Here I collect quotes that have moved, provoked, inspired, and revolted me — mostly the first three.

Feel free to draw grand and imaginative conclusions about my morals and psyche purely on the basis of these assorted snippets. If you do, please send your conclusions to me.

I try and ensure each quote is properly cited so that you can find the work it originated from, if you find a citation lacking or incorrect please let me know.

Cossery’s main characters in this book are redescribing ironists par excellence. That point is indisputable. I think, however, Cossery’s diagnosis is apt but his prescription — or the prescription his main characters proffer — falls short for me. His themes fail to map neatly onto Rorty’s idea of the liberal ironist. In order to be happy, these characters must reject any positive notion of the future. They can only revel in the absurdity of the present, because this is the only certainty there can be in life. We see this in the ambivalence the main characters begin to feel when it looks as if their plans might actually lead to the end of their autocratic governor’s political career. They’re the kids shooting spitballs at the teacher. Their joie de vivre would evaporate if ever the teacher lost patience and abandoned the class room entirely.

But maybe that’s the whole point? Main characters are not meant to be idealized forms. The work of the novelist isn’t to draw a map to a better future or an improved way of “doing politics”. Maybe it’s enough to show that there there is something to be said about rejecting the received wisdom of the world you live in and taking the time to revel in its absurdity.

— Josh Erb, Violence and Derision on Vacation, 2024

The redescribing ironist, by threatening one’s final vocabulary, and thus one’s ability to make sense of oneself in one’s own terms rather than hers, suggests that one’s self and one’s world are futile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates.

— Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, 1964, p. 90 (via)

He played the game of honor and dishonor, just as he was taught to do. He’d never escape. He was more a prisoner than a prisoner in a cell because he shared the same myths as his adversary; they grow and grow and surround everything like unbreachable walls.

— Albert Cossery, La Violence et la Dérision, 1964, p. 114 (via)

Shōwa-era kissas all kind of look the “same,” and so you could argue they are as “pre-fabricated” as contemporary cafés, indie or otherwise. But the big difference is that the catalog of options forty years ago was far more “humane” — natural materials, very little “plastics” (though plastic is present in their Linoleum flooring and Formica tables), lots of dark wood and fabrics, tile, tin, plaster, warm lighting, weird lampshades, low-fidelity radio, “clutter,” the sense of life being lived and a space being used. Contrast with so many third-wave cafés — all glass and concrete, blonde wood, chairs designed to encourage a person to leave after twenty-minutes, not sit back with a newspaper for an hour.

Also, it’s worth mentioning acoustics — mid-century interiors are far preferred places to chat. Thanks to the copious fabrics, angles, and clutter, there’s little to no echo. Lion, in Shibuya, is a superior place to listen to classical music because of the room’s softness. Whereas your average Blue Bottle is basically a racquetball court that sells coffee.

— Craig Mod, Why Kissas Intrigue (Places for People), Ridgeline, 2024

I began as follows: in a hypercapitalist economy—one that has found a way to monetize human attention itself—we are the product. Well, sure, everybody knows that by now, even the fourteen-year-olds. But within this fact does there not lurk the not-so-hidden possibility of a radical and thrillingly simple act of resistance? Think about it (I said, to the fourteen-year-olds). With every other extractive and exploitative industry of the past four hundred years, the process of unraveling and resistance was far more complicated. To end the racialized system of capital called “slavery,” for example, you had to violently revolt, riot, petition, boycott, change minds, change laws, all in order to end one of the most lucrative gravy trains the Western world has ever known. To rein in the unprecedented wealth of the robber baron industrialists at the turn of the twentieth century, you had to regulate their businesses, the banks, and the labor laws themselves, and create the electoral majorities needed to do so. But to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies? To achieve that right now? All you guys would need to do is look away.

— Zadie Smith, The Dream of the Raised Arm, The New York Review, 2024 (via)

Being serious about security at scale means meeting users where they are. In practice, this means deciding how to divide a limited pool of engineering resources such that the largest demographic of users benefits from a security initiative. This results in a fundamental bias towards institutional and pre-existing services, since the average user belongs to these institutional services and does not personally particularly care about security. Participants in open source can and should work to counteract this institutional bias, but doing so as a matter of ideological purity undermines our shared security interests.

— William Woodruff, Security means securing people where they are, 2024 (via)

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 61

More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 57

Forest came and visited this afternoon. His ma died recently — cancer — and we all talked about how he’s faring.

This passage stuck out to me just now because of something he said. In the days after the funeral he and a friend of his ma’s were both independently ‘visited’ by birds that seemed somehow to carry the spirit of his mother. The friend was even gifted a leaf by said bird.

This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character. Their world and their existence seemed very distant and the spirit reached out for them longingly: In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories could move one to tears.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 55-56

I knew only one thing—which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 54-55

“If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”

That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way —an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 52-54

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 51

In the old way of doing things, we treat our servers like pets, for example Bob the mail server. If Bob goes down, it’s all hands on deck. The CEO can’t get his email and it’s the end of the world. In the new way, servers are numbered, like cattle in a herd. For example, www001 to www100. When one server goes down, it’s taken out back, shot, and replaced on the line.

— Randy Bias, The History of Pets vs Cattle and How to Use the Analogy Properly, 2016

Y’all, it’s really gon’ be great to watch y’all grow
I’m appreciatin’ watchin’ y’all grow more than– more than we did, man!
I get to relive it all again and actually appreciate it this time

— J. Cole, Note to Self ♫, Forest Hills Drive, 2014

†

Seeing Cozz about to drop his first project and remembering what that was like. Seeing Bas go on tour…

[…] I realize that, even if I never produce a record for someone who’s signed to me, the real pleasure of having a label is watching somebody start from ground zero and get to level one, two, and three. These dudes are trying to get to 100. It’s mad rewarding for me to see.

— J. Cole in J. Cole Interview: Man of the House (2014 Cover Story), Complex, 2014 (via)

†

TCP hole punching is goofy and unreliable, last I checked. You have to do some arcane ritual of having both peers start a three-way handshake to each others’s public endpoints simultaneously, relying on NATs to accept inbound SYN packets if they match the outgoing SYN. And nobody’s NAT devices implement simultaneous-open the same way, so all your connections just fail.

Naturally this leads to slapping even more arcane fixes on top of that, like NAT port assignment oracles to adversarial interoperate with different port allocation strategies (random, sequential, single, etc.) by analyzing patterns in previous port assignments. Networking sucks.

— foundry27, Hacker News, 2024

The heart of [the] process is finding a question you want to answer.

— Caitlyn Ralph in Gemma Joyce, The Pudding Journalists on Bringing Data to Life in Incredible Visual Essays, Brandwatch, 2019 (via)

Over dinner tonight Avvai shared her ambitions to submit a proposal The Pudding, a small digital publisher that specialises in data visualisation and visual storytelling. I want to help make that happen.

I couldn’t recall having come across The Pudding before, but there work is epic, and has re-excited my desire to dig into some visualisations for the walk too.

And it turns out, the first piece of their work I gravitated towards just now — The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy — was one I’d actually bookmarked on the 4th of November 2023, almost exactly a year ago.

Probably it reached me through Hacker News or Lobsters the first time, and it caught my attention this time on account of our stand-up routines out at the cabin, led by Kyle.

The rumors […] were usually contradictory. They followed one another rapidly and succeeded only in making a contribution to the war of nerves that was waged in the mind […]. Some men lost all hope, but it was the incorrigible optimists who were the most irritating companions.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 49

Standing on tiptoe and looking past the others’ heads through the bars of the window, I caught an eerie glimpse of my native town. We all felt more dead than alive, since we thought that our transport was heading for the camp at Mauthausen and that we had only one or two weeks to live. I had a distinct feeling that I saw the streets, the squares and the houses of my childhood with the eyes of a dead man who had come back from another world and was looking down on a ghostly city.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 48

When the last layers of subcutaneous fat had vanished, and we looked like skeletons disguised with skin and rags, we could watch our bodies beginning to devour themselves. The organism digested its own protein, and the muscles disappeared. Then the body had no powers of resistance left. One after another the members of the little community in our hut died. Each of us could calculate with fair accuracy whose turn would be next, and when his own would come. After many observations we knew the symptoms well, which made the correctness of our prognoses quite certain. “He won’t last long,” or, “This is the next one,” we whispered to each other, and when, during our daily search for lice, we saw our own naked bodies in the evening, we thought alike: This body here, my body, is really a corpse already. What has become of me? I am but a small portion of a great mass of human flesh … of a mass behind barbed wire, crowded into a few earthen huts; a mass of which daily a certain portion begins to rot because it has become lifeless.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 45

psychoanalysis often spoke of a “regression” in the camp inmate—a retreat to a more primitive form of mental life. His wishes and desires became obvious in his dreams.
What did the prisoner dream about most frequently? Of bread, cake, cigarettes, and nice warm baths. The lack of having these simple desires satisfied led him to seek wish-fulfillment in dreams. Whether these dreams did any good is another matter; the dreamer had to wake from them to the reality of camp life, and to the terrible contrast between that and his dream illusions.
I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 43

Beatings occurred on the slightest provocation, sometimes for no reason at all.
[…] At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.

[…] The most painful part of beatings is the insult which they imply.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 36-37

There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose.

— Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti, 1772

Several translation variations from the original German can be found. Frankl doesn’t cite which translation he refers to (he may have been paraphrasing from memory) but I found another on English Stack Exchange.

The original in German,

Wahnwitzige? Das war es also, was er Ihnen von mir vertraute? —Nun, nun; es mag leicht keine von seinen gröbsten Lügen sein. —Ich fühle so was! —Und glauben Sie, glauben Sie mir: wer über gewisse Dinge den Verstand nicht verlieret, der hat keinen zu verlieren.

A madwoman? That is what he told you about me? —Well, well; maybe it’s not one of his grossest lies. —Something like it is what I feel! —And believe me, believe me: Whoever doesn’t lose his mind over certain things has no mind to lose.

Cover of Gotthold Lessing’s play, Emilia Galotti, from 1772

I have experienced this kind of curiosity before, as a fundamental reaction toward certain strange circumstances. When my life was once endangered by a climbing accident, I felt only one sensation at the critical moment: curiosity, curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive or with a fractured skull or some other injuries.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 27

While we were waiting for the shower, our nakedness was brought home to us: we really had nothing now except our bare bodies—even minus hair; all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence. What else remained for us as a material link with our former lives?

[…] After a time we again heard the lashings of the strap, and the screams of tortured men. This time it lasted for quite a while.
Thus the illusions some of us still held were destroyed one by one, and then, quite unexpectedly, most of us were overcome by a grim sense of humor. We knew that we had nothing to lose except our so ridiculously naked lives. When the showers started to run, we all tried very hard to make fun, both about ourselves and about each other. After all, real water did flow from the sprays!

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 26-27

At that moment I saw the plain truth and did what marked the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 25

I’m confident this solution is more performant than using REST, PHP, and database queries (or similar) and I’m certain it’s more efficient than rendering the entire site on the client. The reason I wrote it up is because it’s a good example of the kind of problem I like to solve, and how I like to solve it. Build-rendered beats server-rendered beats client-rendered. Where you delegate the complex logic and data-lifting to the build (using a template filter, in this case) and only supplement this using client-side scripts, you can begin to create engaging experiences with barely any loss of performance.

— Heydon Pickering, The Random Link In The Age Of Static Sites, HeydonWorks, 2020

To return to the convoy about to depart. There was neither time nor desire to consider moral or ethical issues. Every man was controlled by one thought only: to keep himself alive for the family waiting for him at home, and to save his friends.

[…] On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946, Beacon Press (2006 edition), p. 14

“Ah, everyone here is yelling at the guy next to them for work they’re not doing themselves.”

— Joe in Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, 2022, Drawn & Quarterly, p. 222

Cape Breton used to export fish, coal, and steel; but in 2005, it’s main export is people.

[…] The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one.

We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations.

— Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, 2022, Drawn & Quarterly, p. 10

It was my mother gave us news of each other. She was used to living among silent men.

— Pietro in Le Otto Montaigne, 2022

“It would be nice to stay up here forever, without seeing anyone, without having to go down to the valley again.”

Here is the sentiment that had made him dream of a home away from the world. Only now did I understand, I had two fathers. The first was the stranger with whom I had lived 20 years in the city. The second was the mountain father, whom I had only glimpsed, yet known better.

— Pietro in Le Otto Montaigne, 2022

“It would be nice to stay up here forever, without seeing anyone, without having to go down to the valley again.”

— Giovanni Guasti in Le Otto Montaigne, 2022

“I will always carry the memory of these days as the most beautiful refuge.”

— Giovanni Guasti in Le Otto Montaigne, 2022

“It’s when I started to read that I understood how many ways there are to say things.
If not… poor words, poor thoughts.
[…] I’m happy that you have found your words, Berto.”

— Bruno in Le Otto Montaigne, 2022

“You know what we say here when we’re sad?”
“What?”
“I’m elsewhere.”

— Bruno and Pietro in Le Otto Montaigne, 2022

For Bruno there were neither Saturdays nor Sundays in the mountain pastures. Even if it took him a long time, he persisted in milking the cows by hand. There was a right way in his life to do everything.

— Pietro in Le Otto Montaigne, 2022

But Mr. Ebert never intended that moment to last. Nothing does. Nothing should. “The Magnetic Zeros was really no fun once it was completed, because it’s dead,” he said. “Completions themselves are deaths.”

— Alex Ebert in Alex Williams, A Pop Star Becomes a Guru, The New York Times, 2022

Connected for me with something Kyle and Avvai’s have talked about,

She didn’t reach the top. She only made it to the first ledge, but as she stood there, triumphantly looking out over the ancient Teotihuacan ruins, she proudly declared the words that have become famous in our house:

“The Dream Is Dead”.
— Kyle and Avvai, The Dream Is Dead, Making It Meaningful, 2024

When asked for an elevator pitch on the newsletter’s focus, he launched into a minutes-long exegesis about the “commodification of spiritualism” and “the religion of self” that name-checked Descartes, Norman Vincent Peale, Galileo and Kellyanne Conway.

Broadly speaking, Bad Guru is a blend of philosophy and cultural analysis, with a smattering of self-help. Reading like a series of manifestoes from a highly caffeinated cultural omnivore, the newsletter takes aim at Silicon Valley self-empowerment mantras, for-profit spins on Eastern religion by wellness gurus, and sugar-high promises from reality-denying politicians.

— Alex Williams, A Pop Star Becomes a Guru, The New York Times, 2022

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

— Albert Einstein, On the Method of Theoretical Physics, 1933, Oxford University Press (via)

Likely the origin of the aphorism, “everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”.

† †

I am aware that my setup appears baroque with many fiddly manual steps documented only in my shell history. Honestly I regard myself as a kinda not very technical person with a simple setup and (a) reading the above back to myself, it’s a surprise even to myself, a travesty, a fiasco, and yet (b) I feel like it accords with a principle of simplicity on a certain otherwise unnameable axis.

— Matt Webb, Colophon, Interconnected, 2024 (via)

Rings very true to the gulf between how I perceive my computing habits, and how others perceive those same habits. My tools are simple — as simple as possible, but not simpler.

24 years is longer than many programming languages are popular and definitely most frameworks. In that time I’ve cycled through being good and rubbish at software development at least twice.

So following the principles of web longevity, what matters is the data, i.e. the posts, and simplicity. I want to minimise maintenance, not panic if a post gets popular, and be able to add new features without thinking too hard. If push comes to shove, I need my site to be simple enough such that I could re-write the blogging engine in half a day or so (which has happened).

I don’t deliberately choose boring technology but I think a lot about longevity on the web (that’s me writing about it in 2017) and boring technology is a consequence.

— Matt Webb, Colophon, Interconnected, 2024 (via)

This book was not the work of an expert, unless two decades as a professional storyteller has made me an expert in that particular field. Even then, it’s not like you have to take a test and get a license. I’m only here because, in the late ’90s, I realized they’ll basically let anybody do it.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Afterword, p. 392

At the front of every novel is a block of legalese explaining that it is a work of fiction and that no people or places are intended to represent reality. Almost no one ever reads that part, and even those who do apparently don’t believe it. These days, most discussion around fiction involves trying to figure out which opinions expressed in the text are those of the author and which people were copied from the real world to populate its cast of characters.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Afterword, p. 392

Some Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses or some other religious types came to the door today, that’s what I get for leaving the gate open. I’ve often thought that what we need to counter what’s coming is a new religion, where the like-minded form bonds through touch and kindness and soft conversations over home-cooked food, practicing human connection as it has been done for tens of thousands of years. I don’t know exactly what rules this new faith would impose on its congregants, but I think that going door-to-door and interrupting folks while they’re trying to have dinner should be considered a mortal sin.

— Phil Greene in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 389

“It’s funny, he was obsessed with being off-grid because he couldn’t trust anyone, but those panels were manufactured in Germany with Chinese parts, sold by a corporation with employees and stockholders all over the world. Just try to count how many humans operating in perfect sync it took to build and ship all the stuff he needed to live ‘off-the-grid.’”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 388

In the aftermath of chaos, the early narrative is the one that tends to stick, as everyone has usually moved on by the time it gets corrected.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 387

“Maybe one day, you’ll sit down with your own grandkids in some burned-out building and tell them what the country used to be like, that you could get drunk and eat ice cream and watch fireworks, and nobody would bother you. And they’ll say, ‘Damn, that sounds real nice. What happened?’ and you’ll have to try to explain how everywhere, all at once, everybody lost their fucking minds.”

— Sock in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 384-385

[…] “she needed to be needed. I think that’s what I learned from her, that you have this modern thing where the goal is to be totally disconnected from any burdens or obligations. But I think we all need to be needed.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 384

One thing he’d learned in prison was that the other old-timers all shared the same fear, not of dying while incarcerated but of losing people, of getting that call that mothers or brothers had passed and that their own fuckups had kept them away at the end.

[…] She’d held on longer than expected, gave the cancer the fight of its life, but had passed just months before Malort was set to be released. But of course she had; this was all a cosmic joke from start to finish. When Malort had gotten the news over the phone, he’d started bawling, and the huge Mexican dude on the next phone over came and put an arm around him, and there was silence all around. Everybody in there knew that the single thing that scared them most had happened right in front of them, that a man had lost the one most precious to him and that he hadn’t been by her side at the end, hadn’t said goodbye.

— Malort in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 368-369

Watching the growling and clinking monstrosity rampage around Sock’s fancy lawn party had convinced Malort that not only was God real but that he cared only about making the absolute funniest possible thing happen at any given moment.

— Malort in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 359

Abbott Coburn had spent much of his twenty-six years in a state of uncontrolled, frantic paralysis. So it was appropriate that in the moments before chaos was unleashed on the Sokolov estate, he was furiously imagining a dozen possible courses of action while his body remained perfectly still.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 354

Well, he “secretly” believed this in the sense that he told it to everyone he saw, at every opportunity.

— Zeke in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 5, p. 326

This was a stretch where the river got narrow enough that a strong man could chuck a cat across it, should the need arise.

— Malort in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 321

“We want to be zombies. Puppets. So, we’re growing our own puppeteer.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 321

“Our whole society is idle and overeducated, and nothing spices things up like conflict. There’s an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I’d update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle.”

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 318

She absolutely still intended to ditch the rest of the van misfits as soon as she could find another vehicle. Otherwise, even if everything went perfectly and they made the heroic save, it would be difficult to explain why she had turned up at the scene with an incel streamer, his dad, a disgraced makeup influencer, and a Roller Derby girl in a blue hentai van being driven by a disabled furry porn artist.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 306

So much of a modern life was just sitting back helplessly and watching disaster unfold, in real time and in high definition.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 293

He hated driving in the rain, and he hated driving in a strange city. Though Abbott also hated driving on sunny days in familiar cities. It was a relentless barrage of overstimulation and tense standoffs, automobiles having a magical ability to make humans abandon all concepts of empathy and self-preservation.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 271

This man with a thousand stories from a lifetime of traveling the country, a vibrant mind with a yawning loneliness at its core. The world would never understand all his flailing attempts to reclaim some meaning in his life after everything he’d cared about had been placed in a box and lowered into the ground, or the tenderness he felt toward his daughter after decades of estrangement, Sundae having come back home with her own long list of unbelievable tales. This frail old man who waited on his dying little girl hand and foot, convinced until the last that she would recover, certain that fathers did not bury their own daughters next to their own wives. One human soul could surely not be asked to swallow that much sorrow.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 268

Once you see what kind of play is possible — play that extends and expands throughout a life, a remonstration against fear, against smallness, against pettiness, against sinecures — you want to see it everywhere. You want everyone to be this privileged — privileged to make this choice to commit to play, to amplify play and life, and exist as an archetype showing a hundred-thousand others what’s possible as they sip burnt coffee and munch thick toast as a model of the 1964 Shinkansen struts around the shop on its tracks like Lady from Lady and the Tramp.

— Craig Mod, Voting For Train Man, Roden, 2024

What the hell happened? (It turns out that both a lot had happened and nothing had happened, that things were uncertain, frozen almost, and that uncertainty would persist for an infinite amount of time, an uncertainty that even today lingers — lingers harder than ever — in all the pervasive stupidity we bear witness to daily; stupidity on a celestial scale of stupid raised to double stupid in a race condition to the stupidest of stupid deaths.)

— Craig Mod, Voting For Train Man, Roden, 2024

I wanna be on that ledger. Goddamn, you bet I want to be on that ledger. What else is there but the ledger in a moment like this? Pull the lever, cast your tiny pebble into it all and hope things add up. De minimis? Hell no. At the very least, you’ll be present on the cosmic scale, a little number at the end of a bigger number — one that wouldn’t have been quite as big without you. That’s not nothing, and when your grandkids asked what you did right now — in this mythic time of madness and infinite resources all seemingly used in the wrong ways, facing the wrong directions, directed at the wrong people — you can at least say you were present, doing the smallest of things you could in whatever way you could.

— Craig Mod, Voting For Train Man, Roden, 2024

“No more catastrophizing after this, okay? I mean, even if we were going to die, I wouldn’t want to spend all day dwelling on it.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 265

miles always take their toll, no matter how you traverse them.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 263

The real world, where authentic beings live, is boring. Or at least, it is boring to the infected mind under command of the parasite that relentlessly demands the next hit of novelty.

— Phil Greene in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 4, p. 262

radioactive ideas, virulent narratives that develop in insular little subcultures until they burst out onto the scene.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 257

It’s still a free country, if only in certain specific places, times, and circumstances.

— Hunter in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 243

I have this theory that we have been quietly building a society full of Heemeyers, seemingly normal people with middle-class lives and brains full of retribution fantasies. Supposedly mature adults with no sense of scale or proportionality.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 243

“Why do you know all this?”
“Why don’t you know all this? This is the fundamental context of your life! I mean, you don’t even have to get into the big-picture stuff—life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, civil rights, way fewer people dying in dangerous jobs—I could spend the next week just listing all of the little everyday improvements we don’t even think about. If pleasure was a thing that could be measured, the available pleasure to the average person over all of history would basically be a flat line on a graph that then explodes upward right before you and I were born. In terms of timing, we’re fucking lottery winners! Only we know the pleasure of a climate-controlled room, a daily hot shower, of cheap and delicious food and drink, of comfortable shoes and a dazzling ocean of entertainment so vast that we get stressed out trying to keep up. Like music! Music is magic, it heals the soul, and our access to it is infinitely greater than it ever was before! And literature—the most beautiful works from the most incredible minds are out there to be read on demand, at almost no cost.

