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.

But it is different in that ideas have weight. They have momentum. Once an idea starts, it spreads and grows and gets heavier and heavier until it can’t be resisted, even by the Divine.

language can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible.

What we did not understand was that misinformation and disinformation was their business and that they had no intention of using us or anyone else to curb it. A low reliability score next to an article posted on one of the platforms from that website would be an impediment to exactly the sharing and enhanced engagement that the platforms wanted.

The platforms’ business model is dependent on the volume and velocity of the inflammatory content being offered. It is not a side issue. It is the driving metric. The more engaging the content, the more eyeballs. The more eyeballs, the more advertising revenue.

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

Conspiracy theories are particularly well suited to the creation of tribal biotopes on the internet because they allow for delimitation and exclusion, the mechanisms that constitute tribalism and its identity politics.

scale requires technological adjuncts, because scale is only produced when we move beyond the perceptual limits of the human body.

we need both “effective public disapproval” and “the influence of a preponderant professional condemnation.” I offer this book as a springboard to both.