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- We should institute the concept of empty mental calories. How many minutes a day do we utterly waste our brain power on the cognitive equivalent of a fast food? Just like (anti-) food industry profits from the destructive of our bodies the (anti-) information industry profits from the destruction of our minds. This seems fairly uncontroversial; painfully obvious — so why is there no real collective opposition to what’s happening to us? What’s being done to us?
- The incredibly fast, relentless inputting of information generates an existential question: do we really want to waste our lives on this shit?
- An imperative too: we shouldn’t waste our lives on this shit.
- Why do teenagers and college students all go through a phase when music becomes the most important thing? Because in American life, music promises — in most cases, falsely — that we might transcend the suburbanized banality of consumerist life. The rush of our first concert is the rush of the romantic thought that there might be something else. We might get out. The thing is — we don’t; we don’t get out. We begin to realize that concert tickets are expensive; that most pop-music (including pop-indie) is just as suburban as anything else.
- I thank God I was brought up before phones — so I new a few years of uninterrupted reading.
- Academic humanists are like so many Neros fiddling while The Human burns.