Quotes from Manuel Castells

Power does not reside in institutions, not even the state or large corporations. It is located in the networks that structure society.

The Internet is a communication medium that allows for the first time, the communication of many to many, in chosen time, on a global scale.

the media are not the holders of power, but they constitute by and large the space where power is decided.

Yet, the main issue is not the shaping of the minds by explicit messages in the media, but the absence of a given content in the media.

Raum ist der Ausdruck der Gesellschaft.

Clinton brought in billions of dollars, twice the funds raised by Trump, and she also had twice as many campaign offices. But Trump led a movement. His relationship with the electorate was direct, at mass rallies with incendiary speeches.

The protecting state prioritized the protection of speculators and fraudsters over the needs of citizens who had been hit by the crisis and unemployment.

Although Spanish politics is among the most corrupt in Europe, political corruption is in the basic DNA of almost any political system, the USA and EU included, and one of the factors that has had the biggest part to play in the crisis of legitimacy. If

Traditional ideologies, whether the egalitarian ideas of the left, or those that serve the values of the conventional right, have lost their way, and the quest for personal success through politics is now tied to the personal accumulation of capital by profiting from the period that positions of power are held.

the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all took a pro-remain stance, and yet 40 per cent of Labour voters and 60 per cent of Conservative voters went against the leaders of the three parties to vote for Brexit.

how liberal democracy, already weakened at its own hand, is being undermined by the enforced negation of its principles by the onslaught of terrorism.

We find it in the improbable rise to power of a character as bizarre, narcissistic and vulgar as Trump to the imperial office of President of the United States.

only 3 per cent believed that governments worked to improve their lives.

It does, however, form part of a wider and more profound movement of mass rebellion against the established order.

So, nationalism (Spanish nationalism as well as Catalan nationalism), both in Catalonia and in Spain, takes the forefront of the political landscape in line with a broader trend sweeping European democracies.

The Democrats' tactical mistake was to pitch another Clinton, closely linked to the political and financial establishment, against an anti-establishment candidate.

The most significant piece of information in this whole affair is the historic level of voter abstention in the June 2017 legislative elections: 51.2 per cent.

Not what it could have been: It is what it was. And what it was is dead. Octavio Paz, Lesson of Things, 1955

corruption became a systemic feature of Spanish politics, albeit to different degrees depending on the parties, times and areas involved.

The results of the general election in December 2015 established the emergence of a new, imperfect four-party system in Spain. The PP remained the

We talked and talked, strolling to the soundtrack of the waves breaking on the shore at Santa Monica beach, where I was living.

Enter José Antonio González: socialist mayor of the small Granadan city of Jun and part-time hacker, who had brought innovation to his town's democracy by introducing direct public participation through social networks with help from MIT researchers and the support of Twitter's very own CEO.

although racists voted for Trump, the majority of Trump voters are not racist. They are people who feel threatened by their country's rapid economic, technological, ethnic and cultural change. This is why older white men supported Trump: they were trying to preserve their world, a world they saw disappearing day by day, where immigration was the most visible sign that their neighbours were no longer who they used to be.

Trump did extremely well with voters that some analysts have called 'white trash', the pejorative epithet frequently used to describe poor white people throughout history. It was a cry for survival based on the only thing they had a handle on: being white