12 Quotes by Astra Taylor

What kind of ancestors do we want to be? With every action or inaction, we help decide how the future will unfold. What principles and commitments do we want to adopt for a democracy that doesn't yet exist? How will we cast our votes for a society we won't live to see?

There is no such thing as a public Internet: everything flows through private pipes. However, using the Internet for the consumption of culture or to search for information is nearly as essential to participating in modern life as having electricity or plumbing in your home.

Giving people what they want reduces us to consumers instead of treating us like citizens, consumers who are on the prowl for the predictable and comfortable. What we want winds up being suspiciously like what we’ve already got, more of the same – the cultural equivalent of a warm bath.

Alice Marwick, an anthropologist who did her fieldwork studying the tech scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, argues that new communication technologies reflect the individualist and status-conscious values of the competitive, commercial milieu in which they were developed.

The rub is that over the intervening years we have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that this state of insecurity and inequity is a form of liberation.

At present, the United States occupies the worst of both media worlds, lacking either a competitive market or meaningful government investment or oversight.

In fact, wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume, and connect.

MPAA. The idea that piracy is an effective form of resistance, a direct attack on the corporate empire, is confirmed by the reaction it has provoked:.

New media companies look remarkably like the old ones they aspire to replace: male, pale, and privileged.