Astra Taylor Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Look back on the utopian dreams of the previous century, or even the century before that, where people thought machines would ultimately give us a quality of life where our needs would be taken care of so we could all basically be artists together in the evening, after we had fished, hunted, raised cattle - or whatever it was Marx imagined for us.

  Astra Taylor

  Dream, Taken, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Not to be to be a vulgar materialist or be too reductive, but all of that was completely absent from the conversation. Instead we were told it was a "revolutionary" moment, where these new tools would inevitably displace the old media dinosaur and that things would be democratized and wasn't it great we could all collaborate on these platforms.

  Astra Taylor

  Media, Would Be, Tools

  Source: therumpus.net

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• And of course the things that get the most attention online tend to be similar to those that succeeded under the old model.

  Astra Taylor

  Attention, Online, Models

  Source: therumpus.net

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• How valiant to deny the importance of money when it is had in abundance.

  Astra Taylor

  Abundance, Deny, Valiant

  Astra Taylor (2014). “The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age”, p.62, Macmillan

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• One thing I point out is, a lot of people tooting the horn of amateurism, actually, these people were professionals. Some are professors who are employed full time. Others are marketers or business consultants.

  Astra Taylor

  People, Professors, Horns

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There's something odd about telling people, artists, that they need to work for free to be pure while you're sitting there getting a salary that ultimately is paid by a generation of young people going deeply into debt for their education.

  Astra Taylor

  Artist, People, Salary

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I mean look at all these acquisitions and mergers - WhatsApp and Oculus and et cetera. There's no way that you can envision these tech companies as the underdog anymore. They're always presented as though they were these little guys who you should be championing - Facebook will overthrow the cable television complex, blah blah - but it's more likely they will merge with them.

  Astra Taylor

  Mean, Guy, Underdog

  Source: therumpus.net

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• A big factor is that the enthusiast camp's values are really rooted in Silicon Valley and in these supposedly new business models. But again, I think this such an interesting moment because things like the NSA revelations are really forcing people to recognize the connections between corporate and government surveillance.

  Astra Taylor

  Thinking, Nsa, Government

  Source: therumpus.net

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• To go from the vision that we would all be free to express ourselves creatively because our material needs were being met, to this reality where nobody has money, people are unemployed, and the machines are harnessed by the lucky guys who Facebook or Google and we're supposed to be happy just to contribute content to their site.

  Astra Taylor

  Reality, People, Guy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I try to look at the evolution of these utopian claims. In the late '60s there was an assumption that the wealth generated by industry would be taxed and then put into social programs and it would provide a baseline of stability that would allow people to have the time for self-expression; and that social contract has eroded over the last four decades and now it's every person for themselves.

  Astra Taylor

  Expression, Self, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• One thing that struck me about going to those tech conferences was all the enthusiasm for free culture, and remixing, and social media, but people's greatest ambition was to be sponsored by Chipotle or something equivalent to that. It was this weird mix of collaborative, utopian claims and this total acquiescence to commercial imperatives.

  Astra Taylor

  Ambition, Media, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Basically political economy - that you have to look at how funding structures shape the media landscape. You have to look at commercial interests, consolidation - the economy structures are experience.

  Astra Taylor

  Media, Political, Looks

  Source: therumpus.net

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• One thing that's important to point out is that this kind of populism has a long and mixed history. It's part of this tradition of problematic anti-elitism where the elites are always the liberal class - the intellectuals, the professors, the artists - and not the economic elites. Why are we so mad and aggrieved at newspaper editors but not at corporate executives? I think we need to look more at the latter, at economic elites.

  Astra Taylor

  Thinking, Artist, Editors

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Again, it does seem like frustration is mounting in interesting ways, but I'm not sure there will be some dramatic tipping point. Then again, looking back on the history of television, you never know. People had to fight and articulate the politics and the rationale for different funding mechanisms. That was a long and drawn-out battle fought in different countries; it's not like BBC and the CBC in Canada just magically appeared out of the ether. People had to organize for it. I'm always willing to be surprised.

  Astra Taylor

  Country, Fighting, Frustration

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's very complicated. There's been this broader mechanism, an industry, which wants people to use free services, from the old days of advertising-supported papers and magazines, to ad-supported free television.

  Astra Taylor

  People, Want, Use

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There's also the issue of tech titans throwing their weight around in Washington and lobbying. There was just a Reuters poll that reported that more than half of Americans are concerned that tech companies are "encroaching too much on their lives." That's pretty major, considering these companies were universally loved not that long ago.

  Astra Taylor

  Issues, Long Ago, Too Much

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I would like people to be more aware of the fact that ultimately we are paying for things, and it's not just as privacy advocates point out that we're paying with our time and our data. We're also paying with money, because the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on advertising is just factored into the cost of the goods that we buy. It's all coming out of our pocket, just in a really roundabout way.

  Astra Taylor

  Data, People, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• ulturally, we are definitely seeing people being to ask hard questions. There's been a major shift over the last year. The NSA revelations played a big part but there are all sorts of other issues too, like inequality and gentrification in the Bay Area, and labor abuses everywhere from Amazon's warehouse, to Apple's factories, to start-ups like Uber and TaskRabbit.

  Astra Taylor

  Years, Nsa, Uber

  Source: therumpus.net

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• On the one hand, I'm a kind of crazy anarchist-sympathizer with a hippie background, so this sounds pretty good to me. Make something for the love of it! But the reality is so much more complicated.

  Astra Taylor

  Crazy, Hippie, Reality

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There was all this enthusiasm about amateurism and the idea that people could now just make videos in their bedroom, or blog news stories and share it online, and isn't this great? Now we can do it just for the love of it and not try to be professionals, corrupted by careerism.

  Astra Taylor

  News Stories, Ideas, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Also, after Examined Life was finished I found myself thinking about the way creative opportunities and distribution channels were shifting. Should I be showing my films in theaters or just think about getting them out online? There were other issues, too.

  Astra Taylor

  Thinking, Opportunity, Issues

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Technology isn't simply addictive - it's addictive because it's a servant to business incentives. There are huge departments in these companies that are devoted to this and staffed by incredibly talented people who have skills that could be put to socially beneficial projects but who are now trying to find out how to make you click and how to maximize your time on a certain site, or encourage teenagers to "friend" more products and constantly engage with them.

  Astra Taylor

  Teenager, Technology, Skills

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Technology and television didn't dictate one path or the other - it was civil society and public policy intervening in creating alternative funding models. So I think that's one of the questions for our time: do we want to intervene in this model or completely acquiesce and leave it to the unfettered, not-actually-that-free market? Neither path is inevitable.

  Astra Taylor

  Technology, Thinking, Creating

  Source: therumpus.net

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• think there's a culture of Silicon Valley that seems to have the attitude that you can have it both ways, that you can be an insurgent but also, ultimately, it's paid for by advertising, when in fact advertising is totally retrograde. Now that's an industry we should be disrupting, and maybe you disrupt it by funding public media. None of this is technological destiny; there are only social choices.

  Astra Taylor

  Attitude, Destiny, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Are we on the tail-end of a generation that is enamored with the novelty of these devices and will younger people coming of age be more blasé about them in a healthy way? You look back at the history of any medium and the people who were there when it was developing, whether it was the telegraph or cable television or radio, thought, This is amazing, it's going change everything, or, The human community will finally be able to recognize each other and speak and be one - I mean, some people thought the telegraph or television would usher in world peace.

  Astra Taylor

  Mean, People, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

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