Collin G Brooke

It is also a broader cultural sensibility composed out of the steady drip-drip of bureaucratic acts, a loose constellation of practices and postures that is diffused throughout society via the legal and executive branches of the modern state. In short, suspicion is less heroic and more humdrum and routinized than we might think.

Not knowing and not being able to know is the meaning of irony today. Not saying or doing the opposite of what one means, but refusing to reveal whether or not one really means not to mean it.

Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.

Instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open Internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players.

the imaginary waxes while the symbolic wanes.

It is this slackening that thinkers like Jodi Dean, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Andrejevic, Byung-Chul Han and others have warned of as a decline of the symbolic: a malfunctioning of socially sanctioned language, a sagging of meaning and norms.

In retrospect we should not be surprised that an industry excluded from basic liability and told it would not be held accountable grew up to be irresponsible and unaccountable.

we distrust to the point that it becomes dangerous to be a judge, a Capitol Police officer, a doctor, a librarian, a poll worker, or someone installing 5G equipment—our civil society cannot function. The winners then will be those who try to rule by force rather than consent.