"With each upgrade in technology, our experience of the world is further reduced in complexity. The more advanced and predictive the smart-phone interface, the less a person needs to know to use it—or how it even makes its decisions. Instead of learning about our technology, we opt for a world in which our technology learns about us. It’s our servant, after all, so why shouldn’t it just do what it knows we want and deliver it however it can? Because the less we know about how it works, the more likely we are to accept its simplified models as reality. We lose sight of the fact that our digital tools are modeling reality, not substituting for it, and mistake its oversimplified contours for the way things should be. Elected officials are ridiculed as “wonks” for sharing or even understanding multiple viewpoints, the history of an issue, or its greater context. We forget that these are the people we’re paying to learn about these issues on our behalf. Instead, we overvalue our own opinions on issues about which we are ill informed, and undervalue those who are telling us things that are actually more complex than they look on the surface. They become the despised “elite.” It’s not the technology that’s scary. It’s what it does to the relations between people, like callers and operators, that’s scary." __DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF