Information is alienated experience subject to human interpretation. As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value and our creativity then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.
Mashup of a few quotes by Jaron Lanier
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Propaganda is designed to instill panic, demonize the target and spread defeatism.
From an article by Chris Hedges The war according to Hamas
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During the 1960s, large groups of people who are normally passive and apathetic began to try to enter the political arena to press their demands…. The naive might call that democracy, but that’s because they don’t understand. The sophisticated understand that that’s the crisis of democracy.
Noam Chomsky “Manufacturing Consent”, lecture at the University of Wisconsin (15 March 1989)
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Our readiness to accept something as true, or reject it as false, rests less on its argument and evidence and more on how it aligns with the preconceived notions embedded in the dominant culture, assumptions we have internalized due to repeated exposure.
Micheal Parenti Contrary Notions (2007) Ch. 1, Section 4: Objectivity and the Dominant Paradigm
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The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods [and now highly targeted propaganda].
Marshall McLuhan The Mechanical Bride (1951) page 21
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