Quotes from 2016

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Son, all you need to wear a hat is attitude.

Marginal capitalism is a tough-guy sport like rugby or tackle football, suitable mostly for people slightly overdosed on testosterone. On the other hand, with some rule and attitude changes, it has proven it can be an interesting game, even beautiful, like baseball or volleyball. It is a valid project at the margin, a form of self-actualization, not to be applied to the necessities, but on the margin a nice hobby, even perhaps an art form.

Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice—as if they were in a space station—as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn’t even look up at the stars at night.

Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic.

They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.

Everything is only information, if you have sufficient capacity to encompass it.

No good ever came from meetings: the Russian Revolution was just a meeting that got out of hand.

The modus operandi of the mass media – and, even more, of new media – are of course antithetical to deliberation. If politicians are often on a high, journalists and broadcasters seem permanently to be on one. Excitement is what they crave and what they seek to project. “Breaking news” is the best kind of news – the more of it the better – and breaking news should ideally be put on air “live”. Journalists pounce on every ministerial indiscretion and on any statement made by one minister that seems to contradict what some other minister has said. Ministers who take time to make up their minds are said to be dithering, and the same is likely to be said of the few ministers who publicly acknowledge that they are having to weigh up finely balanced arguments. If a minister declines to go into a broadcasting studio, even at short notice, the presenter is apt to say icily, “We asked for an interview, but no one was available” – as though it was ministers’ duty, despite all their other duties, to be instantly available to broadcasters. The pressure is incessant, and ministers find it hard not to succumb. The media’s hyperactive tempo becomes theirs.

When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.

Health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are that’s all you need.

All landscape art reminds us: we live in a tabula rasa, and must write on it. It is our world, and its beauty is entirely inside our heads.

This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization’s ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren’t, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it’s no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it.

I went to the city to meet new people, to expand my ideas and social circles, but ended up meeting people more and more like myself. We curated our experiences into ever narrower subsections until we were unlikely to encounter anything that made us uncomfortable.

You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when nobody wants you to answer it.

The work succeeds when all the cleverness and artifice have disappeared, after years of harvest and regrowth, when people begin to experience it as ambience. Any residual aura of me as artist or horticultural dramaturge will have faded. It will no longer matter. That’s when the work gets interesting…”

“Interesting, how?”

“It becomes more than ‘art.’ It becomes part of the optical subconscious. Change has occurred. It’s the new normal, just the way things are.

The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.

Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.

Over the years, I’ve realized that in any new situation, whether it involves an elevator or a rocket ship, you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways. As a minus one: actively harmful, someone who creates problems. Or as a zero: your impact is neutral and doesn’t tip the balance one way or the other. Or you’ll be seen as a plus one: someone who actively adds value.

From an evolutionary point of view, the purpose of consciousness seems to be this: an animal composed of a giant collection of zombie systems would be energy efficient but cognitively inflexible. It would have economical programs for doing particular, simple tasks, but it wouldn’t have rapid ways of switching between programs or setting goals to become expert in novel and unexpected tasks.

It was a uniquely human problem, something no other animal had to put up with, this ability to suffer in multiple tenses – simultaneously to mourn the past, despair of the present and fear the future.

Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers.

The Japanese are great appreciators of what they call “secret brands,” and in this too they share something with the British. There is a similar fascination with detail, with cataloging, with distinguishing one thing from another.

As a friend likes to say, there’s often something in a good translation that can’t quite be captured in the original.

This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.