Mara

“Whether we’re communicating with a human or a machine, the goal is to create a shared understanding of the world. That’s the point behind both the rules governing polite conversation and how a user-friendly machine should work.”
― Cliff Kuang, User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

“She takes a quick moment to send a text to her son, reminding him that he’s sleeping his life away and should have been up and at it before her. He is, after all, a young man with a whole world to conquer. Late mornings, Vera believes, are only for toddlers and Europeans.”
― Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

“Racism is, let us not forget, a means to reconcile contradictions. Only a society that extolled “liberty for all” while holding millions of people in bondage requires such a powerful ideology in order to build a nation amid such a startling contradiction.”
― Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

“That’s because language doesn’t work to manipulate people into believing things they don’t want to believe; instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they’re already open to. Language—both literal and figurative, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, politically correct and politically incorrect—reshapes a person’s reality only if they are in an ideological place where that reshaping is welcome.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism—Understanding the Social Science of Cult Influence