96 Quotes by Franklin Foer

I believe that the rising of the proletariat, if it ever comes in this country, will end in a colossal victory for capitalism – that capitalism, as at present and in the past, will play off one mob against another, and pick the pockets of both.

But in the end, the hackers were misunderstood figures. They wanted nothing more than to belong, to subsume their brilliant selves in an even more incandescent whole, to lose themselves in the poetry of community.

Back in the seventies, Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

It’s a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data.

Even though Silicon Valley’s monopolies exist for the sake of profit, they view themselves as revolutionary agents, elevating the world to the state of oneness that Brand spent his life chasing.

The sense of crisis is everything for Trump - even if it's largely invented. His depiction of darkness justifies his candidacy, the need to violently shake the system. His ability to conjure fear is what distinguished him from all those career pols he has vanquished. And it suits his ego.

Trump has emphatically denied ties to Russia - a claim refuted by his Twitter feed and a cursory Google search. Putin says his government had nothing to do with the hack of the DNC computers, even though it carelessly left a trail of crumbs tracing back to his intelligence services. The cunning liar is exploiting the blundering one.

The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.

Putin has made a habit of supporting far-right candidates who undermine his foes in Europe; perhaps he never could have imagined such a character taking root on American soil. Trump's reasons for aligning with Putin have been more innocent, if no less dangerous.