Eli Pariser

American author, political and internet activist
17 December 1980 —

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As long as a database exists, it's potentially accessible by the state.

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When the technology's job is to show you the world, it ends up sitting between you and reality, like a camera lens.

By definition, a world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there's nothing to learn. If personalization is too acute, it could prevent us from coming into contact with the mind-blowing, preconception-shattering experiences and ideas that change how we think about the world and ourselves.

The only thing that's better than providing articles that are relevant to you is providing articles that are relevant to everyone.

The personalized environment is very good at answering the questions we have but not at suggesting questions or problems that are out of our sight altogether. It brings to mind the famous Pablo Picasso quotation: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

Google is great at helping us find what we know we want, but not at finding what we don't know we want.

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It's the outliers who make things interesting and give us inspiration. And it's the outliers who are the first signs of change.

In a small town or an apartment building with paper-thin walls, what I know about you is roughly the same as what you know about me. That's a basis for a social contract, in which we'll deliberately ignore some of what we know. The new privacyless world does away with that contract. I can know a lot about you without your knowing I know.

If knowledge is power, then asymmetries in knowledge are asymmetries in power.

When people don't have to worry about having their basic needs met, they care a lot more about having products and leaders that represent who they are.

In the early days of the Internet, this was one of the medium's great hopes - that it would finally offer a medium whereby whole towns - and indeed countries - could co-create their culture through discourse. Personalization has given us something very different: a public sphere sorted and manipulated by algorithms, fragmented by design, and hostile to dialogue.

Without connections and overlap between communities, subcultures that make up the city don't evolve. As a result, the ghettos breed stagnation and intolerance.

To give people control, you have to make clearly evident what the options are, because options largely exist only to the degree that they're perceived.

Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we're being offered parallel but separate universes.

The word media, after all, comes from the Latin for "middle layer." It sits between us and the world; the core bargain is that it will connect us to what's happening but at the price of direct experience.

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