![naked typist II](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/naked-typist-II-1.jpg)
Nothing to Lose But Your Brains
At the internet’s dawn, some felt the universal availability of historical and current information might lead to a golden time of human enlightenment. After all, with so many facts so easily accessed by everyone’s computers—and now their mobile phones—surely we would quickly reach a point of great shared knowledge and understanding.
Interesting theory.
As it turns out, that hopeful notion did not count on a few things. Like the insatiable human capacity for cat videos. And porn. And, for all I know, cat porn (there’s something for everyone on the net). Then there was the problem of disseminating information itself. It soon emerged that misinformation is far more attractive, which goes some of the way to explaining why socialism and communism are again so remarkably popular among the young.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s rise in the UK and Bernie Sanders’s barnstorming 2016 presidential run in the US were both driven by youngsters who are really into this crazy new…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
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A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
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