Chris Fogle via DFW via William Deresiewicz:

What is heroic about true heroism is that it has no reward.

Rebecca Solnit:

Victory sometimes seems so quotidian that you have to look twice to notice it.

Hunter S. Thompson:

The bulk of the press in this country has such a vested interest in the status quo that it can't afford to do much honest probing at the roots, for fear of what they might find.

Jonah Lehrer:

Nothing keeps us motivated like not knowing better.

Jacob Weisberg:

The conservative position that all spending is evil obliterates any distinction between investment and consumption, between the long-term and the short-term. The United States suffers with an increasingly third-world level of infrastructure, a third-tier education system, and enormous gaps in the preparedness of its workforce. The debate has now ended: Money to upgrade those faltering systems will not be forthcoming.

Rebecca Solnit:

Unpredictability is grounds for hope, though please don't mistake hope for optimism.

Everything changes. Sometimes you have to change it yourself.

Jim Gettys:

More is not necessarily better. More is often worse.

Cory Doctorow:

Pariser is concerned that invisible "smart" customization of your Internet experience can make you parochial, exploiting your cognitive blind-spots to make you overestimate the importance or prevalence of certain ideas, products and philosophies and underestimate others.

Decius:

This is an important discussion.

Aren't "filters" inherent and inevitable? The filters on the Internet might be different from those on earlier technologies, but we've always had filters and always will. Aren't "smart filters" the founding principle of MemeStreams?

If the filters are more "personal" today, overall there is much more information, and more diversity, than in an era when the entire population shared just a handful of major sources, namely the four broadcast television channels.

In some ways "The Filter Bubble" seems like a media technology-focused variation on the theme of Bowling Alone. Is there really anything here that McLuhan wasn't saying 40-50 years ago? Consider:

Each new form of media, according to the analysis of McLuhan, shapes messages differently thereby requiring new filters to be engaged in the experience of viewing and listening to those messages.

And then:

In social media circles, there has been much discussion about a (dare I say it) paradigm shift in the way messages are processed in today's digital culture. The focus of this discussion is in the nature of publishing and filtering; specifically, the shift from filter --> publish (mass media) to publish --> filter (social media). I'm still chewing on this, but I think our old friend Marshall McLuhan can help here...

The self-reinforcement effect of "filters" has forever been a characteristic feature of American society, and there is no particular dependence on high technology; see Tocqueville:

The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme sk... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

The Fallacy of the 'The Filter Bubble'

Garrison Keillor, quoting you:

I could have done that. I could have done that while doing all the other things that I do. Why didn't I?

Theodore Dalrymple:

Resentment never lets you down, because it is powerful in its capacity to stimulate the imagination.

Resentment allows you to dream on about all you would have achieved if things had been different (better, of course, for no one dreams of how little they would have achieved had things been worse).

But the real reward of resentment is that is changes the polarities of success and failure, or at least of the worth of success and failure. The fact that I am a failure in a certain regard shows that I am not only more sensitive than a vulgar success in that same regard, but really I am morally superior to him. To become a success, he has not had to contend with all that I have had to contend with to become a failure. Really, I am better than he, if only the world would recognize it.

Decius:

If the key is weak enough and the resentment high enough, you might fall victim to a public cracking effort.

Dr. Nanochick:

Liking Canadians is a way to identify with what you like about American culture without having to sacrifice your resentment.

Paul Krugman:

The main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn't.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

An ABC News employee:

It was embarrassing. It was demeaning. It was inappropriate.

George F. Will:

Disproportion is the common denominator of almost all of life's absurdities.

Bureaucracies try to maximize their missions. They can't help themselves.

Tyler Cowen:

My question is: what is the wife maximizing?

Decius:

Our job is to apply our well-earned cynicism and fail to follow the baby boomers off a cliff in their pursuit of some idealistic agenda.

Randall Stross:

The T.S.A. is much more talented in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems.

An exchange:

Launcelot: "We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril."

Galahad: "I don't think I was."

Launcelot: "You were. You were in terrible peril."

Galahad: "Look, let me go back in there and face the peril."

Launcelot: "No, it's too perilous."

Decius:

Someone recently told me that they wanted me to look at something in order to understand it, not hack into it. I'm a security vulnerability researcher. I don't understand the difference.

Judith Warner:

We're all losers now. There's no pleasure to it.

Tom Friedman:

I think we're entering an era where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. It's going to be very, very interesting.

Barack Obama:

The question is -- can we afford to borrow $700 billion?

Frank Rich:

That's a good question, all right, but it's not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich.

You know things are grim when you start wishing that the president might summon his inner Linda McMahon.

Noteworthy:

If you think "Russia" when you hear "oligarchy", think again.

A banker:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Etay Zwick:

During the last economic "expansion" (between 2002 and 2007), fully two-thirds of all income gains flowed to the wealthiest one percent of the population. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity managers averaged $588 million in annual compensation. On the other hand, the median income of ordinary Americans has dropped an average of $2,197 per year since 2000.

Tony Judt:

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?

We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.

The question is, What do we do now, in a world where, in the absence of liberal aristocracies, in the absence of social democratic elites whose authority people accept, you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense? The answer is, Either you re-educate them in some form of public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism. And that's the risk we run. Not a risk of a sort of ultra-individualism in a disaggregated society but of a kind of de facto authoritarianism.

What we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

The Capacity To Question

Zadie Smith:

We know what we are doing "in" the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online "eventually becomes their truth"? Is it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software isn't limited?