— Abbott and Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 241

“But who told you that, the thing about everybody affording a big house with one job back in the good old days? I feel like we’re getting that from old sitcoms or magazine ads. A quarter of those 1950s houses didn’t have indoor plumbing, and almost none had air-conditioning; that wasn’t a common thing until decades later. And those houses were tiny and packed with three generations of family. I mean, none of this is opinion, you can look it up—the average American now has as much living space as an entire family did back then. And no, they didn’t have two cars; they were sharing one, if that. You’re right that they didn’t have student loan payments, but that’s because hardly anybody went to college—hell, in the 1960s, most Americans didn’t even finish high school. So forget about choosing your dream career; back then, people were still just working in whatever factory kept their town afloat. And if you go back a hundred years, you’re in a totally unrecognizable society. In this part of the country, lots of the kids would have goiters from iodine deficiency, illiteracy would be rampant, virtually every adult would be missing multiple teeth. Oh, and it was considered weird if parents didn’t beat their children. None of what I’m saying requires some deep dive into the research, none of it is disputed. Look it up!”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 240

“I’ve seen the melting ice with my own two eyes. But let me ask you this: When I met you, I asked if you felt like you were cursed to be born when you were, if you felt like you had arrived just in time to see the world end. So I’m guessing that you think the world is collapsing because of the feminization of society, something like that? That we’re killing masculinity?
[…] and in my corner of the internet, the harbingers of doom were the opposite: savage patriarchal governments crushing women’s rights, taking us back to the dark ages while overpopulation destroys the environment. So that’s two groups who both believe the world is ending, but for totally opposite reasons. Some say runaway capitalism, some say runaway socialism. Some say it’ll be chaotic lawlessness, some say iron-fisted authoritarianism. It’s like I have one panicked neighbor saying there’s an impending drought and another screaming that we’re all about to drown in a flood. Somebody has to be wrong.”
“That wouldn’t make them both wrong.” Ether groaned and put her head in her hands.
“Okay,” she said, trying again. “How about this: What do you think the world will look like in the future, post-collapse?”
Abbott thought for a moment as if picturing it. “Uh, terrified people scrounging for food and running from bandits. Rampant disease, infrastructure breakdown. All the stuff from the movies, I guess.”
“No internet?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“No electricity? No running water, no sewage? No hospitals?”
“Probably not.”
“Got it. So, what I’m about to say isn’t an opinion, it’s not a matter of personal philosophy or politics. It is an objective fact that what you’re describing is how virtually all humans have lived through all of history. Until, that is, about thirty years ago. Just in the time I’ve been alive, somewhere between two and a half and three billion people got their first access to clean water and toilets. That’s billion, with a B. About that same number got electricity in their homes for the first time in their lives. Worldwide, infant mortality has been cut in half, illiteracy has dropped almost as much. Suicides are going up here in the US, but worldwide, they’ve dropped by a third—again, that’s all just in my lifetime. Basically, every positive category has skyrocketed: access to communication, paved roads, motorized transportation, international travel, climate control, medicine…”
“Okay, it sounds like you’re talking about a bunch of good stuff that happened in China and India and—I don’t know. A bunch of poor countries I’ll never visit.”
“I’m talking about how your entire life span has been spent in a literal reverse apocalypse. I’m talking about billions of people who lived in what you would consider post-collapse conditions have had those conditions remedied, gaining roofs and lights and safety. A human’s chances of dying from famine or natural disasters are as low as they’ve ever been, ever, in the history of the species. It’s been nothing short of a worldwide miracle that makes everything Jesus supposedly did in the Bible look like party tricks. And people like you and me and others in our demographic describe that state of affairs as the world being ‘on fire.’ I think that’s a bizarre mass delusion and that there’s a very specific reason for it: we’ve been trained to cling to a miserable view of the world to the point that we think that not seeing the world as miserable makes us bad people. When I spent those months doing hallucinogens, I didn’t suddenly see the beauty and harmony of nature; I saw that humans everywhere were working really hard to make life better for other humans and that almost none of us appreciate it. I’m not crediting this miracle to capitalism or socialism or any other kind of ism but to the fact that it’s what humans do, because humans are amazing. And it’s all invisible to us because the progress occurs behind these dark walls of cynicism, outside the black box of doom.”
“That’s nice. And again, nothing you said means anything considering the world’s scientists have agreed that climate change will wipe out civilization.”
“If we don’t fix it, yeah. Climate change is a huge deal; it’s terrifying. And also, it is objectively true that if we do fix it, the media will only report it as bad news. All the headlines will be about the oil and coal workers who lost their jobs, birds dying to windmills—they’ll only focus on the negative side effects. And don’t tell me we never clean up our messes. There used to be oil slicks on our rivers that would literally catch fire. Sulfur dioxide used to choke the air—when’s the last time you’ve heard about acid rain? Or the hole in the ozone layer? Go read about how previous generations all had lead poisoning or how food contamination used to be a nightmare. I’m not saying everything will be fine; I can’t predict the future. I’m saying that it is a one hundred percent certifiable guaranteed fact that it can be fine. But people like us have decided that we’re never allowed to even acknowledge the possibility.” “Or maybe it’s hard for people to care about toilets in India when another maniac is shooting up a school every week.”
“You think that happens every week?”
“I bet you have a whole bunch of stats to dump on me about that, too. I’m sure the parents of those dead kids would love to hear them.”
“And there’s the anger. People hate it when you threaten their nihilism! That’s the black box, drawing you back in. Can’t you see that it wants you to be afraid to do anything but cower in front of your screens? It only has one trick, one card to play, which is this idea that bad news is the only news you can trust. I’m telling you, if you just allow yourself to step outside of it, you’ll see it for what it is: a prison where the walls are made of nightmares.”

— Ether and Abbot in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 234-236

It all started with the Walkman. I was forty years old the first time I saw one, a kid in downtown LA wearing headphones and blasting music from a cassette player on his belt, shutting out the world. This technology had literally invented a new kind of human behavior never previously observed in the species, closing off sense organs to intentionally block out face-to-face social interaction. That was the first time I understood that technology could put the individual in a mental cocoon, replacing the nutrients of tangible socialization with the sweet, processed slurry of passive mass media. When the internet came along a decade later, I knew we were counting down the days until we had the internet version of the Walkman, a portable device that would relieve the individual of the burden to function as a member of society. Only now, instead of the hypnotism of music, it is the parasite of the Forbidden Numbers, rewiring the brain, altering the subject’s very ability to perceive the universe itself. All around me are youths under the grip of cluster B personality disorders that used to be rare but now are the norm, minds totally unable to process physical reality. They transmogrify sensory input into a simplistic technicolor melodrama, the only reality they’ve been trained to understand. I need groceries. I don’t know if it’s safe for me to drive in my current state of health. The meds are making me sick. I don’t want to ask her to take me. She told me they have services now, through your phone, where you can pay a stranger to do your shopping for you. But of course that exists; in a world in which we have all been robbed of the friendships we’d previously have relied upon for such favors, corporations have stepped in with algorithms tuned to the Forbidden Numbers. I feel them calling to me, their promises of eternal frictionless convenience and distraction. A warm, wet, comfortable pod, customized to fit me like a glove. I will not succumb. I will die a free man. I will die fighting.

— Phil Greene in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 227-228

†

“And if you should find yourself in a group of friends who are all united under a cause that makes them miserable, then losing those friends wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 227

“Here’s the thing,” he said, “no matter how this turns out, even if the box is full of lifesaving medicine for orphans, I’m always going to be the incel terrorist. I can live to be a hundred years old, and that’s all I’ll be. The internet doesn’t forget.”
“Fuck the internet, then.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Is it?”
“All of my friends are online. It’s where I work, it’s where I live. If everyone abandons me…” He shrugged, unable to even make himself visualize it.
“I’m not going to say that those friendships aren’t real,” said Ether. “I’m not an asshole. But any friend who abandons you over a baseless internet rumor wasn’t your real friend. Whether you knew them in person or on a screen.”
“You say so much that sounds like it came off some housewife’s inspirational Facebook meme.”
“That’s another game the cynics play. ‘Because this objectively true thing has been said too many times by unoriginal thinkers, we have to reject it and make ourselves miserable just to spite them.’”

— Abbott and Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 226

He knew he should be paranoid, but wasn’t certain of just how paranoid to be, which of course is how paranoia works.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 225

“It’s just money […], a transaction. Stop piling grand emotional significance onto it. That’s the other thing about living in the black box—you get trained to turn every little thing in your life into a grand fucking psychodrama.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 218

†

He was bored by everything normal but lacked the tools to survive excursions into the dangerous and exotic.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 3, p. 214

†

The real difficulty is, isn’t it, to adapt one’s steady beliefs about tribulation to this particular tribulation; for the particular, when it arrives, always seems so peculiarly intolerable.

— C. S. Lewis, a letter to his good friend Owen Barfield, 1940

“Once I was disconnected from it and looking back, it was clear that everything we were doing was insane. It was the first time I realized there was something truly dangerous about this, the devices, the algorithms. It’s like it reduced us to our limbic systems, turned us into mindless zealots in warring tribes.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 204

†

But then she’d seen Abbott, who looked so pale that he seemed at risk of a vitamin D deficiency and had the vibe of a man embarrassed to be caught in the act of existing.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 201

Interactions […] were becoming less and less fruitful as its population grew; they were now forty hours into the crisis, and news of it had spread well into the sphere of casual observers, though still with little in the way of mainstream press coverage. The sub was now the home of a core group of posters and a sprawling audience of spectators whose demands for compelling news were growing faster than it could be produced. Attention-seekers were eagerly filling the void, and that, friends, is how you build a bullshit machine.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 194

†

“There’s nothin’ stopping you. That’s the only thing I learned on the inside. The world lies to you and says change is hard. It ain’t. You can walk out and do it anytime. Just be somebody else.
[…] It’s true. And I’ll tell you something else, the only thing I learned from therapy: People who had rough childhoods, guys like you and me, you grow up scared of being happy. It don’t feel right. You find yourself sabotaging it, because you’re so scared that you’re gonna lose it that you’d rather just trash it yourself, so at least you can say it was your choice. So, you go hunting for grievances, to give yourself an excuse.

— Chap in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 192

Americans, as Malort liked to say, used to be a wild people. It was a whole country descended from hard-barked frontiersmen and those who’d managed to not get slaughtered by them. The USA had sprouted from soil so saturated with blood that the wells tasted of copper, less a “melting pot” than a meat grinder. It was a land of pissed-off underdogs who couldn’t be governed, simple folk who were polite and generous but with no desire to ever again feel a boot on their neck. They knew what freedom really meant, that liberty produces risk and pain the way a motor produces exhaust, that the spirit of America means not just accepting that fact but amplifying it so that it can be heard coming from six blocks away. Or that’s how things used to be, anyway.
For example, Malort could remember a time when a man could hitchhike all the way across the country, if he so desired. Not because it was safe but because whoever picked you up understood that the world was dangerous and accepted it as such.

— Malort in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 189

“I—I lost my shoe. It’s back there in the creek. I didn’t pack another pair. I didn’t think I’d—”
“We’ll get you another shoe.”
“Where? How?”
[…]
“Lots of places sell shoes, Abbott. That’s not our chief concern right now.”

— Abbott and Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 187

Abbott was now so thoroughly confused that he complied mainly because he was kind of afraid not to.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 186

dazed, feeling clumsily around with their hands and trying to figure out why the world had suddenly flipped on its head.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 185

†

“I fully believe that I would think the way you do, if I had lived the life you’ve lived and consumed the media you’ve consumed. But I have this theory, that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what’s happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It’s like a filter that only shows you others’ bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn’t exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it’s designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort. A friend of mine came up with a name for it, for these algorithms, this media mind prison. We call it the black box of doom.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 182

This behavior—gruffly shutting down bids for human connection—was something he vividly remembered hating in his father, and he hated seeing it in himself even more, but found himself doing it all the same. Why did she get to move on and be happy? The fires of rage must be kept alight at all cost, and there is no justice until everyone has been sufficiently burned.
[…] and Abbott could feel the exhaustion hitting him and knew that it wasn’t just the drive and rough sleep but the anger, that the hours of stewing had drained him. And for what? What had been gained?
[…] For the second time in two days, Abbott felt rage slipping through his fingers and sensed himself scrambling to hang on, like it was a precious thing. Like he’d be letting the universe get away with something if he allowed himself peace.
[…] Abbott was once again pleased that Ether seemed to need a moment to gather herself after this. He was causing this woman anxiety, which meant he was winning. Or something.
[…] Abbott scoffed and shook his head. They went under an overpass, and he briefly imagined himself flooring the Navigator into the embankment.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 177-179

In sci-fi and fantasy stories, rebellions are usually the oppressed, impoverished underclasses rising up against their wealthy and powerful oppressors. In the real world, it’s often those who are the most comfortable in the system who want to bring it down. As such, lots of mass killers are in the category of the aforementioned incel hero Elliot Rodger, who carried out his rampage in a brand-new BMW his mother had gifted him. The deadliest shooting in American history—the 2017 Las Vegas attack that killed sixty and wounded more than eight hundred—was carried out by a millionaire who believed he’d been treated poorly by casino staff. The deadliest school massacre in American history wasn’t Sandy Hook, it was a bombing in 1927 that leveled a rural Michigan school, killing thirty-eight children and six adults. The culprit was a local farmer, upset that he lost an election for school board treasurer. What they had in common, in Key’s view, was aggrieved narcissism, a total inability to put personal affronts into perspective. Why shouldn’t others die for your petty humiliations, when you’re the Main Character of the Universe?

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 174

“It sounds like you’ve had some horrible experiences with specific women,” she began, “or groups of women, and I will never tell you that it didn’t happen, or that you imagined it, or that they were right. Okay? But the two of us, as individuals, in this car, were doing fine. We’ve gone through danger together, we’ve trusted each other, we’ve cooperated on a common cause. But you just talked yourself into a seething rage because you’ve abruptly decided we’re on opposite sides of some culture war. You and I aren’t at war! We want the same thing, to get this stupid box to its destination.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 168

Endless highway scrolled under the dashboard. Around them was a lifeless expanse of grass and shrubs and power lines, the same nothing for mile after mile. Abbott had left an empty life and entered a void.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 167

†

“If I were to tell you that your ratio of evidence to wishful thinking is roughly the same as you’d find in a bottle of a homeopathic aphrodisiac, would that be an example of mansplaining or gaslighting? I’m trying to be something other than a boorish obstacle in your journey while also not following you off a cliff.”

— Patrick in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 165

a man who, in the process, had lost his only anchors to reality. Key believed the world was full of crazy men who were kept tethered to reality by sane women […]. Having a support group of friends could maybe have rescued Phil Greene, but he’d chosen isolation, and in isolation, human minds tend to get strange, like a self-portrait painted from memory, in the dark, using a live snake as a brush.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 160

What a wonderful world it would be if it actually worked that way, speculation wilting in the face of evidence.

— Patrick in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 159

all modern hate groups were really just incel grievances in disguise. It’s a historical fact that one of the key precursors to mass violence in a society is simply an excess of young, unmarried men. […] smart societies knew you could deal with this problem simply by finding some excuse to go to war. Through all of history, wars were a way to burn off your excess young men, like venting heat from an engine.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 158

some kind of scribble-patterned wallpaper, but a closer examination revealed it to be scrawled rants in almost illegible handwriting. When you live alone, you’re free to decorate the space with your madness.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 157

This is where paranoia gets you. You can’t stop the chaos of the world, but you can dig a hole.

— Patrick in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 155

Abbott was still enraged but wasn’t totally sure who to be angry at. Maybe everyone. The goblin, Ether, himself, that guy in the truck with his tiny goatee. Fuck him and the horse that rode in on him.
[…] Abbott scrambled to think of a fake name at the exact same time his mouth went ahead and said, “Abbott.”

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 152

†

You hate that the world treats you like a loser. Well, here’s your chance to prove them wrong.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 151

†

Listen. What I’m about to say, I know I’m going to sound like a bumper sticker, but this is just me telling you the situation. Okay? So, all your life, you’ve been clinging to the side of a swimming pool. On the opposite side of that pool is everything you want: independence, respect, your own career and a home, and maybe a partner. But to get to the other side of the pool, you have to let go of the side you’re on. That lightheaded feeling you’re experiencing right now? Part of it is just that. You’re floating free, like a grown-up. Your own actions, your own consequences. Sink or swim.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 151

†

They were wandering around a 7-Eleven store in a sparse city that Abbott thought was Lubbock, Texas, unless Lubbock was the next one and they were in some equally desolate expanse of pavement. […] it would be a tight contest to decide which US state was the emptiest, but Texas was making a strong case. It wasn’t just the vast expanses of perfectly flat nothing along the highway; it’s that even within the towns, the structures were scattered as if they’d all been slid across a smooth floor. There were wide stretches of pavement and/or dying grass in between buildings, as if they couldn’t stand to be too close to one another. This particular gas station was at a busy intersection across from a sports stadium of some kind, surrounded by hotels that stood like islands in a sunbaked ocean of parking.

— Abbot in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 147

For the last forty years, everything has been built around getting into a car, going to an appointed place at an appointed time, and driving back. There’s no chance for adventure, to run into new friends, new situations. It’s all planned, supervised.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 147

†

this is what an adventure is, just overcoming obstacles. We had a problem […] and we solved it.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 144

† †

OK but the real question is what’s up with the two 1800 transitions. They’re synonyms for each other. It’s Australia/Lord_Howe, which has a powerful 30-minute DST transition:

<+1030>-10:30<+11>-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0

10h30m ahead of UTC standard, 11h DST. Love this for them. Running cron jobs on an hourly basis doesn’t in practice have very weird interactions with DST. Everywhere else on the planet, every 60 minutes you’re back to the same spot on the clock.

Except Lord Howe Island. Heroes. On the first Sunday of October, a 60-minute timegap only puts you halfway around the clock. All your cron jobs are now staggered relative to the local wall clock.

— Ulysse Carion, Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone, 2024 (via)

It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that “Bugs”—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.

— Thomas Edison, Edison to Puskas, 1878 (via)

†

I thought you might like to know that the first computer bug is still in existence. We were building Mark II the summer of 1945. It was a hot summer in Cambridge, and naturally since it was World War II we were working in a World War I temporary building. Air conditioning wasn’t very good, no screens, and Mark II stopped. We finally located the failing relay, it was one of the big signal relays, and inside the relay, beaten to death by the relay contacts, was a moth about this big.

So the operator got a pair of tweezers and very carefully fished the moth out of the relay, put it in the log book, and put scotch tape over it. And below it he wrote, “first actual bug found”.

I knew you’d be glad to know that the bug is still in the log book under the scotch tape. It’s in the museum at the Naval Surface Weapons Center at Dahlgren, Virginia.

— Capt. Grace Hopper, Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People, 1982, National Security Agency

†

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

— David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear, 1985 (via)

†

The lead designer and two to seven other developers in a large room or adjacent rooms, with information radiators such as whiteboards and flip charts on the wall, having access to key users, distractions kept away, delivering running, tested, usable code every month or two (okay, three at the most), periodically reflecting and adjusting on their working style.

— Alistair Paul Becker, Alistair Cockburn, Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams, 2004

†

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a ton of very interesting work done on deeply thought out user-centric software designed to augment human intelligence and give people maximum control over what they were doing while still being approachable. The Smalltalk stuff was some of it, but there was some pretty spectacular stuff back in the old Windows 3.x, macOS classic, and even MS-DOS days where apps would interact richly and you had document-centric customizable work flows. You even had things like (gasp) composability of applications in GUIs.

I mean look at this stuff you could do on a machine with 256KiB of RAM and an 8086

All of this was completely abandoned and forgotten because there’s no money in it. Make software like that and there’s no moat, and make it local and people will pirate it. Lock it down in the cloud and lock down the data and people will pay you.

That which gets funded gets built. We get shit because we pay for shit. People won’t pay for good software because the flexibility and user-centrism of good software allows them not to.

— Adam Ierymenko, Hacker News, 2024

The main reason we don’t have a future like this isn’t technical. It’s that there’s no business model here. Developers want apps that jail everything inside to force people to buy or subscribe to the app. Interoperability means no moat, and decomposing apps entirely means no products at all just a tool box that nobody can really control. So far nobody has ever found a way to reliably monetize this kind of software landscape.

[…] Quality software that is easy to use (especially for non-technical users) is extremely expensive. Developers are expensive. So instead you get “WIMPs” (Weakly Interacting Massive Programs) that win in the marketplace because they are more polished, more maintained, and more supported. (Because people pay for them.) Lately most of these WIMPs are in the cloud.

The more I’ve matured as a developer the more I’ve realized that business models are the tail that wags the dog and that a lot of the landscape of software is defined by what people will pay for and/or what is structured so as to make people pay for it.

Business models are also why things are increasingly centralized and in the cloud. It’s not because it’s inherently better, though it does make certain things easier to implement. In many cases it’s a lot worse: higher latency, not available offline, much more limited and slower UI, etc. It’s because the cloud is DRM and makes it easy to force a subscription.

— Adam Ierymenko, Hacker News, 2024

Document-centric workflows were once the great promise of the future […] a future where we would decompose applications and the OS would only really worry about a file, and you would bring functionality to the file.

[…] the OSes we use require us to do this sort of work in a windowed application, […] the future of user interfaces and […] operating systems could support workflows tailored to the individual and the task they wanted to achieve.

— Paul Robinson, Hacker News, 2024

My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.

I experience an enormous difference between “trying to design an augmented reading environment” and “trying to design an augmented version of this specific linear algebra book”. When I think about the former, I mostly focus on primitives, abstractions, and processes. When I think about the latter, I focus on the needs of specific ideas, on specific pages. And then, once it’s in use, I think about specific problems, that specific students had, in specific places.

— Andy Matuschak, In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023, 2024

† †

I felt that my experiments had somehow distanced me from my aim: enabling people to acquire rich understanding of complex ideas that really matter to them. I’d been building systems and running big experiments, and I could tell you plenty about forgetting curves and usage patterns—but very little about how those things connected to anything anyone cared about. I knew that I was making some progress, but I was mostly flying blind, without the feedback I needed to drive my iteration.

So in 2023, I switched gears to emphasize intimacy. Instead of statistical analysis and summative interviews, I sat next to individuals for hours, as they used one-off prototypes which I’d made just for them. And I got more insight in the first few weeks of this than I had in all of 2022.

— Andy Matuschak, In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023, 2024

“I don’t think I’ve relaxed once, in my whole life.”

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 146

And then, for the first time in Abbott’s entire life, he understood everything: this man, this woman, himself, and the gun. Abbott had learned early that when his father got angry at someone, the humanity of his target just evaporated from his mind. In that moment, they were an object, an obstacle unworthy of sympathy or empathy. Abbott had thought his father was a psychopath for as long as he’d known the word, but now, finally, he got it. There is a primal override that shuts off all those feelings, because in moments of maximum peril, they are a weakness that allows the predators and incompetents to do unchecked damage to the world. Abbott raised the gun, looked down the sights, and thought he would find some kind of resistance within himself, some invisible wall of fear or guilt that would push back, prevent him from stepping over this line. Instead, he found nothing at all.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 134

Abbott wasn’t sure if he wanted a passerby to stop and intervene or if he was terrified that would happen. […] But of course he would take everything. This is how it always went. Here was another bully who’d sensed that Abbott was on the verge of actually having some kind of good thing in his life, which could never be allowed. The monsters just took what they wanted, and they got away with it, every time.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 132

†

The Tattoo Monster’s gun was a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun, the kind you’d expect from a bandit in a Mad Max postapocalypse, adding to the impression that he had been birthed directly from the hallucinations of a paranoid mind.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 132

“He’s never said or done anything extreme around me. He’s a lump. He sits around and consumes. Like he thinks that’s his purpose in life, to let other people build and grow so that he can just slurp up what they make while giving nothing back, until he dies.”

— Hunter to Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 129

A storm descends on a small town, and the downpour soon turns into a flood. As the waters rise, the local preacher kneels in prayer on the church porch, surrounded by water. By and by, one of the townsfolk comes up the street in a canoe.

“Better get in, Preacher. The waters are rising fast.”

“No,” says the preacher. “I have faith in the Lord. He will save me.”

Still the waters rise. Now the preacher is up on the balcony, wringing his hands in supplication, when another guy zips up in a motorboat.

“Come on, Preacher. We need to get you out of here. The levee’s gonna break any minute.”

Once again, the preacher is unmoved. “I shall remain. The Lord will see me through.”

After a while the levee breaks, and the flood rushes over the church until only the steeple remains above water. The preacher is up there, clinging to the cross, when a helicopter descends out of the clouds, and a state trooper calls down to him through a megaphone.

“Grab the ladder, Preacher. This is your last chance.”

Once again, the preacher insists the Lord will deliver him.

And, predictably, he drowns.

A pious man, the preacher goes to heaven. After a while he gets an interview with God, and he asks the Almighty, “Lord, I had unwavering faith in you. Why didn’t you deliver me from that flood?”

God shakes his head. “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

— Troy DuFrene, Two Boats and a Helicopter: Thoughts on Stress Management, Psychology Today, 2009 (via)

†

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

— Morpheus in The Wachowski’s, The Matrix, 1999, Warner Bros.

†

Pedro had been Hunter’s business partner for seventeen years, a case of two perfectionists who were fortunate to find each other because no one else could tolerate them. Hunter would rather rip up a brand-new roof and start over rather than leave imperfect work in the world; he’d lost six figures on jobs that he’d redone for reasons that weren’t visible to anyone but him and, invariably, Pedro. His partner hadn’t started as a roof guy but a tile guy, which was perfect—tile guys tended to see themselves as artists, surgeons. Hunter believed with all his heart and soul that guys like them were part of a dying breed of masters, leaving behind work that would baffle generations of mediocrities.

— Hunter in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 2, p. 127

†

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.

— Abraham Lincoln, Letter to John Stuart, 1841

Our old religions created strong societies by cultivating humans who could delay gratification, building a tolerance for suffering that would see them through the hard winter, the invading army, the totalitarian usurper. The modern religion of consumerist instant gratification, on the other hand, serves only the masters for whom the zombified subjects make perfect cattle, relinquishing their freedom and individuality in exchange for the next paltry release of soothing opiates. The effects wear off sooner with each dose, each time leaving the subject hungry and ashamed, a sort of post-ejaculate clarity that in the moment reveals the true state of its abject slavery, making the victim all the more eager to submit fully to the only source of pleasure and comfort it has ever known.

— Phil Greene in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 122

“Who knows? I mean, that’s the whole point—once they settled on a truth, everything else could be reframed to fit. […] That’s just how the brain works: It wants to shape everything into a narrative. Once you realize that, the whole world starts to make more sense. Or less sense.

[…] There’s this whole reality that people all over the world believe mind, body, and soul and when you trace it back to its origin, you find … nothing at all. Just a story so weird and terrifying that it becomes infectious, with mass media acting as the vector.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 121

†

He would have tried to rein in the bullshit, but it was a rule of the internet that any efforts to censor content only gave it credibility. The human brain loves novelty and excitement and, well, what’s more novel than a weird lie somebody pulled straight out of their ass?

