"The circular deals that, in theory, are wheels moving the whole thing forward all have to keep turning. If any of them stop, the whole thing stops, because they are all so interconnected that no failure is truly isolated".
"Round-tripping, generally speaking, refers to the unethical and typically illegal practice of making trades or transactions to artificially prop up a particular asset or company, making it look like it’s more valuable and in demand than it actually is".
"Few investors are looking at why those valuations and stock prices keep climbing, showing little curiosity as to what might happen if all of this money is just getting shifted around, artificially inflating the actual value of the companies".
"The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat".
... Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right".
"Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans.
"You do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy".
"The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy. The historian Orlando Figes has noted that the English, French and Russian revolutions all occurred in societies in which literacy was approaching fifty per cent".
"We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society".
... It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment".
"The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.
"The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life".
"If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history".
... Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution".
"The growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science.
"What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history".
"El acuerdo de 100.000 millones de dólares de AMD y OpenAI depende de unos chips que todavía no existen, y que podrán ser pagados con un valor que sus acciones todavía no tienen, pero que en potencia tendrán ...
