Listen to the technology, Carver Mead says. What do the curves say? Imagine it is 1965. You’ve seen the curves Gordon Moore discovered. What if you believed the story they were trying to tell us: that each year, as sure as winter follows summer and as day follows night, computers would get half again better, and half again smaller, and half again cheaper, year after year, and that in 5 decades they would be 30 million times more powerful than they were then. (This is what happened.) If you were sure of that in 1965, or even mostly persuaded, what good fortune you could have harvested! You would have needed no other prophecies, no other predictions, no other details to optimize the coming benefits. As a society, if we just believed that single trajectory of Moore’s, and none other, we would have educated differently, invested differently, prepared more wisely to grasp the amazing powers it would sprout.
KEVIN KELLY (What Technology Wants)
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder— its DNA —Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane.
NEAL STEPHENSON (Snow Crash, 178)
The logical extension of business is murder.
DON DeLILLO (via character Kendra Hays, in Cosmopolis)
A culture is not just a by-product of economic proficiency.
PAOLO SOLERI (Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory)
Man’s will to profit and be powerful have their natural and proper effect so long as they are linked with, and upheld by, his will to enter into relation.
MARTIN BUBER (I and Thou, p. 48)
Controllers of word and music monopolized and froze the earth
WILLIAM BURROUGHS, The Ticket That Exploded (p. 176)
The main problem with searching for extraterrestrials is to recognize them. Time is so vast and evolutionary strategies and environments so varied that the trick is to know that contact is being made at all.
TERENCE McKENNA
I already know a thing or two. I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful, or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think.
MARGUERITE DURAS (The Lover, p. 18)
I’ve never met a person who I couldn’t call a beauty. Each person has beauty at some point in their lifetime.
ANDY WARHOL
I’ve been quoted a lot as saying ‘I like boring things.’ Well, I said it and I mean it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not bored by them.
ANDY WARHOL (as quoted in Chronophobia : on time in the art of the 1960’s)