— Zeke in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 115

There’s a feeling that there is no word for yet, because no one had ever experienced it prior to the internet era: the dizzying sensation of seeing an online drama escape into the real world. Zeke always compared it to watching that demon girl crawl out of the TV in The Ring, a barrier of safety and unreality breached and violated right before your eyes. He was now in bed but a million miles from sleep, terrified of missing the next bombshell. So now he was lying there, the room dark aside from the glow of the phone lighting his face.

[…] It was like the time he’d received a letter from his doctor implying there was grave news that could only be shared in-person, then when he’d called to make an appointment, was told the doctor had gone on vacation for two weeks.

— Zeke in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 113-114

†

It wasn’t even midnight in his native time zone, but it felt like he’d been awake for a week.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 111

†

we’re all just babies trapped in God’s hot parked car.

— Patrick in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 111

If your entire worldview is “Don’t tread on me,” what’s going to happen when a leader tries to impose rules? You’d think they’d learn to put their differences aside for the cause, but that’s hard to do when you’ve been raised to believe there’s no such thing as a minor disagreement. If you think that, say, a cashier failing to wish you a Merry Christmas is a sign of impending Christian genocide, you’re probably not the type to hash out differences over brunch.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 110

“Don’t serve the time, let the time serve you”

— Sundae Greene in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 109

“The thing is, I’ve tried to leave that person behind, the person I used to be. It’s not a gender transition thing or anything like that. I just got to a dark place and tried to make a clean break from that life. If I told you all the stuff I did, you wouldn’t like me as much. And it’s not cool stuff like robbing banks or selling drugs, it’s mean and petty and gross stuff.”
“When we met, you asked me if sometimes, out of the blue, I’ll cringe at a thing I did or said years ago. Is that what you were talking about? You lay awake and think about all the people you screwed over? Torture yourself with it?”
There was another pause, and she watched the desert roll by as if painful lowlights from her life were playing outside the window.
“I think,” she said, “I caused so many people so much pain for so little reason that my brain can’t hold it all. I finally realized I couldn’t move on, couldn’t live my life unless I just rebooted myself. I think that should be a basic human right, don’t you? To denounce your past? Even if there are records of it online, you should be able to say, ‘I’m sorry and I’ve grown,’ and everyone should judge you based on how you act from then on. If somebody goes mining into your past for stuff to bring you down or embarrass you, they should be treated like the bad guy.”
“But you know that’s not how it works, right?”
“Oh, trust me. I know.”
“Because people are going to preserve that version of you, from the part of your life when they felt the most superior to you.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 106

“Seriously, you need to turn off that catastrophe reflex before it triggers a stroke.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 106

they weren’t at all sure why they were there or why they’d seen what they’d seen.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 105

He’d spent half of his life sensing he was in someone’s way and the other half actually being in someone’s way but failing to sense it.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 103

“Did you try to leave me, just then? Did you try to abandon me and then come back because you decided you needed my help or whatever?”
“No! No. Abbott, even if I was a terrible person, why would I do that? If I didn’t need a driver, I wouldn’t have hired one.”
“You’d have gotten a free hundred-thousand-dollar SUV and a loaded gun.”
Ether suddenly got serious, turning to face him.
“Okay. Abbott. Look at me. Hey. Are you listening? You know those postapocalyptic zombie shows where they have to cross the wastelands and they’re like, ‘We can’t trust anybody out here! We’re on our own!’ Well, that’s a geek fantasy for indoor kids. Out here, in the real world, in the actual desert, this is when you have to be willing to trust people. You don’t have a chance otherwise. Trust is the only advantage humans have as a species, that millions of us can all get together and trust one another. Yes, including weird people you just met earlier in the day.
[…] That’s what you’ll find out here in the wastelands. Almost all of these people are just like you. They want to do the right thing, and every morning, they wake up and go do it. Every. Single. Day.”

— Abbott and Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 102-103

one cop pointed his gun Malort’s direction and screamed for him to get fucking down or get fucking shot. He didn’t normally like complying with cops, but sometimes you have to pick your battles. He tossed the shotgun into the Buick and then got low, thinking that if he were about to die, he was going to go out how he’d lived: with absolutely no idea what the hell was going on.

[…] Malort watched with anticipation, wondering if the kid would manage to take out either of the police before they ventilated his entire torso. At a moment when Malort was certain both cops had started pulling their fingers into their triggers, the girl in the Circle K shirt ran over to the kid, ripping the gun away and clawing him in the face. Then the cops started yelling at both of them, the school shooter now screaming and crying in protest. It was, without question, the funniest fucking thing Malort had ever seen.

[…] Just then, Malort turned his head, and there was the goddamned white Lincoln Navigator, rolling past at a leisurely pace, the girl visible in the passenger seat, some nerdy guy at the wheel. They rounded the corner toward the interstate and were gone. Malort cursed to himself, and also cursed loudly, to everyone in the vicinity.

— Malort in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 101-105

†

He stood there, the nauseating realizations hitting him in waves.
[…] He was going to puke. Here was another familiar sensation, of being humiliated down to a level lower than he’d previously thought existed. When you’re so far down the social ladder that you’re basically lying on the floor, that’s when they love to stomp you the most, to grind your face into the shit. Ether had seen him coming a mile away because she saw in him what everyone saw: a clueless outcast whose people skills were so poor that tricking him was as easy as kicking an old dog.
[…] how easily he’d been swindled? How stupidly trusting he’d been?

[…] He imagined them snickering at him from behind the counter and decided he’d just find someplace else. […] Maybe he should just step into traffic instead.

[…] But then he heard Ether say, “Where are you going? Get in!”
He spun to face her. “Where did you go?”
It was an accusation. Even in this moment, he was absolutely convinced that she’d abandoned him but had just changed her mind.

[…] “I’ve been chasing you for several minutes. It was comical. Let’s go, hero!”

[…] he stood there for a moment, still enraged but now struggling to grasp exactly why. He felt his anger begin to dissipate but also felt an inexplicable impulse to cling to it with all his might.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 100-102

†

The surrounding landscape was, in fact, alternating patches of trees and roadways, of bunny invisibility and bunny death. Abbott was just beginning to rehearse how he would break the bad news to Lupita after his bold proclamation earlier when [… he saw …] Petey Dumptruck, huddled in the shadows of the stones, trying to make himself as small as possible against this impossibly huge, terrifying world. He was close enough to the highway that he could surely hear the cars whooshing by, even if he couldn’t see them. And he had to know that they meant death, that out here, everything did.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 96

It’s one of the purest things you can do, to protect them from this, all this. I mean, we knew he wouldn’t live forever, but it was our job to be there at the end for him, to give him comfort when he couldn’t see or hear anymore. To hold him as he passed, to bury him.

— Lupita in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 95

[…] listening to an interminably long story that a sobbing woman was telling in the wrong order, with the only important information saved for the very end.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 86

“All those people killing themselves by various means fast and slow, I’m telling you, part of that is that we just don’t gather anymore. We’ve stopped going to church, we’ve built suburbs where people don’t have that third place that isn’t work or home, where everybody can go hang out. You can’t do that at a chain restaurant; they want you out of there so they can seat the next customer. Young people don’t go to bars or clubs like they used to. But in general, there’s just no profit in providing a public place where we can all just go and be together. All the money is in, I don’t know, getting us addicted to some piece of software. You talked about people gambling on their phones; think how sad that is—going broke from blackjack from your sofa without even a cheap casino buffet to cushion the blow.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 83

Abbott glanced over at the register and caught the cashier looking back at him. She quickly looked away, like a teacher had just called her out for cheating on a test. Then Abbott quickly looked away, like it was a contest to see who could be most embarrassed by the accidental eye contact. Abbott’s understanding of social interactions always ran on a delay ranging from a few seconds to several years, so it took a moment to realize that her reaction implied that she’d recognized him.

[…] He told himself not to look over at the counter again, but for some reason his brain interpreted it as a command to do exactly that.

[…] Abbott paid while the cashier acted like eye contact would turn her to stone.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 82-83

“You’ve just been sitting in a moving chair this whole time!”
“Do you want to drive?”
“I’m not criticizing, I’m making a point. I don’t think you’re exhausted because of the driving. I think you’re mentally exhausted from riding with me.”
“That is, uh, not the shocking revelation you think it is.”
“No, listen. I think you find it draining to deal with anyone face-to-face. And I think it’s specifically because you can’t control it. Online, you can duck out of any conversation, you can say anything you want, you can calibrate how you come across. Not here.”
“The ability to block people yelling death threats and making racist jokes is a net positive, in my mind.”
“Sure, but I think our interactions could be totally great the whole time and you’d find it just as exhausting because the world has trained you to be afraid of being fully and truly perceived. We’re social animals; that’s the equivalent of making a fish afraid of water! We evolved in tribes where everybody could see everybody else, all the time; we didn’t even have separate rooms or beds. Just by evolution, you should find personal contact comforting, and the fact that they’ve burned that out of so many of us is apocalyptic.”

— Ether and Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 82

“I heard a stat that almost one in ten men are on antidepressants now, and almost one in five women. Which was shocking because—”
“It’s so low.”
“I know, right! I don’t have any friends who aren’t on an antidepressant, or an antipsychotic, or something. I was like, where is this well-adjusted majority?”

[…] “I heard that the average number of close friends has dropped over the last thirty years,” said Ether. “It used to be that the number of loners who literally had no friends was tiny, like three percent of the population. That’s quadrupled since then; now twelve percent of us have nobody. […] I’m telling you, it’s a crisis. Humans need friends every bit as much as we need food. But because this kind of starvation is invisible, and because we’re all physically really fat, nobody sees it. Then, every ten minutes or so, somebody sticks a gun in their mouth.”

— Ether and Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 79-84

At this point, I think my meds’ side effects should qualify as a disease all on their own. But if I don’t take them, it feels like there’s a shrieking car alarm going off right next to my ears twenty-four hours a day. I mean, it’s no surprise there’s a pill shortage; that’s what happens when you build a society that can only be survived if you either have a super-specific type of brain or a prescription to block out the chaos.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 79

I was never great at figuring out those rules anyway, what you’re not supposed to talk about.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 78

If reality isn’t enough to keep you interested and you find yourself constantly inventing a fake reality for yourself, you need to rethink your life.

— Zeke in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 77

it turned out that Key’s actual favorite hobby was buying supplies for hobbies. She didn’t really get any joy out of the next part, and it was starting to get expensive. Her dining room table was, at the moment, piled high with calligraphy tools, including a $400 block of solid handmade ink from Japan.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 75

You say the internet like we’re talking about a singular dumb entity who’s always wrong. Everyone is online, including smart people with access to actual information.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 75

“You’re worried about an uprising from a population that needs four different antianxiety prescriptions to order a pizza over the phone?”
In the time since, she had developed a very specific theory about the potential for domestic terror in the USA spreading, not as a mass political movement but as a social contagion. The country was full of isolated weirdos who were rapidly trying to find ways to make their lives meaningful and, she believed, would eventually run out of options that didn’t involve scattered corpses in a food court.

[…] these modern attacks were a grab bag of loosely held beliefs that secretly all pointed in the same direction: a desire to destroy the ability and willingness of individuals to gather in public and form communities. They were attacks on social cohesion, pushing a vision of the future that, in many cases, not even the attackers were aware of.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 72-73

She’d spent her entire adult life having her ears blasted by a clarion cry repeated in a thousand different forms, alternating the same two lines:
“Something must be done.”
“Nothing can be done.”

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 72

With the lethal purpose of a jungle predator on the hunt, Key burst through the door of her apartment, cleared off a spot on her kitchen counter for her purse and Glock, checked her phone for updates, then raced to the bathroom to vomit up the misguided burrito she’d eaten in the car. Then she raced to her sofa, cleared off a spot large enough that she could mostly lie down, then immediately went to sleep for over an hour. Then she burst awake, raged at herself for falling asleep, and checked her phone for updates.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 71

what was life but a series of hard jobs you had to endure because you’d screwed up the easy ones?

— Malort in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 69

Not only was that not an option for a man like Malort—or just Malort, since he thought he might be the only man exactly like him—but he strongly suspected the pair weren’t going to make it to their destination one way or the other.

— Malort in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 69

Emphasis mine.

it’s a trait of the human species that we can’t be in a spot for more than a few minutes without producing some kind of waste.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 65

If she were a lady detective in a TV show, she’d go whip his ass with some martial arts moves that, in real life, only work if the victim has also carefully rehearsed the choreography.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 64

Bureaucracies by nature don’t move quickly and, well, that’s exactly what the B in FBI stands for.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 63

In 1995, an army veteran named Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City after having spent nine months sourcing the materials. Nine hundred federal agents would work the case … after the bomb went off. Prior to that, the number was zero, despite the fact that McVeigh had spent weeks blabbing about his plan to everyone he knew.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 62

I was living in a van. Or, well, a converted ambulance, actually. And the biggest thing I discovered was that I hated it. Eventually, my entire life off the grid was all about trying to replicate all the stuff I had on the grid, piece by piece.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 62

This is a trick I learned living off the grid. Ironically, wearing high-vis gear makes you invisible; people assume you’re part of a landscaping crew or something, which means they don’t catalog your face since you’re not considered a real human being.

[…] you’re trying to pin down what kind of person I am. If I say I’ve been living on the streets for the last two years, do you start to worry? If I say I’ve been working as a kindergarten teacher, do you feel safer? It’s weird how we assign personalities based on employment.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 61

Isn’t it crazy that less than two hundred years ago, Jedediah Smith would get famous just for making it through the Mojave alive? And the Donner Party, those settlers who got stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains and had to eat each other, that happened a hundred and seventy years ago. It took two months for rescuers to get to them. Two months! Now there’s a ski resort up there with a bunch of cute shops and restaurants all connected by smooth roads and packed with well-fed people in shiny, warm cars. And right now, I bet there’s somebody eating in one of those joints who’s frothing mad that they’ve waited twenty minutes for their food. ‘When are those tacos going to get here?’ they’ll say. ‘I’m starving!’ And they’ll be saying it within shouting distance of where those explorers boiled and ate their shoes, shivering in the dark for an entire winter just two lifetimes ago. And here’s the weird thing: The angry diner’s anger will be genuine; the bad service will actually ruin their day.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 60

“So I’ve just been trying to get some perspective, you know?”
“Can you take some of mine? I’d be less depressed if I didn’t have so much perspective, if I could just get excited about golf or gardening.”

— Ether and Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 60

“Twenty-two bombs,” said Ether, “to clear a way for 40 through the Bristol Mountains. Boom, boom, boom, boom. That’s what’s unique about humans. We see a mountain range in our way and we’re like, ‘Absolutely not.’”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 59

Ha, I can tell you don’t have a lot of in-person conversations. You always say, ‘What?’ even though you clearly heard, because you have to buy time to think of a response. You treat every conversation starter as a pop quiz you’re scared you’re going to fail.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 59

The woman was pounding both fists on the hood and screaming, “WHY NOW, HUH?!? WHY NOW?!?” while visibly sobbing and occasionally stopping to flip off surrounding cars. Multiple other bystanders could be seen filming the tantrum as part of a new public ritual in which humans are captured at their lowest in order to cement that as their public face forever. The teary woman finally got back into the truck, and it started right up, a humorous punch line that those filming the scene were praying would thrust them into virality.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 57

Facebook was the first ubiquitous social network (still with some three billion users worldwide) but was now seen by the youth as a crumbling home for the elderly, isolated, and paranoid. Instagram, founded as the first entirely photo-based network, had created a sort of image-based language made up of carefully staged visuals, entire human lives distilled down to an aesthetic. Twitter, with its character limit that required all thoughts to be boiled down to a sentence or two, was frequently cited as a cancer on democracy and society in general, as it rendered detail and nuance all but impossible (this is why a large portion of the posts on Twitter were about how Twitter should be destroyed). Also, it was technically no longer called Twitter—these platforms frequently rebranded for no discernable reason. And then there was TikTok, which was the new kid on the block, a video version of Twitter that fed users a stream of clips mostly less than fifteen seconds in length, just enough time for a striking visual or a single thought before the user swiped up to the next, and the next, consuming literally hundreds of them in a session. Key believed TikTok was possibly the most addictive piece of software ever created, and she understood why multiple countries had already outlawed it.
Still, she believed the scariest platforms were those that didn’t cater to short attention spans at all. Charismatic streamers would stay on camera for twelve hours or more on YouTube and Twitch, their cultlike followings sending in actual money purely for the right to hear their name said on the broadcast. Among the youth, the most famous celebrities were almost all streaming personalities, their most popular uploads often drawing viewership that rivaled the Super Bowl. If one of them suddenly started spouting reactionary rhetoric, the ripples could instantly be felt across an entire demographic.
And all that was just a sip of the septic tank; there were literally dozens of similar platforms, and these days, some of the most important vectors of radicalization weren’t even social media but online games in which the voice chats had birthed entire subcultures of their own.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 56-57

Dozens of platforms with largely identical functionality served radically different populations with diverging cultures and use patterns, often overlapping the same users who switch personalities based on which app they have open.
This dizzyingly complex landscape changed so quickly that it felt like trying to track the exact position of every locust in a swarm; entire online ecosystems seemed to appear overnight and evaporate just as quickly.

— Key in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 56

What’s wrong with silence? Think of all the thinking you’ll get done. This is why good ideas occur to you in the shower and why you can’t sleep because you’re too busy replaying some argument or rehearsing some hypothetical argument you might have. Your brain needs quiet to process all the stuff that happened, and these days, you never give it a chance. Unless we’re bathing or sleeping, it’s a nonstop stream of new input with no time to process the old.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 54

Think about the load of anxiety you’ve taken on there, and for what practical purpose? It kind of seems like a superstition to me, like a sports fan who thinks his team will lose if he doesn’t watch the games.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 54

I don’t miss my phone because I’m addicted, I miss it because I’ve lost my ability to communicate or transact with everyone in my life and have severed my conduit to all human knowledge and world events. A literal war could break out and we wouldn’t know. We could drive right into a tornado or a riot. We’re totally cut off.

[…] I think that the odds are high that there will be some huge news or a disaster somewhere, considering we now average one of those every few hours. There’s a war in Europe, you know. And a plague. And constant mass shootings. And democracy is collapsing. And climate change is about to render the species extinct.

— Abbott in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 53

He knew what he was about to do was dangerous. He was summoning a dark force that, once unleashed, no man or government could contain. But he could see no other options. Zeke was going to take this problem to the hive mind at Reddit, the sprawling message board of mostly young males armed with a vast arsenal of shallow knowledge and free time, humming with a relentless desire to assuage their boredom by continually ingesting and digesting new morsels of information.

[…] Reddit was divided up into thousands of subreddits, usually by subject, each moderated by volunteers with their own often-inscrutable rules, each sub operating as a parallel reality with its own distinct culture and moral code.

[…] Reddit posts were granted or denied visibility based on votes, specifically the votes of the most bored users who sifted through the slush pile of new submissions.

[…] Reddit, the vast message board that served something like half a billion users a month. This was, to a large degree, where the internet’s unfathomable gush of data was gathered, sorted, and shaped into a satisfying narrative. Redditors half-jokingly referred to themselves as a “hive mind,” a collective of idle brainpower that could solve complex mysteries and generate new hyper-specific porn fetishes at the rate of several per minute.

[…] audiences connected like neurons forming new pathways in a brain.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 50-57

†

The knowledge, regardless of its usefulness, would sate his anxiety just enough to let him soldier on through his day. To simply remain in the dark was unthinkable.

— Zeke in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 49

†

there’s so much to unpack in the fact that you think enthusiasm is childish.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 47

Being far from home is a state of mind, and I’ll bet this will be the farthest you’ve ever been.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 47

Abbott allowed himself to relax just a bit, returning to the baseline level of anxiety dictated by the circumstances and human existence in general.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 47

“cringe, like that’s the worst thing that can happen, messing up a real-life interaction. Nobody has people skills, because they stay home all the time, so they’re scared to do anything but stay at home because they’re afraid of being weird in public or getting caught on camera and mocked by millions of strangers. It’s an isolation vortex.”

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 47

the man leaned out his window and asked, “You know what’s goin’ on in there?” A lot of cigarettes in that voice.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 44

he’d developed a habit of coming up with medical-sounding ways to say that he’d rather be at home, alone, playing video games in his room.

— Hunter in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 39

Something must be done. The hour is later than you think.

— Phil Greene in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 30

so sad! What has the world done to kill our sense of wonder? This, right here, what you’re about to do, this is every downtrodden schlub’s dream come true. Every fantasy blockbuster has the same premise: A reluctant nobody is finally put into a position where he or she has to go on an adventure. Luke’s aunt and uncle are dead, Harry Potter’s homelife is a shit sandwich, Neo’s job sucks, Bruce Wayne’s parents got eaten by bats. The dream isn’t that the chance for adventure will come along—you can do an adventure any time you want—but that circumstances will line up just right so that you simply have no more excuses.

[…] Are you honestly telling me you’re not bored? Like, every day? Your phone can numb the feeling moment-to-moment, but it’s still there in the long term, the boredom. Well, that sensation exists for a reason! It’s your instincts telling you to go exploring. That boredom is your call to adventure.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 23-24

Those things didn’t even exist fifteen years ago! I bet you’re having a physical reaction right now at the thought of being untethered from it. Look at how well they’ve trained us! Constant sharing, constant tracking, everything offered up for scrutiny. See, that’s the one thing the system can’t tolerate today: privacy. In private, dangerous ideas happen, unique individuals are formed, cool secret boxes are moved. They can’t have that, can they?!?

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 21

Instead of just saying what you’d prefer, you off-load the choice to someone or something else. Instead of ‘I don’t want to hang out with you,’ it’s ‘I have work that night’ or ‘I’m not feeling well.’ Nothing is ever expressed as your own needs and wants, so you never have to defend your choices or own the consequences later. I used to do it all the time.

— Ether in Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 17

Abbott Coburn had spent much of his twenty-six years dreading the wrong things, in the wrong amounts, for the wrong reasons. So it was appropriate that in his final hours before achieving international infamy, he was dreading a routine trip he’d accepted as a driver for the rideshare service Lyft.

— Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press, Ch. Day 1, p. 3

†

Try to picture just one person unwillingly deported: the altered life, the use of force, the effect on those who participate, those who inform, or those who stand by. And now try to do it twice: imagine a second person. And now consider a country with twelve million such scenes. It is a different America, one in which violence is normal and everywhere, one is which we see it and are dulled to it, one in which we all change for the worse.

[…] Such an enormous deportation will requires an army of informers. People who denounce their neighbors or coworkers will be presented as positive examples. Denunciation then becomes a culture. If you are Latino, expect to be denounced at some point, and expect special attention from a government that will demand your help to find people who are not documented. This is especially true if you are a local civic or business leader. You will be expected to collaborate in the deportation effort: if you do, you will be harming others; if you do not, you risk being seen as disloyal yourself. This painful choice can be avoided not at a later point but only now, by voting against mass deportations.

— Timothy Snyder, Twelve Million Deportations, Thinking about…, 2024 (via)

Under the pressures of real economic hardship, the fascist believes the problem can be solved by getting rid of some undesirable group.

[…] Violence from the bottom up is never to be tolerated. Violence from the top down is seen as equivalent to justice. The state is the source of what is right and wrong, so it is impossible for their actions to be condemned.

— Karma Bennett, What Is Fascism? A Detailed Guide to a Dangerous Philosophy, Subversas, 2017 (via)

The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent on fragile technological systems that few of us can understand or can imagine living without.

— Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies, 2023 (via)

Here is what I’m seeing, then: the political contours emerging from the pandemic foreshadow a fork in the road for the politics of climate change. As long as the goal was to have climate change taken seriously, this could unite us, however different our understandings of what taking climate change seriously might mean. As we near that goal, though, the differences in understanding come more sharply into focus…

Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly lit highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad swathe of liberal opinion, to the wilder fringes of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance, and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth, and development. The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth, and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a world worth living for nonetheless remains. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may recognize just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport adverts. The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent on fragile technological systems that few of us can understand or can imagine living without. And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicized frame of science, will lead inexorably to their solutions.

If I’m anywhere close to right in this reading of the signs of the times, if the new politics of science emerging from the pandemic does stabilize into something like its current shape, then those of us who are partisans of the small path will find ourselves in a strange position. However far it may be from our political roots, we find that we have more in common with assorted conservatives, dissidents, and skeptics — including some whose skepticism extends to climate science — than with the mainstream progressive currents that have so far had a claim to be on the right side of history when it comes to climate change. Under the authority of “the science,” talk of climate change will belong to the advocates of the big path, and those of us who do not wish to contribute to that future will need to find another place to start from when we want to talk about the depth of trouble the world is undoubtedly in.

— Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies, 2023 (via)

She didn’t reach the top. She only made it to the first ledge, but as she stood there, triumphantly looking out over the ancient Teotihuacan ruins, she proudly declared the words that have become famous in our house:

“The Dream Is Dead”.

— Kyle and Avvai, The Dream Is Dead, Making It Meaningful, 2024

†

[…] in many cases, you really do need explicit guidance, scaffolding, practice, intentioned memory support. Learning by immersion works naturalistically, when the material has a low enough complexity relative to your prior knowledge, that you can successfully process it on the fly. And when natural participation routinely reinforces everything important, giving you fluency.

