5 Quotes by Zeynep Tufekci

If the internet is virtual, what harm could a few bloggers typing in an unreal space do?

A common media trope imagines connectivity devices functioning as mere “alienating screens.” In fact, especially in protests, they act as “inte- grating screens” because many people use their devices to connect with other people, not hide from them.

The internet similarly allows networked movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of formal or informal organizational and other collective capacities that could prepare them for the inevitable challenges they will face and give them the ability to respond to what comes next.

As people chat with me and learn that I have studied movements elsewhere, one question keeps coming up: “How do you think this will end?” I say that I do not know. In the mountains of Chiapas, I learned a Zapatista saying: “Preguntando caminamos.” It means “we walk while asking questions.

Libraries are core symbols of an ethic of non-commodified knowledge. Anyone, regardless of how much money she or he has, can check out a book, and a book is passed from person to person in a chain of knowledge sharing.