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One sad consequence of this is that people don't feel permitted to try understand Internet infrastructure, so I'm really grateful to groups like Free Press and other nonprofits who are trying to make the issue urgent and comprehensible. And Andre Blum's book Tubes is great on this topic.

Astra Taylor

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Astra Taylor
Age: 43
Born: 1981
Born: September 29
Film Director
Filmmaker
Winnipeg
Manitoba
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More quotes by Astra Taylor

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One of the big myths about people growing up is that they are digital natives that just because they've been raised with the Internet - that you're very adept at using the app on your phone - it doesn't mean you have any idea about how the Internet actually works.
Astra Taylor
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How valiant to deny the importance of money when it is had in abundance.
Astra Taylor
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One thing I point out is, a lot of people tooting the horn of amateurism, actually, these people were professionals. Some are professors who are employed full time. Others are marketers or business consultants.
Astra Taylor
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To go from the vision that we would all be free to express ourselves creatively because our material needs were being met, to this reality where nobody has money, people are unemployed, and the machines are harnessed by the lucky guys who Facebook or Google and we're supposed to be happy just to contribute content to their site.
Astra Taylor
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A big factor is that the enthusiast camp's values are really rooted in Silicon Valley and in these supposedly new business models. But again, I think this such an interesting moment because things like the NSA revelations are really forcing people to recognize the connections between corporate and government surveillance.
Astra Taylor
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Not to be to be a vulgar materialist or be too reductive, but all of that was completely absent from the conversation. Instead we were told it was a revolutionary moment, where these new tools would inevitably displace the old media dinosaur and that things would be democratized and wasn't it great we could all collaborate on these platforms.
Astra Taylor
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My point, though, is that if lines have indeed shifted, it's not so much that the younger generation just doesn't care, it's that we have ceded more and more of our public life over to the private sector. If you grow up with advertising at school, you have come of age in a sold-out world.
Astra Taylor
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The point is, this is what happens when advertising and data collection is the dominant business mode. We are encouraged to be compulsive. It's not that we're terrible addicts who need to go to an AA meeting and get off our gadgets.
Astra Taylor
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There's also the issue of tech titans throwing their weight around in Washington and lobbying. There was just a Reuters poll that reported that more than half of Americans are concerned that tech companies are encroaching too much on their lives. That's pretty major, considering these companies were universally loved not that long ago.
Astra Taylor
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The market won't let us treat all data equally because there's a potential to make huge gobs of money not doing that. In the United States of America, people will pay to be first unless we do something to stop them. We don't have defenses built in because we haven't been investing in criticism that would help us mount a defense. I
Astra Taylor
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One consequence of this is that people are expected to make it on their own by chasing clicks or building a brand. What a diminished vision that is.
Astra Taylor
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We haven't developed a progressive vocabulary. We say something is public, but we just mean it's viewable online. Or we say it's open, but we just mean it's accessible. I would like for us to think about terms critically and maybe change our vocabulary a bit. What if pubic actually meant publicly-funded, or social meant socialized.
Astra Taylor
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On the one hand, I'm a kind of crazy anarchist-sympathizer with a hippie background, so this sounds pretty good to me. Make something for the love of it! But the reality is so much more complicated.
Astra Taylor
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We've been criticizing these superficial aspects, like whether we are all more distracted. We really need to articulate a defense, a critique, that merges awareness of the technology with a more traditional, progressive, left-wing critique of the market.
Astra Taylor
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I think that overall, ultimately the impact of advertisers calling the shots is a more cloying, complacent culture. For example, it was just announced that Unilever is branding environmental content at The Guardian. How radical or pointed can that content be?
Astra Taylor
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All this stuff - about the materiality of the network, what it's made of, and how it works - should be part of a basic media literacy, because we depend on this technology for more and more aspects of our day-to-day lives.
Astra Taylor
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What we need to do is take that inchoate sense that something isn't right and give it a structural component and the sense that things can be another way.
Astra Taylor
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Giving people what they want reduces us to consumers instead of treating us like citizens, consumers who are on the prowl for the predictable and comfortable. What we want winds up being suspiciously like what we've already got, more of the same-the cultural equivalent of a warm bath.
Astra Taylor
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It's not just that we all as individuals should reevaluate our relationship with our devices - maybe you should, on a personal level - but in terms of balancing the micro and the macro and the personal and the structural, it's actually a bigger issue than you and your phone addiction.
Astra Taylor
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I work for free all the time, as a writer but also as an activist. The decisions we have to make as individuals are really fraught but also can be really wonderful and we're all navigating this reality to the best of our abilities. But, again, I wanted to take a step back and look at the broader context.
Astra Taylor