— Andy Matuschak, How Might We Learn?, 2024

Sounds like you’re slacking and you know it. Been there. Over it, forgiven myself and pulled myself out. Did you see the books I recommended? 7 habits of highly effective people is a bible, it is. […] lemme drop some seriously old school quotation action on you my friend:

Ask, and it shall be given. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

It’s not ever gonna be easy, you might have to knock for 20 years, ask 1000 people and look until your eyes bleed. But you have to do it for yourself. […] let them know where you’re at and where you wanna be. Admit that you’re behind and you need help. ALL people want to help on some level, and you’d be amazed what asking can do. But if you ask, and then don’t follow through with your end of the bargain (i.e. math homework 4 nights a week and music practice 3 nights [or whatever dude you make up the rule]) you’re letting yourself down and you’re letting that person down too. Don’t do that.

A big part of growing up is the realisation that YOU HAVE TO KICK YOUR OWN ASS harder than your parents did. Because, ultimately, you’re the only one who can.

Keep in touch my friend, and keep fucking practicing. I’m serious.

— ryans01, 2013

Ouch. Sounds like you’re having a tough time max. That sucks. I’ve been there, so I kinda know what you’re talking about. I’ve been in the ever circling vortex of self doubt, frustration, and loathing. It’s no bueno. I know. If you don’t mind lemme tell you a couple things. You can read em if you want, read em again later if you feel like it. But honestly man, if I spend all this time typing this out to you and you don’t let it be a little tinder for your fire, well, you’re just letting us both down. And you don’t HAVE to do that. You don’t HAVE to do anything. But you get to choose.

(Who am I? My name’s Ryan and I live in Canada. Just moved to a new city for a dream job that I got because of the rules below. I owe a lot of my success to people much cooler, kinder, more loving and greater than me. When I get the chance to maybe let a little bit of help out, it’s a way of thanking them. )

Rule numero uno - There are no more zero days. What’s a zero day? A zero day is when you don’t do a single fucking thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on. No more zeros. I’m not saying you gotta bust an essay out everyday, that’s not the point. The point I’m trying to make is that you have to make yourself, promise yourself, that the new SYSTEM you live in is a NON-ZERO system. Didnt’ do anything all fucking day and it’s 11:58 PM? Write one sentence. One pushup. Read one page of that chapter. One. Because one is non zero. You feel me? When you’re in the super vortex of being bummed your pattern of behaviour is keeping the vortex goin, that’s what you’re used to. Turning into productivity ultimate master of the universe doesn’t happen from the vortex. It happens from a massive string of CONSISTENT NON ZEROS. That’s rule number one. Do not forget.

La deuxieme regle - yeah i learnt french. its a canadian thing. please excuse the lack of accent graves, but lemme get into rule number 2. BE GRATEFUL TO THE 3 YOU’S. Uh what? 3 me’s? That sounds like mumbo jumbo bullshit. News flash, there are three you’s homeslice. There’s the past you, the present you, and the future you. If you wanna love someone and have someone love you back, you gotta learn to love yourself, and the 3 you’s are the key. Be GRATEFUL to the past you for the positive things you’ve done. And do favours for the future you like you would for your best bro. Feeling like shit today? Stop a second, think of a good decision you made yesterday. Salad and tuna instead of Big Mac? THANK YOU YOUNGER ME. Was yesterday a nonzero day because you wrote 200 words (hey, that’s all you could muster)? THANK YOU YOUNGER ME. Saved up some coin over time to buy that sweet thing you wanted? THANK YOU. Second part of the 3 me’s is you gotta do your future self a favour, just like you would for your best fucking friend (no best friend? you do now. You got 2. It’s future and past you). Tired as hell and can’t get off reddit/videogames/interwebs? fuck you present self, this one’s for future me, i’m gonna rock out p90x Ab Ripper X for 17 minutes. I’m doing this one for future me. Alarm clock goes off and bed is too comfy? fuck you present self, this one’s for my best friend, the future me. I’m up and going for a 5 km run (or 25 meter run, it’s gotta be non zero). MAKE SURE YOU THANK YOUR OLD SELF for rocking out at the end of every.single.thing. that makes your life better. The cycle of doing something for someone else (future you) and thanking someone for the good in your life (past you) is key to building gratitude and productivity. Do not doubt me. Over time you should spread the gratitude to others who help you on your path.

Rule number 3- don’t worry i’m gonna too long didnt’ read this bad boy at the bottom (get a pencil and piece of paper to write it down. seriously. you physically need to scratch marks on paper) FORGIVE YOURSELF. I mean it. Maybe you got all the know-how, money, ability, strength and talent to do whatever is you wanna do. But lets say you still didn’t do it. Now you’re giving yourself shit for not doing what you need to, to be who you want to. Heads up champion, being dissapointed in yourself causes you to be less productive. Tried your best to have a nonzero day yesterday and it failed? so what. I forgive you previous self. I forgive you. But today? Today is a nonzero masterpiece to the best of my ability for future self. This one’s for you future homes. Forgiveness man, use it. I forgive you. Say it out loud.

Last rule. Rule number 4, is the easiest and its three words. exercise and books. that’s it. Pretty standard advice but when you exercise daily you actually get smarter. when you exercise you get high from endorphins (thanks body). when you exercise you clear your mind. when you exercise you are doing your future self a huge favour. Exercise is a leg on a three legged stool. Feel me? As for books, almost every fucking thing we’ve all ever thought of, or felt, or gone through, or wanted, or wanted to know how to do, or whatever, has been figured out by someone else. Get some books max. Post to reddit about not caring about yourself? Good first step! (nonzero day, thanks younger me for typing it out) You know what else you could do? Read 7 habits of highly successful people. Read “emotional intelligence”. Read “From good to great”. Read “thinking fast and slow”. Read books that will help you understand. Read the bodyweight fitness reddit and incorporate it into your workouts. (how’s them pullups coming?) Reading is the fucking warp whistle from Super Mario 3. It gets you to the next level that much faster.

That’s about it man. There’s so much more when it comes to how to turn nonzero days into hugely nonzero days, but that’s not your mission right now. Your mission is nonzero and forgiveness and favours. You got 36 essays due in 24 minutes and its impossible to pull off? Your past self let you down big time, but hey… I forgive you. Do as much as you can in those 24 minutes and then move on.

I hope I helped a little bit max. I could write about this forever, but I promised myself I would go do a 15 minute run while listening to A. Skillz Beats Working Vol. 3. Gotta jet. One last piece of advice though. Regardless of whether or not reading this for the first time helps make your day better, if you wake up tomorrow, and you can’t remember the 4 rules I just laid out, please, please. Read this again.

Have an awesome fucking day ☺

tldr; 1. Nonzero days as much as you can. 2. The three you’s, gratitude and favours. 3. Forgiveness 4. Exercise and books (which is a sneaky way of saying self improvement, both physical, emotional and mental)

[…] Someone asked what I meant by “much more when it comes to how to turn nonzero days into hugely nonzero days”. The long and short of it is a simple truth, but it’s tough to TOTALLY UNDERSTAND AND PRACTICE. It’s this: you become what you think. This doesnt mean if I think of a tree, I’ll be oakin’ it by august. It means that the WAY you think, the THINGS you think of, and the IDEAS YOU HOLD IN YOUR MIND defines the sum total that is you. You procrastinate all the time and got fear and worry goin on for something? You are becoming a procrastinator. You keep thinking about how much you want to run that 5 k race in the spring and finish a champion? Are ya keeping it in mind all the time? Is it something that is defining your ACTIONS and influencing you DECISIONS? If it is, then you’re becoming the champion you’re dreaming about. Dreaming about it makes it. Think and it shall be. But do not forget that action is thought’s son. Thoughts without actions are nothing. Have faith in whatever it is you’ve steeled your mind to. Have faith and follow through with action.

Ok, Ryan that’s a bunch of nice words n shit, but how does that help me turn slightly nonzero days into hugely nonzero days. Do you believe all these words you just read? Does it makes sense to you that you BECOME WHAT YOU THINK OF? Ask yourself: What do I think of? When you get home and walk in the door. (how quickly did you turn that laptop on? Did turning it on make you closer to your dreams? What would?) At the bus stop. Lunch break. What direction are you focusing your intentions on? If you’re like I was a few years ago, the answer was either No direction, or whatever caught my eye at the moment. But no stress, forgive yourself. You know the truth now. And knowing the truth means you can watch your habits, read books on how you think and act, and finally start changing your behaviour. Heres an example: Feeling like bunk cause you had zero days or barely nonzero days? THINK ABOUT WHAT YOURE DOING. and change just a little bit more. in whatever positive direction you are choosing to go.

— ryans01, 2013 (via)

The particular brand of misdirection that lies at the heart of theatrical conjuring is also a favourite Priest literary ploy – the art of not so much fooling the audience as encouraging them to fool themselves.

[…] more Gothic than science fiction in flavour, heavy with metaphorical power. There are revelations, and more is implied about the peculiar nature of the Angier/Tesla effect’s payoff or ‘prestige’ – a term used in this sense by both magicians. The trick is done; before and after, Priest has rolled up both sleeves; his hands are empty and he fixes you with an honest look. And yet … you realise that it is necessary to read The Prestige again. It’s an extraordinary performance, his best book in years, perhaps his best ever.

— Dave Langford, Christopher Priest, The Prestige (review), The New York Review of Science Fiction, 1996 (via)

She wants to tell the secret; what cannot be said with the voice for being too much the truth; the great truths are not usually said through speaking: the truth of what passes in the secret depth of time, in the silence of lives, and which cannot be said. ‘There are things that cannot be said,’ this is certain. Yet, what cannot be said is what has to be written. To discover the secret and to communicate are the two motives that move the writer.

— María Zambrano, Hacia un saber sobre el alma, 1950 (via)

If I were able to focus and have motivation I’d be done for sure. And I don’t think this is laziness — I sit at my computer staring at it for hours… and then just don’t do it. Or do it and undo it over and over again.

Maybe it’s fear that it’ll suck? Or that it’s hard? Or that it’s all meaningless?

— Kyle Siemens, How To Wish Away Depression, 2023

Over the last decade of high-ADD discursive wandering, ribbonfarm has steadfastly refused to have a focus, and outlasted hordes of blogs (and blogs about blogging) that earnestly advised everybody to “find a niche” and “focus.”

Nuts to that. ADHD ftw.

— Venkatesh Rao, Ten Years of Refactoring, Ribbon Farm, 2017

Rule numero uno - There are no more zero days. What’s a zero day? A zero day is when you don’t do a single fucking thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on. No more zeros. I’m not saying you gotta bust an essay out everyday, that’s not the point. The point I’m trying to make is that you have to make yourself, promise yourself, that the new SYSTEM you live in is a NON-ZERO system. Didnt’ do anything all fucking day and it’s 11:58 PM? Write one sentence. One pushup. Read one page of that chapter. One. Because one is non zero. You feel me? When you’re in the super vortex of being bummed your pattern of behaviour is keeping the vortex goin, that’s what you’re used to. Turning into productivity ultimate master of the universe doesn’t happen from the vortex. It happens from a massive string of CONSISTENT NON ZEROS. That’s rule number one. Do not forget.

— ryans01, 2013 (via)

I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so?

— Albert Camus, The Stranger, 1942

At the heart of any fundamentalism, as we define it, is a disdain for learning from evidence. Truth is already known, given, and clear

— Gary Saul Morson, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us, 2021 (via)

In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

— David Brooks, Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This?, The New York Times, 2024 (via)

My understanding is that the control system for deciding when to send the water to urine and the control system for whether the parts of your body needs water were put together by different contractors who didn’t talk to each other. As a consequence your kidneys can be busily shoving out water to your bladder while your organs are crying out for water.

— postorm, Comment on Reddit, 2024 (via)

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.

— Rebecca Martin, a 17-year-old’s note to PostSecret, 2008 (via)

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.

— Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936, Schocken

The Cambridge Multiple-Access System was first introduced into service experimentally in March 1967, and has been fully operational since 1968. It runs on the Titan computer which was the prototype Atlas 2.

A conventional password system for logging-in is used, but is has associated with it a feature, due to R. M. Needham, that greatly improves its effectiveness. This feature is easily implemented and deserves to be better known. It consists in storing in the computer, not the original password, but a scrambled form of it. The scrambling is done by an algorithm resembling one for generating pseudo-random numbers. When first set, the password is scrambled and the result stored; when the user attempts to log-in and types his password, what he types is again scrambled and compared with the original version. Only if they agree, is logging-in permitted. Since the scrambling algorithm is virtually irreversible, at any rate without a great deal of computer time being used, no harm is done if the list of scrambled passwords gets printed out by inadvertence. It is not even necessary to keep the scrambling algorithm secret. The security of the system is further improved by the fact that users can set and change their own passwords from their consoles. Thus, it is not necessary for a password to be communicated to a second party, or even written down.

— M. V. Wilkes, The cambridge multiple-access system in retrospect, Software: Practice and Experience, 1973, Vol. 3, p. 323-332 (via)

there’s no denying that the legacy we’re talking about is a powerful one that will cast a long shadow. The cultural reign of the blog, roughly 2000-20 or so, coincided with the second full chapter of the internet. Far more than aggregators, photo-sharing services, or social feeds, the blog was “Web 2.0.” Blogs didn’t produce the most Web 2.0 bytes, but they produced the most significant ones.

Perhaps it’s my blogocentric conceit, but it feels like the active lifespan of ribbonfarm in particular, 2007-24, coincides rather neatly with a very well-defined chapter in the grand narrative of civilization itself, with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the 2024 US Presidential election serving as neat bookends. Whatever the outcome of the election, when this blog officially retires on November 13, we’ll be in some sort of new era. An era blogs helped usher in, but won’t be a part of.

Conceit or not, it’s hard for me to see the story of ribbonfarm as merely my story, or even merely the marginal story of the few dozens of contributors, or of the little subculture of a few hundreds that coalesced around it for the better part of a decade. The story of ribbonfarm has been, in a small one-of-a-million threads way, the story of civilization itself, through the 2007-24 period.

— Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm is Retiring, Ribbon Farm, 2024

What awesome images are suggested by the existence of such secret cities within cities! Beholding this ingulph’d and search-defying fragment of yesterday, the active imagination conjures up endless weird possibilities - ancient and unremember’d towns still living in decay, swallow’d up by the stern business blocks that weary the superficial eye, and sometimes sending forth at twilight strains of ghostly music for whose source the modern city-dwellers seek in vain. Having seen this thing, one cannot look at an ordinary crowded street without wondering what surviving marvels may lurk unsuspected behind the prim and monotonous blocks.

— H. P. Lovecraft, The letters of H.P. Lovecraft (via)

I’m not interested in paternalistic nudges or vapid prompts to think twice, but rather, something like the way a well-designed park creates space both to gather and to wander — quiet benches tucked under trees alongside open fields fit for games, pathways for walking in ones and twos, blooms and birdhouses that invite a moment of rest. What if our social spaces had more ways to get lost? More places to sit a spell? What if we brought more intention to the way we contribute to these patterns? To the way our own choices overflow the container, and push on what’s possible. What is it that we are making together?

— Mandy Brown, What are we making together?, A working library, 2024 (via)

We think we no longer love the dead because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

— Marcel Proust, Lettre à René Blum dans L. Pierre-Quint

Kieślowski suggests that two separate lives can be enigmatically linked, displaced only in time.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

an Arcadian escape from the tyranny of time. It’s a glimpse of what will happen when it’s all over, which is to say: nothing.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

I am half-asleep, and therefore more awake than if I were completely awake.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

how I interpret this is that when I’m awake, conscious, working, in a certain way I am more unconscious than in my half-sleep. When I’m in that half-sleep there’s a kind of vigilance that tells me the truth. First of all, it tells me that what I’m doing is very serious. But when I’m awake and working, this vigilance is actually asleep. It’s not the stronger of the two.

— Jacques Derrida, Out-take from ‘Derrida’ (film), 2002

All I want is to be dragged down into a space of narrative that I haven’t been in before, into a place where […] truth is created.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

Thou shalt not muzzle the ox
that treadeth out the corn,
making straw for the bricks of Egypt,
nor spare the arms that endlessly
winnow the grain in the wind
to separate the wheat from the chaff
wheat borne stolidly
on the backs of countless slaves
from the heavy-laden Nile boats
to the teeming shore.

Endlessly they plod
beneath the sheaves of wheat
and endlessly return for more.

A golden harvest to the threshers,
a grain safe to feed the masters,
bitterness to feed the slaves,
and to feed the brick pits, straw,
carried on the bowed backs of women
down into the never-ending valley
of toil and agony,
stretching mile after mile.

An inferno of mud-soaked bodies,
where the treaders’ feet
churn clay and straw
into the mixture
for the Pharaoh ’s bricks.

And everywhere the lash
of watchful taskmasters
ready to sting the backs of the weary.

Blades chopping straw.
Mattocks chopping clay.
A ceaseless cycle of unending drudgery.

From the mixing feet of treaders
to the pouring hands of brick molders
moves the constant stream of mud,
the lowly seed of tall cities,
day after day, year after year;
century after century.

Bondage without rest,
toil without reward.

These are the children of misery,
the afflicted,
the hopeless, the oppressed.

And he went out unto his brethren
and looked on their burdens.

— The Ten Commandments, 1956

A metaphor is semantic. A double negative, on the other hand, is syntactical: two negations in their right places in a sentence usually lead to an affirmation (in the wrong places, they could be merely an intensified negation). A double negative, in the sense of two wrongs making a right, is a form of strategic long-windedness. To use two terms of negation, to say, for instance, that something is “not unlike” something else, is not the same as to say it is like that thing. Double negatives register instances of self-canceling misdirection. They are about doubt, the productive and counterproductive aspects of doubt, the pitching ground, the listing figure, and the little gap between intention and effect.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

Metaphors are at home in South Africa’s strange and sad history, where many things are like many other things, but nothing is quite the same as anything else.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

In the 1980s, the scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued that metaphor is pervasive in the English language and that our penchant for metaphorical speech creates the structures of social interaction.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

these are invented stories about an invented self interacting with other invented persons. It is not recollection—but it is also not not recollection. It is a double negative.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

What we missed was not just Egypt. What we missed was dreaming Europe in Egypt—what we missed was the Egypt where we’d dreamed of Europe.

— André Aciman, Out of Egypt, 1995

Aciman returns to memory obsessively, looking for the words that can help him understand it better, finding solace in the idea of being in one place while desiring another, not for the sake of being in that other place, but for the sake of desire itself.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

and from the various smells of foods and perfumes the stories of communities and persons emerge.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

I swim out in a trance
on the glittering dark water.
A steady note of a tuba comes in.
It’s a friend’s voice: “Take up your grave and walk.

— Tomas Tranströmer, Two Cities from The Sorrow Gondola, 1996

But the black body comes prejudged, and as a result it is placed in needless jeopardy. To be black is to bear the brunt of selective enforcement of the law, and to inhabit a psychic unsteadiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety. You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the street or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

There were a few glances at the hotel when I was checking in, and in the fine restaurant just up the road; there are always glances. There are glances in Zürich, where I spent the summer, and there are glances in New York City, which has been my home for fourteen years. There are glances all over Europe and in India, and anywhere I go outside Africa. The test is how long the glances last, whether they become stares, with what intent they occur, whether they contain any degree of hostility or mockery, and to what extent connections, money, or mode of dress shield me in these situations. To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right….Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.

— Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927

Through the act of writing, I was able to find out what I knew about these things, what I was able to know, and where the limits of knowing lay.

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016, Random House

It all started with one essay—about some of the problems, aesthetic and moral, posed by the omnipresence of photographed images; but the more I thought about what photographs are, the more complex and suggestive they became. So one generated another, and that one (to my bemusement) another, and so on—a progress of essays, about the meaning and career of photographs—until I’d gone far enough so that the argument sketched in the first essay, documented and digressed from in the succeeding essays, could be recapitulated and extended in a more theoretical way; and could stop.The essays were first published (in a slightly different form) in The New York Review of Books, and probably would never have been written were it not for the encouragement given by its editors, my friends Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, to my obsession with photography. I am grateful to them, and to my friend Don Eric Levine, for much patient advice and unstinting help.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

In the spring of 1921, two automatic photographic machines, recently invented abroad, were installed in Prague, which reproduced six or ten or more exposures of the same person on a single print.When I took such a series of photographs to Kafka I said light-heartedly: “For a couple of krone one can have oneself photographed from every angle. The apparatus is a mechanical Know-Thyself.”
“You mean to say, the Mistake-Thyself,” said Kafka, with a faint smile. I protested: “What do you mean? The camera cannot lie!”
“Who told you that?” Kafka leaned his head toward his shoulder.
“Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling … . This automatic camera doesn’t multiply men’s eyes but only gives a fantastically simplified fly’s eye view.”

— Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, 1921

I sometimes think the day will come when all modern nations will adore a sort of American god, a god who will have been someone who lived as a human being and about whom much will have been written in the popular press: images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, not floating on a Veronica cloth, but fixed once and for all by photography. Yes, I foresee a photographed god, wearing spectacles.

— from the Journal of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1861

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on the old dry plates of sixty years ago … . I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. And they in turn seem to be aware of me.

— Ansel Adams, preface to Jacob A. Riis: Photographer & Citizen, 1974

The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it.

— Marshall McLuhan

Oswiecim, Poland—Nearly 30 years after Auschwitz concentration camp was closed down, the underlying horror of the place seems diminished by the souvenir stands, Pepsi-Cola signs and the tourist-attraction atmosphere.Despite chilling autumn rain, thousands of Poles and some foreigners visit Auschwitz every day. Most are modishly dressed and obviously too young to remember World War II.They troop through the former prison barracks, gas chambers and crematoria, looking with interest at such gruesome displays as an enormous showcase filled with some of the human hair the S.S. used to make into cloth … . At the souvenir stands, visitors can buy a selection of Auschwitz lapel pins in Polish and German, or picture postcards showing gas chambers and crematoria, or even souvenir Auschwitz ballpoint pens which, when held up to the light, reveal similar pictures.

— At Auschwitz, a Discordant Atmosphere of Tourism, The New York Times, 1974

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.

— Emmet Gowin

Belfast, Northern Ireland—The people of Belfast are buying picture postcards of their city’s torment by the hundreds. The most popular shows a boy throwing a stone at a British armored car … . other cards show burned-out homes, troops in battle positions on city streets and children at play amid smoking rubble. Each card sells for approximately 25 cents in the three Gardener’s shops.“Even at that price, people have been buying them in bundles of five or six at a time,” said Rose Lehane, manager of one shop. Mrs. Lehane said that nearly 1,000 cards were sold in four days.Since Belfast has few tourists, she said, most of the buyers are local people, mostly young men who want them as “souvenirs.”Neil Shawcross, a Belfast man, bought two complete sets of the cards, explaining, “I think they’re interesting mementoes of the times and I want my two children to have them when they grow up.”“The cards are good for people,” said Alan Gardener, a director of the chain. “Too many people in Belfast try to cope with the situation here by closing their eyes and pretending it doesn’t exist. Maybe something like this will jar them into seeing again.”“We have lost a lot of money through the troubles, with our stores being bombed and burned down,” Mr. Gardener added. “If we can get a bit of money back from the troubles, well and good.”

— October 29, 1974, Postcards of Belfast Strife Are Best-Sellers There, The New York Times, 1974

An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them?

— Jasper Johns

As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work … . you can only see what you are ready to see—what mirrors your mind at that particular time.

— George Tice

Men still kill one another, they have not yet understood how they live, why they live; politicians fail to observe that the earth is an entity, yet television (Telehor) has been invented: the “Far Seer”—tomorrow we shall be able to look into the heart of our fellow-man, be everywhere and yet be alone; illustrated books, newspapers, magazines are printed—in millions. The unambiguousness of the real, the truth in the everyday situation is there for all classes. The hygiene of the optical, the health of the visible is slowly filtering through.

— László Moholy-Nagy (1925), Painting, Photography, Film, 1925

“Why do people keep photographs?”“Why? Goodness knows! Why do people keep things—junk—trash, bits and pieces. They do—that’s all there is to it!“Up to a point I agree with you. Some people keep things. Some people throw everything away as soon as they have done with it. That, yes, it is a matter of temperament. But I speak now especially of photographs. Why do people keep, in particular, photographs?”“As I say, because they just don’t throw things away. Or else because it reminds them—”Poirot pounced on the words.“Exactly. It reminds them. Now again we ask—why? Why does a woman keep a photograph of herself when young? And I say that the first reason is, essentially, vanity. She has been a pretty girl and she keeps a photograph of herself to remind her of what a pretty girl she was. It encourages her when her mirror tells her unpalatable things. She says, perhaps, to a friend, ‘That was me when I was eighteen …’ and she sighs … You agree?”“Yes—yes, I should say that’s true enough.”“Then that is reason No. 1. Vanity. Now reason No. 2. Sentiment.”“That’s the same thing?”“No, no, not quite. Because this leads you to preserve, not only your own photograph but that of someone else … A picture of your married daughter—when she was a child sitting on a hearthrug with tulle round her … . Very embarrassing to the subject sometimes, but mothers like to do it. And sons and daughters often keep pictures of their mothers, especially, say, if their mother died young. ‘This was my mother as a girl.’”“I’m beginning to see what you’re driving at, Poirot.”“And there is, possibly, a third category. Not vanity, not sentiment, not love—perhaps hate—what do you say?”“Hate?”“Yes. To keep a desire for revenge alive. Someone who has injured you—you might keep a photograph to remind you, might you not?”

