#society (81 quotes)
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.
— , The Ministry for the Future The narcissism of small differences. That’s an odd name. It’s Freud’s name. Means more regard for yourself than for your allies or the problems you both face.
— , The Ministry for the Future Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
— , New York 2140 Quoting Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.
No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.
— , The Peripheral Nobody truly decided for themselves. There was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics.
— , Flight Behaviour Technologies are not value-free. If you choose a technology, you are implicitly accepting the political imperatives that provide the context the technology operates within. If you want railroads, you must accept coal and steel industries, compulsory seizure of land for rights-of-way, standard railway time, and central stations.
— , Dark State Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.
— , Feel Free I prefer reason and agreement. Allies are much more useful than bodies.
— , The Golem and the Djinni 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.
— , 2312 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.
— , Children of Time 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.
— , The Blunders of Our Governments 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.
— , The Annihilation Score 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.
— , The Outrun 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.
— , Distrust that Particular Flavor England in its most potent era, the nineteenth century, was driven by a civic provincialism far from the metropolis. People are likely to lose faith in self-government when those exercising it on their behalf grow distant and unfamiliar. This is already noticeable in declining confidence in public services and a turning to private ones, for health, education and security. Few people in England can identify or name a leader of their local community. This anonymity is depoliticising communities and entrenching social divisions in a peculiarly domestic class system.
— , A Short History of England It is the paradox of a free and tolerant society that in order for it to work, intolerance cannot be tolerated.
— , The Martians Judgments like ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ and ‘smiles’ and ‘frowns’ were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?’ and you’d say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!’ That kind of thing. But now it’s not just junior high kids who do it, it’s everyone…
— , The Circle The difference between right-wing people and left-wing people. You said it all came down to imagination. Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them. They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever. Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are. It’s all to do with imagination; empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning. Hard-headed people – business people – didn’t have that sort of imagination; it’s all directed at seeing business opportunities, identifying gaps in the market, spotting weaknesses in rivals.
— , The Steep Approach to Garbadale Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.
— , Spook Country There were cameras literally everywhere, in London. So far, he’d managed not to think about them. He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of autoimmune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ’roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes, eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected.
— , Zero History Power is best when it's distributed most broadly. That's what democracy means. That's what freedom means. The right to determine your individual destiny belongs in your hands, and no one else's.
— , Nexus The idea that a private sector obliged to provide yearly dividends to shareholders and yearly bonuses to employees would be likely to provide infrastructural improvements that would be of benefit to future generations was always absurd. Infrastructural investment, almost by definition, is undertaken to provide profit for others, who can prosper from it, and pay taxes for their prosperity, taxes that can be reinvested in providing healthy, well-educated citizens who can in turn maintain, improve and exploit that infrastructure.
— , These storms could be a catalyst for just the kind of major works Britain needs | The Guardian As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier.
— , The secrets of the world’s happiest cities The security state isn’t a person, it’s people. There’s so many of them and they’ve been given leave to take so many liberties that they’ve managed to become the environment. Like a demented terraforming project, they’re sucking down our communications and we’re breathing their air. This is an ecological disaster and it demands an ecological response. We shouldn’t be protecting ourselves. We should be protecting each other.
— , NSA-Proof Your Email! Consider your Man Card Re-Issued. Never be Afraid Again. Fleming saw the House of Rumour as the image of an intelligence service; we can know it now as an ancient vision of the internet. The haunt of credulity, rash error, empty joy and unreasoning fear. The world whispers stories to itself. This is what conspire means: to breathe with.
— , The House of Rumour