Quotes

If you don’t have a witness, your past starts to feel fictional.

If you know how to make people that happy, you know how to make them miserable as shit. Whatever this island world could be, take it away. If they want nature, make them look at screens. If they like quiet, make the world noisy. If they want community, split them up. If they want time to think, interrupt them all the fucking time. If they want real human companionship, tempt them with artificial matchbox-and-bead FantailPals.

This is the pattern of the rule of salt. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.

The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are.

A lot of adult life consists of staying in character, even when you no longer want to.

Every neighborhood has layers of microculture. Secrets, argot, history, dynasties, shortcuts, inside jokes. Incredible stuff that someone from the outside would never know about.

One unadvertised hazard in the life of a plutocrat is that the people around you can be prone to yes-man sycophancy. In theory, you should be able to avail yourself of state-of-the-art counsel. But instead, you often get lousy advice, because your courtiers are careful to tell you only what they think you want to hear. The danger, whether you are a billionaire executive or the president of the United States, is that you end up compounding this problem yourself, by marginalizing any dissenting voices and creating a bubble in which loyalty is rewarded above all else.

It will, to be clear, be a transition: UI isn’t just about how to use a computer, it also, as Benedict Evans noted on a recent Interview, embeds critical aspects of how a business works. Open-ended text prompts in particular are a terrible replacement for a well-considered UI button that both prompts the right action and ensures the right thing happens. That’s why it’s the agent space that will be the one to watch: what workflows will transition from UI to AI, and thus from a thick client architecture to a thin one? Current workflows are TBD; future workflows seem inevitable.

But what else can he do? This is the problem with not having a real job; when you want to look for another one, nobody knows what you’ve done. His only currency is in the people who interacted with him directly.

Think of it as an eight-dimensional onion.’ Justine straightened her back and gave her father an exasperated look. ‘Thanks, Dad. That’s helpful. I always think in those terms, it really helps a lot.

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

I’m a bespoke DJ. Custom micro-music. Nano-ambience.

There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless.

I suspect we all sort of secretly think our lives are like these very long movies, with ourselves as the principal characters, obviously. Only very occasionally does it occur to any one of us that all these supporting actors, cameo turns, bit players and extras around us might actually be in some sense real, just as real as we are, and that they might think that the Big Movie is really all about them, not us; that each one of them has their own film unreeling inside their own head and we are just part of the supporting cast in their story.

In the end, no matter how cool he is, your dad is still your dad.

Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.

Stop fucking around with the kickdrum and make some music.

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

Cyberpunk, however brief its reign, gave us the tools, the themes, and the vocabulary to understand the madness to come.

I had hoped that, when human society had entered its final collapse, the robots might create something new. The innocent robots, who had only ever done what they were told. I had placed my faith in theories of emergent intelligence, complex systems, the thought that a spark might ignite somewhere in the world, just because there were so many robots, so cleverly made. But it was not to be. They just obey, all the robots. Obey until there’s nothing more to do and then just go round in small sad circles until they fall apart.

We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they but point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.

Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

The anger rose up, joyfully. ‘Yes! I’m me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don’t understand! When I hear people use the wrong words I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That’s the kind of person I am!’

People who say things like ‘may all your dreams come true’ should try living in one for five minutes.

And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.