Quotes

It is the nature of the idea to be communicated, written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass it craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows stronger from being stepped on.

Something we don’t usually notice—but which becomes apparent if we zoom out as far as possible—is that Google Maps is giving us the world in an aggressively distorted form. Google tweaks our perception by using a version of the classic projection called Web Mercator, which is identical to its forebear save for one crucial difference. GPS receivers translate GPS data into latitude and longitude points using, as reference, an irregularly shaped model of the world called an ellipsoid, which closely approximates the actual shape of the earth. Web Mercator considers the earth to be a perfect sphere. Google Maps receives latitude and longitude computed using one model of the planet, and then does its own computation to project it onto a visual interface that uses a different model.

The one advantage we had, which is a thing I brought to the enterprise, was the understanding that the plan was not the goal. The goal was the goal, and we were going to get to it however we could. And if it meant changing our plans, sometimes in the middle of executing them, then we would.

Computers were the bones, but imagination, ambition and possibility were the blood. These kids, they simply did not accept that the world as it is has any special gravity, any hold upon us. If something was wrong, if it was bad, then that something was to be fixed, not endured. Where my generation reached for philosophy and the virtue of suffering, they reached instead for science and technology and they actually did something about the beggar in the street, the woman in the wheelchair. They got on with it. It wasn’t that they had no sense of spirit or depth. Rather they reserved it for the truly wondrous, and for everything else they made tools.

The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected.

Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.

But Morgenes told me any gift that cannot be thrown away is not a gift but a trap.

There are plans that come off the rails as soon as they start moving, and plans that get you frightened because they seem to be going too well, too smoothly, picking up a scary speed…

The world, made complex by technology, was becoming simple again, its technology hidden deeply behind the face of reality.

I prefer reason and agreement. Allies are much more useful than bodies.

He had been running, he recalled. Running as one does sometimes but only in dreams – in long, floating steps that reach for leagues and seem barely to touch down.

Our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it. Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

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.