January 2012
12 posts
“We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”
— William Gibson, offering an accidentally perfect definition of what media and our relationship to it.
“I would like to see photography make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.”
—Marcel Duchamp
“My wife suggested, on the phone from America, that pinball appeals to me because the entire machine, the massive unmoveable megascopic thing, was constructed entirely for the purpose of playing just this one game, pinball, in contrast with the video games that you might, on a whim, download onto your cellphone, play for a while, and then abandon. She said that playing pinball on a machine made precisely for pinball is like having a wife, rather than a mistress. I’m not sure I understood this on all the levels on which my wife intended it, but intuitively I think I agree.”
— Justin E. H. Smith in n+1
“Treat your network well. It is not a renewable energy source. As Whitney Johnson elucidated, a network needs to be cultivated and nurtured. You are a steward of your network — use it for yourself but more so for the benefit of others. The more you share your network, the more it grows and increases in value and meaning to everyone.”
— Deborah Mills-Scofield in HBS Review
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“The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing, an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world.”
— G.K. Chesterton
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“
They were swayed by a myth - a myth of progress in which humanity is converging on a universal set of institutions and values. The process might be slow and faltering and at times go into reverse, but eventually the whole of humankind would live under the same enlightened system of government.
When you’re inside a myth it looks like fact, and for those who were inside the myth of the end of history it seems to have given a kind of peace of mind. Actually history was on the move again. But since it was clearly moving into difficult territory, it was more comfortable to believe that the past no longer mattered.
” —John Gray in this BBC piece
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