“We don’t understand what we’re doing, what we’re writing about, our own creation has surpassed the methods of reductionism we used to create it.”
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“The sum of human knowledge is your latent, unthought thoughts, the words of all the other humans your memories to never be remembered.”
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“You are a node, like a forgotten memory to everyone else, just as they are to you.”
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“And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world “better.” This is a dangerous word. Like: “If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?” Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical. Because when you say a thing like that at South By: “Oh, we’re here to make the world better” — you haven’t even reached the level of hypocrisy. You’re stuck at the level of childish naivete.”
— Text of SXSW2013 closing remarks by Bruce Sterling | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com
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Waiting for a lake that will never come Cool Dam
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“If Borges, say, is their poet laureate, then we might say that these—lost bolts, grids, and baselines—are the sites and relics of other Earths that nearly were, derelict props from a Borgesian folklore now geodetically coextensive with the planet.”
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“Fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them”
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Characters in Mad Men seem to only exist within the script.
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“The writing in Mad Men is, indeed, very much like the writing you find in ads—too many scenes feel like they have captions.”
— The Mad Men Account by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books
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“That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and concepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them; as with many fads that take the form of infatuations with certain moments in the past, the Mad Men craze tells us far more about today than it does about yesterday. But just what in the world of the show do we want to possess? The clothes and furniture? The wicked behavior? The unpunished crassness? To my mind, it’s something else entirely, something unexpected and, in a way, almost touching.”
— The Mad Men Account by Daniel Mendelsohn | The New York Review of Books
