76 Quotes by Eli Pariser

We bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.

We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it’s looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves.

In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. Along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that’s not actually what’s happening right now.

It’s a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren’t.

It feels great to have your own views reflected back to you, and you feel so right, but actually it’s very dangerous. Because to make good decisions, you need to have a clear view of what all the options are.

In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it’s our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.

Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. – Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder.

Google is great at helping us find what we know we want, but not at finding what we don’t know we want.