- Why do we anthropomorphize the behavior of machines? Of animate objects in general? Why do we still instinctively use language to imply that we are caught up in a struggle with a living cosmos? — when rationally, we believe the universe is quite dead. We are both scientists and myth-makers, though we don’t know it. When an app crashes, we are prone to think that it has done something to us, when of course, it just merely crashed.
- Notice how self-care regimes never include reading or deep thinking or philosophical inquiry. They are always about relaxing, letting go, emptying out. Getting fitter, happier, more productive. Self-care is really athletic care: its about getting our bodies back into the competitive market place.
- We need a new psychoanalysis that takes into account the changes the mind has undergone in the wake of first the internet, and more importantly, the smartphone. An entirely new strain of neurosis has been produced by technology — and yet we still essentially use the same old therapeutic models. Is there a way to combine Freud’s classical insights with research into the habit forming power of smartphones? I think so.
- What poems, dreams, and the internet have in common is their symbolic content.
- Wouldn’t it be simpler to say that everyone is queer — so we can stop making a big deal about it? Doesn’t it seem like our obsession with identity is actually incredibly repressive? As if we think we could talk away, or rebrand away, the deep, intractable question of what it means to be alive? There is something neurotic about desperately trying to assert which category of being we belong to —
- So what if love of beauty is representative of a sublimated desire? Isn’t that the point?
- The most difficult thing for a writer to do, now, is write. The second a writer feels pressure to become a content creator, they are lost. You cannot seek truth if you also seek attention.