— Agatha Christie, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, 1951

I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty … . Here was every sensuous curve of the “human figure divine” but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.

— Edward Weston

Sometimes I would set up the camera in a corner of the room, sit some distance away from it with a remote control in my hand, and watch our people while Mr. Caldwell talked with them. It might be an hour before their faces or gestures gave us what we were trying to express, but the instant it occurred the scene was imprisoned on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened.

— Margaret Bourke-White

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, “I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.” I mean people are going to say, “You’re crazy.” Plus they’re going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that’s a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

— Diane Arbus, remarks made in class, 1971

The young artist has recorded, stone by stone, the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Rheims in over a hundred different prints. Thanks to him we have climbed all the steeples … what we never could have discovered through our own eyes, he has seen for us … one might think the saintly artists of the Middle Ages had foreseen the daguerreotype in placing on high their statues and stone carvings where birds alone circling the spires could marvel at their detail and perfection … . The entire cathedral is reconstructed, layer on layer, in wonderful effects of sunlight, shadows, and rain. M. Le Secq, too, has built his monument.

— H. de Lacretelle, La Lumière, 1852

… a new industry has arisen which contributes not a little to confirming stupidity in its faith and to ruining what might have remained of the divine in the French genius. The idolatrous crowd postulates an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature—that is perfectly understandable. As far as painting and sculpture are concerned, the current credo of the sophisticated public, above all in France … is this: “I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature (there are good reasons for that). I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature … . Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art.” A vengeful God has granted the wishes of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the public says to itself: “Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the idiots!), then photography and Art are the same thing.” From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal … . Some democratic writer ought to have seen here a cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history and for painting among the people … .

— Charles Baudelaire

Most of my photographs are compassionate, gentle, and personal. They tend to let the viewer see himself. They tend not to preach. And they tend not to pose as art.

— Bruce Davidson

The daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to draw nature … [it] gives her the power to reproduce herself.

— Louis Daguerre, from a notice circulated to attract investors, 1838

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense … symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller—to find out how they are. So they’re dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there’s nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come from me and involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it’s unearned. It has no past … no future. And when the sitting is over—when the picture is done—there’s nothing left except the photograph … the photograph and a kind of embarrassment. They leave … and I don’t know them. I’ve hardly heard what they’ve said. If I meet them a week later in a room somewhere, I expect they won’t recognize me. Because I don’t feel I was really there. At least the part of me that was … is now in the photograph. And the photographs have a reality for me that the people don’t. It’s through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it’s in the nature of being a photographer. I’m never really implicated. I don’t have to have any real knowledge. It’s all a question of recognitions.

— Richard Avedon

It has quite justly been said of Atget that he photographed [deserted Paris streets] like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance.

— Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936, Schocken

Now, for an absurdly small sum, we may become familiar not only with every famous locality in the world, but also with almost every man of note in Europe. The ubiquity of the photographer is something wonderful. All of us have seen the Alps and know Chamonix and the Mer de Glace by heart, though we have never braved the horrors of the Channel … . We have crossed the Andes, ascended Tenerife, entered Japan, “done” Niagara and the Thousand Isles, drunk delight of battle with our peers (at shop windows), sat at the councils of the mighty, grown familiar with kings, emperors and queens, prima donnas, pets of the ballet, and “well graced actors.” Ghosts have we seen and have not trembled; stood before royalty and have not uncovered; and looked, in short, through a three-inch lens at every single pomp and vanity of this wicked but beautiful world.

— “D.P.”, columnist, Once a Week [London], 1861

That the outer man is a picture of the inner, and the face an expression and revelation of the whole character, is a presumption likely enough in itself, and therefore a safe one to go on; borne out as it is by the fact that people are always anxious to see anyone who has made himself famous … . Photography … offers the most complete satisfaction of our curiosity.

— Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851, Ch. 29, Vol. 2, p. 377

Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzsche meant when he said, “I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.” He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own vision.

— Paul Strand

I long to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases—but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing … the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think—and it is not at all monstrous in me to say, what my brothers cry out against so vehemently, that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced.

— Elizabeth Barrett, letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 1843

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.

— Julia Margaret Cameron, Annals of my Glass House, 1874

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.

The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up—and, therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more. But images are not a treasure for which the world must be ransacked; they are precisely what is at hand wherever the eye falls. The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletion. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to “fix” the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The world is “one” not because it is united but because a tour of its diverse contents does not reveal conflict but only an even more astounding diversity. This spurious unity of the world is effected by translating its contents into images. Images are always compatible, or can be made compatible, even when the realities they depict are not.Photography does not simply reproduce the real, it recycles it—a key procedure of a modern society.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

beauty is not inherent in anything; it is to be found, by another way of seeing—as well as a wider notion of meaning

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Possession of a camera does not license intrusion, as it does in this society whether people like it or not. (The good manners of a camera culture dictate that one is supposed to pretend not to notice when one is being photographed by a stranger in a public place as long as the photographer stays at a discreet distance—that is, one is supposed neither to forbid the picture-taking nor to start posing.) Unlike here, where we pose where we can and yield when we must, in China taking pictures is always a ritual; it always involves posing and, necessarily, consent. Someone who “deliberately stalked people who were unaware of his intention to film them” was depriving people and things of their right to pose, in order to look their best.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

War and photography now seem inseparable, and plane crashes and other horrific accidents always attract people with cameras. A society which makes it normative to aspire never to experience privation, failure, misery, pain, dread disease, and in which death itself is regarded not as natural and inevitable but as a cruel, unmerited disaster, creates a tremendous curiosity about these events—a curiosity that is partly satisfied through picture-taking. The feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt. Partly it is because one is “here,” not “there,” and partly it is the character of inevitability that all events acquire when they are transmuted into images. In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Like a pair of binoculars with no right or wrong end, the camera makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras. It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up—a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing—that “it seemed like a movie.” This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

a person is an aggregate of appearances, appearances which can be made to yield, by proper focusing, infinite layers of significance.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The photographic exploration and duplication of the world fragments continuities and feeds the pieces into an interminable dossier, thereby providing possibilities of control that could not even be dreamed of under the earlier system of recording information: writing.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Photography is acquisition in several forms. In its simplest form, we have in a photograph surrogate possession of a cherished person or thing, a possession which gives photographs some of the character of unique objects. Through photographs, we also have a consumer’s relation to events, both to events which are part of our experience and to those which are not—a distinction between types of experience that such habit-forming consumership blurs. A third form of acquisition is that, through image-making and image-duplicating machines, we can acquire something as information (rather than experience). Indeed, the importance of photographic images as the medium through which more and more events enter our experience is, finally, only a by-product of their effectiveness in furnishing knowledge dissociated from and independent of experience.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Our irrepressible feeling that the photographic process is something magical has a genuine basis. No one takes an easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of, an extension of that subject; and a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the hypothetical photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The media are essentially contentless (this is the truth behind Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated remark about the message being the medium itself); their characteristic tone is ironic, or dead-pan, or parodistic. It is inevitable that more and more art will be designed to end as photographs. A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of photography.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

“The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk,” said the priest. “All I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk, you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumors and conversational catch-words; something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.” He stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of frown, and went on talking almost as if he were alone. “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery and a pig is a mascot and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words: ‘He was made Man.’”

— Father Brown in G. K. Chesterton, The Oracle of the Dog, 1926 (via)

there is power and leverage in not being interesting in the stuff everybody else is interested in — the stuff other people insist is urgent.

Map the regions of your own affinity and interest, across all relevant dimensions: intellectual, aesthetic, moral. The rest, you can ignore freely. Ignore strenuously!

— Robin Sloan, Summer Wind, 2023

the simple fact that it takes up space—is weirdly magical.

[…] For digital designers, I think this terrain remains rich for investigation. There’s been a decades-long emphasis on interfaces that are exquisitely polite, that recede when not in use; but there’s a place, in certain contexts, for interfaces that impose themselves, that refuse to go gentle into that digital night.

Stand up for yourself!

— Robin Sloan, Summer Wind, 2023

One deep drawback of digital reading is that e-books are so quick to disappear. If you acquire an e-book, either through purchase or library loan, you’d better read it immediately and without stopping. Otherwise … if you forget about it for a single day … that e-book will eagerly slink away onto the third page of a list you’ll never again review.

Print books behave differently, of course. They remain exactly where you left them. They take up space. They declare: hey, at one point, you were interested in me … REMEMBER?

Obviously, this can become a burden, but, on balance, I think it’s a great gift: the eloquence of the physical.

— Robin Sloan, Summer Wind, 2023

When Chicago’s Vienna Sausage Company moved from its original premises which were “put together in a Rube Goldberg kind of arrangement” to a brand new state-of-the-art facility, the sausages didn’t taste as good. For a year and a half, the company tried to work out the problem to no avail. One day, workers were remixadniscing about an ex-employee, Irving, who didn’t come to work at the new factory due to the long commute required. Irving’s job was to move the sausages from the filling room to the smokehouse, taking them on a half hour journey through a maze of rooms where other products were getting produced. After noting this absence, it clicked that Irving’s daily trip was the secret ingredient\u200a—\u200aon his journey the sausages were getting pre-cooked and infused with flavor. The company was evenxadtuxadally able to recreate the sausages’ original taste, building a brand new room onto the factory which emulated the propxaderxadties of Irving’sxa0trip.

— Anna Pendergrast & Kelly Pendergrast, Notes, 2023-07-10, Scope of Work, 2023 (via)

The strategy is the same as it always was: cultivate small, sturdy networks of affinity and interest. Connect them to each other. Keep them lit.

Bookstores and libaries have had this down for decades, of course. These days, their rock-solid reliability feels like a super power.

— Robin Sloan, A summer wind, 2023

[I]n some ways social life is anything but scarce and people are anything but reasonable. From this point of view, human societies are driven by reckless profligacy, impulse, and rivalry rather than prudent saving, coolheadedness, and self-interest.

— Fourcade & Healy, The Ordinal Society, 2024, p. 67 (via)

Wonderful people I respect have sought to innovate secular forms of community to replace the goods religious congregations bring. They are incredibly hard to sustain. (If you have counter-examples I’d love to know about them.) Enduring communities of real interdependence and mutual care tend to gather not for their own sake, but around something. It is the shared attention to what might be beyond us, the collective practices and rituals in service of a story bigger than our immediate needs which provides the glue. It looks a lot like these goods are not, or not wholly, reproducible within a purely immanent frame.

[Psychologist Richard] Weissbourd shies away from this conclusion, because, of course, he can’t “suggest.. that we should become more religious.” I am not doing that either, not least because I have very mixed feelings about that word. I am just trying to find a place to rest between the two stories I am hearing. I need a way through what often feels like a binary choice when institutions disappoint us: adopt a “see no evil” denial about their failures and defend them from the barricades, or give up on them altogether. I think we’ve seen, as a society, where that second choice leads.

Ultimately, I go to church. I show up at this “wholly fallible, deeply weird” gathering of fragile, annoying human beings, and attempt to tolerate the tensions. I am becoming aware that part of why it’s annoying is it is full of people Not Like Me. They come from different backgrounds, socio-economic strata, political and theological perspectives. The formation of my culture has trained me out of being around people Not Like Me (NLM), encouraged me to forget that it is possible to hold together respect, even love with deep disagreement. This discomfort is part of why “institutional” church seems more likely to form me into the kind of person I want to become. The kind of person the world might need. It reminds me I am also fragile and annoying, and that seems healthy. I need to regularly let this gathering move me past my obsession with everyone else’s faults and compassionately draw my attention to my own. It’s the only way I can find healing for them. I want to be growing up my soul, moving ever closer towards the Love that comes to meet me.

— Elizabeth Oldfield, Institutions: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. , Fully Alive, 2024 (via)

Companies also don’t just die just once, they can do so repeatedly. Xapian is an example I like to quote here. It started out as a GPL v2+ licensed search project called Muscat which was built at Cambridge. After several commercial acquisitions and transitions, the project eventually became closed source (which was possible because the creators held the copyright). Some of the original creators together with the community forked the last GPLv2 version into a project that eventually became known as Xapian.

What’s the catch? The catch is that the only people who could license it more liberally than GPLv2 are long gone from the project. Xapian refers to its current license “a historical accident”. The license choice causes some challenges specifically to how Xapian is embedded. There are three remaining entities that would need to agree to the relicensing. From my understanding none of those entities commercially use Xapian’s original code today but also have no interest in actually supporting a potential relicensing.

Unlike trademark law which has a concept of abandonment, the copyright situation is stricter. It would take two lifetimes for Xapian to enter the public domain and at that point it will be probably be mostly for archival purposes.

— Armin Ronacher, FSL: A Better Business/Open Source Balance Than AGPL, 2024

I believe the real future of transportation was launched in pre-Enlightenment France, by Blaise Pascal — he of the famous wager, that posited belief in God was a safer bet than non-belief — in the year 01662. After inventing the mechanical calculator, the philosopher turned his mind to the problem of traffic in Paris, which, with a population of half a million, was then the most populous city in Europe, and the most densely settled. The wealthy got around in private carriages, drawn by horses, which they paid vast sums to maintain. The poor walked. Pascal dreamt up a system by which “les petites gens,” the little people, could move, if not in as much comfort as the rich, then at least as quickly and reliably. His “carrosses à cinq sols” were horse-drawn carriages, each seating eight passengers, “infinitely convenient,” as Pascal described them in his appeal for a royal patent, and “leaving at regular times, even when empty.” For a fare of five sous, the carrosses carried passengers along five lines, on both sides of the Seine River. (A fare increase to six sous led to protests, and, after fifteen years, the service shut down.)

— Taras Grescoe, Pascal’s Other Wager, The Long Now, 2024

†

Though the global population shows signs of heading for a plateau, the world’s cities continue to grow. Urbanization means the equivalent of a city with the population of New York is now added to the planet every two months. Cities are all about increasing human opportunity by reducing the space between humans, as well as their businesses, homes, schools, and cultural institutions. Cars and trucks — and there are 1.475 billion of them on Earth now — require vast amounts of that precious space. The simple truth is they barely fit into today’s cities, let alone into the megacities of the future.

— Taras Grescoe, Pascal’s Other Wager, The Long Now, 2024

Do I fill? Do I push 2/3 of a stop? Do I need to gel my strobe? Am I too close? Can I get out of here when I need to get out of here? Do I have enough? Should I do more? What if they want to run a package? Rinse and repeat, day in, day out. Success and crippling failure haunting the scenes painted on the ceiling as I laid awake at night listening to the sounds of things I should be photographing.

— Daniel Milnor, Adventure: I Defy You, Shifter, 2024

It feels like spontaneous generation: the old belief that life could just appear from lifeless matter. For most of history, people thought that living critters—little ones especially—could just materialize into being. It wasn’t until the 17th century that Francesco Redi, an early scientist, began to challenge this idea. He showed that if you kept flies away from rotting meat, no maggots would appear.

Even after Redi’s experiments, belief in spontaneous generation persisted for centuries. In fact, even Redi himself didn’t entirely give up on the idea. While he was disproving spontaneous generation for flies, he still believed in it for other invertebrates. He speculated that plants and animals had some mysterious force within them that could create life. Roundworms might generate inside intestines, or suddenly you’d just be lousy with lice even when there hadn’t been a single other louse in the house. The reason he didn’t just abandon spontaneous generation altogether is that the life cycles of some parasites can be extremely complicated. Without today’s powerful scientific tools, at some point Redi threw up his hands and called it all sorcery.

My big takeaway is that even Redi, one of the people famous for having refuted spontaneous generation, still hedged his bets when reality got too complex. It wasn’t his fault. Settling the question required centuries of additional scientific research, debate, and technological advancements. Only in the 19th century did Louis Pasteur’s work with bacteria finally prove that life doesn’t just hocus-pocus out of thin air.

— Doug Sofer, Spontaneous Generation and Author Platform, 2024

And then of course in Book IV we get the apparently Utopian vision of the land of the morally and intellectually excellent Houyhnhnms and the disgusting Yahoos — the former being an allegorical representation of what humans might have been, the latter being a savagely realistic picture of us as we are…. At least, that’s what it looks like at first. Reflection complicates things. The Houyhnhnms’ moral excellence comes at a great cost: they cannot lie, but (per necessitatem) they also cannot imagine, cannot speculate, cannot explore. They can only receive what has been handed down to them by Tradition (it’s immensely significant that they are illiterate). What has been handed down is perfectly right … but the cost, the cost of it is high.

— Alan Jacobs, Modes of representation, The Homebound Symphony, 2024

One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies.

— Alan Jacobs, Modes of representation, The Homebound Symphony, 2024 (via)

There’s lots more to it — decades of narrative embroidery; a surfeit of clones — but this is the core: “You could extinguish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occupied by the task of living.

The thing I appreciate about this story — this parable — is that it cuts a million different ways.

Isn’t poverty the techno-organic virus, and aren’t millions of people on this planet the mutant marvels, all their incandescent capability occupied by the stress of surviving day to day?

— Robin Sloan, You could extinguish a star, 2024

When you name something, you label the thing; frame it. This is an important job, before anyone has actually encountered that thing! But, very quickly, the flow of meaning reverses. The thing’s specific characteristics and its performance — its great success, we hope — fill the vessel of its name, which was pretty empty all along. Instead of the name defining the thing, the thing (re)defines the name. This happens with companies, with works of art, with people themselves.

So, when naming something, while it’s important to choose an appealing label, it’s probably more important to choose a vessel of sufficient capacity.

This is why the names Star Wars and Star Trek, both of which are objectively stupid, have been so successful: their very blandness leaves them capacious.

That’s important to understand! Names can be totally stupid. Apple? YouTube? Spider-Man? SPIDER-MAN?? Those labels glow with meaning and power, and it’s not because of the words.

Any name can work, as long as it doesn’t get in the way.

— Robin Sloan, You could extinguish a star, 2024

When capability increases so substantially, the activity under discussion is not “the same thing, only faster”. It is a different activity altogether. We can look to the physics of phase change for clues here.

Basically, I want to immunize you against this analogy, and this objection. There’s plenty to debate in this nascent field, but any comparison between AI training and human education is just laughably wrong.

This is what digitization does, again and again: by removing friction, by collapsing time and space, it undermines our intuitions about production and exchange.

No human ever metabolized information as completely as these language models. “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” You’re gonna need fresh intuitions.

— Robin Sloan, At home in high-dimensional space, 2024

Nothing is very obscure on the Internet, but these lists on lists must be among the least-accessed pages. It’s not because they’re not useful, it’s more because on the Internet, we’re used to traveling directly to the object we’re seeking rather than navigating so many layers. But we are able to do that precisely because the Internet is made of so many lists, indices that tell us which websites are important, which software is appropriate, and which data we’ve already consumed. Actual lists, well beyond the tired archetype of the viral listicle, are unsung heroes of thexa0Web.

— Kyle Chakra , New York Mag (via)

Tim Berners-Lee worked for the particle physics lab CERN, and he built the initial prototype for the web with their backing. CERN is based in Switzerland, but has researchers spread out all around the world. So when Berners-Lee and his boss pitched their idea for an Internet-powered hypertext system to the higher ups, their proposed utility for it was a giant directory of names of everybody that worked at or with CERN. A big list of phone numbers, updated frequently, and accessible anywhere. That was enough to get buy-in for the first version of the web.

— Jay Hoffmann, It’s Lists All the Way Down, 2024

Is it drugs? Did I lose consciousness while reading it? I’m still chasing the absolute narcotic of the Sweet Valley High books.

[…] Does it vibrate strangely? This is the most ineffable category, but also the most important to me. Is the work so singularly itself that it has transcended in some way?

— Rufi Thorpe, The 2024 Tournament of Books, 2024 (via)

I’ve been thinking (again) (endlessly) about that fabulous phase change, when fiction goes from reading to dreaming.

“Suspension of disbelief” is really apt, because it feels like lifting off. A sudden drop in friction. Floating. Flying.

I was most aware of the phase change as a young person, a novice reader. I remember being very conscious, sometimes, that it was NOT happening; that my wheels were just bumping along the runway. I remember giving up.

There are plenty of adult readers who rarely, or never, take flight. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means they read a different way. Enjoy different things.

Likewise, there are readers who jet along at a speed I can’t quite imagine. Their unit of recognition isn’t the phrase or the paragraph but something close to the page. They read in great gulps, like baleen whales devouring whole regions of ocean. I believe this kind of reader is most often found deep in genre, where a certain formalism reigns: “I see what you’re doing here. Yes. Okay. Yes.”

— Robin Sloan, Is it drugs?, 2024

I will say: in a perfect world, you should use dialogue only when there are no other resources [ … ] It should be the last resort — that’s what I’m saying. When I say “I hate dialogue,” it’s not true. I don’t. But it’s true that I feel, myself as a film director, uninspired when I read 500 pages of dialogue. For me, it’s boring.

— Denis Villeneueve, 2024 (via)

There should probably be more soundtracks to films that don’t exist, right? I am recalling Wes Anderson’s method, in his early years, of assembling a soundtrack first, then imagining the movie that could contain all those tunes …

— Robin Sloan, Is it drugs?, 2024

The past is only a complex of traces. All physical. Craters in soil, memories in brain. Stone tablets, photographs. Now imagine: millions of years pass. More. All is dissolved and smoothed over. Washed away. Did anything happen?

— Robin Sloan, Is it drugs?, 2024

When tech companies emulate Her or other decades-old science fiction ideas, it’s a form of cosplay. I don’t mean that a derogatory way […] More that it’s seems driven by the same impulse as every kid doodling their favorite cartoon characters. When we’re so enthralled with a particular vision, we want to fold it into our own reality.

— Jack Cheng, Die Hard, Calmwashing, and Cosplaying the Future, 2024

It’s useful to take a moment and meditate: of those people in our lives who have had the most heartfelt impacts, how were those connections made? For me, they can almost all be traced to writing, essays, books. Put tangible things into the world, spoon in a dollop or two of vulnerability, do this again and again, and if you don’t find yourself communing with good people, then I’ll eat my shoe.

— Craig Mod, Meeting Kevin, Ridgeline, 2024

Define a function, foo, that calls some other function, bar, that is not yet defined. Now call foo. What happens?

Obviously, the call to foo breaks, because bar is not defined. But what happens when it breaks?

[…]

The answer to that question is the differentiating point of repl-driven programming. In an old-fashioned Lisp or Smalltalk environment, the break in foo drops you into a breakloop.

A breakloop is a full-featured repl, complete with all of the tools of the main repl, but it exists inside the dynamic environment of the broken function. From the breakloop you can roam up and down the suspended call stack, examining all variables that are lexically visible from each stack frame. In fact, you can inspect all live data in the running program.

What’s more, you can edit all live data in the program. If you think that a break was caused by a wrong value in some particular variable or field, you can interactively change it and resume the suspended function.

[…]

Moreover, because the entire language and development system are available, unrestricted, in the repl, you can define the missing function bar, resume foo, and get a sensible result.

— Mikel Evins, On repl-driven programming, engine of joy, 2020 (via)

But the digital world has been different. In fact, this may be the biggest but least recognised shock delivered by the internet. The flexibility of computers, the connectivity of networks, and the end-to-end principle of internet architecture that means new services can be invented by users rather than by infrastructure operators have together made it incredibly easy to create novel types of services that precisely offer “shared means to many ends.” And many of these services have become critical infrastructure over a highly compressed timeline.

— Robin Berjon, The Infrastructure Shock, 2024

the new age of unbelief strengthened the allegiance to images. The credence that could no longer be given to realities understood in the form of images was now being given to realities understood to be images, illusions. In the preface to the second edition (1843) of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach observes about “our era” that it “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Berlin, destroyed by war, divided by architecture, where people SCUBA dive through an artificial sea at its broken center. It felt like a mandala, a cosmic diagram, with this inverted Mt. Meru at its heart, not an infinite mountain but a bottomless pit.

What was so interesting to me about Berlin at the time was that it felt like a triple-exposure photograph, the city’s future overlaid atop everything else in a Piranesian haze of unbuilt architecture, whole neighborhoods yet to be constructed, everything still possible, out of focus somehow. It was incoherent in an exhilaratingly literal sense. In Potsdamer Platz, what you thought was the surface of the Earth was actually a bridge; you were not standing on the Earth at all, or at least not on earth. It was the Anthropocene in miniature, a kind of masquerade, architecture pretending to be geology.

— Geoff Manaugh, Potsdamer Sea, BLDGBLOG, 2022

a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal

— William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 1962 (via)

Perhaps the Anthropocene is really just a world denuded of its ecological functions, all life other than human vacuously replaced by landscape-scale storage facilities housing just-in-time detritus—the psychosis of a species surrounded only by things it can store and retrieve at will.

— Geoff Manaugh, World Store, BLDGBLOG, 2023

A year later, in the second winter of the invasion, as the army inched forward on a final, desperate push into Stalingrad, a daring joke began making the rounds in Germany, a mock dispatch from Stalingrad HQ: ‘Today our troops captured a two-room apartment with kitchen, toilet, and bathroom. They have succeeded in retaining two-thirds of it despite fierce counterattacks by the enemy.’

