Quotes About Society

Everything has been homogenized. Over time, with television and jet travel, everybody has blended together. Some of our wonderful charm has been lost.

It doesn't matter how big your neocortex is or how abstractly you can reason: unless you can trust others, your species will forever remain stuck in the Stone Age.

we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

Privacy is not a luxury that we can only afford in times of safety. Instead, it's a value to be preserved. It's essential for liberty, autonomy, and human dignity. We must understand that privacy is not something to be traded away in some fearful attempt to guarantee security, but something to maintain and protect in order to have real security. None of this will happen without a change of attitude. In the end, we'll get the privacy we as a society demand and not a bit more.

Opting out just isn't a viable choice for most of us, most of the time; it violates what have become very real norms of contemporary life.

And before any of that can happen, there must be some major changes in the way society views and values privacy, security, liberty, trust, and a handful of other abstract concepts that are defining this

Or we fear terrorists more than the police, even though in the US you're nine times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.

Given current laws, trust is our only option.

You can't have a United States if you are telling some folks that they can't get on the train. There is a cracking point where a society collapses.

I think politics come out of psychology.

These were the kids destined to live the hardworking lives of their parents and take up their fathers' trades, the future farmers, homemakers and baby makers, if they could scoot through these few years of wild pounding hormones without getting hurt or hurting someone else. If they could keep out of jail for this short stretch, most would go on to be the spine of American society - fixing the cars, working the factories, growing the food and fighting the wars.

If they could keep out of jail for this short stretch, most would go on to be the spine of American society - fixing the cars, working the factories, growing the food and fighting the wars.

War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.

An Internet of Things is not a consumer society. It's a materialised network society. It's like a Google or Facebook writ large on the landscape.  Google and Facebook don't have "users" or "customers". Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos.

If America suffers from drugs, perhaps you should ask what America is lacking, ["What an asshole,"] Eric King commented suddenly. They ignored him.

The Net was a lot like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality. ?

The Internet of Things is not a capitalist marketplace. It's a new platform for radically broadening digital activity.

The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.

Old preconceptions were in tatters, old loyalties were obsolete. Whole societies were paralyzed by the mind-blasting vistas of absolute possibility.

There is a certain threshold, an intensity of sin and cynicism, beyond which no society can survive.…

That doesn't mean that the Internet of Things will triumph, because, in some ways, it can't win. It's too broad and vague to win; it's a huge, looming infrastructural phenomenon, much like "electrification" or "automation" once were. People never voted to become electrical or automated.

There is no power-group of consequence in the world today that successfully renounces smartphones. No one who matters refuses what they offer.

People who might once have bought a newspaper to beguile themselves now look at their Android. Magzines readers look at their Android, too. Amazingly, even manufactures of chewing gum have taken a hit, because nervously chewing while staring out the window has become nervously tapping while staring into a handled screen.

Community and anarchy. Politics pulls things together; technology blows them apart.