Quotes

The system offered a simulation of access, rather than the real thing. Tyler said this with a note of disappointment, even betrayal, but it sounded to me like standard user interface. Despite their excitement, they were in exactly the same position I was: they didn’t understand the core systems at all.

There is a baseline arrogance to all of us in the programme. Arrogance and impatience and, whatever else we might say, fear of a certain kind of complexity. That is why we take seriously the notion of transcending the world. Why understand something, when you can jump over it? Why put in the effort?

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

They’re blind to a simple truth: complex minds can’t develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any others. And minds don’t grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.

All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online ‘attention economy’, of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.

Some deep thinkers, following in the footsteps of Turing and Dennett, argued that any AI you could have an open-ended conversation with and whose responses on any topic remained indistinguishable from a human interlocutor was as conscious as you were. This raised troubling questions about the likes of Smart-Alec and Iskander. The software engineers who had built the robots insisted this wasn’t the case. The underlying processes were completely different, and consciousness was (it had turned out) superfluous to intelligent conversation. This raised troubling questions about humans.

The technologies we use to try to ‘get on top of everything’ always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the ‘everything’ of which we’re trying to get on top.

If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.

The only products advertised to young people like the ones I met in Leicester are UPF. This is for a simple reason: UPF is proprietary, so its manufacturers can generate a lot of money. People will pay a lot for a KitKat relative to its cost of production. No one else can really make KitKats, because Nestlé owns the recipe and the trademark and everything that creates the KitKat’s unique barcode that keeps bringing us back.

As the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much? I don’t know why, but it’s true.

Among the hallmarks of a charismatic brand are a clear competitive stance, a sense of rectitude, and a dedication to aesthetics. Why aesthetics? Because it’s the language of feeling, and, in a society that’s information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.

Today there’s still a need for identity manuals and the visual consistency they bring. But consistency alone does not create a brand.

When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand. In other words, a brand is not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.

He did not understand—none of these people did—that this is stochastic land on the edge of a stochastic reservoir. They didn’t understand it because those are statistical concepts. People can’t think statistically. People are hardwired to think in terms of narratives.

Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.

Everybody always thought they were right, and shared, too, the quaint belief that the very fervency of a belief, however deluded, somehow made it true.

Life was indeed a continuous lesson in finding ways to be less troubled by certain things, so that we might make room for new concerns, which arrived with the promptness and regularity of mail coaches.

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. With luck.

The Dutch are posthuman already.

That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

Monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors.

The Zurich plan, the Mondragón system, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, communism, the Public Trust plan, the What’s Good Is What’s Good for the Land plan, the various post-capitalisms, and so on and so forth; there are lots of versions of a Plan B, but they all share basic features. It’s not rocket science. The necessities are not for sale and not for profit.