“I was ticked off at Todd yesterday,” she said. “He walks into a gas station as we’re driving over from Minnesota. He buys a Slim Jim—we’re always eating that jerky stuff—for $2.69. I said, ‘Todd, those used to be 99 cents, just recently!’ And he says, ‘Man, the dollar’s worth nothing anymore.’ A jug of milk and a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs—every time I walk into that grocery store, a couple of pennies more…”

“The working class is underrepresented on the Internet. Without their voices, their issues are ignored…That chasm is unlikely to break down until everyone has a host of digital production tools at both home and work.”

“No genre is without its controversial and offensive characters- I’m not naive. I’ve asked myself a thousand times why this is pushing me over the edge. Maybe it’s the access to him (his grotesque twitter, etc). Maybe it’s because I’m a human being, both a girl and a lesbian. Maybe it’s because my mom has spent her whole adult life working with teenage girls who were victims of sexual assault. Maybe it’s because in this case I don’t think race or class actually has anything to do with his hateful message but has EVERYTHING to do with why everyone refuses to admonish him for that message.”

“

You can read as many reports about inequality as you want (and there are lots) but the most important barrier to the introduction of pro-poor economic strategies is quite simple: lack of political will. What are the chances of the Peruvian (4 million users, 13% of the population) or Senegalese (360,000 users, 2.5% of the population) educated classes deciding to forgo the luxuries that their Facebook peers in the west (even the not very educated ones) discuss online? A car. Frequent trips abroad. The latest gadgets. Answer: about as much chance as those of us who already take all these things for granted deciding to give them up.

In the better off “middle income” countries, home to two-thirds of the world’s poorest people, the Facebook generation has done well out of the last 20 years. But their fortunes contrast with the huge numbers of people still living in abject poverty in city slums or further out in the countryside. In 55% of middle-income countries inequality has increased since the 1990s, and in a further 20% it has remained high, decreasing in only a quarter of middle-income countries – according to the World Bank.

“Food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer, now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.”

“Political correctness” may be an even more despised term in our culture than “hipster,” but little has been written about p.c.’s utility, the source of its infernal staying power. Leftists may try to jazz up its drabness with a little radical rhetoric, but, as the exchange quoted above shows, progressives need the cordiality of p.c. to quell the fractiousness of any Left coalition. We won’t be getting rid of it anytime soon because we have no functional social contract to replace it with.”

“I’m homeless, very homeless, dirt broke and all, but I still own an iPad and a MSI Wind u130 netbook. These, I feel, are essential tools… Being without a home is not that big a deal in today’s world, but having connections to the rest of the world is pretty important.”

“In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the tastes of others … which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes”