Sociologists describe the "spiral of silence": people with socially unpopular ideas fear that they're the only ones who think that way, and say nothing, and their silence convinces others that they, too are alone, begetting yet more silence.
Now, he can say that a billionaire who refuses to unlock an iPhone to aid in the fight against terrorism on American soil, the House Speaker, Elon Musk, and none other than Karl Rove himself are secretly commiserating on an island at a lavish, neocon-hosted conference to stop America from exercising their right to choose the next President!
It would be difficult to craft a better narrative to tell working class Americans if you tried.
Owen Jones 15 Dec 2015, "I’m an opinion writer: my opinions appear in the opinion section. But the media is swollen with opinion writers, and in too many cases their work ends up in the news section."
Yhdysvalloissa asuva Hursti saavutti kansainvälistä kuuluisuutta, kun hän kymmenen vuotta sitten paljasti vakavia tietoturva-aukkoja Yhdysvaltojen sähköisestä äänestysjärjestelmästä.
Kiista Viron kanssa alkoi viime vuonna, kun Hursti yhdessä Michiganin yliopiston tutkijoiden kanssa tutki Viron e-äänestysjärjestelmää. (https://estoniaevoting.org/)
GW Bush 20 Sept 2001: "“And one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry and to tell the traveling public, get on board, do your business around the country, fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
Interview by Hugo Prieto in Contrapunto.com
12 October 2015
Article
Edgardo Lander argues that Venezuela’s once-hopeful revolution is coming to an end, because it failed to overcome the Leninist logic of verticality as well as the model of the rentier state.
"Electoral calculations eliminate all possibility of transformation, of going beyond, of imagining a different country, because the starting point is what already exists. In this sense, electoral competition has an extraordinarily conservative effect on political systems, reaffirming ‘common sense’; whoever goes beyond these limits will have big problems."
"Neither in political debates nor in government programmes is there an acknowledgment of where we are. The two party political forces differ in absolutely everything, except for one small detail: both offer (at least when Chávez was last elected) an oil production of six million barrels a day by the end of this constitutional period. They disagree on everything else except the idea of strengthening the oil rentier-state model. But this is precisely what needs to be discussed. The problem is that there is a nation-wide rentier-state consensus. "
Exclusive: Intellectual figurehead of European integration says efforts of previous generations put at risk by Angela Merkel’s hardline stance on Greece
The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzzphrase that has outlived its usefulness: ‘the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people’. So why did that happen – and what’s coming in its place, asks Steven Poole
Guardian 17.12.2014
In truth, competing visions of the smart city are proxies for competing visions of society, and in particular about who holds power in society. “In the end, the smart city will destroy democracy,” Hollis warns. “Like Google, they’ll have enough data not to have to ask you what you want.”
S. Rodotä. The Information Society: Innovation, Legitimacy, Ethics and Democracy, 233, page 17-26. Boston, Mass., International Federation for Information Processing, Springer, (2007)
J. Lamla, B. Büttner, C. Ochs, F. Pittroff, and M. Uhlmann. Die Zukunft von Privatheit und Selbstbestimmung. Analysen und Empfehlungen zum Schutz der Grundrechte in der digitalen Welt, Springer Vieweg, Wiesbaden, (2021)