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Some commentators argue that to counter manipulation, tech firms should actively expose people to conflicting views. The tech industry has plenty of tools at its disposal: fact-checking plug-ins and trust ratings to combat disinformation, and crowdsourcing, blockchains, and cryptography to fight evidence collapse.

— Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles, Cennydd Bowles

Conspiracies bloom in the dark, in the gaps between trusted information, allowing the powerless to explain away their lack of agency. In this battle of the timelines, no matter how outlandish the narrative, there are people ready to believe. Furries, flat-earthers, and fascists alike can stitch together their own narratives from the digital fragments of the web, and broadcast them into their communities.

— Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles, Cennydd Bowles

Nudge doesn’t trespass on individual freedoms the industry [Silicon Valley] holds dear, but is still a potent technique for liberating people from their money or time.

— Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles, Cennydd Bowles

Some physicians declared that the bicycle promoted immodesty in women and harmed their reproductive organs. Moralists thought women on bicycles were indecent because they wore shorter skirts to ride them, and worried that women would find straddling the seat sexually stimulating. The bicycle craze helped kill the bustle and the corset and encouraged “common-sense dressing.” Many in the women’s suffrage movement adopted bicycles. In 1896, Susan B. Anthony declared: “Bicycling . . . has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. ... It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.” The women’s movement embraced the bicycle, and its democratization became part of their drive for social equality.

— Technology matters by David E. Nye

'[...] There's little value in seeking to find reasons for why people do what they do, or feel what they feel. Hatred is a most pernicious weed, finding root in any soul. It feeds on itself' 'With words.' Indeed, with words. Firm an opinion, say it often enough and pretty soon everyone's saying it right back at you, and then it becomes a conviction, fed by unreasoning anger and defended with weapons of fear. At which point, words become useless and you're left with a fight to the death.'

— House of Chains by Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #4)

Lewis Hyde wonderfully illustrates this dissonance in his exploration of the "Indian giver." This expression, used negatively today as a pejorative for someone who gives something and then wants to have it back, actually derives from a fascinating cross-cultural misinterpretation between an indigenous culture operating a gift economy and a colonial culture predicated on the concept of private property. When gifts were given to the settlers by the Native inhabitants, the recipients understood that they were valuable and were intended to be retained. Giving them away would have been an affront. But the indigenous people understood the value of the gifts to be based on in reciprocity and would be affronted if the gifts did not circulate back to them. Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.

From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the "gift" is deemed to be "free" because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood as to be a "bundle of rights", whereas in a gift economy property has a "bundles of responsibilities" attached.

— Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Page 27)