Eli Pariser: The Filter Bubble

To give people control, you have to make clearly evident what the options are, because options largely exist only to the degree that they're perceived.

You have to see lots of ways of living in order to choose the best life for yourself. This is what the best cities do: They cultivate a vibrant array of cultures and allow their citizens to find their way to the neighborhoods and traditions in which they're most at home.

Without connections and overlap between communities, subcultures that make up the city don't evolve. As a result, the ghettos breed stagnation and intolerance.

Who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior.

George Gerbner(quoted)

By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world.

Peter Thiel(quoted)

The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson(quoted)

The greatest achievement of human technology is tools that allow us to create more than we understand.

Danny Hillis(quoted)

Technology is no more benevolent than a wrench or a screwdriver. It's only good when people make it do good things and use it in good ways.

Technology doesn't solve every problem of its own accord. If it did, we wouldn't have millions of people starving to death in a world with an oversupply of food.

In the early days of the Internet, this was one of the medium's great hopes - that it would finally offer a medium whereby whole towns - and indeed countries - could co-create their culture through discourse. Personalization has given us something very different: a public sphere sorted and manipulated by algorithms, fragmented by design, and hostile to dialogue.

Democracy works only if we citizens are capable of thinking beyond our narrow self-interest. But to do so, we need a shared view of the world we cohabit. We need to come into contact with other peoples' lives and needs and desires. The filter bubble pushes us in the opposite direction - it creates the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists. And while this is great for getting people to shop online, it’s not great for getting people to make better decisions together.

When people don't have to worry about having their basic needs met, they care a lot more about having products and leaders that represent who they are.

If knowledge is power, then asymmetries in knowledge are asymmetries in power.

In a small town or an apartment building with paper-thin walls, what I know about you is roughly the same as what you know about me. That's a basis for a social contract, in which we'll deliberately ignore some of what we know. The new privacyless world does away with that contract. I can know a lot about you without your knowing I know.

As long as a database exists, it's potentially accessible by the state.