A biography for Zeynep Tufekcihasn’t been written yet.
“As long as Facebook and other social-media platforms make money by increasing engagement without much regard to the content they algorithmically amplify, it doesn't matter whether every last employee is an avowed liberal.”
“Frankly, I find even the most mindless lolcat sites on the Internet to be an improvement over canned-laughter-filled sitcoms.”
“It's not speech per se that allows democracies to function, but the ability to agree - eventually, at least some of the time - on what is true, what is important and what serves the public good. This doesn't mean everyone must agree on every fact, or that our priorities are necessarily uniform.”
“We care deeply, deeply about our social status and signals, and will do just about anything for them. And humans will make anything and everything into social signals.”
“If you're teargassed repeatedly, as I have been as an academic researching protest movements, you learn how to hold your breath and close your eyes.”
“When people confidently announce that once robots come for our jobs, we'll find something else to do like we always did, they are drawing from a very short history.”
“In many complex systems, efficiency, redundancy, and resiliency pull in different directions: More efficient systems, which are cheaper, eliminate redundancies, which provide resilience but cost more.”
“I'm all for biking and bikeable cities.”
“The punishment online mobs can mete out is often disproportionate.”
“Lawmakers, sometimes they get surprised by something and they assess it to be powerful even when it's not really signaling that kind of capacity.”
“Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech - it's just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard.”
“China has made giant investments in gaming companies, and has many eager gamers.”
“Entertainment can only go so far if a regime is unable to provide the basic foundations of legitimacy, which almost always includes the necessities for life and often extends to freedom and personal autonomy.”
“When I type 'Fukushima radiation' into Google, I get a mish-mash of confusing, unhelpful, outdated or sensationalist articles from a random mix of sources, none looking very trustworthy or comforting.”
“Exercise, the outdoors, and sunshine are essential, not just as luxuries but as ways to sustain population health and resilience.”
“If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives.”
“Authoritarian blindness is a perennial problem, especially in large countries like China with centralized, top-down administration.”
“In fact, commercial aviation is so safe because redundancy is mandated by regulation and built into every level, but our commercial-flying experience is so miserable because airlines have made it as efficient as possible to save money.”
“Modern shortages of 'labor' are almost always a shortage of willingness to pay well, or a desire to avoid hiring the 'wrong' kind of people.”
“Technical solutions have to be built around and integrated with social signals, not by stepping on them.”