A Commonplace Book

In the lives of all of us, short or long, there have been days, dreadful days, on which we have had to acknowledge with gloomy resignation that our world has turned against us. I do not mean the human world of our relations and friends: to enlarge on that is the province of nearly every modern novelist. In their books it is called 'Life' and an odd enough hash it is as they portray it. No, it is the world of things that do not speak or work or hold congresses and conferences. It includes such beings as the collar stud, the inkstand, the fire, the razor, and, as age increases, the extra step on the staircase which leads you either to expect or not to expect it. By these and such as these (for I have named but the merest fraction of them) the word is passed round, and the day of misery arranged.

The bicycle is an easy pancake.

Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.

Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the D__ Coffee-House in London....

I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street....

At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.

I resolved to follow the stranger whithersoever he should go.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

Stop motion animation looks fake, but feels real, while CGI look[s] real, but feels fake.

Susanna [Winona Ryder]: I'm ambivalent. In fact that's my new favorite word.

Dr. Wick [Vanessa Redgrave]: Do you know what that means, ambivalence?

Susanna: I don't care.

Dr. Wick: If it's your favorite word, I would've thought you would...

Susanna: It means I don't care. That's what it means.

Dr. Wick: On the contrary, Susanna, ambivalence suggests strong feelings...in opposition. The prefix, as in "ambidextrous", means "both". The rest of it, in Latin, means "vigor". The word suggests that you are torn...between two opposing courses of action.

The Farrelly brothers, the Coen brothers & the Wachowski brothers team up for an ironically slapstick yet heartwarmingly violent P.S.A. for Reading is Fundamental.

The county plans to phase out apostrophes on all street signs, in part "to prevent complications while searching on databases,"

[Kate] "They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself — ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide...."

[John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling] None of this is new, of course. I do not, to tell the truth, pay too much attention to what she says. It is her voice that tells me how she is. Now she speaks in her "bold" tone and since she appears more composed, to the point of being cheerful, than her words might indicate, I am not seriously concerned about her.

BALLARD: You could say the Space Age lasted fifteen years, from Gagarin's first flight to 1975 and the first Apollo splashdown that was not shown live on television. The American networks realized that the public was bored. Until then, all the Apollo splashdowns had been shown live. The one in 1975 was not shown live and I think the Space Age ended then. The Challenger disaster was the final nail in the coffin....

SECONDS: And the propulsion systems have not advanced that much.

BALLARD: Yes, they're Nineteenth Century brute-force ballistic propulsion systems, and that's why people aren't interested in Space Flight. They instinctively know that these huge Saturn rockets and their Russian counterparts belong to the age of the Nineteenth Century, along with the huge steam engines. It's brute-force ballistic technology that has nothing to do with what people recognize as the characteristic technology of this century: micro-processors, microwave data links, everything that goes in the world at the speed of an electron....

SECONDS: Would you go into Space?

BALLARD: I definitely wouldn't, just as I wouldn't spend a year in the Sahara Desert.

I think you drive about one mile an hour slower for each year you age.

SECONDS: People's memories will be composed of third-hand TV images.

BALLARD: Yes, they will. What we think of as first-hand experience will occur less and less.

SECONDS: There will only be the pioneers who go into the real world and record experiences for everyone else.

BALLARD: Exactly. I went to a wedding not so long ago where five cameras were working. We had a bizarre case in England a couple of years ago where a father had an incredibly lavish wedding for his daughter and hired a professional crew to record it, only to find out later there was something wrong with the film. He then, with the agreement of the hundreds of guests and the clergyman, restaged the entire thing right down to having a big reception, at the same cost all over again. Nothing is real until you can put it into the VCR.

[Discussing the TV show "24"]: This isn't a show about terrorism. Terrorism is a location. This is a show about a man trying to keep his family together. Never confuse your plot for your location. Back to the Future is not a story about time travel. Jaws isn't about a shark. Godfather's not about the mafia.

It's the movies where it becomes about the shark. That's when you got a problem."

One of the core lessons gleaned from Bateson is that addressing problems in ways that seem direct and results-oriented often leads to failure. Consider this flawed approach as akin to a medicine that treats superficial symptoms without ever tackling underlying causes.

Be and you will know. Instead of "Cogito, ergo sum" [I think therefore I am] Zen says, "Sum, ergo cogito" [I am therefore I think].

Perhaps all systems -- that is to say all formulations, verbal, symbolic, semantic or otherwise, that claim to explain the universe by a universal hypothesis -- are manifestations of paranoia.

We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.

[T]he subjective world of one rather powerful person can infringe on the world of another person. If I can make you see the world the way I see it, then you will automatically think the way I think. You will come to the conclusions that I come to. And the greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.

