Franklin Foer Quotes

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Franklin Foer

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 20, 1974

Google's ability to pick winners and losers in the information world is a menace. These companies have the ability to determine which media companies are successful and which ones are failures. If I adopt a business plan that doesn't line up with Google's, then they're not going to reward me.

Franklin Foer

If I'm reading my Facebook feed, it's using algorithms, procedures, and methods to give me what I want, or what it thinks that I want, or what suits its business plan.

Franklin Foer

Booksellers initially thought of Amazon as their best friend. They were coming in, and they were challenging Barnes and Noble, and Borders, which were the big, dominant corporations of the day, and that they would disrupt them and make them less powerful, but they could never envision that Amazon would overtake them all.

Franklin Foer

Apple was very important in terms of disrupting the music business and remaking the television business. They made it harder for people to make money on the things that they produce. In news, they've created Apple News, and they've tried to steer people towards information.

Franklin Foer

From the start, the promise of Jurgen Klinsmann as manager of the U.S. men's national team was revolution: gritty, plodding American soccer would give way to attacking flair; the parade of journeymen would end; an era of skilled stylists would begin.

Franklin Foer

Michael Bradley has the stuff of leadership; he works hard and can break up the opponent's play. However, that's not enough to justify his philanthropic attitude towards possession, the generous portion of balls that he contributes to his foes. His sloppiness constantly culminates in unnecessary goals.

Franklin Foer

There's no reason why there needs to be one search engine or one social network or one store that we buy all of our crap from. It's possible to imagine a world in which there's actually competition.

Franklin Foer

Who can complain about the price that Google is charging you? Or who can complain about Amazon's prices; they are simply lower than the competition's. And that's why I think we need to shift back to a more Brandeisian conception of antitrust, where we consider values other than simply efficiency and low prices.

Franklin Foer

I'm reading the way a lot of technology executives have decried 'gatekeepers' and 'traditional media,' and that one of the promises of 'new media' was that it would break the chokehold that old media companies had on public opinion.

Franklin Foer

Once upon a time, gatekeepers were newspaper publishers and magazine editors and people who ran radio stations and news networks. And they decided what went above the fold and what went on page A10.

Franklin Foer

Trump and Yanukovych have shared the same political brain: an operative named Paul Manafort.

Franklin Foer

Ukrainians use the term 'political technologist' as a favored synonym for electoral consultant. Trump turned to Manafort for what seemed at first a technical task: Manafort knows how to bullwhip and wheedle delegates at a contested convention.

Franklin Foer

The genesis of Donald Trump's relationship with Paul Manafort begins with Roy Cohn. That Roy Cohn: Joe McCarthy's heavy-lidded henchman, lawyer to the Genovese family. During the '70s, Trump and his father hired Cohn as their lawyer to defend the family against a housing discrimination suit.

Franklin Foer

There are, in fact, apps you can use to measure how many times you check your phone, and I shudder to think how many times I check my phone. I'm sure it would be probably in the hundreds of times that I check over the course of the day.

Franklin Foer

I look at the way that my kids interact with technology, and it becomes a mirror to the ways in which I myself interact with technology. I can see the ways in which that addiction and compulsion starts to settle in on them, and it's much more unnerving to see it in them than it is to experience it myself.

Franklin Foer

On its face, Donald Trump's hateful musings about women and his boastful claims of sexual dominance should be reason alone to drive him from polite society and certainly to blockade him from the West Wing. Yet somehow, his misogyny has instead propelled his campaign to the brink of the Republican nomination.

Franklin Foer

Not even Trump's father's wealth, nor his father's faith in his son's destiny, could save Trump from incessant discipline. At the age of 13, he was shipped off to the New York Military Academy, which employed brutal tactics for the remaking of delinquent character, even resorting to violence to assert control over the boys.

Franklin Foer

Trump considers himself such a virile example of masculinity that he's qualified to serve as the ultimate arbiter of femininity. He relishes judging women on the basis of their looks, which he seems to believe amounts to the sum of their character.

Franklin Foer

Our faith in technology is no longer fully consistent with our belief in liberty.

Franklin Foer

As parents, we have kids who reflect back to us our addiction to devices, and we have all sorts of worries about whether this is a healthy thing.

Franklin Foer