the online world would become increasingly centralized and consolidated, with both governments and businesses accelerating their attempts to intervene in what had always been a fundamentally peer-to-peer relationship. But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time...the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people.

Deep in a tunnel under a pineapple field—a subterranean Pearl Harbor-era former airplane factory—I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who'd ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens.

A consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease, and that nothing else will.

Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures. This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.

And, as we have seen repeatedly, the demands of democratically installed authority may also come into conflict with conscience. The importation and enslavement of millions of black people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese Americans, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation.

Some dismiss the Nazi example because we live in a democracy and not an authoritarian state. But, in reality, this does not eliminate the problem. For the problem is not "authoritarianism" as a mode of political organization or a set of psychological attitudes but authority iself.

The price of disobedience is a gnawing sense that one has been faithless. Even though he has chosen the morally correct action, the subject remains troubled by the disruption of the social order he brought about, and cannot fully dispel the feeling that he deserted a cause to which he had pledged support. It is he, and not the obedient subject, who experiences the burden of his action.

While technology has augmented man's will by allowing him the means for the remote destruction of others, evolution has not had a chance to build inhibitors against these remote forms of aggression to parallel those powerful inhibitors that are so plentiful and abundant in face-to-face confrontations.

However, there is a phenomenological expression of this shift to which we do have access. The critical shift in functioning is reflected in an alteration of attitude. Specifically, the person entering an authority system no longer views himself as acting out of his own purposes but rather comes to see himself as an agent for executing the wishes of another person.

In the case of the human organism—if we may employ psychoanalytic terminology—instinctual urges having their origin in the id are not immediately channeled into action but are subjected to the inhibitory checks of the superego. We note that most men, as civilians, will not hurt, maim, or kill others in the normal course of the day.

Indeed, the idea of a simple instinct for obedience is not what is now proposed. Rather, we are born with a potential for obedience, which then interacts with the influence of society to produce the obedient man. In this sense, the capacity for obedience is like the capacity for language.

The most pervasive principle is that the subject's action is directed by the person of higher status. Simultaneously there is pressure to find a coherent line of action in this situation. Such a line becomes evident only when there is a clear hierarchy lacking contradictions and incompatible elements.

Subjects are willing to shock the learner on the authority's demand but not on the learner's demand. In this sense, they regard the learner as having less rights over himself than the authority has over him. The learner has come to be merely part of a total system, which is controlled by the authority. It is not the substance of the command but its source in authority that is of decisive importance.