Top 45 Franklin Foer Quotes

Ukrainians use the term ‘political technologist’ as a favored synonym for electoral consultant. Trump turned to Manafort for what seemed at first a technical task: Manafort knows how to bullwhip and wheedle delegates at a contested convention.

What I worry about ultimately is that when we’re stripped of our privacy, when we’re stripped of free will, when we start to merge with machines in a more robust way, at some point, we’ll cease to be identifiably human. And therefore, I think our humanity is, in some ways, the thing that’s under existential threat.

One of Trump’s vulnerabilities is that he doesn’t always vet his people, whether it’s business partners, the dubious characters he retweets, or the foreign leaders who show up at his door.

Who can complain about the price that Google is charging you? Or who can complain about Amazon’s prices; they are simply lower than the competition’s. And that’s why I think we need to shift back to a more Brandeisian conception of antitrust, where we consider values other than simply efficiency and low prices.

Gay marriage is a divisive issue in France, where Fillon has vowed to block adoption by same-sex couples. The battle against Islamism also remains a rallying cry; Fillon’s campaign manifesto is called ‘Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism’.

I have really no desire to go back into management ever again.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about telepathy, and Elon Musk has invested in trying to create a brain-machine interface.

My hope is that we revive ‘monopoly’ as a core piece of political rhetoric that broadly denotes dominant firms with pernicious powers.

Privacy won’t survive the present trajectory of technology – and with the sense of being perpetually watched, humans will behave more cautiously, less subversively. Our ideas about the competitive marketplace are at risk.

There’s no reason why there needs to be one search engine or one social network or one store that we buy all of our crap from. It’s possible to imagine a world in which there’s actually competition.

I grew up using maps and having a sense of direction, and now I have a phone. I used to try to remember numbers, and now I… can just call them up instantly. And that’s great. But what’s happening right now is that we’re in a phase of human evolution where we’re merging with machines.

I’m reading the way a lot of technology executives have decried ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘traditional media,’ and that one of the promises of ‘new media’ was that it would break the chokehold that old media companies had on public opinion.

Brazil is strewn with ruins of projects – refineries, power plants – begun but never finished. Most of this investment never landed in places or industries that really meshed with the trajectory of the global economy. This wasn’t state-of-the art industrial policy. The projects seemed curiously nostalgic.

Of course, formulas always existed in journalism. When I was just getting into the business, ‘Time’ and ‘Newsweek’ knew if they could put Jesus’ face on the cover that it would do really well on the newsstands. So every year, they would put Jesus’ face on the newsstand. There was a formula there.

If you’re presented with choices that steer you toward your worst instincts, that’s what you’ll choose. If I’m presented with Snickers bars, I won’t necessarily seek out kale.

The Internet was invented in an age when our entire approach to regulation has been extremely lax, and so you’d think, ‘OK, there might be a law on the books that governs how these corporations can handle our data.’

My dad has been in the fight against monopoly since it wasn’t so cool. I’m sure I’ve turned to the subject to please him, though I think he might consider some of my arguments a little flamethrowing for his tastes.

Our faith in technology is no longer fully consistent with our belief in liberty.

The demise of Jeb Bush has been a source of immeasurable pleasure for, well, nearly everyone.

Trump considers himself such a virile example of masculinity that he’s qualified to serve as the ultimate arbiter of femininity. He relishes judging women on the basis of their looks, which he seems to believe amounts to the sum of their character.

Trump and Yanukovych have shared the same political brain: an operative named Paul Manafort.

An article in the ‘Moscow Times’ described Trump as the city’s first grand builder since Stalin.

As parents, we have kids who reflect back to us our addiction to devices, and we have all sorts of worries about whether this is a healthy thing.

We think of Netflix as a great personalization machine. It understands how you love French midcentury cinema and British murder mysteries, so examples of those pop up in your personalization engine. But you’re also getting fed a lot of Netflix content.

Michael Bradley has the stuff of leadership; he works hard and can break up the opponent’s play. However, that’s not enough to justify his philanthropic attitude towards possession, the generous portion of balls that he contributes to his foes. His sloppiness constantly culminates in unnecessary goals.

From the start, the promise of Jurgen Klinsmann as manager of the U.S. men’s national team was revolution: gritty, plodding American soccer would give way to attacking flair; the parade of journeymen would end; an era of skilled stylists would begin.

The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.

There are, in fact, apps you can use to measure how many times you check your phone, and I shudder to think how many times I check my phone. I’m sure it would be probably in the hundreds of times that I check over the course of the day.

If you think of data as kind of an x-ray of our soul, it’s this window into our minds that the company has possessed. It’s a very, very powerful x-ray for them to hold because the more that you understand about somebody, the easier it is to manipulate them.

Donald Trump’s interest in Russia dates back to Soviet times. In fact, there’s extraordinary footage of him shaking hands with Mikhail Gorbachev. It comes from 1988, the peak of perestroika and Gorbachev’s efforts to charm the American public.

Having a friend in the Kremlin would help Trump fulfill his longtime dream of planting his name in the Moscow skyline – a dream that he pursued even as he organized his presidential campaign.

Putin has made a habit of supporting far-right candidates who undermine his foes in Europe; perhaps he never could have imagined such a character taking root on American soil. Trump’s reasons for aligning with Putin have been more innocent, if no less dangerous.

Trump uses the phrase ‘America First,’ only dimly aware that he is repeating a phrase from the interwar years and indifferent to its historic resonances. But he compulsively echoes that period – another time when leaders described the world in apocalyptic terms.

When I started off in journalism, you knew there was an audience out there and that you wanted people to read what you produced. But it also felt like you had a limited ability to shape the audience, or to acquire an audience, for what you were doing. So you didn’t really think too much about that.

It’s very un-American to say nice things about elites. Elites are often terrible. It’s not like we’ve ever had a perfect set of benevolent democratic elites ruling over our country. But the fact of the matter is that a representative system of democracy delegates power to elites.

If you game Facebook and Google in the right way, then you can achieve a mass audience.

The genesis of Donald Trump’s relationship with Paul Manafort begins with Roy Cohn. That Roy Cohn: Joe McCarthy’s heavy-lidded henchman, lawyer to the Genovese family. During the ’70s, Trump and his father hired Cohn as their lawyer to defend the family against a housing discrimination suit.

We’ve been merging with tools since the beginning of human evolution, and arguably, that’s one of the things that makes us human beings.

I look at the way that my kids interact with technology, and it becomes a mirror to the ways in which I myself interact with technology. I can see the ways in which that addiction and compulsion starts to settle in on them, and it’s much more unnerving to see it in them than it is to experience it myself.

There’s an oft-used shorthand for the technologist’s view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn’t wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.

Once upon a time, gatekeepers were newspaper publishers and magazine editors and people who ran radio stations and news networks. And they decided what went above the fold and what went on page A10.

Monopolists always defend their monopolies by arguing that competition is wasteful. When the railroad barons completed their monopoly, they argued it would be wasteful to have competing rail lines, AT&T said the same thing. But today, the size and scope of these monopolies is different.

As the 2016 campaign has graphically illustrated, Trump doesn’t treat rivals gently. Testifying before a congressional committee in 1993, he began with his rote protestations of friendship.