“We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric… It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave.”
—Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of Growth, Mobile, and International at Facebook, in a conversation at Stanford
“Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan… who comes ambling along.”
—Carl Sagan
“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day.”
—Carl Sagan
“We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.”
—Carl Sagan
“Somehow, we survived as a culture for centuries without exposing ourselves to thousands of profit-driven manipulations dumped on our living room carpet all day, every day.”
—Seth Godin in Shields up
“Don't make the mistake of thinking you're Facebook's customer. You're not. You're the product. Its customers are the advertisers.”
—Bruce Schneier
“The advertising man is the enfant terrible of the time, unabashed before the eternities. He does not conceal his awareness of the fact that he is the cornerstone of the most respectable American institutions; the newspapers and magazines depend on him; Literature and Journalism are his hand maidens. Even war needs him.”
—S. N. Behrman in The New Republic, 1919
Do social media advertisers realize they have the same power today, by funding the new engines of literature, journalism, and war?
“As anyone who has actually gone outside to touch grass will attest, what you see in social media is typically so exaggerated and distorted that it may as well be entirely fictional.”
—Viktor in Are you okay?
I tweeted the following on April 2nd, 2019, about one month before deleting my account:
Our technology is evolving faster than we are. We have built ourselves a twenty-first century library when we possess stone-age critical thinking skills. What did we think was going to happen?
I later learned that Dr. E.O. Wilson once made a similar point, in a statement often quoted by the Center for Humane Technology:
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
His version may be better than mine. I'm just glad I'm not alone.