Zeynep Tufekci: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the area where you’re a dissenter? Like you think the best döner kebab is in Paris, or some crazy view like that, which is clearly false. Anything. Okay. For example, I think the US is a less racist society than most of Europe because I’ve lived in Europe, and I have a feeling this is where I sometimes differ from my own intellectual circles. They think of Europe as — because they tend to see the social democrat side of it. Compared to the US, Europe is a lot more government-oriented in some ways, for good or bad, but it can be suffocated sometimes. It’s actually a much more — in some ways — racist society, in my experience, than the United States. That sometimes I differ on. Another thing I differ on is that GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], the digital regulation — I think it was just at the wrong level. If anything, it backfired. I think you can’t just regulate something by wagging your finger across the pond sometimes. That just isn’t going to work. I differ in some of those ways, the way I look at Europe. I think that’s partly because I have an immigrant’s view of the United States, which is, in some ways, more realistic. But I’ve lived in Europe, too, so I have, I think, a lot more positive feelings about certain things that might not be as apparent to somebody who’s looking at Europe from this side of the Atlantic because some things look good if you’re an American, but are not necessarily great if you’re living in Europe. Question from the iPad: how does your background in programming affect your work as a sociologist and public intellectual?…

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