Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a number, say salary or consumer power.
Z
Zeynep Tufekci
Profession:
Unknown
Born:
1970
Nationality:
Turkish
Quotes by Zeynep Tufekci
Showing 50 of 100 quotes
It seems to me that states (and corporations) have become increasingly secretive and opaque, while people are increasingly exposed.
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Zeynep Tufekci
A 'fair' fight between non-equals is not fair, and being blind to power is an implicit endorsement of the powerful.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Ability to disseminate one's ideas on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere; it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have dubbed a 'quasi-public sphere,' where the property owners can sideline and constrain dissent.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Frankly, I find even the most mindless lolcat sites on the Internet to be an improvement over canned-laughter-filled sitcoms.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Entertainment can only go so far if a regime is unable to provide the basic foundations of legitimacy, which almost always includes the necessities for life and often extends to freedom and personal autonomy.
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Zeynep Tufekci
We have an energy crisis but we continue to consume as if there will be a magical solution.
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Zeynep Tufekci
We have large-scale nuclear power but are avoiding steps to evaluate it, update it or make it safer.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Behavioral research increasingly confirms what one might suspect: when confronted with a long-term catastrophic problem which requires short-term unpleasant consequences, many people will try to avoid making a decision altogether even if it makes the problem worse over the long run.
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Zeynep Tufekci
When I type 'Fukushima radiation' into Google, I get a mish-mash of confusing, unhelpful, outdated or sensationalist articles from a random mix of sources, none looking very trustworthy or comforting.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Social media is enhancing human connectivity as people can converse in ways that were once not possible.
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Zeynep Tufekci
If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech - it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Working with children with autism is difficult, tiring work, especially since the social rewards - the smile, the eye-contact, the hug, the thank you - that make most of us tick are few and far between. I've never tried such an endeavor; I'm in no position to judge anyone.
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Zeynep Tufekci
In the Middle Ages, psychosis may have involved visions of the devil, snakes, or witches. In the 21st century, it can involve dressing in pseudo-combat gear, donning numerous high-powered rifles, and walking through a public place in a blaze of violence.
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Zeynep Tufekci
You might be tempted to think that China has a Streisand-effect problem, in which trying to censor an event creates even more publicity. But that assumes the Chinese government doesn't understand the Streisand effect, and that can't be right, because if one government understands attention dynamics online, it's China's.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Western companies (and governments) have deeply integrated themselves with an authoritarian regime without thinking through the consequences, and when push comes to shove, many will choose money over their nice mission statements.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Apple depends on China for much of its hardware production and to juice its iPhone sales.
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Zeynep Tufekci
China has made giant investments in gaming companies, and has many eager gamers.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Lowering the eligibility age for Medicare to 60 and then to 55 and expanding the Veterans Health Administration, the largest integrated health care system in the country, to include firefighters, social workers, teachers and others who serve their communities are among the options that should become part of the political conversation.
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Zeynep Tufekci
What is the point of talking about health care access and outlining how it manifests itself in failure after failure, given that the Republican Party seems determined to block progress and even roll back what little improvement we have had with the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare?
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Zeynep Tufekci
Deluged by apparent facts, arguments and counterarguments, our brains resort to the most obvious filter, the easiest cognitive shortcut for a social animal: We look to our peers, see what they believe and cheer along. As a result, open and participatory speech has turned into its opposite.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Throngs on social media violate fundamental notions of fairness and due process: People may be targeted because of a misunderstanding or an out-of-context video.
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Zeynep Tufekci
If surveillance, censorship and propaganda are the three pillars of authoritarianism, information, organization and leverage are the counter-pillars of citizen power. And the Internet provides the best and most appropriate infrastructure for strengthening all three.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Many of my favorite restaurants in Hong Kong seat diners elbow to elbow, knee to knee.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Exponential growth isn't the only tricky part of epidemiological models. These models also need to use parameters to plug into the variables in the equations. But where should those parameters come from?
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Zeynep Tufekci
Modeling an exponential process necessarily produces a wide range of outcomes. In the case of COVID-19, that's because the spread of the disease depends on exactly when you stop cases from doubling.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Epidemiologists routinely turn to models to predict the progression of an infectious disease. Fighting public suspicion of these models is as old as modern epidemiology, which traces its origins back to John Snow's famous cholera maps in 1854.
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Zeynep Tufekci
If pandemic theater gets mixed up with scientifically sound practices, we will not be able to persuade people to continue with the latter.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Just like healthy diets, the best pandemic interventions are sustainable, logical, and scientifically justified.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Exercise, the outdoors, and sunshine are essential, not just as luxuries but as ways to sustain population health and resilience.
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Zeynep Tufekci
China is not a nation known for cooperating with international agencies when it doesn't want to.
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Zeynep Tufekci
In 2003, the world didn't learn about SARS until after it had escaped China and become impossible to deny.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Fixing the WHO is crucial, because we desperately need well-functioning global health institutions.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Trump's ploy to defund the WHO is a transparent effort to distract from his administration's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Thanks partly to their long history of fighting epidemics, Hong Kong also has some of the world's most prominent experts in infectious diseases.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Unsurprisingly, Hong Kong has had a long history of epidemics. The 1968 flu pandemic that killed 1 million people around the world started in Hong Kong, and killed at least many thousands of the city's residents, and became known as the Hong Kong flu. Hong Kong also lost the most people outside of mainland China to the 2003 SARS epidemic.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Sometimes the social-media mob isn't just justified or understandable, but necessary because little else is available to protect the real victims.
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Zeynep Tufekci
The punishment online mobs can mete out is often disproportionate.
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Zeynep Tufekci
There is no doubt that social-media fury can go wrong.
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Zeynep Tufekci
As long as Facebook and other social-media platforms make money by increasing engagement without much regard to the content they algorithmically amplify, it doesn't matter whether every last employee is an avowed liberal.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Silicon Valley engineers and employees may well be overwhelmingly liberal, but Facebook is run by the algorithms they program, which optimize for the way the site makes money, rather than sifting through posts one by one.
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Zeynep Tufekci
In 2016, there was no sign that conservative pages did badly on Facebook. To the contrary, they were the pages that got the most engagement on Facebook.
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Zeynep Tufekci
Playing the refs by browbeating them has long been a key move in the right-wing playbook against traditional media.
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Zeynep Tufekci
After decades of research, I've personally concluded that perhaps the single most effective police action for crowd control would be for the police to show up dressed like humans, not terminators. But crowd control is often not the point of state violence.
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Zeynep Tufekci
For many people, tear gas is their first interaction with state violence. It's the first time they've been treated like an insect, usually by police geared up like robocops. That warlike stance is a strong escalatory agent in a protest.
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Zeynep Tufekci
If you're teargassed repeatedly, as I have been as an academic researching protest movements, you learn how to hold your breath and close your eyes.
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Zeynep Tufekci
The first time I was teargassed, in Istanbul, Turkey, I thought I was going to die. Overwhelming pain flooded my eyes, nose, throat, and lungs. I couldn't breathe.
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Zeynep Tufekci
The outdoors, exercise, sunshine, and fresh air are all good for people's immune systems and health, and not so great for viruses.
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Zeynep Tufekci