"You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment — the Internet — with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what's going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn't have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn't have the capacity to create large blocs of belief. The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Activists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesBloggers from the United StatesInternet activists
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Perry_Barlow
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow (3 October 1947 – 7 February 2018) was an American poet, essayist, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cattle rancher, cyberlibertarian political activist, and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Freedom of the Press Foundation.
23 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Perry Barlow →
Related Quotes
"Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say somethin…"
"Imagine discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions. Imagine a new world with more reso…"
"The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."
"I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the …"
"It didn't matter what we did or where we did it as long as we were together. We knew we'd found what most people eith…"
"I don't know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles, and our time together was filled with …"
"With a care both conscious and reverential, Cynthia and I built a love which I believe inspired most who came near it…"
"Among the waves of tragedy which have crashed on me with her death is a terror that our message of hope has been chan…"
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Min…"
"My time coming, any day, don't worry about me, no Been so long I felt this way, I'm in no hurry, no. Rainbows end dow…"