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Title: The Circle Authors: Dave Eggers Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 14 Date: 2024-09-21 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Having a matrix of preferences presented as your essence, as the whole you? Maybe that was it. It was some kind of mirror, but it was incomplete, distorted.
âBetter to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you donât, right? Some shitty-ass ladder made of shit?â
âThe Rights of Humans in a Digital Age.â Mae scanned it, catching passages: âWe must all have the right to anonymity.â âNot every human activity can be measured.â âThe ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavor is catastrophic to true understanding.â âThe barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable.â At the end she found one line, written in red ink: âWe must all have the right to disappear.â
Suffering is only suffering if itâs done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.
We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown?
There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life problem solving.
Knowledge is a basic human right. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.â
Tags:knowledge
âNow weâre all God. Every one of us will soon be able to see, and cast judgment upon, every other. Weâll see what He sees. Weâll articulate His judgment. Weâll channel His wrath and deliver His forgiveness. On a constant and global level. All religion has been waiting for this, when every human is a direct and immediate messenger of Godâs will.
At certain moments, there was the happy visual of a herd of heads nodding in what appeared to be unison, as if there were some common music playing in all of their minds.
Surveillance shouldnât be the tradeoff for any goddamn service we get.
Tags:technology
Ty had devised the initial system, the Unified Operating System, which combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppyâusersâ social media profiles, their payment systems, their various passwords, their email accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of their interests.
âMae, câmon,â he said. âYou know we canât do that. What would transparency be if we could delete anything we felt was embarrassing in some way? You know we donât delete.â
I mean, like everything else you guys are pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive, but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do.â
Gina was still talking. âBut how to provoke, how to stimulate purchasesâthatâs the conversion rate. You can zing, you could comment on and rate and highlight any product, but can you translate all this into action? Leveraging your credibility to spur actionâthis is crucial, okay?â