[I think] the technological infrastructure of podcasts matters tremendously. That line -- I forget who wrote it -- being able to say, "'Wherever you get your podcasts' is a radical statement."

The fact that podcasts have built audiences largely outside of algorithmic feeds, have built them through an open protocol called R.S.S. That technical backbone actually matters....

Part of the reason podcasts have flourished -- two-, three-hour podcasts, podcasts with novelists about obscure topics, long solo monologues about history -- is because they're not embedded in the same technical attentional marketplace. I think that really matters a lot, and I think it's actually really hopeful.

History is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerizing but harmful stories.

Underlying the notion of truth is the premise that there exists one universal reality. Anything that has ever existed or will ever exist in the universe--from the North Star, to the NILI pigeon, to web pages on astrology--is part of this single reality.

Truth and reality are nevertheless different things, because no matter how truthful an account is, it can never represent reality in all its aspects.... reality contains many viewpoints.... That does not mean, of course, that there are several entirely separate realities, or that there are no historical facts. There is just one reality, but it is complex.

...Reality includes an objective level with objective facts that don't depend on people's beliefs.... Reality also includes a subjective level with subjective facts like the beliefs and feelings of various people, but in this case, too, facts can be separated from errors. For views and feelings--just like stars and pigeons--are a part of the universal reality.

Where criticism interprets and contextualizes, trolling dismisses, and shitposting removes context entirely.

Shitposting--the sharing of absurd, low-effort, context-free content--has a more recent lineage. In early 20th-century Switzerland, cultural and economic stagnation, dehumanizing modernity, and the rise of nationalism triggered the Dada Movement, an avant-garde artist collective that championed nihilism and absurdity. "The beginnings of Dada," Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara recalled, "were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust." Perhaps it's no wonder that, in the time of algorithms, AI, and Hawk Tuah, a similarly nihilistic artform (or anti-artform, you might say) designed for "maximum impact with minimum effort" has hijacked our frazzled psyches.

[T]he American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

The daily newspapers then fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise.... Recently, in Commentary, Benjamin DeMott wrote that the "deeply lodged suspicion of the times [is] namely, that events and individuals are unreal, and that power to alter the course of the age, of my life and your life, is actually vested nowhere." There seems to be, said DeMott, a kind of "universal descent into unreality."

With information flooding in from near and far, people were falling victim to "present-mindedness." They were so busy consuming new information that they had no time to step back and view the information in a broad historical and cultural context. Overwhelmed by immediate concerns and diversions, they shunned the hard, slow work of interpretation.

The rapid commercialization of communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the attendant expansion of media into telecommunications and broadcasting, exacerbated the problem. In seeking a return on large capital investments, the companies building and operating media empires -- in television, radio, and publishing -- had a strong financial incentive to keep their customers in the flux of the new. Slowing down the mind, broadening a person's view beyond the moment, was bad for business. As Innis wrote in Changing Concepts of Time, his last book, he feared that large media companies were becoming "monopolies of communication" engaged in "a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity."

[Unregenerate segregationists] have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism.

[T]he lesson we learn from Durrell's work... is that poverty is so much worse for the upper classes than it is for the little people.... I mean, no one knows how ghastly it is living in this palazzo... Having to sell your jewelry so you can go on holiday...

The 7 Questions For Any Technological Idea

- What is the problem that this new technology solves?
- Whose problem is it?
- What new problems do we create by solving this problem?
- Which people and institutions will be most impacted by a technological solution?
- What changes in language occur as the result of technological change?
- Which shifts in economic and political power might result when this technology is adopted?
- What alternative (and unintended) uses might be made of this technology?

Five ideas about technological change

First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price.

Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners.

Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on.

Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates.

And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

When we listen subconsciously to the sound of flowing water, does it not seem to create a rhythm? Yet not a single drop of water passes over the same rock twice, and the murmur of water rushing over a rock is constantly changing. Sameness is but an illusion of the human ears, eyes, mind. Water that has once flowed along a riverbed can never retrace its course. Human life is no different. It is only our mundane eyes and minds that see yesterday as being the same as today.

Lucy [Scarlett Johansson]: Humans consider themselves unique so they've rooted their whole theory of existence on their uniqueness. "One" is their unit of measure, but it's not. All social systems we've put into place are a mere sketch. One plus one equals two. That's all we've learned, but one plus one has never equaled two. There are, in fact, no numbers and no letters. We've codified our existence to bring it down to human size to make it comprehensible. We've created a scale so that we can forget its unfathomable scale.

Lucy [Scarlett Johansson]: We never really die.