Best 12 quotes of Siva Vaidhyanathan on MyQuotes

It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it.

[T]he public library is where those without money, power, access, university affiliation, or advanced degrees can get information for free.

A global system that links 2.2. billion people across hundreds of countries, allows every user to post content indiscriminately, develops algorithms that favor highly charged content, and is dependent on a self-service advertising system that precisely target ads using massive surveillance and elaborate personal dossiers cannot be reformed at the edges.

By timbre, temperament, and sheer force of personality, Donald Trump is the ideal manifestation of Facebook culture. Trump himself uses Twitter habitually both as a bully pulpit and as an antenna for reaction to his expressions. Twitter has a limited reach among the American public, and his off-the-cuff, unpracticed, and untested expressions could do him more harm than good. But Facebook, with its deep penetration into American minds and lives, is Trump’s natural habitat. On Facebook his staff makes sure Trump expresses himself in short, strong bursts of indignation or approval. Trump has always been visually deft but close to illiterate. His attention span runs as quickly and frenetically as a Facebook News Feed. After a decade of deep and constant engagement with Facebook, Americans have been conditioned to experience the world Trump style. It’s almost as if Trump were designed for Facebook and Facebook were designed for him. Facebook helped make America ready for Trump.

Derived from the Greek word anarchos, "without authority," anarchism denies law and considers property to be tyranny. Anarchists believe that human corruption results when differences are enforced through the maintenance of property and authority. Anarchists do not oppose or deny governance as long as it exists without coercion and the threat of violence. They oppose and deny the authority of the centralized state and propose governance through collaboration, deliberation, consensus, and common coordination. Justice can emerge from a sense of common purpose and practices of mutual aid, not the monopoly on violence that the state demands. While anarchism is commonly associated with bloody violence and rage, anarchists believe deeply in an ideology of love.

Extremism will generate both positive and negative reactions, or “engagements.” Facebook measures engagement by the number of clicks, “likes,” shares, and comments. This design feature—or flaw, if you care about the quality of knowledge and debate—ensures that the most inflammatory material will travel the farthest and the fastest. Sober, measured accounts of the world have no chance on Facebook. And when Facebook dominates our sense of the world and our social circles, we all potentially become carriers of extremist nonsense

Facebook does not favor hatred. But hatred favors Facebook

I’ve certainly scolded myself for an hour or more blown on a flow of dog videos, family updates, shallow political expressions, and pleas for funds. Every one of those items has some value to me, just as each potato chip delivers some pleasure, some flavor. I savor them. But I lose count. And upon reflection I feel just horrible. But the thing is, snack foods are explicitly designed to make us behave this way. Food producers have studied, mastered, and tinkered with the ratios of salt, sugar, and fat to keep us coming back, even when the taste of much of the food is unremarkable. Facebook is designed to be habit-forming in just the same way.

Real education happens only by failing, changing, challenging, and adjusting. All of those gerunds apply to teachers as well as students. No person is an “educator,” because education is not something one person does to another. Education is an imprecise process, a dance, and a collaborative experience.

Teaching, I soon learned, was a deliberate dance, a constant running conversation, a pleasure.

The pinnacle of the struggle for attention, which we are promised will surely pay off through wealth and fame, is the TED Talk. Purposely informal and limited to eighteen minutes, these punchy, pithy talks are meant to inspire and entertain. They don’t invite deliberation or debate. They don’t demand immersion or even background reading. They are capsules of knowledge. To deliver a TED Talk, however, is the apex of self-branding. And, not coincidentally, one of the major ways people discover TED Talks and other self-promotional videos is through Facebook.

We have a long way to go before humanity is constantly connected to and monitored by a handful of companies. Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Oculus Rift are currently just vanity products for the wealthiest among us. But the model is clear: the operating system of our lives would be about our bodies, our consciousness, our decisions. Attention would be optional. Power would be more concentrated, and manipulation constant. That’s a world with no patience for autonomy and no space for democracy. It would be a lazy, narcotic world. It would not be some dystopian state of mass slavery, as portrayed in The Matrix. It would be kind of dull and kind of fun. It would be an existence like that in Brave New World.