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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.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer
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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.
Franklin Foer -
An article in the 'Moscow Times' described Trump as the city's first grand builder since Stalin.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer -
Trump and Yanukovych have shared the same political brain: an operative named Paul Manafort.
Franklin Foer -
Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information. Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to filter the news we encounter. Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.
Franklin Foer
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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.
Franklin Foer -
I'd actually argue that the best thing to happen to the 'Washington Post' was hiring Marty Baron, maybe the greatest newspaper editor of his generation.
Franklin Foer -
Hunting for malware requires highly specialized knowledge of the intricacies of the domain name system - the protocol that allows us to type email addresses and website names to initiate communication. DNS enables our words to set in motion a chain of connections between servers, which in turn delivers the results we desire.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer -
Not even Trump's father's wealth, nor his father's faith in his son's destiny, could save Trump from incessant discipline. At the age of 13, he was shipped off to the New York Military Academy, which employed brutal tactics for the remaking of delinquent character, even resorting to violence to assert control over the boys.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer
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I have really no desire to go back into management ever again.
Franklin Foer -
Booksellers initially thought of Amazon as their best friend. They were coming in, and they were challenging Barnes and Noble, and Borders, which were the big, dominant corporations of the day, and that they would disrupt them and make them less powerful, but they could never envision that Amazon would overtake them all.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer -
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.'
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer
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If you game Facebook and Google in the right way, then you can achieve a mass audience.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer -
Our faith in technology is no longer fully consistent with our belief in liberty.
Franklin Foer -
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.
Franklin Foer