blogalldogearedpages-blog

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If you value information the most, then you don’t care about convention. It’s not, 'Who do you know?'; it’s 'How fast are you? How dense?' It’s not, 'Do you talk like my old friends?'; it’s 'What do you have to say?' It’s not, 'Is this comfortable?'; it’s 'Is this interesting?'

Rudy Rucker, "What Is Cyberpunk?" (1986)

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Listen to the technology, Carver Mead says. What do the curves say? Imagine it is 1965. You’ve seen the curves Gordon Moore discovered. What if you believed the story they were trying to tell us: that each year, as sure as winter follows summer and as day follows night, computers would get half again better, and half again smaller, and half again cheaper, year after year, and that in 5 decades they would be 30 million times more powerful than they were then. (This is what happened.) If you were sure of that in 1965, or even mostly persuaded, what good fortune you could have harvested! You would have needed no other prophecies, no other predictions, no other details to optimize the coming benefits. As a society, if we just believed that single trajectory of Moore’s, and none other, we would have educated differently, invested differently, prepared more wisely to grasp the amazing powers it would sprout.

KEVIN KELLY (What Technology Wants)

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"The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder-- its DNA --Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane."

NEAL STEPHENSON (Snow Crash, 178)

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"The logical extension of business is murder."

DON DeLILLO (via character Kendra Hays, in Cosmopolis)

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"A culture is not just a by-product of economic proficiency."

PAOLO SOLERI (Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory)

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"Man's will to profit and be powerful have their natural and proper effect so long as they are linked with, and upheld by, his will to enter into relation."

MARTIN BUBER (I and Thou, p. 48)

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"Controllers of word and music monopolized and froze the earth"

WILLIAM BURROUGHS, The Ticket That Exploded (p. 176)

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The main problem with searching for extraterrestrials is to recognize them. Time is so vast and evolutionary strategies and environments so varied that the trick is to know that contact is being made at all.

TERENCE McKENNA

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I already know a thing or two. I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful, or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.

MARGUERITE DURAS (The Lover, p. 18)

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I've never met a person who I couldn't call a beauty. Each person has beauty at some point in their lifetime.

ANDY WARHOL

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I've been quoted a lot as saying 'I like boring things.' Well, I said it and I mean it. But that doesn't mean I'm not bored by them.

ANDY WARHOL (as quoted in Chronophobia : on time in the art of the 1960's)

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You realize how important sexuality is to the human race, in terms of art, culture, society, psychology, everything.

DAVID CRONENBERG

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Progress is a noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational, intractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to understand the pattern of history.

STEPHEN J. GOULD

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The city has twice been humiliated by the suburbs: once upon the loss of its constituency to the suburbs, and again upon that constituency's return. These prodigal citizens brought back with them their mutated suburban values of predictability and control.

JOHN McMORROUGH (Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping)

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I have come to the conclusion that curiously I don't think film is a very good narrative medium. If I was to ask you to tell me the full story of Casablanca, or La Dolce Vita, I bet you couldn't do it. Because I don't think people do remember close narrative or close story-telling in the cinema. They remember ambience, they remember event, they remember incidents, performance, atmosphere, a line of dialogue, a sense of genius loci, but I really doubt whether they truly remember narrative. I would argue that if you want to write narratives, be an author, be a novelist, don't be a film maker. Because I believe film making is so much more exciting in areas which aren't primarily to do with narrative.

PETER GREENAWAY

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He had this annoying tic during his time with us of pinning aphorisms to the wall. We liked nothing less than people quoting at us from their corkboards. Hank Neary was the only one who could quote at us with impunity because he rarely made any sense, so we knew the quotation must add up somehow and we marveled at the obscurity. Quotations that tried to instruct us or rehabilitate our ways, like those Tom favored--we didn't like those quotations. We were especially put off by Tom's because it seemed a great irony that Tom Mota was trying to reveal to us a better way to live, when just look at the guy! What a fuckup. His quotations were never allowed to stay pinned up for very long. It would take him days to notice and then he would holler out into the hall, in his inimitable and eloquent manner, 'Who the fuck's been stealing my quotes?'

JOSHUA FERRIS (Then We Came to the End, p. 341)

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During that brief moment, the empty hallway felt possessed of a haunted tranquility that gave the impression that all down the hall, and down the other hallways and offshoots of hallways and the passageways between cubicle partitions, the offices and workstations had all been suddenly and irrevocably vacated, and that all the corporate, animating, human life that once burbled and cackled and Xeroxed and inputted had ended with an inextricable filing away, and that all the days spent here, the time served, the camaraderie enjoyed, were now casualties of some unhappy, indeterminate fate.

JOSHUA FERRIS (Then We Came to the End, p. 300)