"Utopians used to insist that the internet would be a paradise of connectivity, “where minds, doors and lives open up”. Instead, it is, at best, a virtual Las Vegas casino, enticing us to enrich the big tech behemoths by playing their inane games; at worst, it has become a sickbay for neurotics addicted to “cyber-crack”, a training camp for alt-right crazies and a battlefield." —Peter Conrad, reviewing The Twittering Machine , the Guardian 11 August 2019
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51