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- It is hard to expel the idea that, if you’re not consuming, you’re not enjoying; after a certain point, the lie becomes true. In QuarLife, we’re like animals in a feedlot, fattening for future harvesting. We consume because that’s inevitably how we become valuable to the System.
- Disneyland New York City remains closed.
- Chaos organizes itself into an existentialism: we are at the top level of a pyramid which can’t see its own base...
- I’ve noticed that “obsession” has replaced “passion.” Instead of having real, life-long passions, vocations, we have a series of pseudo-avocations, recommended by this or not that celebrity or Internet movement.
- One way of looking at the history of philosophy is as a series of attempts at limiting the possibility that we may say anything — that anything can be argued for. Philosophy is an attempt to regulate rhetoric and to tamp down the chaos made possible by words themselves.
- We all want to believe that our beliefs have foundations; at the bottom of every belief is the will-to-believe.
- What Wagner’s operas were to the 19th century, ‘news’ is to the 21st century: an overwhelming flow of hypertrophied symbolism.
- When words lose their meaning (when we stop meaning anything we say), a dangerous vacuum opens. The social immune system becomes dangerously weak. Political parasites move in, attack, sink in.
- Bad ideas are popular precisely because they’re bad. Path-dependence locks in what…
