Foreword to The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
“The Net’s interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.”
Source: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
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Nicholas Carr 10
American writer 1959Related quotes

Page 14.
A Grammar of the English Language (1818)

Chap. 2 : Transform Self-love into Empathy
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)
Source: "Influence, Power, Religion, and the Mechanisms of Social Control," 1999, p. 161

Cf. Mark Twain: "If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
2010s, Lying (2011)

“The levers of power have been tipping toward the public, thanks to social media.”
Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

“But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.”
1860s, Interview with Alexander W. Randall and Joseph T. Mills (1864)
Context: My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is and will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.

Source: Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938), Ch. 1 "Anarchism: Its Aims and Purposes"
Context: Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.
It was from the understanding of this that modern Anarchism was born and now draws its moral force. Only freedom can inspire men to great things and bring about social and political transformations. The art of ruling men has never been the art of educating men and inspiring them to a new shaping of their lives. Dreary compulsion has at its command only lifeless drill, which smothers any vital initiative at its birth and can bring forth only subjects, not free men. Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.