Noam Chomsky Quotes

Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world's most elaborate system of censorship.

Power in America today is control of the means of communication.

The message I'm trying to send is that technology is political, and that many decisions that look like decisions about technology actually are not at all about technology - they are about politics, and they need to be scrutinized as closely as we would scrutinize decisions about politics.

If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.

The C.E.O. of Google doesn't look like a Dick Cheney World Domination sort whom we should worry about as Google ogles our houses, our oceans, our foibles, our movements and our tastes.

Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.

Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person.

If Google decided at any point to publish my search history, or your search history, or anyone's search history, there's a litany of things they could idea police you about, and if it was published, you would be publicly shamed. Everyone would be publicly shamed. But we trust Google, and we trust the people that run that company.

Coal companies have a lot of power in the media, and unfortunately a lot of information doesn't get out.

Words are power. And a book is full of words. Be careful what power you get from it. But know that you do.

A generation of people are being radicalised by the criminalisation of information sharing.

Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.

Society is becoming less and less transparent. People no longer know where decisions that substantially affect their lives are taken, nor by whom, nor how.

Barack Obama is a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.

We had the controlling shares but we weren’t in control.

It is control and domination over information, ideas and knowledge that has enabled the centres of power in the West to shape the world in its own image. More than information and ideas, the West has also succeeded in molding some of our most fundamental values through a whole variety of avenues ranging from comics and cartoons to films and music. The attitudes of significant strata of non-Western societies towards attire and architecture, fashion and food, life and leisure have been determined to a large extent by values transferred from the West. Indeed, it has reached a point where even our thinking on certain aspects of male-female relations, on the position of the woman, on the upbringing of the child, on the family, and on the community are now being conditioned by Western values and worldviews …. Long before Western values and ideas on these aspects of life began to penetrate our societies, we had already structured law, administration, government and the economy on Western models.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

Owning media is power. That’s the way it is.

The sheer amount of information captured from the average Google user makes this company a particularly big threat.

The United States was famously founded as a government of limited powers; suspicion of concentrated private power has surged in periodic waves throughout its history.

They’re everywhere, and it’s not a mistake. These are private companies building private algorithms for private ends.... Algorithms were built by private companies and sold to the government institutions. They call it their “secret sauce” — that’s why they can’t tell us about it. It’s also private power. They are profiting for wielding the authority of the inscrutable.

Americans' information independence is under attack, whether it's the repeal of net neutrality or the repeal of broadband privacy protections.

Capitalism and people who control the market have a large hand in everything. It doesn't have anything to do with figuring out what the crowd wants to hear. It has to do with the media deciding what they think people want to hear.

Compared to Apple, Internet companies like Google and Facebook don't have strong perspectives on the way they want the world to work.

If you think of data as kind of an x-ray of our soul, it's this window into our minds that the company has possessed. It's a very, very powerful x-ray for them to hold because the more that you understand about somebody, the easier it is to manipulate them.