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He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.
“Identity” had been forever changed by the Internet; formerly it had meant “who you really are” but now it meant “any one of a number of persistent faces that you can present to the digital universe.”
― Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
― Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
―
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
―
“What’s the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”
― Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
― Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
“The most important thing in life is style. That is the style of one s existence the characteristic mode of one s actions is basically ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing then style is doubly definitive because style describes the doing. The point is this happiness is a learned condition. And since it is learned and self generating it does not depend upon external circumstances for its perpetuation. This throws a very ironic light on content. And underscores the primacy of style. It is content or rather the consciousness of content that fills the void. But the mere presence of content is not enough. It is style that gives content the capacity to absorb us to move us it is style that makes us care.”
― Another Roadside Attraction
― Another Roadside Attraction
“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”
― Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
― Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
April’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at April’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
525 books
|
56 friends
8 books
|
25 friends
37 books
|
88 friends
1 book
|
43 friends
0 books
|
110 friends
1 book
|
10 friends
0 books
|
15 friends
3 books
|
121 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by April
Lists liked by April
