Collin G Brooke

The story of Section 230 in the United States—and around the world, as other countries followed America’s lead in giving free rein to these American companies—is stunningly simple. Technology platforms had been given the freedom to sell the first consumer product ever that was absolutely immune from age-old common-law or modern regulatory oversight

charisma required distance from the audience.

Scale in its practice in humanist reason is thus both a concept and a metaconcept, insofar as it represents to us not only a theory of objects and a theory analyses, but an argument for the relation between objects and analyses, grounded in the claim that they both “have” scale.

As a result, the news and information ecosystem that is so important to a functioning democracy and civil society has suffered a double whammy. First, as we have seen, the social media platforms’ recommendation engines have promoted misinformation and disinformation. Second, we have now seen how programmatic advertising has provided financial suppo

There is no teleological arc for digital platforms; they don’t move in one direction toward perfection, the way hard drives have been able to store more and more data over time. Instead, it is cyclical, swinging between different strategies of centralization and decentralization like a pendulum.

Conspiracy theories, as we have seen, are both symptoms of confusion and powerlessness and tools of division and distraction that benefit elites.

linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.

Much of our capacity to ‘use’ the world depends, not on an attempt to open ourselves as much as possible to apprehending whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, but instead on apprehending whatever I have brought into being for myself, my representation of it. This is the remit of the left hemisphere, and would appear to require a selectiv

As Gilroy-Ware puts it, “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”