— Lee Sandlin, Losing the War, 2007 (via)

He was on the top of the world after the 2012 election, with everyone desperate to hear from the race’s second biggest winner on how he got it so right. He could have tempered their excitement, explaining the limits of his own role in his own forecasts, how he never technically made any calls, how much he relied on the collective polling industry getting it right. Instead, he played right into their mythical conception of him, taking full credit for “calls” as noncommittal as the 50.2% chance he gave for Obama to win Florida. There would never be a pained explanation as to why he didn’t technically get the election right, like how he explained after 2016 and 2022 that he didn’t get the election wrong. He was going all in, betting that he could fully sustain his new image as a clairvoyant mastermind.

— Joshua Cohen, The Art of Losing: A FiveThirtyEight Story, Part I, Ettingermentum Newsletter, 2023 (via)

It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.

— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals IV A 164, 1843

That error opens up onto the myriad conceptual fallacies built into the entire enterprise, if something so unavoidable can be called an “error.” Past performance is no guarantee of future results; but past performance is all a pollster has to go on. That’s why much of the process of choosing and weighting samples is … well, you can call it “more art than science.” Or you can call it “intuitive.” Or you can call it “trial and error.” But you can also call it “made up.”

— Rick Perlstein, The Polling Imperilment, The American Prospect, 2024

Most major, typical infrastructure systems emerged gradually over time. And since becoming widespread, they have evolved and innovated, but usually within a relatively similar set of means and ends, at least in terms of what they enable directly. Thanks to that gradual emergence and relative stability over time, the governance of those systems has had the occasion to become reasonably established and reliable.

— Robin Berjon, The Infrastructure Shock, 2024

†

At the city water treatment plant, I learned that someone comes in each and every day of the year to take bacterial plates out of an incubator and verify that there are no pathogens in the drinking water. Then they prepare another set to be read the next day. And the next, and the next. Water treatment plants are a physical instantiation of the idea that politics are the structures we create when we are in a sustained relationship with other people. They’re more than just the technological systems.

— Debbie Chachra, Care at Scale: Bodies, agency, and infrastructure, 2021 (via)

label each task with one of three priorities: “A” for things that are important and urgent, such as those with impending deadlines; “B” is for tasks that are important but not urgent, and can therefore be postponed if necessary; “C” is for things that are small, easy, and don’t require attention at the moment.

You start by completing the A tasks, crossing them off your list as you go. Then you move on to the B category. If you finish the B tasks, you can tackle some of the C. Lakein notes that these task priorities might evolve. An important obligation with a distant deadline, for example, might start at B, but then, as the deadline approaches, upgrade to A. Lakein’s intention is to help you make sure that you make progress on the things that most require your attention.

— Cal Newport, When Time Management Was Easy, 2024

The fact that our modern workflows would swamp Lakein’s quaint system of simple lists and priorities is perhaps more an inditement of us than him. To have more work, arriving with much more urgency, than we can possibly get our arms around is not a good recipe for getting useful effort out of human brains. It is, however, a good recipe for burnout.

— Cal Newport, When Time Management Was Easy, 2024

When we move from sequential programs to concurrent ones, we need to extend our concept of what “correct” means to account for the fact that operations from different threads can overlap in time. Linearizability is the strongest consistency model for single-object systems, which means that it’s the one that aligns closest to our intuitions. Other models are weaker and, hence, will permit anomalies that violate human intuition about how systems should behave.

— Lorin Hochstein, Linearizability! Refinement! Prophecy!, Surfing Complexity, 2024

While tags in collaborative tagging systems serve primarily an indexing purpose, facilitating search and navigation of resources, the use of the same tags by more than one individual can yield a collective classification schema.

— Lucia Specia; Enrico Motta, Integrating Folksonomies with the Semantic Web, The Semantic Web: Research and Applications. ESWC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4519, 2007, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, p. 624–639 (via)

†

Living a life through the lens is a rewarding experience. Sometimes, the camera works as a shield, but most of the time the camera brings us closer to the world around us. It allows us to see in high-resolution detail. Louping the world, so-to-speak. Inching along. Inspecting the details. Looking for patterns and memories.

— Daniel Milnor, Creative: Japan Notes, Episode Four, Shifter, 2024

It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he’ll have to type. If this isn’t precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were.

— Paul Graham, Being Popular, 2001 (via)

The rant: After using Hugo for a little while I got fed up with how annoying it was to add custom functionality (everything has to be a template), how “content” and “static” files were treated differently, how CSS files were excluded from the templating system, how you couldn’t display data from the data folder easily on pages, how confusing index files were, and other silly things.

Being a programmer, I thought treating all files equally and enabling the use of an actual programming language would solve most of these problems.

— Marcus Thunström, LuaWebGen. Why?, 2018

†

A transition from an author’s book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

— Samuel Johnson, No. 14, The Rambler, 1750 (via)

The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer’s integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic text editors such as Vim. But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems. They have warped and corrupted their production workflow into using Microsoft Word .doc [.docx] files as their raw substrate, even though this is a file format ill-suited for editorial or typesetting chores. And they expect me to integrate myself into a Word-centric workflow, even though it’s an inappropriate, damaging, and laborious tool for the job. It is, quite simply, unavoidable. And worse, by its very prominence, we become blind to the possibility that our tools for document creation could be improved. It has held us back for nearly 25 years already; I hope we will find something better to take its place soon.

— Charlie Stross, Why Microsoft Word must Die, 2013 (via)

†

Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908, Ch. The Suicide of Thought (via)

†

As we move into an age when our possessions communicate without our intervention, we should be asking what stories they’ll be creating, whose norms they reproduce, who will access them, and how will they act on them.

— Jane Ruffino, Business Post, 2014 (via)

When you thwart what’s real about you in order to keep creating content for financial need, you’re just not gonna make it. You’re not gonna keep going. You have your number. It’s very dangerous to be liked by more people than should like you. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for you. There’s gonna be a shock down the road for them, or you’re gonna dilute yourself and take yourself to a place where you can’t live with who you are. I think that you make an honest account of who you are and you live with the results. The results will be appropriate to who you are… If you’re saying things just to piss people off, then I don’t know why do it. If you’re saying things just to please people, that’s a short-lived victory. But if you just say the things you believe, and the things you like to say, and that mean something to you — if you stay close to the gut — then everything will work itself out.

— Louis C.K., Episode 92: Louis C.K., The Bill Simmons Podcast, 2016 (via)

The scale of the Kia and Hyundai theft problem is astounding. In Chicago, during the “old normal” days prior to the summer of 2022, six to eight percent of all stolen cars were Kias or Hyundais, according to data obtained by Motherboard. This was in line with how many Kias and Hyundais were on Chicago’s roads, according to the lawsuit Chicago filed against Kia and Hyundai. Then, in June 2022, the percentage of stolen cars that were Kias and Hyundais edged up to 11 percent. In July, it more than doubled to 25 percent. By November, it had almost doubled again, to 48 percent. Through August 2023, the most recent month for which Motherboard has data, 35 percent of the 19,448 stolen cars in Chicago have been Kias or Hyundais.

— Aaron Gordon, U.S. Cities Have a Staggering Problem of Kia and Hyundai Thefts. This Data Shows It., Vice, 2023 (via)

Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images; and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking the standard of an image-free way of apprehending the real.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The traditional fine arts are elitist: their characteristic form is a single work, produced by an individual; they imply a hierarchy of subject matter in which some subjects are considered important, profound, noble, and others unimportant, trivial, base. The media are democratic: they weaken the role of the specialized producer or auteur (by using procedures based on chance, or mechanical techniques which anyone can learn; and by being corporate or collaborative efforts); they regard the whole world as material. The traditional fine arts rely on the distinction between authentic and fake, between original and copy, between good taste and bad taste; the media blur, if they do not abolish outright, these distinctions. The fine arts assume that certain experiences or subjects have a meaning. The media are essentially contentless (this is the truth behind Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated remark about the message being the medium itself); their characteristic tone is ironic, or dead-pan, or parodistic. It is inevitable that more and more art will be designed to end as photographs. A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of photography.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

In the course of my long wanderings throughout the devastated area, on that day and on those following, I saw or heard of no instance of profiteering among the common people. Even the last bottle, the last candle, the last bit of fruit, were sold at ordinary prices, even before martial law made profiteering an offense. It was not thought of.

— Henry W. Kinney, Earthquake Days, The Atlantic, 1924 (via)

The Tamagawa River, which divides the two prefectures of which Tokyo and Yokohama are the principal cities, formed also the dividing line between the two distinct phases of the disaster. Behind us, Tokyo suffered shocks of far less severity than those which devastated Yokohama, the principal damage being wrought by the fires which, immediately following it, swept devouringly through the capital. Yokohama, on the other hand, was smashed, utterly ruined by the shock. The flames merely reduced ruins to ashes, brought death to those who had been wounded or lay pinned under debris. Throughout the entire stricken area strange pranks of the quake had left some localities relatively unpunished, while others, scattered among the former, were flattened and shattered. It seemed as if the movement must be wave-like, smiting with greatest force the points touched by the crests of its billows.

The massive buttresses supporting the railroad bridge across the Tamagawa had been twisted, rocked out of place, and the tracks hung fantastically suspended between them. Oddly, a slight foot-bridge, formed by two widths of boards, was almost intact. We hurried across, the one thought in control being: what if another shock should catch us while on this bridge?

We had to jump from the bridge to the embankment. It had sunk, split, and shattered, one set of twisted tracks being more than six feet above the other.

— Henry W. Kinney, Earthquake Days, The Atlantic, 1924 (via)

the very question of whether photography is or is not an art is essentially a misleading one. Although photography generates works that can be called art—it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure—photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made. Out of language, one can make scientific discourse, bureaucratic memoranda, love letters, grocery lists, and Balzac’s Paris. Out of photography, one can make passport pictures, weather photographs, pornographic pictures, X-rays, wedding pictures, and Atget’s Paris. Photography is not an art like, say, painting and poetry. Although the activities of some photographers conform to the traditional notion of a fine art, the activity of exceptionally talented individuals producing discrete objects that have value in themselves, from the beginning photography has also lent itself to that notion of art which says that art is obsolete. The power of photography—and its centrality in present aesthetic concerns—is that it confirms both ideas of art. But the way in which photography renders art obsolete is, in the long run, stronger.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Valéry claimed that photography performed the same service for writing, by exposing the “illusory” claim of language to “convey the idea of a visual object with any degree of precision.” But writers should not fear that photography “might ultimately restrict the importance of the art of writing and act as its substitute,” Valéry says in “The Centenary of Photography” (1929). If photography “discourages us from describing,” he argues,we are thus reminded of the limits of language and are advised, as writers, to put our tools to a use more befitting their true nature. A literature would purify itself if it left to other modes of expression and production the tasks which they can perform far more effectively, and devoted itself to ends it alone can accomplish … one of which [is] the perfecting of language that constructs or expounds abstract thought, the other exploring all the variety of poetic patterns and resonances.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

For Baudelaire, photography was painting’s “mortal enemy”; but eventually a truce was worked out, according to which photography was held to be painting’s liberator. Weston employed the most common formula for easing the defensiveness of painters when he wrote in 1930: “Photography has, or will eventually, negate much painting —for which the painter should be deeply grateful.” Freed by photography from the drudgery of faithful representation, painting could pursue a higher task: abstraction.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

As photography takes the whole world as its subject, there is room for every kind of taste. Literary taste does exclude: the success of the modernist movement in poetry elevated Donne but diminished Dryden. With literature, one can be eclectic up to a point, but one can’t like everything. With photography, eclecticism has no limits.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

For while paintings or poems do not get better, more attractive simply because they are older, all photographs are interesting as well as touching if they are old enough. It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph—only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The language in which photographs are generally evaluated is extremely meager. Sometimes it is parasitical on the vocabulary of painting: composition, light, and so forth.

More often it consists in the vaguest sorts of judgments, as when photographs are praised for being subtle, or interesting, or powerful, or complex, or simple, or—a favorite—deceptively simple.

The reason the language is poor is not fortuitous: say, the absence of a rich tradition of photographic criticism. It is something inherent in photography itself, whenever it is viewed as an art. Photography proposes a process of imagination and an appeal to taste quite different from that of painting (at least as traditionally conceived). Indeed, the difference between a good photograph and a bad photograph is not at all like the difference between a good and a bad painting.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

For a brief time—say, from Stieglitz through the reign of Weston—it appeared that a solid point of view had been erected with which to evaluate photographs: impeccable lighting, skill of composition, clarity of subject, precision of focus, perfection of print quality. But this position, generally thought of as Westonian—essentially technical criteria for what makes a photograph good—is now bankrupt. (Weston’s deprecating appraisal of the great Atget as “not a fine technician” shows its limitations.) What position has replaced Weston’s? A much more inclusive one, with criteria which shift the center of judgment from the individual photograph, considered as a finished object, to the photograph considered as an example of “photographic seeing.” What is meant by photographic seeing would hardly exclude Weston’s work but it would also include a large number of anonymous, unposed, crudely lit, asymmetrically composed photographs formerly dismissed for their lack of composition. The new position aims to liberate photography, as art, from the oppressive standards of technical perfection; to liberate photography from beauty, too. It opens up the possibility of a global taste, in which no subject (or absence of subject), no technique (or absence of technique) disqualifies a photograph.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

That all the different kinds of photography form one continuous and interdependent tradition is the once startling, now obvious-seeming assumption which underlies contemporary photographic taste and authorizes the indefinite expansion of that taste.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

the line between amateur and professional, primitive and sophisticated is not just harder to draw with photography than it is with painting—it has little meaning. Naive or commercial or merely utilitarian photography is no different in kind from photography as practiced by the most gifted professionals: there are pictures taken by anonymous amateurs which are just as interesting, as complex formally, as representative of photography’s characteristic powers as a Stieglitz or an Evans.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

It was photography that first put into circulation the idea of an art that is produced not by pregnancy and childbirth but by a blind date (Duchamp’s theory of “rendez-vous”).

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.

— Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, Albert Einstein: Philosopher–Scientist, 1951 (via)

The glacier is the memory of past winters that the mountain holds onto for us.

— Pietro’s father, Le Otto Montaigne, 2022

Even in the nineteenth century, when photography was thought to be so evidently in need of defense as a fine art, the line of defense was far from stable. Julia Margaret Cameron’s claim that photography qualifies as an art because, like painting, it seeks the beautiful was succeeded by Henry Peach Robinson’s Wildean claim that photography is an art because it can lie. In the early twentieth century Alvin Langdon Coburn’s praise of photography as “the most modern of the arts,” because it is a fast, impersonal way of seeing, competed with Weston’s praise of photography as a new means of individual visual creation. In recent decades the notion of art has been exhausted as an instrument of polemic; indeed, a good part of the immense prestige that photography has acquired as an art form comes from its declared ambivalence toward being an art. When photographers now deny that they are making works of art, it is because they think they are doing something better than that. Their disclaimers tell us more about the harried status of any notion of art than about whether photography is or isn’t one.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Questions about knowledge are not, historically, photography’s first line of defense. The earliest controversies center on the question of whether photography’s fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine did not prevent it from being a fine art—as distinct from a merely practical art, an arm of science, and a trade. (That photographs give useful and often startling kinds of information was obvious from the beginning. Photographers only started worrying about what they knew, and what kind of knowledge in a deeper sense a photograph supplies, after photography was accepted as an art.) For about a century the defense of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was a vanguard revolt against ordinary standards of seeing, no less worthy an art than painting.

Now photographers are choosier about the claims they make. Since photography has become so entirely respectable as a branch of the fine arts, they no longer seek the shelter that the notion of art has intermittently given the photographic enterprise.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Photographers seem to need periodically to resist their own knowingness and to remystify what they do.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

as cameras get ever more sophisticated, more automated, more acute, some photographers are tempted to disarm themselves or to suggest that they are really not armed, and prefer to submit themselves to the limits imposed by a pre-modern camera technology—a cruder, less high-powered machine being thought to give more interesting or expressive results, to leave more room for the creative accident. Not using fancy equipment has been a point of honor for many photographers—including Weston, Brandt, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Frank—some sticking with a battered camera of simple design and slow lens that they acquired early in their careers, some continuing to make their contact prints with nothing more elaborate than a few trays, a bottle of developer, and a bottle of hypo solution.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

What talented photographers do cannot of course be characterized either as simply predatory or as simply, and essentially, benevolent. Photography is the paradigm of an inherently equivocal connection between self and world—its version of the ideology of realism sometimes dictating an effacement of the self in relation to the world, sometimes authorizing an aggressive relation to the world which celebrates the self. One side or the other of the connection is always being rediscovered and championed.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

For Lange every portrait of another person is a “self-portrait” of the photographer, as for Minor White—promoting “self-discovery through a camera”—landscape photographs are really “inner landscapes.” The two ideals are antithetical. Insofar as photography is (or should be) about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it is the instrument of intrepid, questing subjectivity, the photographer is all.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

reality is, in Viktor Shklovsky’s word, de-familiarized. What is being urged is an aggressive relation to all subjects. Armed with their machines, photographers are to make an assault on reality—which is perceived as recalcitrant, as only deceptively available, as unreal. “The pictures have a reality for me that the people don’t,” Avedon has declared. “It is through the photographs that I know them.”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Style or taste is knowing who you are and knowing what you like, and then being able to look outside of yourself, see the world around you, and then pick out the one thing from around you that does resonate with you […] it’s a process of collection, almost. Like you’re grabbing on to the little voices and artists and touchstones that make you who you are and give you your sense of self. You’re drawn to something without knowing why.

— Kyle Chayka, Ezra Klein Interviews Kyle Chayka, The Ezra Klein Show, 2024 (via)

In a living process, what is always happening is that every step (large or small, whether it comes late or early) is done in such a way to as to increase the beauty – the life – of the whole. The process starts with a vision of a possible whole that comes out of the circumstances, that is felt as something which grows out of the form of the world.

— Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, 1977, Ch. The Process of Creating Life, p. 266 (via)

What usually happens when someone thinks of building on a piece of land? He looks for the best site—where the grass is most beautiful, the trees most healthy, the slope of the land most even, the view most lovely, the soil most fertile—and that is just where he decides to put his house [… F]or a person who lacks a total view of the ecology of the land, it seems the most obvious and sensible thing to do […]

But think now of the three-quarters of the available land which are not quite so nice. Since people always build on the one-quarter which is healthiest, the other three-quarters, already less healthy ecologically, become neglected. Gradually, they become less and less healthy […] Not only that. When we build on teh best parts of the land, those beauties which are athere already—the crocuses that break through the lawn each spring, the sunny pile of stones where lizards sun themselves, the favorite gravel path, which we love walking on—it is always these things which get lost in the shuffle. When the construction starts on parts of the land which are already healthy, innumerable beauties are wiped out with every act of building.

— Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, 1977 (via)

If it was me guiding the devel­op­ment of AI agents, I would push away from language models, toward richly multi­modal approaches, as quickly as I could. I would hurry to enrich their sensorium, widening the aperture to reality.

— Robin Sloan, Are AI language models in hell?, 2023

Whatever the camera records is a disclosure—whether it is imperceptible, fleeting parts of movement, an order that natural vision is incapable of perceiving or a “heightened reality” (Moholy-Nagy’s phrase), or simply the elliptical way of seeing. What Stieglitz describes as his “patient waiting for the moment of equilibrium” makes the same assumption about the essential hiddenness of the real as Robert Frank’s waiting for the moment of revealing disequilibrium, to catch reality off-guard, in what he calls the “in-between moments.”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

the contradictory declarations of photographers converge on pious avowals of respect for things-as-they-are.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

between the defense of photography as a superior means of self-expression and the praise of photography as a superior way of putting the self at reality’s service there is not as much difference as might appear. Both presuppose that photography provides a unique system of disclosures: that it shows us reality as we had not seen it before.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Where the claims of knowledge falter, the claims of creativity take up the slack. As if to refute the fact that many superb pictures are by photographers devoid of any serious or interesting intentions, the insistence that picture-taking is first of all the focusing of a temperament, only secondarily of a machine, has always been one of the main themes of the defense of photography. This is the theme stated so eloquently in the finest essay ever written in praise of photography, Paul Rosenfeld’s chapter on Stieglitz in Port of New York. By using “his machinery”—as Rosenfeld puts it —“unmechanically,” Stieglitz shows that the camera not only “gave him an opportunity of expressing himself” but supplied images with a wider and “more delicate” gamut “than the hand can draw.” Similarly, Weston insists over and over that photography is a supreme opportunity for self-expression, far superior to that offered by painting. For photography to compete with painting means invoking originality as an important standard for appraising a photographer’s work, originality being equated with the stamp of a unique, forceful sensibility. What is exciting “are photographs that say something in a new manner,” Harry Callahan writes, “not for the sake of being different, but because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself.” For Ansel Adams “a great photograph” has to be “a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

In this century, the older generation of photographers described photography as a heroic effort of attention, an ascetic discipline, a mystic receptivity to the world which requires that the photographer pass through a cloud of unknowing. According to Minor White, “the state of mind of the photographer while creating is a blank … when looking for pictures … The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.” Cartier-Bresson has likened himself to a Zen archer, who must become the target so as to be able to hit it; “thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards,” he says, “never while actually taking a photograph.” Thought is regarded as clouding the transparency of the photographer’s consciousness, and as infringing on the autonomy of what is being photographed. Determined to prove that photographs could—and when they are good, always do—transcend literalness, many serious photographers have made of photography a noetic paradox. Photography is advanced as a form of knowing without knowing: a way of outwitting the world, instead of making a frontal attack on it.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken, the inevitable even when inadvertent authority of the camera’s results, suggest a very tenuous relation to knowing. No one would dispute that photography gave a tremendous boost to the cognitive claims of sight, because—through close-up and remote sensing—it so greatly enlarged the realm of the visible. But about the ways in which any subject within the range of unaided vision is further known through a photograph or the extent to which, in order to get a good photograph, people need to know anything about what they are photographing, there is no agreement. Picture-taking has been interpreted in two entirely different ways: either as a lucid and precise act of knowing, of conscious intelligence, or as a pre-intellectual, intuitive mode of encounter

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Nothing is more acceptable today than the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as an everyday activity and as a branch of high art. Yet something about photography still keeps the first-rate professionals defensive and hortatory: virtually every important photographer right up to the present has written manifestoes and credos expounding photography’s moral and aesthetic mission. And photographers give the most contradictory accounts of what kind of knowledge they possess and what kind of art they practice.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Photographs are often invoked as an aid to understanding and tolerance. In humanist jargon, the highest vocation of photography is to explain man to man. But photographs do not explain; they acknowledge. Robert Frank was only being honest when he declared that “to produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation.” If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” as Arbus observed. “The more it tells you the less you know.” Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The urge to take photographs is in principle an indiscriminate one, for the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera. But this quality of being interesting, like that of manifesting humanity, is an empty one.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

What the moralists are demanding from a photograph is that it do what no photograph can ever do—speak. The caption is the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth. But even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached. And the caption-glove slips on and off so easily. It cannot prevent any argument or moral plea which a photograph (or set of photographs) is intended to support from being undermined by the plurality of meanings that every photograph carries, or from being qualified by the acquisitive mentality implicit in all picture-taking—and picture-collecting—and by the aesthetic relation to their subjects which all photographs inevitably propose.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The best writing on photography has been by moralists—Marxists or would-be Marxists—hooked on photographs but troubled by the way photography inexorably beautifies. As Walter Benjamin observed in 1934, in an address delivered in Paris at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, the camera is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can only say, ‘How beautiful.’ … It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment.

Moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus Smith’s Minamata photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a general news magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each of these situations suggests a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning. As Wittgenstein argued for words, that the meaning is the use—so for each photograph. And it is in this way that the presence and proliferation of all photographs contributes to the erosion of the very notion of meaning, to that parceling out of the truth into relative truths which is taken for granted by the modern liberal consciousness.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

As the vehicle of a certain reaction against the conventionally beautiful, photography has served to enlarge vastly our notion of what is aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes this reaction is in the name of truth. Sometimes it is in the name of sophistication or of prettier lies: thus, fashion photography has been developing, over more than a decade, a repertoire of paroxysmic gestures that shows the unmistakable influence of Surrealism. (“Beauty will be convulsive,” Breton wrote, “or it will not be at all.”)

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The camera can be lenient; it is also expert at being cruel. But its cruelty only produces another kind of beauty, according to the surrealist preferences which rule photographic taste.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

— H. Jackson Brown, Jr’s mother, P.S. I Love You, 1990 (via)

[To take photographs is] to find the structure of the world—to revel in the pure pleasure of form, [to disclose that] in all this chaos, there is order.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

When I make a photograph, I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order.

