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- There is a tendency to understand compulsion as freedom —
- What we say only ever hints at what must be said. The history of language is a history of hints.
- Freewill is an illusion; the algorithms which now largely control our behavior, however, are not illusions.
- A society is a collective agreement of mutual surveillance and control.
- I find it vaguely disturbing to live without freewill, like I have a phantom limb.
- Technology amplifies power.
- Self-knowledge has been replaced by data. We only understand ourselves externally. Inwardness has evaporated like a puddle in the sun.
- A radical transformation of the human is radical precisely because there is no obvious break between old and new: it is radical because it appears gradual and natural…. The world is completely different than it was when I was born in 1989. Now it is wired. A single, throbbing brain. We should mark our birthdays according to the beginning of the internet, and again, for the beginning of the smartphone.
- When Mark Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to work for the good, the question is not, ‘is he sincere?’ The question is: does Facebook respond to His Will? Does the queen control the hive, or the hive the queen?
