Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations.
Zeynep TufekciRead
Given exponential growth dynamics of infectious diseases, containing an epidemic is straightforward early on, but nearly impossible once a disease spreads among a population.
Interpretation
Early intervention is crucial in controlling infectious diseases; once they spread widely, they become very difficult to manage.
This quote emphasizes the importance of prompt action in the face of infectious diseases. It suggests that while it is relatively easy to contain an epidemic at its early stages, the situation becomes increasingly unmanageable as the disease penetrates deeper into the population, highlighting the necessity of early detection and response mechanisms in public health policies.
In practice
During a public health conference emphasizing the importance of vaccination.
Political activism is not failing because people are too busy watching cat videos online, but because of a fundamental collapse of citizen leverage on institutions of power like governments and corporations.
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.
Attention, to a terrorist group, is often what the well-meaning, outraged response is to your two-bit Internet troll: it is the food that feeds them.
Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a number, say salary or consumer power.
You might be tempted to think that China has a Streisand-effect problem, in which trying to censor an event creates even more publicity. But that assumes the Chinese government doesn't understand the Streisand effect, and that can't be right, because if one government understands attention dynamics online, it's China's.
A 'fair' fight between non-equals is not fair, and being blind to power is an implicit endorsement of the powerful.
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.
If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world.
The conscious mind can only pay attention to about four things at once. If you've got these nagging voices in your head telling you to remember to pick up the laundry and call so-and-so, they're competing in your brain for neural resources with the stuff you're actually trying to do, like getting your work done.
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