— Aaron Siskind, Credo, 1950

Increased familiarity does not entirely explain why certain conventions of beauty get used up while others remain. The attrition is moral as well as perceptual. Strand and Weston could hardly have imagined how these notions of beauty could become so banal, yet it seems inevitable once one insists—as Weston did—on so bland an ideal of beauty as perfection. Whereas the painter, according to Weston, has always “tried to improve nature by self-imposition,” the photographer has “proved that nature offers an endless number of perfect ‘compositions,’—order everywhere.” Behind the modernist’s belligerent stance of aesthetic purism lay an astonishingly generous acceptance of the world.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Weston’s assertion that “photography has opened the blinds to a new world vision” seems typical of the overoxygenated hopes of modernism in all the arts during the first third of the century—hopes since abandoned.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Though photographers have not ceased to look for beauty, photography is no longer thought to create, under the aegis of beauty, a psychic breakthrough. Ambitious modernists, like Weston and Cartier-Bresson, who understand photography as a genuinely new way of seeing (precise, intelligent, even scientific), have been challenged by photographers of a later generation, like Robert Frank, who want a camera eye that is not piercing but democratic, who don’t claim to be setting new standards for seeing.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

the habit of photographic seeing—of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs—creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature.Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective. These discrepancies were much remarked by the public in the early days of picture-taking. Once they began to think photographically, people stopped talking about photographic distortion, as it was called. (Now, as William Ivins, Jr., has pointed out, they actually hunt for that distortion.) Thus, one of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings into things, things into living beings. The peppers Weston photographed in 1929 and 1930 are voluptuous in a way that his female nudes rarely are. Both the nudes and the pepper are photographed for the play of forms—but the body is characteristically shown bent over upon itself, all the extremities cropped, with the flesh rendered as opaque as normal lighting and focus allow, thus decreasing its sensuality and heightening the abstractness of the body’s form; the pepper is viewed close-up but in its entirety, the skin polished or oiled, and the result is a discovery of the erotic suggestiveness of an ostensibly neutral form, a heightening of its seeming palpability.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

While most people taking photographs are only seconding received notions of the beautiful, ambitious professionals usually think they are challenging them. According to heroic modernists like Weston, the photographer’s venture is elitist, prophetic, subversive, revelatory. Photographers claimed to be performing the Blakean task of cleansing the senses, “revealing to others the living world around them,” as Weston described his own work, “showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed.”

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. That is, the identification of the subject of a photograph always dominates our perception of it—as it does not, necessarily, in a painting. The subject of Weston’s “Cabbage Leaf,” taken in 1931, looks like a fall of gathered cloth; a title is needed to identify it. Thus, the image makes its point in two ways. The form is pleasing, and it is (surprise!) the form of a cabbage leaf. If it were gathered cloth, it wouldn’t be so beautiful. We already know that beauty, from the fine arts. Hence the formal qualities of style—the central issue in painting—are, at most, of secondary importance in photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary importance. The assumption underlying all uses of photography, that each photograph is a piece of the world, means that we don’t know how to react to a photograph (if the image is visually ambiguous: say, too closely seen or too distant) until we know what piece of the world it is. What looks like a bare coronet—the famous photograph taken by Harold Edgerton in 1936—becomes far more interesting when we find out it is a splash of milk.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Freed from the necessity of having to make narrow choices (as painters did) about what images were worth contemplating, because of the rapidity with which cameras recorded anything, photographers made seeing into a new kind of project: as if seeing itself, pursued with sufficient avidity and single-mindedness, could indeed reconcile the claims of truth and the need to find the world beautiful.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free State. I have never been able to answer the question with any satisfaction to myself. It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced. I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate. In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my arrival at New York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions. This state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness. I was yet liable to be taken back, and subjected to all the tortures of slavery. This in itself was enough to damp the ardor of my enthusiasm. But the loneliness overcame me. There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren — children of a common Father, and yet I dared not to unfold to any one of them my sad condition. I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts of the forest lie in wait for their prey. The motto which I adopted when I started from slavery was this — “Trust no man!” I saw in every white man an enemy, and in almost every colored man cause for distrust. It was a most painful situation; and, to understand it, one must needs experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances. Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land — a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders — whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers — where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey! — I say, let him place himself in my situation — without home or friends — without money or credit — wanting shelter, and no one to give it — wanting bread, and no money to buy it, — and at the same time let him feel that he is pursued by merciless men-hunters, and in total darkness as to what to do, where to go, or where to stay, — perfectly helpless both as to the means of defence and means of escape, — in the midst of plenty, yet suffering the terrible gnawings of hunger, — in the midst of houses, yet having no home, — among fellow-men, yet feeling as if in the midst of wild beasts, whose greediness to swallow up the trembling and half-famished fugitive is only equalled by that with which the monsters of the deep swallow up the helpless fish upon which they subsist, — I say, let him be placed in this most trying situation, — the situation in which I was placed, — then, and not till then, will he fully appreciate the hardships of, and know how to sympathize with, the toil-worn and whip-scarred fugitive slave.

— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845 (via)

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “n****r,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

— Martin Luther King, Letter from the Birmingham Jail, 1963 (via)

By then, in the countryside near my parents’ home, I had also undergone solitary apprehensions of a vibrant unity among all visible things and the thing I guessed was hid beneath the visible world — the reachable world of trees, rocks, water, clouds, snakes, foxes, myself, and (beneath them) all I loved and feared. Even that early I sensed the world’s unity as a vast kinship far past the bond of any root I shared with other creatures in evolutionary time, and the Bible stories had begun to engage me steadily in silence and to draw me toward the singular claim at their burning heart — Your life is willed and watched with care by a god who once lived here.

— Reynolds Price, Three Gospels (via)

The porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The ‘showings’ manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only.

— Alan Jacobs, some enchanted evening, The Homebound Symphony (via)

The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.

I remember a conversation we had a year or so before his death, walking in the hills above Pasadena. We were exploring an unfamiliar trail and Richard, recovering from a major operation for the cancer, was walking more slowly than usual. He was telling a long and funny story about how he had been reading up on his disease and surprising his doctors by predicting their diagnosis and his chances of survival. I was hearing for the first time how far his cancer had progressed, so the jokes did not seem so funny. He must have noticed my mood, because he suddenly stopped the story and asked, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

I hesitated. “I’m sad because you’re going to die.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, “that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think.” And after a few more steps, “When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you’ve told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway.”

We walked along in silence for a few minutes. Then we came to a place where another trail crossed and Richard stopped to look around at the surroundings. Suddenly a grin lit up his face. “Hey,” he said, all trace of sadness forgotten, “I bet I can show you a better way home.”

And so he did.

— Danny Hills, Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, 1989 (via)

The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such “punctuated equilibrium,” so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our “discoveries” were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. “Hey, we got it right!” he said. “Not bad for amateurs.”

— Danny Hills, Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, 1989 (via)

I do not mean to imply that Richard was hesitant to do the “dirty work.” In fact, he was always volunteering for it. Many a visitor at Thinking Machines was shocked to see that we had a Nobel Laureate soldering circuit boards or painting walls. But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn’t understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool.

— Danny Hills, Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, 1989 (via)

Feynman the Explainer

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

“We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids.”

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

We tried to take advantage of Richard’s talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. “Don’t say ‘reflected acoustic wave.’ Say [echo].” Or, “Forget all that ‘local minima’ stuff. Just say there’s a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out.” Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

— Danny Hills, Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, 1989 (via)

Recently I was talking to a writer who described something she did whenever she moved to her writing table. I don’t remember exactly what the gesture was—there is something on her desk that she touches before she hits the computer keyboard—but we began to talk about little rituals that one goes through before beginning to write. I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that’s a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular … Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

— Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134, The Paris Review (via)

[…] there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.

— Michelle Obama, A Couple in Chicago, The New Yorker, 1996 (via)

The reason I do my huge walks alone is because, like Wenders notes, it’s the only way I can “see” and it’s the mode in which I feel the strongest impulse to photograph. It’s also the mode where the literary voice in the back of my head perks up and rattles off. Aloneness and solitude in my twenties was painful, but I think it did teach me how to “be alone” and make the most of it, to not be afraid of it. And I’ve tried to transmute as much of that learning into my work as possible.

— Craig Mod, Japanese Kissa by Kissa, Norm Maclean, Toni Morrison, Akiya in Japan, Howtown, Bobby Fingers, and more

By far, the most satisfying thing was seeing how the segment got edited and broadcast. My name and position as 実行委員長 / Steering Committee Chairman were shown on the screen. There was no reference to or discussion of my country of birth, or why I am in the position. They did ask me to indicate how many years I have been chairman (around eight, by my count). To me this is the best kind of social progress: The implication that people who do not look and are not named in traditionally Japanese ways are just out there in society doing stuff, and this is normal enough that no particular discussion of it is needed. When people see that a news broadcast included such a scene without that discussion of nationality or otherness, it changes their perceptions more than any explicit discussion would. The way I envision it (wishfully, sure; indulge me), a viewer who would have expected that discussion wonders internally, “Hmm, they didn’t even mention this dude’s clear otherness. Maybe it’s getting common enough for non-traditional-looking people to simply do stuff that TV programs don’t discuss it anymore. Huh.” That is why I like to do community things, and to be on TV in this way.

— Derek Wessman, NHK News Watch 9 (via)

All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.

— John Cage, Lecture On Nothing, 1959

Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with the twentieth century’s most seductive form of moralism. Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Photography inevitably entails a certain patronizing of reality. From being “out there,” the world comes to be “inside” photographs.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

photographs not only proliferate in a way that paintings don’t but are, in a certain sense, aesthetically indestructible. Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” in Milan hardly looks better now; it looks terrible. Photographs, when they get scrofulous, tarnished, stained, cracked, faded still look good; do often look better. (In this, as in other ways, the art that photography does resemble is architecture, whose works are subject to the same inexorable promotion through the passage of time; many buildings, and not only the Parthenon, probably look better as ruins.)

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

photography—the cumulative de-creation of the past (in the very act of preserving it), the fabrication of a new, parallel reality that makes the past immediate while underscoring its comic or tragic ineffectuality, that invests the specificity of the past with an unlimited irony, that transforms the present into the past and the past into pastness.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

†

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects—making it possible, as Benjamin said, to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. From the start, photographers not only set themselves the task of recording a disappearing world but were so employed by those hastening its disappearance. (As early as 1842, that indefatigable improver of French architectural treasures, Viollet-le-Duc, commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of Notre Dame before beginning his restoration of the cathedral.) “To renew the old world,” Benjamin wrote, “that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things.” But the old world cannot be renewed—certainly not by quotations; and this is the rueful, quixotic aspect of the photographic enterprise.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The bigger we get the more likely egos collide, it’s just physics
Please let’s put our egos aside

— J. Cole, 28th January ♫, Forest Hills Drive, 2014

The error of the Surrealist militants was to imagine the surreal to be something universal, that is, a matter of psychology, whereas it turns out to be what is most local, ethnic, class-bound, dated.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Unlike the fine-art objects of pre-democratic eras, photographs don’t seem deeply beholden to the intentions of an artist. Rather, they owe their existence to a loose cooperation (quasi-magical, quasi-accidental) between photographer and subject—mediated by an ever simpler and more automated machine, which is tireless, and which even when capricious can produce a result that is interesting and never entirely wrong.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited, flattered disorderly presences. What could be more surreal than an object which virtually produces itself, and with a minimum of effort? An object whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weight are likely to be further enhanced by any accidents that might befall it?

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the ‘open secret.’ I’m used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven’t spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven’t repressed something there to my detriment. Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it’s never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody’s in drastic need. I’d rather give pleasure, or shake things up.

— Susan Sontag (via)

The mainstream of photographic activity has shown that a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive —the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

†

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts. In fact, it is the one art that has managed to carry out the grandiose, century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility, while most of the pedigreed candidates have dropped out of the race.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

I started reflecting on what had happened to “complexity”, and whether there was something to leverage from the institutional structure that had grown up around it. Nearly 20 years after the publication of A New Kind of Science, what should “complexity” be now?

I wrote “Charting a Course for ‘Complexity’: Metamodeling, Ruliology and More”—and in doing so, finally invented a word for the “pure basic science of what simple rules do”: ruliology.

— Stephen Wolfram, Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What’s Next, 2024

Each library will have a small window (probably no more than 3 versions at any time) of acceptable protocol versions.

A new version will be specified, with a brand new KDF salt, every time we need to improve the protocol to address a security risk. Additionally, we will upgrade the protocol version at least once a year, even if no security risks have been found in the latest version of the protocol.

— Soatok, Introducing Alacrity to Federated Cryptography, 2024

†

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

— Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, 1952, Ch. 9, p. 86 (via)

I spent the first decade or more of my career working on ASCII terminals, 24 80-column lines in green or orange or white on black. If you got an upscale terminal from Ann Arbor or Falco, you could have 40 lines, and you were an aristocrat.

— Tim Bray, More Monos!, 2023

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.

— Winston Churchill, Speech, House of Commons, 1936 (via)

[Photography records] a fragmentary sensation that you intuit as being potential. All these are vague — fragmentary, potential, intuition — they’re not substantial, but they are essential. They are what define you as the being you are and the artist you are.

So if you’re looking to be a photographic artist, then you’re going to be searching for your identity on the street. You’re not looking for pictures, you’re looking for what is it that makes me go “a ha!”, because that is inspiration […] which means your sensory being has been shocked by something in front of you that manifests itself out of the chaos of everyday reality. You’re looking for these moments of transformation.

— Joel Meyerowitz, The Big Interview, Monocle, 2024

I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way – things that I had no words for.

— Georgia O’Keeffe, Foreword of the catalogue for the show at the Anderson Galleries in New York, 1926 (via)

[…] And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper’s robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet’s engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn’t worked out how to test database backups regularly.

— Nikhil Suresh, I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again, 2024 (via)

I’ve got a cell phone, a pocket organiser, a beeper, a calculator, a digital camera, a pocket tape recorder, a music player, and somewhere around here, I used to have a color television.

Sometime in the next few years, all of those devices are going to meld into one. It will be a box less than an inch thick and smaller than a deck of cards. (The size will be determined by what’s convenient to hold, not by the technology inside.)

The box will have a high-res color screen, a microphone, a plug for a headset or earphones, a camera lens, wireless connectivity, cell phone and beeper functions, a television and radio receiver, a digital recorder, and it will have enough processing power and memory to function as a desktop system. It will be able to dock with a keyboard and full size monitor. Oh yes, and it will handle email as well.

Most important of all, it will have both speech recognition and speech synthesis. It will listen and respond in English or whatever language you need, and yes it will be a translator too. It will be an agent, going out and doing cyber errands for you. For instance, I need a Japanese restaurant in Tulsa, near the Ramada Inn. Book a reservation and arrange transportation.

If there’s no Japanese restaurant, try for Italian. Or voicemail Bob as follows: ‘Bob, we accept your offer, but we’ll need a draft of the deal memo by the 15th. Let me know if that’s a problem.’

I call this device a Personal Information Telecommunications Agent, or Pita for short. The acronym also can stand for Pain in the Ass, which it is equally likely to be, because having all that connectivity is going to destroy what’s left of everyone’s privacy.

An image of the magazine

Mentioned on twitter

— David Gerrold, Is That a Pita in Your Pocket, Smart Reseller Magazine, 1999

Arbus’s work is a good instance of a leading tendency of high art in capitalist countries: to suppress, or at least reduce, moral and sensory queasiness. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing; art changes morals—that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not. The gradual suppression of queasiness does bring us closer to a rather formal truth—that of the arbitrariness of the taboos constructed by art and morals. But our ability to stomach this rising grotesqueness in images (moving and still) and in print has a stiff price. In the long run, it works out not as a liberation of but as a subtraction from the self: a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life. What happens to people’s feelings on first exposure to today’s neighborhood pornographic film or to tonight’s televised atrocity is not so different from what happens when they first look at Arbus’s photographs.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Thus, what is finally most troubling in Arbus’s photographs is not their subject at all but the cumulative impression of the photographer’s consciousness: the sense that what is presented is precisely a private vision, something voluntary. Arbus was not a poet delving into her entrails to relate her own pain but a photographer venturing out into the world to collect images that are painful. And for pain sought rather than just felt, there may be a less than obvious explanation. According to Reich, the masochist’s taste for pain does not spring from a love of pain but from the hope of procuring, by means of pain, a strong sensation; those handicapped by emotional or sensory analgesia only prefer pain to not feeling anything at all. But there is another explanation of why people seek pain, diametrically opposed to Reich’s, that also seems pertinent: that they seek it not to feel more but to feel less.Insofar as looking at Arbus’s photographs is, undeniably, an ordeal, they are typical of the kind of art popular among sophisticated urban people right now: art that is a self-willed test of hardness. Her photographs offer an occasion to demonstrate that life’s horror can be faced without squeamishness. The photographer once had to say to herself, Okay, I can accept that; the viewer is invited to make the same declaration.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Diane Arbus’s photographs were already famous to people who follow photography when she killed herself in 1971; but, as with Sylvia Plath, the attention her work has attracted since her death is of another order—a kind of apotheosis. The fact of her suicide seems to guarantee that her work is sincere, not voyeuristic, that it is compassionate, not cold. Her suicide also seems to make the photographs more devastating, as if it proved the photographs to have been dangerous to her.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The greats weren’t great because at birth they could paint, the greats were great because they paint a lot.

— Macklemore, Ten Thousand Hours, The Heist (2012), 2012

Empathy is only effective when it’s balanced with autonomy, critical thinking, and personal agency. Empathy is not acquiescence, it’s presence. It means staying present to the truth of the situation I’m in, and working from within that truth to develop a better outcome. Part of that truth includes a deep respect for my own boundaries and self-worth.

— Laura Killingbeck, Empathy is a Survival Skill, 2024

Empathy is not a guarantee of safety, but I know that it makes the world safer. It makes the world safer because it creates the safety that all people mutually seek.  Empathy transforms conflict into relationship, and from that position, we all get something we need and desire.

— Laura Killingbeck, Empathy is a Survival Skill, 2024

And I’ve learned without any shred of doubt that what people everywhere truly want is connection and mutual safety. Beneath the layers of culture, individuality, upbringing, conflict, and circumstance, it’s the basic foundation of human nature. In the darkest moments of my life, when I’ve had to face the truth of people’s scariest behaviors, this is what I’ve found.

— Laura Killingbeck, Empathy is a Survival Skill, 2024

I’ve been greatly influenced by Cory Doctorow and his memex method. In my inbox, I keep a “today.gmi” file in which I write small reflections and links to interesting articles. When the file is bigger than 1000 words, I try to give it a direction, I reorder the nuggets and publish it without thinking too much about it.

— Lionel ‘Ploum’ Dricot, P&B: Ploum, People & Blogs, 2024

Unlike life partners — what we consider to be soul-mate relationships or “the one” — twin flame relationships are intense and challenging relationships that force us to deal with our unresolved issues and, through trials, tribulations, and breakthroughs, become a bigger person. Because of this intensity, it’s uncommon for twin flames to be a lifelong partnership. Rather, they are people who enter your life for a period of time to help you grow and steer you on course. “It is common for those relationships to separate because they are very difficult to maintain.”

— Sophie Saint Thomas, What Is a Twin Flame, and How Is It Different From a Soul Mate?, allure, 2022 (via)

The collective People Who Stutter Create (PWSC) contends that stuttering (also called stammering) can create room for deep listening and collaboration. Through repeated sounds, prolonged sounds, and blocks with no sound, the group aims to describe social reality while also being able to change it through the act of description. For its first project, PWSC mobilizes the Whitney’s exhibition billboard as a place to publicly celebrate the transformational space of dysfluency, a term that can encompass stuttering/stammering and other communication differences such as aphasia, Tourette’s, and dysarthria.

— People Who Stutter Create: Stuttering Can Create Time, Whitney Museum of Art (via)

We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe…

— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Rant About “Technology”, 2005 (via)

In the world colonized by Arbus, subjects are always revealing themselves. There is no decisive moment. Arbus’s view that self-revelation is a continuous, evenly distributed process is another way of maintaining the Whitmanesque imperative: treat all moments as of equal consequence. Like Brassaï, Arbus wanted her subjects to be as fully conscious as possible, aware of the act in which they were participating. Instead of trying to coax her subjects into a natural or typical position, they are encouraged to be awkward—that is, to pose. (Thereby, the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd, askew.) Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images of themselves.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The authority of Arbus’s photographs derives from the contrast between their lacerating subject matter and their calm, matter-of-fact attentiveness. This quality of attention—the attention paid by the photographer, the attention paid by the subject to the act of being photographed —creates the moral theater of Arbus’s straight-on, contemplative portraits.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

two people form a couple; and every couple is an odd couple

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977, Ch. In Plato’s Cave

Buñuel, when asked once why he made movies, said that it was “to show that this is not the best of all possible worlds.” Arbus took photographs to show something simpler—that there is another world.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Steichen’s choice of photographs assumes a human condition or a human nature shared by everybody. By purporting to show that individuals are born, work, laugh, and die everywhere in the same way, “The Family of Man” denies the determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts. Arbus’s photographs undercut politics just as decisively, by suggesting a world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships. The pious uplift of Steichen’s photograph anthology and the cool dejection of the Arbus retrospective both render history and politics irrelevant. One does so by universalizing the human condition, into joy; the other by atomizing it, into horror.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Whitman preached empathy, concord in discord, oneness in diversity. Psychic intercourse with everything, everybody —plus sensual union (when he could get it)—is the giddy trip that is proposed explicitly, over and over and over, in the prefaces and the poems. This longing to proposition the whole world also dictated his poetry’s form and tone. Whitman’s poems are a psychic technology for chanting the reader into a new state of being (a microcosm of the “new order” envisaged for the polity); they are functional, like mantras—ways of transmitting charges of energy. The repetition, the bombastic cadence, the run-on lines, and the pushy diction are a rush of secular afflatus, meant to get readers psychically airborne, to boost them up to that height where they can identify with the past and with the community of American desire. But this message of identification with other Americans is foreign to our temperament now.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

[Stieglitz as one] of the great affirmers of life. There is no matter in all the world so homely, trite, and humble that through it this man of the black box and chemical bath cannot express himself entire.

— Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York, 1924

If the choice doesn’t effect your path, like Coke or Pepsi, then it’s not interesting; and if one choice is obviously stupid, like keep your car on the road or run it off, then it’s not interesting. But deprive people of interesting choices for too long, and they start making the obviously stupid choice just to feel alive. Another way to say it: we would rather do the wrong thing that we choose ourselves, than the right thing that is chosen for us. I think this explains a lot of behavior that otherwise doesn’t make any sense, and it’s why even the most benevolent central control can never make a good society.

— Ran Prieur

the world is ruled by the stories the elite have to tell themselves to feel like they’re the good guys. These stories include: that global-scale decisions must be made from the top (or center); that political stability is more valuable than political participation; and that anything you can call “economic development” is good.

— Ran Prieur

By all appearances, Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower”… This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good.

— Julian Assange, Google Is Not What It Seems, Wikileaks (via)

When I was young, there was a fish vendor who would come by on his bicycle every morning with the fresh catch of the day. The fish were iced in a basket strapped onto a carrier at the back of the bike. Later on, he exchanged his bicycle for a motorbike, while still retaining the air horn that signaled his arrival every day. A few years later, news spread that the ice used to preserve fish at the dock was high in ammonia. Everyone slowly ditched the fish vendor and started buying fish from the supermarket. Supermarkets were new to us then, and no one knew where the fish came from, so that erased everyone’s worries about ammonia-poisoned fish.

— Sachin Benny, Pax Sardinia, Summer Lightning, 2024

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

— H.P. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu, 1926 (via)

The canneries themselves fought the war by getting the limit taken off fish and catching them all. It was done for patriotic reasons.

— John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday, 1954, Viking Press, Ch. 1, p. 1 (via)

I do not doubt but the majesty & beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world … I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed …

— Walt Whitman, Assurances, Whispers Of Heavenly Death, 1891

each precise object or condition or combination or process exhibits a beauty

— Walt Whitman, Preface, Leaves of Grass, 1855

As Walt Whitman gazed down the democratic vistas of culture, he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness, importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbish to make any discriminations of value, except the most generous ones. Great claims were made for candor by our boldest, most delirious prophet of cultural revolution. Nobody would fret about beauty and ugliness, he implied, who was accepting a sufficiently large embrace of the real, of the inclusiveness and vitality of actual American experience.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarmé, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

†

In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery. Any photograph has multiple meanings; indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit —what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. Photographs like the one that made the front page of most newspapers in the world in 1972—a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming with pain—probably did more to increase the public revulsion against the war than a hundred hours of televised barbarities.One would like to imagine that the American public would not have been so unanimous in its acquiescence to the Korean War if it had been confronted with photographic evidence of the devastation of Korea, an ecocide and genocide in some respects even more thorough than those inflicted on Vietnam a decade later. But the supposition is trivial. The public did not see such photographs because there was, ideologically, no space for them. No one brought back photographs of daily life in Pyongyang, to show that the enemy had a human face, as Felix Greene and Marc Riboud brought back photographs of Hanoi. Americans did have access to photographs of the suffering of the Vietnamese (many of which came from military sources and were taken with quite a different use in mind) because journalists felt backed in their efforts to obtain those photographs, the event having been defined by a significant number of people as a savage colonialist war. The Korean War was understood differently—as part of the just struggle of the Free World against the Soviet Union and China—and, given that characterization, photographs of the cruelty of unlimited American firepower would have been irrelevant.Though an event has come to mean, precisely, something worth photographing, it is still ideology (in the broadest sense) that determines what constitutes an event. There can be no evidence, photographic or otherwise, of an event until the event itself has been named and characterized. And it is never photographic evidence which can construct—more properly, identify—events; the contribution of photography always follows the naming of the event. What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one—and can help build a nascent one.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

— Gustave Flaubert, written to Gertrude Tennant, 1876

Some people do it by the book but I prefer to go by feel.

— Red Hot Chili Peppers, C’mon Girl, Stadium Arcadium, 2006

its reading is an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one has forgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end.

