Quotes from Robert W. McChesney

If you are using an internet service for free, you are not the customer, you are the product.

The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising—all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism—are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop. Any attempt to make sense of democracy divorced from its relationship to capitalism is dubious.

Yale political scientist Robert Dahl asked. "And if citizens cannot be political equals, how is democracy to exist?

The quasi-mythical competitive "free market" provides an overpowering metaphor for a free and efficient economy, but it has little to do with real-world capitalism. As Charles E. Lindblom put it, conventional wisdom continually "stumbles" and is incapable of grasping capitalism as a system, "because the market's dazzling benefits half blind it to the defects.

because mainstream scholarship simply accepted capitalism as the same as democracy and the only possible economic system, scholarship that emphasized political economy was left to those who were by definition radicals, which increased its likelihood of being stigmatized as "ideological" and "unscientific.

This book seeks to foster that progress by identifying a place of reconciliation between the two poles outlined in the exchange between Paul Mason (whose optimism we relish) and Nigel Pollitt (whose realism we value) within a society that has already changed radically. We

The democratization of the Internet is integrally related to the democratization of the political economy. They rise and fall together.

Nearly everything about the way the digital giants conduct their operations smacks of antitrust violations, or at least violations of the spirit in which the relevant statutes were passed a century ago.

What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone," Eli Pariser wrote in 2011, "is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data.

This may be the great Achilles' heel of the Internet under capitalism: the money comes from surreptitiously violating any known understanding of privacy.

It is not just incompetence or banality that should concern us. Governments, even democratic ones, are capable of acting unconscionably and undermining the very freedoms that are necessary for self-government to be effective. When they grow secretive, the likelihood that they are representing powerful interests grows.

If the public doubts that objective journalism is possible, on what basis can journalists claim professional status?

for all its problems in teaching other subjects, the United States is leading the pack in commercial indoctrination. The massive wave of advertising to children is considered a contributing factor in the epidemic of juvenile obesity, the growth of attention-deficit disorders, and other psychological issues, as well as the rampant sexualization of girls at ever-younger ages.

As Ben Scott puts it, we are in a "triple paradigm shift," wherein personal communication, mass media, and market information have been subsumed within the new order so that the distinctions are becoming passé.