Collin G Brooke

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

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

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.

This is the problem beneath other problems because if we can’t agree on what’s true, then we can’t navigate out of any of our problems.”

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

The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.

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.

The critic Roy Christopher has called irony “the most abused trope of our time, a ‘get out of judgment free’ card, an escape route, an exit strategy.”

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.