Stewart Brand Quotes

I do sometimes feel like I function within an echo chamber and I'm just kind of preaching to the choir.

What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven't seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn't a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time.

The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.

Life inside the Beltway bubble dulls your thinking.

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

The more a President sits surrounded only by his own views and those of his personal advisors, the more he lives in a house of mirrors in which all views and ideas tend to reflect and reinforce his own.

Who wants to hear that he is wrong when he can be told that he is right? …. We are losing the ability to change our mind because of our media.

If you only talk to people who agree with you, it’s easy to believe that you’re in the majority.

The politicians are not the only people who are in their own silos. Many of our citizens only watch or listen to the news that they want to hear, and if there is anything else, they turn it off. We all need to listen to the people who are on the other side.

We all go through life living in little bubbles, which we share with people who think pretty much the same as us.

Facebook Algorithms have got us all screwed up, where we only listen and talk to people with the same views as us, and I think it's not helping us as a culture to grow.

When people silo themselves by belief, only affiliating with like-minded media organizations and people, we lose the opportunity for genuine conversation, much less persuasion.

The separation of audience into tribes preferring to reinforce their own views with media of similar ideological stripe makes true debate impossible.

In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by the group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.

For too many of us, it's become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or on college campuses, or places of worship or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

We do our worst when we're surrounded by a lot of people who agree with us.

I feel that we Germans are spending less and less time talking to each other. And even less time listening to each other.

If you go to certain cable news shows, you're generally going to hear the viewpoints that you already have reported back to you. I think there's no harm in that.

Technology has allowed the creation of media echo chambers, so that a person can reinforce, rather than debate, viewpoints.

When you got on the private plane, you had your own private lounge where you could close the door. So there wasn't a lot of friendly conversation; we were in incubators by ourselves. That just bred a void - avoid each other, and avoid the issues.

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.

Everything that's happening in our world is a function of what is going on inside of people. We are violent in our minds. We are violent with one another. We walk past one another in the street and don't even look nor make eye contact - don't speak. We can be outraged about the missiles and the planes. I'm more outraged that somebody will walk past me in the street and not look me in the face and say good morning.

If you're always in the company of people who agree with you, you're going to think of people who don't agree with you as venal or stupid. I constantly tell my students that if they're in the company of people who always say "amen" to what you say, find other company. And that is the source of illiberalism, when you are unable to listen to someone who thinks differently. That's when democracies are in trouble.

We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.