“One of the luxuries of power in Silicon Valley is the luxury to deny that your power exists.”
“In this way, the god-emperors of our smartphones form an instructive contrast with our president-elect: They are anti-charismatic. Unlike Trump, the agents of disruption would rather not be seen as disruptors. In the sharing economy, nothing gets distributed like guilt.”
“The argument that Facebook has no editorial responsibility for the content it shows its users is fatuous, because it rests on a definition of “editorial” that confuses an intention with a behavior.”
“Editing isn’t a motive. It is something you do, not something you mean.”
“I have my own issues with the New York Times, but when your all-powerful social network accidentally replaces newspapers with a cartel of Macedonian teens generating fake pro-Trump stories for money, then friend, you have made a mistake. It is time to consider pivoting toward a new vertical in the contrition space.”
“It’s telling, in that regard, that Trump supporters, the voters most furiously suspicious of journalism, also proved to be the most receptive audience for fictions that looked journalism-like.”
“Authoritarianism doesn’t really want to convince its supporters that their fantasies are true, because truth claims are subject to verification, and thus to the possible discrediting of authority.”
“Authoritarianism wants to convince its supporters that nothing is true, that the whole machinery of truth is an intolerable imposition on their psyches, and thus that they might as well give free rein to their fantasies.”
“This is what Orwell meant when he wrote that the goal of totalitarianism is to destroy our “common basis of agreement,””
“One of the stories of this election season is that the American right has now fully postmodernized itself.”
“This would have been hard to imagine even 20 years ago. There was a time, not all that long ago, when conservative Republicans considered themselves the party of virtue, a word they used not only in the evangelical sense but also to conjure a loose tradition of European and American moral philosophy.”
“They championed Locke as well as Leviticus.”
“Virtue was church, but it was more than that. It was an intellectual formation, or at least a gesture toward one. It was a sense that great things had been thought and written in past centuries and that whether one chose to familiarize oneself with those great things personally, by reading them, respectable people would still regard them with respect.”
“Often the battleground for this idea was the integrity of language itself. The conservative idea, at that time, was that liberalism had gone insane for political correctness and continental theory, and that the way to resist the encroachment of Derrida was through fortifying summaries of Emerson. Great Books. Great Ideas. Ideas have consequences. Words mean things. Remember the Clinton-era furor over “it depends upon the meaning of what the word ‘is’ is”?”
“What had really happened was that the left had become sensitized to the ways in which conventional moral language tended to shore up existing privilege and power, and had embarked on a critique of this tendency that the right interpreted, with some justification, as an attack on the very concept of meaning. But what would we have without meaning? Isolation and chaos, conditions in which it would presumably be easy to raise the capital gains tax.”
“So if the left found itself in the strange position of supporting science on the one hand while insisting that truth was a cultural construct on the other, the right found itself in the even stranger position of investing in meaning even as it dissociated itself from fact. Evolution was a myth and climate change was a hoax, but philosophers still had access to objective truth, provided they had worn curly wigs and died enough centuries ago.”
“It turned out that postmodernism also contained the seeds of a system that would shore up existing privilege and power. All you had to do was take the insights of subversion and repurpose them for the needs of authority.”
“Everything was a media construct? Perfect! Hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier and pose for cameras in a flight suit. Truth was an attribute of language? Brilliant, talk about trusting your gut while you’re shutting down the government. Political correctness invested victimized groups with moral power? Outstanding, redefine your own group, the most privileged of all the groups, as the most victimized. That this would fly in the face of all reason and common sense would make no difference as long as it was done unscrupulously enough, because the intellectual left had spent a generation taking apart the ideas of reason and common sense and was deeply unprepared to defend them.”
“There has always been a heavy dose of unreality mixed into American reality. But so many of the checks against unreality have fallen away, and reality — the thing outside your windows — is paying the price for it.”
“An America where we are all entitled to our own facts is a country where the only difference between cruelty and justice is branding.”
“Mark Zuckerberg, in his mild, untroubled blamelessness, may simply be demonstrating the Crescent Park version of the delusion afflicting many Trump voters, which is that privilege is itself a kind of innocence.”
“But then, some things are hard to disrupt. And if our president-elect has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t have to believe in your own convictions to let other people suffer for them.”