Collin G Brooke

The hijackers, Democrats and Republicans alike, have acted as if the idea that self-government depends on people being able to count on independent providers of information is a quaint relic and that the new media channels present new opportunities that creative political operatives must seize.

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.

Liberalism in the sense I am using it refers to the rule of law, a system of formal rules that restrict the powers of the executive, even if that executive is democratically legitimated through an election.

There are three major psychological weapons that combatants often transfer into culture war: scapegoating, deception, and violent threats.

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.

There is a sort of magic that we are losing. If you introduce viewers to your private life, you lose the magic of distance that is core to charisma, this stardust you can never touch. There is a difference between being a godlike character and the illusion of a guy you can have a beer with. The sheer amount of access makes it less exciting.

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.

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

It has become increasingly possible to give almost continuous access to politicians—or that's the illusion. Think of our phones, these totemic objects we all carry—the intimacy of sitting in bed with the screen close to your face, watching a politician record a video or a livestream of themselves with their own phone. That's different from sitting