Dean R. Snow:

It's really easy to kid yourself.

Edward Wyatt and Tanzina Vega:

Privacy advocates are pushing for a "do not track" feature that would let Internet users tell Web sites to stop surreptitiously tracking their online habits and collecting clues about age, salary, health, location and leisure activities.

Marketers hate the idea.

In a conversation last week at The New York Times, Eric Schmidt said that the explosion in online consumer monitoring was increasing friction about how strict the privacy limits should be. And, he added, "it's going to get a lot worse."

Ian Malcolm:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Om Malik:

Rapleaf sells pretty elaborate data that includes household income, age, political leaning, and even more granular details such as your interest in get-rich-quick schemes.

Andy Greenberg:

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents.

A warning:

If you are ever approached by a bunch of over-eager white guys in a white van who try to sell you ("cheap!!!") a set of surround-sound speakers straight out of the van, ... mock them laughingly and offer to sell them some dot-com stock.

Roger Ebert:

I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.

Tim Kreider's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

Roger Ebert:

I love to wander lonely streets in unknown cities. To find a cafe and order a coffee and think to myself -- here I am, known to no one, drinking my coffee and reading my paper. To sit somewhere just barely out of the rain, and declare that my fortress.

Virginie Tisseau:

I ride the tram because every day it takes me to a place less familiar.

Decius:

Noticing is easier in a foreign place because mundane things are unusual. It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Sterling Hayden:

Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

Christina Hendricks:

No man should be on Facebook.

Rahm Emanuel:

We have to play the game.

Zadie Smith:

If it's not for money and it's not for girls -- what is it for? With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery. Maybe it's not mysterious and he's just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming?

Jaron Lanier:

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

Steve Coll:

All wars are terrible, but some must be fought.

Col. Lawrence Sellin:

It doesn't matter how inane or useless ... Once it is part of the battle rhythm, it has the persistence of carbon 14.

Alberto Manguel:

What is created when an artist sets out to create? Does a new world come into being or is a dark mirror of the world lifted up for us to gaze in?

We live in the grip of this immemorial and contradictory injunction: on the one hand, not to build things that might lead to idolatry and complacency; on the other, to build things worthy of memory -- "to put into verse," as Dante says, "things that are hard to conceive."

David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Rebecca Brock:

You can't even remember what I'm trying to forget.

Jules Winnfield:

The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Kurt Schwenk:

I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you'd be somewhat still and quiet for a bit, at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.

Frank Chimero:

Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling.

Michael Lopp:

Bright people often yell at each other.

n+1:

"This is a protest against the skeptics!" retorts a 30-something man with a soul patch. He hands us a leaflet. "Get out of the new road if you can't lend a hand! This is a demonstration! Read our program!"

But the leaflet is blank.

Zadie Smith:

We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? I fear I am becoming nostalgic. I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and -- which is more important -- to herself.

Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

Those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

Monica J. Harris:

As in any social trap, when everybody acts in their self-interest, a negative collective outcome ensues. I don't want to be part of the problem any more.

Virginia Postrel:

We can certainly survive without another pair of shoes, a beach vacation, or an iPad. We just imagine we'd be happier with them. Sometimes we are. But even the most successful purchases rarely live up to our daydreams, which edit out all the flaws and aggravations. At the very least, we get used to what we have. The thrill of novelty wears off, and we start dreaming of something else.

But even the most seemingly materialistic daydreams -- the transformed life we imagine in a new dress, a new car, a new house -- allow us to rise above the here and now, projecting ourselves into an idealized future. In the process, we learn truths about who we are, what we desire, and who we might become. Those things may matter only to our minds, but that doesn't make them any less valuable or any less real.

Roger Scruton:

There is a strong argument to be made that the Facebook experience, which has attracted millions of people from all around the world, is an antidote to shyness, a way in which people otherwise cripplingly intimidated by the venture outwards into society are able to overcome their disability and enjoy the web of affectionate relationships on which so much of our happiness depends. But there is an equally strong argument that the Facebook experience, to the extent that it is supplanting the physical realm of human relationships, hypostatizes shyness, retains its principal features, while substituting an ersatz kind of affection for the real affection that shyness fears. For by placing a screen between yourself and the friend, while retaining ultimate control over what appears on that screen, you also hide from the real encounter -- denying the other the power and the freedom to challenge you in your deeper nature and to call on you here and now to take responsibility for yourself and for him.

Ali Dhux:

A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.

Richard Betts:

The sacred concepts of freedom, individualism, and cooperation are so ingrained in U.S. political culture that most people assume them to be the natural order of things, universal values that people everywhere would embrace if given the chance.

Decius:

This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

Lydia Sweetland:

This is not the American dream. This is not my American dream.

Mark Whitehouse:

Giving up on the American dream has its benefits.

Betts:

In times of change, people wonder more consciously about how the world works.

Roger D. Hodge:

The world is construed out of blood and nothing else but blood. Death is the condition of existence and life is but an emanation thereof. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood. Before man was, war waited for him. The idea that man can be understood is an illusion. All horses possess one soul. What the wolf knows man cannot know.

Vannevar Bush:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

Bill Bryson:

It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung.

Virginia Postrel:

In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas.

By contrast, consider a middle-class worker's wardrobe during the Great Depression. Instead of roughly 90 items, it contained fewer than 15.

An exchange:

Researcher: How long have you had trouble remembering things?

Patient: That I don't know myself. I can't tell you because I don't remember.

Rebecca Brock:

You can't even remember what I'm trying to forget.