— H. L. Mencken’s, A Book of Prefaces, 1917 (via)

I have intentionally caricatured the worse-is-better philosophy to convince you that it is obviously a bad philosophy and that the New Jersey approach is a bad approach.

However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.

— Richard P. Gabriel, The Rise of Worse is Better, 1991

No one, but no one, in this city, no matter where they live or how they live, is free from the fairness of our administration. We’ll find you and be fair to you wherever you are!

— Harold Washington (via)

One of the downsides of the disposable camera is that it’s fun, which is in strict contrast to real professional photography which must always be stressful, or else you go to photography jail.

— Casually Explained, Photography, 2023 (via)

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it I felt very perverse.

— Diane Arbus

While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.

Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977, Ch. In Plato’s Cave

A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights—to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself—so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977, Ch. In Plato’s Cave

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977, Ch. In Plato’s Cave

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic—Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977, Ch. In Plato’s Cave

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977, Ch. In Plato’s Cave

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977, Ch. In Plato’s Cave

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977, Ch. In Plato’s Cave

The victorious man in the day of crisis is the man who has the serenity to accept what he cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered.

— Reinhold Niebuhr, 1932

Persist too long in making choices without justifying them, and an entire creative effort might wander aimlessly. The results might be the sum of wishy-washy half decisions. [..] Developing the judgment to avoid this pitfall centers on the refined-like response, evaluating in an active way and finding the self-confidence to form opinions with your gut you can also justify with your head. It’s not always easy to come to grips with objects or ideas and think about them until it’s possible to express why you like them or not, yet taking part in a healthy and productive creative process requires such reflective engagement.

— Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, 2018 (via)

It’s often hard to find “misfits” when I’m thinking about general forms. My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.

— Andy Matuschak, In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023, 2024 (via)

The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction.

— Paul Ford, Why So Bad, AI Ads?, aboard, 2024

For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

— Oscar Wilde, Intentions, 1891

the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belong statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called “deep truths,” are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth.

— Niels Bohr, Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics, 1949

The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the solution first. It’s operating on vibes and intuition. It’s making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s a feeling that we nailed it.

It’s knowing how to bend the process in your favor. It’s the sense to know how to keep making your work better. And it’s a clear, unwavering ideal of what good looks like.

It’s messy and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

— Jenny Wen, Don’t trust the (design) process, The faintest idea, 2024

The lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use, in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”

— Thomas Jefferson, From Thomas Jefferson to Ebenezer Hazard, 1791 (via)

The orders are arriving non-stop. My left hand grabs tickets, separates white ones for the grill man, yellow ones for the sauté man, and pink master copies, which I use to time and generally oversee the production. My right hand wipes plates, inserts rosemary sprigs into mashed potatoes. I’m yelling full time, trying to hold it all together. If there is an unforeseeable mishap—say, one of the big tables’ orders was prematurely sent out, only to be returned—the whole process could come to a full stop. “Where’s that fucking confit?” I yell at Angel, who’s struggling to make blinis for smoked salmon, to brown ravioli under the salamander, to lay out plates of pâté, and to do five endive salads, all more or less at once. A hot escargot explodes in front of me, spattering me with boiling garlic butter and snail guts.

— Anthony Bourdain, One Day—and One Night—in the Kitchen at Les Halles, The New Yorker (via)

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.

— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 1902 (via)

The gift must be given back, sooner or later, willingly or unwillingly, and sadly it seems that I will be made to give it back before my time. I have learned much, experienced much, made many mistakes, enjoyed my triumphs, suffered my defeats, and, most vitally, experienced love. So many people live who never get that last one, and I have been lucky enough to.

— Jake Seliger, How do you say goodbye?

Non-action is already something. There are people who don’t seem to do very much, but their presence is crucial for the well-being of the world. You may know people like this, who are steady, not always busy doing things, not making a lot of money, or being engaged in a lot of projects, but who are very important to you; the quality of their presence makes them truly available. They are contributing non-action, the high quality of their presence. To be in the here and the now—solid and fully alive—is a very positive contribution to our collective situation.

— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Sit, 2014 (via)

Looks like our writing on the wall
Is lorem ipsum after all

— Dessa, Sound the Bells ♫, Parts of Speech, 2013

The man of talent is like a marksman who hits a mark others cannot hit; the man of genius is like a marksman who hits a mark they cannot even see.

— Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 1886 (via)

[mastery] to the point where working forwards from the possibilities of a set of parts, and backwards from the constraints of a vision, are part of a near-unconscious fluency in the medium.

— Venkatesh Rao, Imagination vs Creativity

Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage. The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and the antarctic in the pit. A myriad computers are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends only to one equation or part of an equation. The work of each region is coordinated by an official of higher rank. Numerous little “night signs” display the instantaneous values so that neighbouring computers can read them. Each number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communication to the North and South on the map. From the floor of the pit a tall pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theatre ; he is surrounded by several assistants and messengers. One of his duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe. In this respect he is like the conductor of an orchestra in which the instruments are slide-rules and calculating machines. But instead of waving a baton he turns a beam of rosy light upon any region that is running ahead of the rest, and a beam of blue light upon those who are behindhand.

Four senior clerks in the central pulpit are collecting the future weather as fast as it is being computed, and despatching it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room. There it will be coded and telephoned to the radio transmitting station.

Messengers carry piles of used computing forms down to a storehouse in the cellar.

In a neighbouring building there is a research department, where they invent improvements.

— Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather prediction by numerical process, 1922 (via)

The morality of this means that we have the possibility of progress. It’s not one life and you’re done, it’s like being a goldsmith. As a goldsmith crafts a beautiful statue, and if he doesn’t like it, can melt it back down again, and try to make something more perfect, so that’s what our lives are. They’re attempts, and they can get better.

— Karma, In Our Time (via)

Our software interfaces are fiercely rigid; they can’t be meaningfully nudged — in big ways or small — to more closely reflect our mental models or meet our individual needs. We can’t modify the interfaces which render our things, and we can’t bring things together to reflect our thinking. Each thing lives in its pre-determined box, can’t be taken elsewhere, and can only be seen in a handful of pre-determined ways.

— Alexander Obenauer, Noticing the problem with our operating systems, The Interfaces With Which We Think

The concepts in modern operating systems — apps, windows, desktops, notifications, and so on — have so permeated our understanding of personal computing that it’s hard to imagine anything else, let alone believe there could be anything better.

It’s easy to assume that this is, somehow, simply, how computers work.

But this can’t be further from the truth.

Consider our concepts of time: the day and year are based on the earth’s rotation and orbit around the sun, yet the seven-day “week” and the twelve months are constructs of human imagination, which hopefully serve us well.

Similarly, in computing, binary is how our chips process logic. But the apps, windows, desktops, notifications, and such — these are all constructs of human imagination. This is true of nearly all the systems, metaphors, and interface patterns we’ve built on top of our binary-crunching chips.

Common as some of these concepts are, they are all manufactured attempts at making personal computing easier for people to contribute to and use.

But today, our abstractions are holding us back.

— Alexander Obenauer, The Interfaces With Which We Think

Writing online—where the barrier to people responding to you is very low—tends to make people slightly worse writers because you always have the voice of the most pedantic reader in your head, so you go with the unassailable generic over the specific, or you dilute the impact of a strong sentence by adding a bunch of disclaimers to head off commenters. Presumably the bigger your audience, the stronger the effect.

— McKinley Valentine, Heart-smitten with that desire of wandering and looking on new things, The Whippet, 2022 (via)

If I take too much, dragging it from place to place will be tiresome; on the other hand, if I take too little, I will forever be having to break my journey to pick up things along the way—and that will be even more tiresome.

— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, 1997, Ch. 3

The people of your culture are captives of a story….All of you know it by heart by the time you’re six or seven. You hear it incessantly. Every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly….Once you know this story, you’ll hear it everywhere, and you’ll be astonished that the people around you don’t hear it as well but merely take it in….Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way….Two different stories have been enacted here during the lifetime of man. One has been enacted from the very beginning of human life millions of years ago and is still being enacted here today, as successfully as ever by peoples that you (in your superior wisdom) deem to be primitive. The other story began to be enacted here some ten thousand years ago by the founders of your culture and is apparently about to end in catastrophe.

— Daniel Quinn, foreword to Ishmael, 2017

Francis, the best editor I was ever to know, was a great and severe teacher, and nothing passed his desk (to reach the desk of the editor in chief) that didn’t make sense. Making sense may sound like a rather low standard, but it was a very high one when applied by Francis. To give him an article in which one sentence fell short was to be loudly summoned to his desk in the middle of the room and given a sarcastic scolding that would leave any department head gnashing his teeth (not because Francis was wrong but because he was so damned right).

I learned perforce to demand sense of every word in every article handed me by one of the writers in my department or by one of the outside scholars who contributed articles. (Our article on relativity was written by Albert Einstein.) And without noticing it, I began to demand sense of everything I knew, which included the received wisdom of our culture.

— Daniel Quinn, foreword to Ishmael, 2017

When putting something into words you don’t have to settle for the first thing you try, there are always going to be dozens of others to try.

— Daniel Quinn, foreword to Ishmael, 2017

A complex world has made us over-emphasize How-based thinking and education. Once the tools are understood, grasping why to do certain things becomes more valuable than how to do them. How is recipes, but learning a craft is more than following instructions.

— Frank Chimero, Big Ideas

To delight means to present something with a different point of view, while retaining clarity. It makes others see the world in new and different ways.

— Frank Chimero, Big Ideas

To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.

— Eva Zeisel (via)

When you go into the desert, you meet your demons face to face. After coming out of the desert, all those demons become angels.

— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997

†

Your life is the manifestation of your dream. It is an art.

— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997

There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with god, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements, you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say this is what I am, this is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do.

— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997

True justice is paying only once for each mistake. True injustice is paying more than once for each mistake. How many times do we pay for one mistake? The answer is thousands of times. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake.

— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997

We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid of being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough. Eventually we become someone we are not. We become a copy.

— don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, 1997

If my mind is modest, I walk the great way. Arrogance is all I fear. The great way is low and plain, but people like shortcuts over the mountains.

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

†

The paradox is that the more individuals are liberated from the restraints imposed on them by others (e.g. relational bonds, communal duties, morals and norms) and by themselves (moral conscience and self-discipline), the more directionless and atomized they become; and the more atomized they become, the more vulnerable and reliant they are on the safety offered by some greater collective. Alone in his “independence,” the individual finds himself dependent on a larger power to protect his safety and the equality of his proliferating “rights” (desires) from the impositions of others, and today it is the state that answers this demand. Yet the more the state protects his right to consume and “be himself” without restraint, the less independently capable and differentiated he becomes, even as his private affairs increasingly become the business of the expanding state.

Subject to the impersonal regulations of mechanistic processes and procedures rather than his own judgement or that of the people in close communion with him, the individual is molded into a more and more uniform cog to fit into the machine: a mere passive “consumer” and easily manipulated and programmed puppet – an automaton – rather than a true individual actor. In the effort to maximize his autonomy, his real autonomy has been lost.

— N. S. Lyons, Autonomy and the Automaton, The Upheavel (via)

Obedience to law is the dry husk of loyalty and good faith. Opinion is the barren flower of the way, the beginning of ignorance.

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Knowing other people is intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom. Overcoming others takes strength, overcoming yourself takes greatness. Contentment is wealth. Boldly pushing forward takes resolution, staying put keeps you in position. To live til you die, is to live long enough.

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

The un-wanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever wanting soul sees only what it wants.

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast—a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world—the black plague is a housepet by comparison.

— Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation, 2008, Macmillan (via)

There is no consensus on the origin of the movement’s name; a common story is that the artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife randomly into a dictionary, where it landed on “dada”, a French term for a hobby horse. Others note it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate it might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement’s internationalism.

— Wikipedia, Dada

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

— Leonardo Da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, 1883

So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow — the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.

— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977 (via)

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below but what is below does not know what is above.

— René Daumal, Mount Analogue, 1952 (via)

I felt in perfect control and knew the thrill of seeing the ropes from my waist curl down through empty space. I was as light as the air around me, as if I were dancing on tip-toes, relaxed, measuring every movement and seeking a complete economy of effort. Speak with your eyes, speak with your hands, let it all flow from your heart. True communication, true communion, is silent.

— Pete Boardman, The Shining Mountain: Two Men on Changabang’s West Wall, 1976 (via)

As I sat daily in my room, and saw that range of snowy battlements uplifted against the sky […] I felt it should be the business of Englishmen, if of anybody, to reach the summi.

— Lord George Curzon, 1899 (via)

concrete building… is the most repellant object imaginable… it has no beauty of surface… no translucence… and it is an exceptionally ugly color.

— an unknown architect, 1920 (via)

The enlightenments metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life, it leads almost inevitably to an intolerable one

— Hubert L. Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining

The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990

Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war.

As an instance of [friction], take the weather. Here, the fog prevents the enemy from being discovered in time, a battery from firing at the right moment, a report from reaching the general; there, the rain prevents a battalion from arriving, another from reaching in right time, because, instead of three, it had to march perhaps eight hours; the cavalry from charging effectively because it is stuck fast in heavy ground.

— Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832 (via)

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

— Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999 (via)

I didn’t explore the idea strongly enough, or readers don’t want to take seriously the much more (quietly) radical ideas in McPherson’s book: that limits on our existential choices are part of how we make our peace with life, that Tyler Harper’s “therapeutic libertarianism” — or what Christopher Lasch, by way of Adorno, called the “cult of authenticity” — is the default mode of so much contemporary socio-political discussion, and an active agent that deforms one’s character. Taking limits seriously is an enormous challenge, one that I assumed would come across in the piece. But then, it’s easier to domesticate constraints to the ones we pick and choose, cafeteria-style, for some modest stylistic innovation.

— Sara Hendren, not that kind of constraint, 2024

No, not a soul, intimidating stillness. Uncannily, though, in the midst of all this, a fire is blazing, lit, in fact, with petrol. It’s flickering, a ghostly fire, wind. On the orange-colored plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing. Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.

— Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice, 1978

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952, p. 128

†

As young children, we listen to adults talking before we understand what they’re saying. And that’s, after all, where we start — we start in a position of not getting it. It’s true of listening to music, too. The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental — that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you, but you don’t know what it is. You’ll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you’ve been educated in a certain way, but I think you’ll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.

— Paul Holdengräber, Adam Phillips, The Art of Nonfiction No. 7 (via)

The Internet is going through a major upheaval. Mega-corporations are trying to box consumers into proprietary platforms. A frothy VC market chasing after the Next Big Thing is beginning to see major warning signs. Top operating systems vendors have gotten the smackdown for their monopolistic business practices, being forced to offer real choice for access to third-party browsers and other key software. A growing backlash against technology’s dominance threatens to stall the heady growth of the industry. The nerd set is fighting back against capitalist entrenchment, building new open infrastructure that respects user privacy and eliminates gatekeepers. A revolution is underway to make it even easier to publish on the web, push content and software features across networks, and find meaningful successful as an indie producer.

Wait, which decade am I describing here? The late 90s? Or now??

— Jared White, Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again, 2024

Usually there are several possible responses to a question, which means you’re traversing a tree. But essays are linear, not tree-shaped, which means you have to choose one branch to follow at each point. How do you choose? Usually you should follow whichever offers the greatest combination of generality and novelty. I don’t consciously rank branches this way; I just follow whichever seems most exciting; but generality and novelty are what make a branch exciting.

— Paul Graham, The Best Essay

If you come across a question that’s sufficiently puzzling, it could be worth exploring even if it doesn’t seem very momentous. […] you commit to a specific string of words in response, as you would if you were talking. This initial response is usually mistaken or incomplete. Writing converts your ideas from vague to bad. But that’s a step forward, because once you can see the brokenness, you can fix it.

— Paul Graham, The Best Essay

In my social circles, many people have read James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which is subtitled How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human World Have Failed. A key concept from the book is “legibility”, what a state can see, and how this distorts what states do. One could easily write a highly analogous book, Seeing like a Tech Company about what’s illegible to companies that scale up, at least as companies are run today. A simple example of this is that, in many video games, including ones made by game studios that are part of a $3T company, it’s easy to get someone suspended or banned by having a bunch of people report the account for bad behavior. What’s legible to the game company is the rate of reports and what’s not legible is the player’s actual behavior (it could be legible, but the company chooses not to have enough people or skilled enough people examine actual behavior); and many people have reported similar bannings with social media companies. When it comes to things like anti-fraud systems, what’s legible to the company tends to be fairly illegible to humans, even humans working on the anti-fraud systems themselves.

— Dan Luu, Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

Keeping a “writer’s notebook” in public imposes an unbeatable rigor, since you can’t slack off and leave notes so brief and cryptic that they neither lodge in your subconscious nor form a record clear enough to refer to in future. By contrast, keeping public notes produces both a subconscious, supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that rattle around, periodically cohering into nucleii that crystallize into full-blown ideas.

— Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic: Pluralistic is four; The Bezzle excerpt (Part III), 2024

February 25. Continuing on positive emotions, this subreddit post disagrees with my statement that nobody would consciously avoid feeling good. Clearly this subject is less straightforward than I thought, because it’s hard to separate “feeling good” from the stuff that you feel good about, from social displays of feeling good, and from the whole internal ecology of how you feel.

When I think about my personal perspective, it’s mainly about motivation: feeling good about doing things. That’s why, despite high grades and test scores, I didn’t get into an elite college, and never passed an interview for a salaried job, because everyone could tell I wasn’t really into it. I failed at homesteading because tasks that I valued in an abstract way turned out to feel like chores. I’m constantly trying to 1) find stuff that I feel like doing, or 2) hack my own perspective so that I feel like doing stuff, or if both of those fail, 3) force myself to do stuff, which is exhausting. So that’s the context from which I don’t understand why someone would avoid feeling good if they have the option.

And Noah comments:

Happiness is not a meaningful state without something to compare it to. If there was no suffering, we would have no word to describe happiness, it would simply be the natural state of things. It would be invisible to us I imagine, like the background space of our awareness.

That sounds wonderful! And it reminds me of the Christian idea, that the fall of man happened through knowledge of good and evil. This never occurred to me, but maybe the principle that you can’t have something without also having its opposite, is only true on a cognitive level.

— Ran Prieur, Feeling Good

She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading… She has been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That’s what a marriage is for. Now I know.

— Roger Ebert, Life Itself, 2011

Because it’s like, when you start rubbing against each other, in that sense, a feeling comes up like “I don’t like this. I’d rather go and hide away.” Staying with that is a powerful way of getting to know yourself and others, deepening conversations and relationships.

I think it’s so important to embrace conversations, particularly ones with people who make salient points with whom you don’t agree. That’s when you really learn stuff. “You think this and I think something different. Change my mind. Let me come into your perspective.” You don’t need to feel threatened by that. Because it’s not like you as a human being are weakening as your opinion is changing.

— Jacob Collier, On managing the complexity of virtual collaborations

I think the job of someone who’s in charge of the beginnings of the process, is to encourage an environment where it’s cool if something doesn’t work. Because a lot of that stuff is the friction that creates the spark that makes the idea happen. The myth that the frictionless environment is the most effective is just not true. It’s not true in your life, it’s not true in your workflow, and it’s not true in your music.

— Jacob Collier, On managing the complexity of virtual collaborations

it’s been important to form a routine because it lets me curate my habits. Since I was young, I would get incredibly interested in something and build a routine around it. Then once that routine breaks, it’s like I’ve forgotten it ever existed. Even if that routine went on for months, I struggle to get back to it. When a good one sticks, I want to protect that. There’s an inner conflict of breaking my routines. The safety of the known. I wonder if fear of the past failed routines makes me overvalue routines that are currently sticking. But then there’s a dullness of the known.

— Jamie Crisman, Getting Out, Getting Lost

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, 1989, Harper & Row

† †

A powerful way to improve the Web platform is to provide new primitives. A primitive is a capability that, on its own, likely doesn’t do much that interesting. But a good primitive will be designed to interact usefully with existing (and future) parts of the stack, and this will enable it to enrich the platform across the board.

— Robin Berjon, Web Tiles: Towards a local-first, trustworthy Web, 2023

the idea that lack of effort to maintain the talismans and protocols of representation would result in a void. Put more simply: You’re the keeper of yourself and of what matters. There is no consistency that will protect you.

— Jason Scott, Archiving in the Time of Streaming, TEXTFILES.COM, 2023

Every explorer I have met has been driven—not coincidentally but quintessentially—by curiosity, by a single-minded, insatiable, and even jubilant need to know.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World

Charismatic figures are obeyed because of the extraordinary abilities of an individual personality, by virtue of which they are set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with superhuman, supernatural, or exceptional powers or qualities that are not accessible to the ordinary person.

— Vaber

†

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.

— G.K. Chesterton, The New Jersusalem, 1920

Shellen in particular still rues losing the fight over the name. Even now, he bristles thinking about the fight and the fact that Google Reader is known as “an RSS reader” and not the ultra-versatile information machine it could have become. Names matter, and Reader told everyone that it was for reading when it could have been for so much more. “If Google made the iPod,” he says, “they would have called it the Google Hardware MP3 Player For Music, you know?”

— David Pierce, Who killed Google Reader?, 2023

In Japanese, the word for mountain pass is tōge. It’s written: 峠. It’s a great character, comprised of three other characters (or “radicals”). On the left is the character for mountain: 山. On the top right is the character for up: 上. And on the bottom right is the character for down: 下. So the character for pass — tōge — is mountain-up-down: 峠.

— Craig Mod & Dan Rubin, Koya Bound: Eight Days on the Kumano Kodo, 2016

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.

— Bessie A. Stanley, What Constitutes Success?, 1905

transclusion

In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by reference via hypertext. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normally automatic and transparent to the end user. The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places.

— Wikipedia, Transclusion

†

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, Essays: First Series, 1841

† †

When you look at something you’re working on, no matter what it is, you can’t help but see past the actual thing to the ideas that inspired it, your plans for extending it, the emotions you’ve tied to it. But when others look at it, all they see is a piece of junk.

You only get one chance to make a first impression; why have it be “junk”? Once that’s associated with your name or project, it’s tough to scrape off. Even people who didn’t see it themselves may have heard about it second-hand. And once they hear about it, they’re not likely to see for themselves. Life’s too short to waste it on junk.

— Aaron Swartz, Release Late, Release Rarely

The need of people to express power by writing about how much they could destroy has continued to present day. However, with more information than ever available to the serious researcher, files seem more and more professional than ever before. But make no mistake; the same caveats and warnings of previous generations are the same: don’t believe everything you read, and don’t try to blow things up based on what you read.

— Jason Scott, destruction

†

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Life… we understand it differently at different stages. It’s what is interesting about getting older, you realize your relationship with the past is always negotiable. There is a lot of freedom in that, because you realize you can go back to what you did such a long time ago. You can talk with the dead, talk with your lost self, your disappeared self, and you can visit those places again, and understand it differently. That makes a huge difference.

— Jeanette Winterson, Jeanette Winterson: It is the Imagination that Counts

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

— Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

— Lawrence Pearsall Jacks (via)

In fact, not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the argument that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible. And saying that, I am prompted to add what follows out of it: that since everything ends badly for us, in the inescapable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time; and that the second rule of life is to hurt as few people as possible in the course of doing so. There is no third rule.

— Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker, 1975

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

— god, apparently, Mattew 7:13–14, The New Testament

†

I want to share with you my simple two-step secret to improving the performance of any website.

  1. Make sure that the most important elements of the page download and render first.
  2. Stop there.

You don’t need all that other crap. Have courage in your minimalism.

— Maciej Cegłowski, The Website Obesity Crisis, 2015

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

— Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, The Atlantic, 1945 (via)

† †

I’ve never been a cropper. Having grown up photographing with film and spending years developing black and white photos in my university apartment in Philadelphia, cropping has always felt like a hack, a lie. Of course, all photos are lies, all photos are crops. The very definition of a photograph is to add edges to the world, slice off some snippet, place it in a tiny box. Or, as the late Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain put it, “The game [of photography] is to organize the rectangle.”

I realize now that a “perfect” rectangle — pulled back so you see the edges of the negative in the exposed print (to “prove” you haven’t cropped) — is a parlor trick more than anything.

— Craig Mod, The Leica Q: A six month field test, 2016

The story isn’t the art, nor its players, nor the paint, the technique, or the interpretation. The feelings are the art. The rest is just the way in.

— Adriana Trigiani, All the Stars in the Heavens, 2014, p. 4

Once ideas find an audience, they’re hard to eradicate. Many a surprised creator has found that they’ve lost control over an idea, watching helplessly as it’s shaped and reinterpreted in ways they didn’t intend. It is enormously difficult for a successful creator to escape their own idea, because ideas need hosts to survive.

— Nadia Eghbal, The tyranny of ideas, 2019

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Consider the obsessiveness with which creators birth new ideas into the world, which we’ve clinically termed “intrinsic motivation”, but don’t really seem to understand beyond that. We can observe that it is happening, but we don’t know what actually causes someone to drive themselves nearly to death just so they can give an idea a beating heart and a chance at survival in the world. “Because I had to” or “Because I couldn’t stop thinking about it” are symptoms, not causes.

— Nadia Eghbal, The tyranny of ideas, 2019

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I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.

— Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 1975 (via)

The essence of systems is relationships, interfaces, form, fit, and function. The essence of architecture is structuring, simplification, compromise, and balance.

— Eberhard Rechtin, The Art of Systems Architecting (Second Edition), 2000