Quotes

We see culture and selfhood as shaped by market forces, technology constraints, business decisions, and arbitrary software designs. No form of meaning stands apart from the technopoly and remains relevant; there is no evidence of meaning beyond those actions which can be turned into apps or pages and made to generate profit. In the democratic…

We blink into a sunset, search for our phone’s camera, and imagine how the photo will play on the screens where our avatar lives, screens belonging to other selves whom we know only as representations. Mills Baker, on leisure as “non-activity”

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill…

But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that…

Tracking nearly anything you do is alarming and humbling. The aggregates of our actions are lost on us: we can watch hundreds of hours of television and write it off as a small time commitment. How much is too much? It’s hard to make pretty charts without learning something and thinking about what they should…

I want to attain to a greater degree of proficiency all the time. My education is never completed, it’s wide open all the time. As long as you’re green, you continue to grow. But when you get to where you’re ripe with knowledge, then the next step is to become rotten. Napoleon Hill, In His…

However little the world needs the next lolcat, the message “You can play this game too” is a change from what we’re used to in the media landscape. The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. Once you accept the idea that we actually like making and sharing things, however dopey in content…

Our technology whizzes along at the velocity of a speeding electron, and our poor overtaxed neurons struggle to keep up. Everything has become a split-second decision. Find something you like. Share it. Have a half-baked thought. Tweet it. Don’t wait. Don’t hesitate. Seize the moment. Keep up. “A Short Lesson in Perspective” by Linds Redding…

I believe part of the recent surge in the desire to do ‘real’ stuff with our ‘hands’ is driven by the digital thinness we’re wrapped in. Conferences like Do Lectures, new shops selling pickles in Brooklyn, woodsy digital refuges. It feels like there’s a renewed momentum around craft and physicality. All circumstantial, of course, and…